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Sept. 17, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:39
418 Part 1: Call In Show Sep 17 2006 4pm EST

Brothers-in-arms, and the 'false self' of birth order

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Alright, thanks everyone for joining us this fine Sunday afternoon.
It's a little bit after 4pm Eastern Time, Sunday, September the 17th.
We are going to just do the general thing that we do, which is that everyone's muted because we have a fair amount of noise in the world.
And if you want to say something, then just type it into the Skype chat.
And if you're not in the Skype chat, just ask.
I think Nils is running it. Then that's the way to ask questions, and then I'll unmute you.
So just sort of raise your hand in that sense.
What I'd like to start off with is with...
A comment that was put out on the Freedom Aid Radio board, which I thought was particularly fascinating, and I did mention it in a podcast recently.
It is with regards to the Muslim sort of offensibility.
And the question was, just sort of briefly for those who haven't heard the other podcast, somebody posted and said, this new wave of protest 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 times, they also bring cameras and very convenient signs in English, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Now, we all know what their apologists will say.
This poster goes on to write.
They are poor and desperate, and they are angry about their exploitation from the West.
They have no other way to channel their frustration.
That's BS. I'm not sure what that stands for.
The overwhelming majority of the world is poor and frustrated.
Most, in fact, are poor than the Muslims, who usually live in what the UN classifies as middle-income countries.
Before all the accusations start, I don't believe there is something inherently wrong with Islam, in my opinion.
All religions can be bad or good.
This is somebody who's posting from another board.
It's not his particular opinion, but it's an interesting set of questions.
This reminds me of when a listener was coming through Toronto with his grandparents.
He asked for me to sit down with his grandparents and have a chat with them about the cult that we were trying to lure him into.
So, of course, I showed up in a thong with some paper clips on my nipples and a shaven head, of course, just so that I could help put their mind at rest about the kind of nefarious underworld of cult-like obsession that we were trying to lure him into.
And it was actually a very pleasant chat with his grandparents who seemed like very nice people.
Still Republicans, but we shan't hold that against them.
And they said, do you talk about Islam?
And I said, yeah, I do. I haven't gotten around because it takes quite a bit of research to do my big podcast on Islam.
But they kind of went sort of a little pale, right?
And they said, well, you can't talk about those people.
I mean, and I didn't think of this at the time, but I'm going to read a response.
That I think was very well put.
Actually, no. Just before that, somebody who is a Muslim actually wrote back and said the following.
He said that...
Let me just find it here.
He said that there are sort of two basic reasons that this sort of happens.
The first is that he said a lot of Muslims are sensitive.
Sorry, a lot of Muslims take their religion a lot more seriously than many Christians, and of course I think that that's relatively true.
And also he said that a lot of Muslims are sensitive of their effective minority status after having much of their historical lands colonized.
I'm not going to get into the whole history of this sort of colonization.
Of course, it has a lot to do with oil and so on.
But I've never really found those kinds of explanations too satisfying.
I take my beliefs much more seriously than even the average Christian does.
So the strength of one's belief It's not something that results in violence and touchiness and volatility and so on.
And, you know, I come from Ireland and our lands were colonized by the British and, you know, so I could be a mad Irish terrorist or something like that.
So it really... It's never...
A very satisfying answer, to me at least, when somebody says, well, it's because of these and these factors, but doesn't stop to test that theory with regards to other groups who suffer from the same history and have not turned out to be so violent.
So I thought that was an interesting response.
But the one that I really wanted to get to was somebody who said, in response to the question, are the Muslims the most volatile group in the known universe?
He said, I wonder if that's really true.
Do you know how U.S. tax court judges and IRS bureaucrats will react if you point out there is no law obligating individuals to pay income tax on wages?
Not only will they be deeply offended, they will happily destroy your life if necessary in order to seize your money for the benefit of the state they worship.
Very few Muslim individualists will treat you with as much brutality regardless of what you say to them about their religion.
Have you ever witnessed the reaction of a liberal democrat when somebody points out that most poverty is the direct result of the programs he advocates?
He will belligerently continue to support programs that destroy lives.
How is that any worse than what a gang of offended Saudi Muslims will do?
Have you seen what a soldier's parents will do?
If you point out that the military is engaged in mass murder, is their easily provoked hostility any less horrifying than the hostility of an offended Muslim?
Have you ever noticed how easily a school teacher will be offended if you point out that government schools are incurably evil, institutions that invariably and unavoidably poison, pollute and destroy the minds of children, enraged Muslims might occasionally burn an embassy, but is that anywhere near as evil as abusing other people's children and wrecking their lives?
Now, whatever hyperbole may be embedded within that statement, I'm not going to sort of try and dissect, but I do think that the fundamental issue is very, very important, that we need to resist, I think, I won't say at all costs, because I don't want to add my own hyperbole to the debate,
but we do need... We're good to go.
I mean, philosophy is like the pruning of the mind.
It grows wild in the absence of rational standards, just as our knowledge of the world grows wild and mystical in the absence of scientific standards, our knowledge of ethics and our place in society and our ethics really grow wild in the absence of philosophy, and most of human society is in a complete state of nature with regards to philosophy.
It's not that they are oppressed by the West, and it's not their history, of course, because, as I pointed out, most Muslims are far more oppressed by their local friendly theocracy than they are by, say, you and I. And, of course, I do know that a lot of foreign policy from the United States and from Britain and from other countries has contributed to problems.
There's lots of arms sales that go on to these Saudi governments and so on.
But fundamentally, the central problem with Islam is merely a subset of other problems that result in violence.
And the central reason that violence results in human society is because of irrational moral absolutes.
Irrational moral absolutes.
And those irrational moral absolutes, obey your government, pay your taxes, worship your God, go to church, go to mosque, pray five times a day, blah, blah, blah, blah, we could go on all day, or you're evil and respect your father and your mother regardless of how they've behaved morally.
Those irrational moral absolutes always end up...
Resulting in violence. And why?
Because they're irrational.
And irrational things have to be enforced.
Just as companies who produce bad products want to go towards the government to get the government to force you to buy them or to prevent imports from coming in.
And it's the most unappealing people who were always in favor of arranged marriages, right?
I don't think that Brad Pitt would necessarily be lining up at the front of the queue to say, we should really get arranged marriages in because then the odds of him getting Angelina Jolie, who I'm not saying is a great catch, but, you know, sure is kind of pretty.
He's not going to be lining up for arranged marriages.
It's going to be some horrible person with a bad temper who's overweight and bad breath or something.
That person is going to be wanting to be lining up for arranged marriages.
It's people who have bad ideas, who have bad tempers, We're good to go.
So it is because irrational absolutes are always produced by inferior people in a way of trying to level the playing field so that they can gain some sort of respect.
It's that touchiness, that insecurity, that vanity, which covers up a kind of narcissistic rage, always tends to lead to violence.
There's no way to negotiate with people who have irrational absolutes.
And so the Muslim world is exactly the world that we would live in if we were over there and we grew up in that world.
We can't blame the average Muslim for believing crazy things.
They're terrorized as children.
They're told that up is down, black is white, evil is good and good is evil.
The women in particular are terrorized their whole life long.
And... The idea that this is because of historical Western imperialism, I don't think that the average woman in Syria wakes up every morning and say, gee, if only I could be rid of Belgian rule in the 19th century.
What I think she thinks is, man, I better put this burqa on or I'm going to get stoned to death.
So I think that we need to try and humanize the problem of Islam, not say that it's other people out there who just believe crazy things who want to hurt us, because that level of fear is what is always used by states to enslave their own citizens, to create more and more regulations and laws towards their own citizenry.
Osama bin Laden can't do a damn thing to tax you or I. He can't take one freedom away from us.
He can't impose national ID cards on any of us.
All he can do is sit there and, you know, I have no idea his involvement with 9-11 or lack of, but he can't take away our freedoms.
Only our own government can do that.
And so we always want to make sure that we humanize everyone around the world that you and I have far more in common with the average Muslim than we do with our own leaders because we're all subjugated under this gruesome apparatus of the state.
And organized power structures.
So I just sort of wanted to point that out as a possibility.
And this is not to say that Islam is not a corrupt and destructive creed and set of beliefs.
It certainly is. But I think that if we do want to start fighting irrational, destructive beliefs, we can start a whole lot closer to home.
And of course, what nobody has mentioned so far, which I'll just end up with here, is that if you really do want to see irrational hostility in action, you don't need to tune into CNN to look at Muslim hordes.
Generally, what you need to do only is to sit down with your family and tell them about the beliefs that you hold the most dear and why you believe them and why they're important to you.
And you'll get all of the irrational hostility that you need to be able to analyze without necessarily having to go through the filter of something on television.
So I just want to make sure that people focus on where you have control and where you have some sort of ability to have a real effect on things.
You can look within your own society and your own social circle much more closely than you can look into the soul of Islam.
And more importantly, you can look at your own family, which I think is the most useful thing to do.
Let's just see here. Let's see.
I'm just going to...
The audio is bad.
You know what's funny? It keeps cutting out here.
All right, so let's just wait for one moment.
I'm recording on this side still, I think, so we'll just wait and see for somebody to come back.
Now, Greg, whether you feel comfortable or not talking about this, you can let me know.
And of course, when I say Greg, I do actually mean Sally.
It's a pseudonym. But you did have a rather exciting week.
If you wanted to talk a little bit about that, I'm sure it would be helpful for people.
It's up to you. Yeah, actually...
It was pretty instructive, I have to admit.
On Friday afternoon, my brother called me and said that we'd been invited over to my parents for dinner.
I've been kind of avoiding them the last few months myself.
But I said, okay, I'll go with.
And when we got over there, you know, about halfway through the meal, John pipes up and says, you know, starts talking about how John's my youngest brother.
And he starts talking about how You know, there's things that have been bothering him about our parents and starts asking them a bunch of questions and stuff.
And I realized about a minute or two into his talk that he was essentially defooing Let me just, for those who are just jumping into the language, defuing is a family of origin.
It's that if you can't establish a satisfactory relationship with your family, that you should not feel morally obligated to continue to see them.
Sorry, go ahead. Oh yeah, sorry about that.
But anyway, it's kind of funny because I've been kind of bouncing some of the ideas that I've That I've picked up here off of him over the last four or five months.
Of course, I've been stewing them in my own head for about the last eight or nine months, right?
And trying to come up with the best approach to dealing with my parents.
And sorry, just for those who haven't followed this history, Greg is our resident Hamlet.
His opening speech is usually defoe or not defoe.
Anyway, sorry. Yeah, I have to admit that I'm wishy-washy.
But anyways, I guess all this chatter has been kind of rubbing off on him.
He's kind of taken it to heart and picked the ball up and run with it all by himself without even really any prompting from me and kind of Come to the same sorts of conclusions completely independently of the podcast or any of your own writings of that.
It's just in general conversations that I've had with him, he's sort of come around to the same kind of idea and what really caught me off guard was his Ability to actually put the plan into action,
I guess you could say. It was very It's startling to see it happening right in front of me.
I hadn't expected it, and I know my parents weren't expecting it.
I've got a couple of questions to ask, but first of all, there are ways to tell whether he's been listening to the podcast.
For instance, when he began launching into this process of at least bringing about a trial separation with your family, did his voice alter into a slightly nasal, slightly British accent?
Did he go on for about 20 minutes without taking a breath?
Like, were there indications that he might have been listening to the podcast?
Because that's, you know, there are clues, you know?
Did he have lots of open picks?
Well, I've been noticing his hairline has been receding lately, so.
Oh, I can't wait for the conference call.
It's live. Now, let me ask you something, because I have a couple of questions about it overall, if you don't mind.
And the first question that I would ask is, why do you think that...
Oh, no, let me ask you this.
If he had told you what he was going to do, what would your reaction have been?
Well... I don't know.
I would have probably... I probably would have been encouraging him to make sure that what he's doing is What he wants to do and not something that he thinks he has to do because of some of the talks that we've been having.
That he owns that decision, right?
I guess that's what I would have done had he mentioned it to me beforehand.
And what criteria would you have accepted for him to know that it was his own decision?
I don't know. Because, I mean, that's kind of like a worrying question, you know?
It's like when you say, I want to go to the mall, and someone says, are you sure you want to go to the mall?
It's like, you know, suddenly I don't know, right?
So I just wonder if you might not have...
What kind of worries me is the fact that, I mean, he rooms with me.
I have a spare bedroom and he lives here, so...
You know, he's around all this stuff that I do all the time, so I just don't want what he's doing to be, you know, what he thinks he has to do because I'm here.
And do you think that your particular, like, so you're afraid of being sort of the elder brother dominant influence on him and him sort of running off half-cut, so to speak, based on stuff that he's...
Right. Exactly.
I'm always worried about that.
Right. Do you feel that that's your relationship with the conversations that we have on the board and in the podcast and just the stuff that you're reading in general?
Do you feel like the stuff that you're looking at with your own family is something that's owned by you or something that's sort of you being swept away in a conversation that's initiated by other people?
Well, my opinion on that swings back and forth quite a bit.
Of course it does. Naturally. I mean, you wouldn't want to come down on either side of the fence.
I'm just kidding. Go ahead. Okay, I don't know why that is, but that's the way it is.
So do you think, and the reason that I'm just sort of, I'm asking this is because I'm an enraged younger sibling, but we'll get to that in a moment.
But do you think, I mean, the question that I have to some degree around your interaction in this area with your brother in particular is that I think that you may...
not necessarily seeing the sort of aspects of projection that we've talked about in some podcasts before around, if you feel that you might be in duly influenced by other people, that's your issue to deal with yourself, right?
I don't know that it's necessarily empirical, not to say fair, to say to other people, because I might be overtly influenced by other people, I'm concerned that you might be overly influenced by other people.
Like, if you can withstand the influence of 400 podcasts, I'm sure your brother can withstand the influence of a couple of conversations.
Does that make sense? That's fair.
That's a fair criticism, I think.
I guess maybe I'm not giving him enough credit is what you're saying.
Well, no, I'm saying more so that you are projecting your own concerns into him.
So you're on the fence about this whole process, and so you're asking him or intimating to him that he should doubt himself, because you doubt yourself.
And the reason that I'm saying this is because I think that's the reason he didn't tell you beforehand.
Certainly, I'm very sensitive to the stuff that comes back and your stuff is almost always fantastic.
It's always fantastic in every way.
But certainly, I've been brought up short a couple of times by questions and comments.
It's not necessarily bad, but you could make a dead man doubt that he's dead.
If that makes any sense.
You two have that incredible ability.
I sort of see you dissolving mountains into clouds somehow.
I can only imagine what it's like living inside of that, let alone...
I totally understand that.
Now imagine how...
Now imagine how bad things would be if I was actually like a relativist.
Oh my lord. Yeah, I can see why you need this stuff, right?
We must turn at least one of these cloud mountains back into a mountain.
I need some place to stand. But I would say that, and the only reason for that is that I think that that's probably the reason that...
That he didn't talk to you about this beforehand was because he was afraid of what might happen to his resolve with your gently probing and fundamentally corrosive kinds of questions, if that makes any sense.
And that's a possibility.
And then the last question that I would have is, we do in life generally what was done without significant intervention.
We do unto others what was done unto us.
That's just the natural cycle of psychology.
And so, do you have anyone in your life who you feel may have projected their own emotional state onto you in the past, and that's sort of where you learn to be perhaps a little bit over-solicitous, or to project your own concerns into conversations with others?
Well, the obvious answer for that, I suppose, is my parents, right?
Now, do you hear that, suppose?
See, that's what we're talking about here.
It's not a yes. It's not a no.
It's a, yeah, it could be kind of.
Greg never wants to get into any room where there's not at least 200 exits.
If it's not a honeycomb all leading to two exits, then it's a problem, right?
Well, we'll wait for Michael to get back on the line to continue that in a philosophical sense.
Well, I don't know, because I only know some facts about your parents, but did you feel sometimes, like if your mom got worried, did you ever feel like she tried to, like, unconsciously or whatever, but made everyone else worried as well?
Let's see there, I... Well, my mom always made everybody worried.
So far, the trail might not be entirely cold.
Right. Okay. Okay.
Now, that's very important.
And Christina does the same thing, right?
I have a fundamental inability to know when it's cold outside.
I don't know what it is. I have some sort of bizarre exoskeleton that just gives out 10 minutes into a walk.
And so, Christina is, do you think you need a jacket?
Right? So I'm striding out confidently into a howling blizzard in just like a thong and a baseball cap.
And then Christina's like, do you think you might need a jacket?
And suddenly I'm like... Yeah, I guess I might.
Now I don't know, right?
And if this to a really hyper level is what occurred in your family, right, then you're used to other people getting anxious, and that makes you anxious, right?
So then when you get anxious, one of the ways in which you might deal with that is to ask other people sort of, quote, probing questions, which makes them anxious, and then that sort of makes you feel a little less anxious, if that makes any sense.
Yeah. Well, I guess what it...
I don't know if that exactly applies.
I mean, I can't point to one thing that says, this is what makes me anxious, right?
Or, this is where I get my anxiousness from.
I just sort of am.
I mean, there's lots of things I could complain about with my parents and my brothers and whatnot, but I can't really think of one specific thing that says, oh, you know, that's why I'm the way I am.
Right, and that either means that the theory that we're working with here is totally incorrect, or it's totally correct, right?
Because if... I mean, this is the level of scientific precision that we'll – no, it means that it's – like, if it is something that's a very sort of core and fundamental aspect of learning that went on within your personality, then either it's so core and fundamental that it's hard to see, right, in the same way that it's hard to be constantly aware of gravity or oxygen, they're just sort of your environment, or there's no connection whatsoever, in which case it's totally wrong.
And I think when you talk about your mother making everybody else anxious – That's a pretty common phenomenon.
And the reason I picked you on your mom is just because it generally is a little bit more.
Immature men will handle fear with rage.
And of course we know certain aspects of that with your father.
And so basically when men are unable to handle fear, then what they do is they make somebody else afraid.
So basically they'll act in a menacing manner or hit a child or scream at a child.
So they'll make a child afraid and that's how they handle their own fear is they dump it on the kid and then feel that at least they're not as frightened as the kid and that helps them restore some kind of equilibrium.
I mean it's brutal and it's unjust but that's not a very uncommon phenomenon.
Like you all know the sort of thing where...
The kid goes missing.
We all know this sort of cliché.
A child goes missing in a mall, and then the mom gets completely panicked, right?
And the dad gets sort of angry and efficient, and then they find the kid, and the mom grabs the kid, clutches her to...
Clutches the boy to her chest so he can barely breathe and is sobbing and so on.
And the dad is like, don't you ever frighten your mother and I like that again.
Gets all angry. I mean, this is a pretty typical kind of response among parents.
A lot of times the men will deal with their own fear through anger.
Sorry, go ahead. That exact same scenario happened to my brother Steve when we were in...
Oh, where the hell were we?
We were in Florida in 79 or 80.
And he was just like...
Toddler at the time and wandered off just randomly.
There was tons of crowds at Disney World.
He wanders off and they just happen to stumble on him in the process of looking for him.
The exact same scenario you just described there is exactly what happened.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is not me being overly psychic.
That's just the sort of natural way that things work.
And moms feel anxiety and manage it by making their children anxious, right?
By, you know, are you warm enough?
Do you have enough food?
Do you have enough clothing? Do you have enough money?
Do you need anything, right?
And you get enough of that, right?
You get enough of that, and suddenly you're like, you know, I thought I had enough of everything, and now I'm not so sure.
Yeah. It's actually worse than that in our household.
She goes to the point of actually apologizing when we don't have what we need.
Right, right, right. Listen, I packed you some lunch and an extra kidney that I took out with a spoon this morning just in case you get hurt at lunchtime.
Right, or like, you know, like we'll be out and I'll grab my wallet and go, oh damn, I forgot to get cash and mom will go, oh I'm sorry.
Like, what, you're going to get me cash?
Right, right, right, right.
No, and look, I mean, it's all fun and games.
This is a desperately sad situation for women, right?
I mean, I don't want to come across like all feminists, but it is a very, very difficult situation.
to be assertive and so on can be very tough.
And a lot of women are kind of ground down, and they're ground down both by their moms, right, who also instill them with fear and guilt and all that kind of stuff, by their fathers and also by their husbands and so on.
So, I mean, not to say that your mom's not responsible, She is, right? But there's a lot of social pressure for women to kind of apologize themselves into a kind of fine, guilty vapor, if that sort of makes any sense.
And there's a lot of control in that for other people, right?
It's kind of claustrophobic being around somebody who apologizes for themselves all the time, right?
There's a lot of manipulation and control, right?
It's passive aggression. Sorry?
I'd say it's unbelievably claustrophobic.
Yeah, it is. You feel like you can't move, like you're in this suffocating net of claustrophobic femininity.
When I'm around it, it's hard for me as well.
My mom wasn't exactly the most apologetic person in the world.
She chose somewhat more masculine ways of...
Of controlling her own emotions or managing her own emotions.
But that particular approach is something that you might profit from talking about it with someone or sort of thinking about it more yourself.
What happens when you feel something that makes you uncomfortable?
That's sort of the fundamental question of psychology.
What do you do when you have an emotion that makes you feel uncomfortable?
Which for me is just about every one.
Right, and that's because it doesn't work.
Projection doesn't work.
Projection works about as well in managing the emotions as taking heroin does in managing depression, right?
You will get a very short relief, but the problems will come back worse and worse, right?
So, projection is a very dysfunctional way of dealing with emotions, right?
So the important thing is to just look at the emotional handling mechanisms that you were taught and sort of abstract them and understand them.
And there's tons of books and so on that you can look at for that.
And then just recognize that you don't want to do the same thing.
You want to find some other way of managing your emotions.
And the great thing about that is that you will eventually end up having the capacity to involuntarily burst into tears at work.
And I think that's really the ultimate goal of mental health, right?
Is to be so free and easy with your emotions that you're like some You know, Spanish conquistador on LSD, right?
I mean, so... And I'm sort of kidding about that.
There is a certain amount of emotional sort of, quote, instability that goes around with developing more authentic ways to feel.
But for sure, it's well worth doing, right?
Because you don't want to have this continued level of, like, anxiety and over-dithering-ness, if that may be a phrase that I can invent.
I think that's pretty fair.
Right, and so one of the things that you can do is you can ask your brother why he didn't talk to you, and if it was to do with the fact that I thought that I might, you know, that you might sort of say, hey, let me just see your sword for a moment and then throw it off a cliff.
But the last thing that I would ask, and this to me is important, and I'm sorry for taking up so much of other people's question time, but I think this is important.
Because, you know, something that I haven't really talked about much is sort of birth order, but I do think it's a very important thing.
Because you'd said at one point in your post, you'd said, well, I'm supposed to be the older brother, I'm supposed to do this stuff first, I'm supposed to this, I'm supposed to that.
And can you tell me a little bit about this sort of older brother thing and what it means to you?
I don't know. I've just always kind of felt like I should be an example.
And how old is your younger brother?
He's 26 now.
So that's 13 years, right?
Yeah. Right, right.
So, I mean, that's a pretty significant chunk.
But he has sort of been legally allowed to vote for...
What, seven years?
Yeah. Eight years? Nine years.
Twenty-seven, was he? Twenty-six?
Eight years. Yeah, yeah.
And for ten years, he's been allowed to legally drive a car?
Mm-hmm. So, I'm just, I mean, to me, I'm always sort of curious about when the older brother thing sort of fades away.
And I'll be perfectly honest, I mean, because I don't want to project into you either, but I have, my brother never let this grip go.
We're only two years apart.
My elder brother was never able to let this grip go of the elder brother thing, so don't take any of my emotional aspect behind this with any seriousness, but it is sort of curious to me because I sort of wonder at what point the statute of limitations on birth order begins to diminish.
Yeah, I suppose that's true.
It's not really reasonable, but I don't know.
I just feel like You know, with 13 years on him, I've got 13 years more time spent, right?
Yeah. And it's not like I'm, you know, kind of forcing myself on him.
At least I try not to.
Now, my brother Tom is completely different.
In that respect. He's always tried to play daddy with John, which I found kind of creepy, quite frankly.
Whereas you're more sort of the wise uncle kind of guy?
Yeah, I try to be like that.
I try to be available rather than to be domineering.
And at what age do you think that you will be able to look at him as an equal?
Well... Well, that's a good question.
Because, you know, after this week I would have said that he might have moved up just a little bit, you know, in this kind of hierarchy.
Quite frankly, I didn't even think of it in those terms, but when you ask the question, it makes it pretty obvious that I'm not...
Well, just in this area, right?
Because you love him, right?
He's one of your family members that you want to stick with, right?
Yeah. Now, if he's on a pretty focused mission to figure out who gives him the most freedom, who gives him the most positive responses, I think that you don't want to accidentally get moaned down by having older brother attitudes if he's going through a pretty...
Grim evaluation of his family members and the degree of latitude and freedom and respect that they give him, I can guarantee you, as a younger brother myself, that he is going to be exquisitely sensitive to any feelings that you have of sort of being the wise old man on the rock teaching the newbie.
No, I understand that.
I completely agree, which is why whenever I have a conversation with him, I always Approach from the standpoint of Just, you know, one-on-one kind of thing, you know, not like lecturing.
I don't lecture, you know.
Right, but I mean, if you do have feelings that you are sort of the older brother and you should teach him and so on, those will communicate themselves.
The one great thing about getting older is you realize how impossible it is to hide anything from anyone.
Sorry, go ahead. On that question, though, it was more like It's more like I felt like, you know, why haven't I gotten to that point by now?
Why haven't you? Why haven't I gotten to the point that he's gotten to in four months that I've been wringing my hands over for nine months?
Right, and I would say that one of the reasons that you haven't been able to is that you have a slightly false self aspect called older brother.
Okay. Right, because he obviously, like, it's a pretty significant thing, as I mentioned in the post, that he did this while you were there, right?
That's not an accident, right?
He could have absolutely at any time driven over and done it on his own, right?
So you were totally...
Sorry, go ahead. Another telling aspect of that whole event was the fact that he was noticing and starting to get really irritated by things that my parents were doing that night that I was oblivious to.
Oh yeah, parents are incredibly cooperative when you defu.
Fundamentally, they beautifully validate everything that you're concerned about.
You give them every piece of rope in the world and all they do is keep throwing themselves off a cliff, so to speak.
But the thing I was really curious about is that obviously your conversations with him have had a huge effect, but He still didn't talk to you about this before he did it, right?
Because you guys could have done it together.
You could have been a less sort of, hey, wait, catch up kind of guy in the conversation.
And I'm guessing, and of course you should talk to him, obviously, to find out what he thinks, but I'm guessing that it's because there is still a certain hierarchical difference between you that's based on the birth order, which I think is something that,
you know, if you do love and respect him, and he sounds like a Yeah, I guess there's some aspect to that.
But... It's a lot less prominent, I guess you could say, than it is with the rest of my brothers.
Yeah, I certainly agree, and that's why he wanted you there.
I mean, you guys have probably the best relationship.
In fact, I'm positive you guys have the best relationship and your whole family and almost for sure your whole extended family and maybe perhaps you're half of the state, right?
So, I mean, I'm serious, right?
You guys have a great relationship and that's something to really be treasured, right?
And I just have noticed in my own life that...
This hierarchy of, it's not just siblings, right?
I have friends who are older than me, who have a very tough time learning anything from me, right?
And it's not like I'm out there spouting off saying, you should do this and you should do that, right?
But it's something that Christina and I kind of noticed, right?
Like, we have this fantastic marriage, we love every moment that we have together, and Nobody will ever ask us who's older than us, gee, how can we improve our relationship?
It's just something that there's an age hierarchy that's even more the case with siblings, but it occurs with friends as well.
This age hierarchy, to me, is just pure nonsense, right?
I mean, once you get beyond the age, once you can all walk and read and talk, then I think things should sort of even out a bit.
And of course, it's that age hierarchy in its most fundamental sense that is what makes parents so problematic.
Because they just stay in this hierarchy and they try and maintain this hierarchy that's totally crippling for their children as the children try and become adults themselves.
That's a good point.
One of the things I consciously try to do at work, for example, is to not pay any attention to that, to...
I'll often defer to guys younger than me, especially in this industry, you know, where there's a new programming language coming out every 15 minutes.
Right. Free the main code is next, yeah.
So you have to stay open to that, you know, because they'll teach you things that you don't know.
Yes, for sure. And here's a very strong example of your brother, right?
Obviously, he's learned a lot from you about this question.
He's been able to put it. But you have something really to learn from him about decisiveness.
And you won't be able to get to that knowledge if you have a hierarchy still as part of your interaction.
That's a good point.
That's a very good point. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk to about that?
And I certainly do appreciate it. I know it's not the easiest topic in the world, and I think it's great.
I mean, I think it's fantastic that you're having these conversations with your brother.
And has there been any fallout from your parents or with your parents on this yet?
Well, actually, they're not calling John anymore, but they keep calling me.
I haven't picked up the phone, but they keep calling me wanting to nag me about it, and I'm like, I don't want to talk about it anymore.
It's done and over with.
Greg, sorry, hi.
I was just going to say that if If your brother has sort of separated from your parents and you're living with your brother, it's very, very likely that your parents are going to try to use you to get at him.
So you just need to be a little careful and set a limit with them.
It's going to be really difficult for you until you clarify your own position.
Right, that's a good point.
Yeah, I'm still kind of working in that direction myself.
Right. But it's definitely a direction I'm moving in, but as we've made abundantly clear here, I can't poop or get off the pot, I guess. You know, just some encouragement.
I mean, this isn't an easy thing.
Your brother did it in four months.
We don't know what motivated him to do it.
We don't know how long he's been thinking about it.
I certainly don't know anything about your brother, so I don't know what his motivating factors are, how long he has felt distressed, or how long he's been aware of problems with your parents.
But nine months is not a long time, so if it takes you a year, if it takes you two years, you've got to do it at your own process.
You've got to take your process at its own pace.
And, you know, your brother did it in four months.
Well, that's great for him. But if you're not ready to do it, there are things that you obviously need to answer for yourself.
And I kind of feel like he went through as a kid a lot more than I did because my parents were unloading all kinds of crap on him that I don't remember ever having to deal with.
You know, their own personal marital problems and problems between them and other brothers and stuff like that.
My dad would spill it all on him.
My mom would spill it all on him.
I mean, he was 11, 12, 13 years old at the time.
So... Wow.
You know, one of the things that just struck me listening to you, I mean, he is living with you and maybe he found the courage to leave your parents or to defoo because he has a safe place to be while he does it.
That's a good point. That's kind of how I've been sort of looking at it myself.
I've been trying to stay out of his way and let him do his thing.
He's trying to get into grad school and working his way through college and all that kind of stuff.
It's hard enough to do that and then to take on this.
I've I kind of feel like I'm at least helping by providing a space for them.
You kind of feel like what? I feel like I'm helping at least because I can provide a space for them.
Right. Now, did you drive to your parents' place together?
Actually, no. I had to work late.
I was going to ask you what the drive home was like.
After getting home, we talked for about two hours after that.
He aired out a lot there, too.
Go ahead.
I know, this is very, very personal and very hard to talk about, so I'm going to give the mic back to Steph.
And maybe you and I can chat some other time.
I'm just trying to figure out a way to say it without saying too much.
Right, right, right.
I appreciate that. Like I said, I know that it's very personal, very sensitive, and you don't necessarily want to be talking about all of this in front of a bunch of people.
Well, I did post it on the internet, too.
That's true. And actually, you know what?
I mean, kudos to you.
It is a very brave thing to do, and as part of the healing process, it's important to talk about what we've experienced and to name the things that we've gone through.
The more we keep things close to our chest, it's like we're giving people sanction for what they've done.
That's an interesting point.
So, yeah, it's part of the healing process, so good for you.
Steph's back. Thank you. All right.
Sorry, on a minor technical aside...
I think the reason that we have had problems with Skypecast is that I did set up the Skypecast to go for three hours, but apparently when you confirm, it sets the time back to 15 minutes, and of course that's the issue that's occurring.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask people to...
I set up a new one, because nobody can get in.
So I'm going to...
I've just set up a new one. If you can hear this, then we can just have a look for a new one that's starting at 5 o'clock.
It's starting right now. And if you don't mind, let's switch over to that one.
And let's sort of continue the chat from there.
Okay, so if you would like to just go back to...
Actually, let me just...
I will put it up here so that we can...
I started one minute ago.
to go, I will put the Skype cost in.
Okay, I'm just going to put this into the window.
If you'd like to join there, then we can keep going.
Sorry about that. I didn't realize that it moved over and substituted a very sad amount of time for something which should have been the standard.
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