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Sept. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:05
420 Reason and Passion Part 2
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Hi, everybody. Hope you're doing fantabulously.
It's Steph. It is 6 o'clock.
Just coming home from my first day at my new job.
Which is just a fine position.
I'm the director of product-like management at a fine company called P-Velocity, P-V-L-O-C-I-T-Y, which you can find at P-Velocity.com.
And I spent the morning going over stuff with the CFO and the afternoon going over stuff with the CTO. And it's all, it should be fun.
Not quite as much fun as staying home and doing philosophy podcasts, but it's okay.
I can be patient for that.
And I guess I am...
My birthday is now the 18th of September 2006, and my birthday, I'm six days shy of being 40 years old, which is...
Which is going to endear me with all the young people in the audience.
So, you laugh all you want.
I laughed when I was your age, and lo and behold, I ended up here.
So, laugh all you want, but you will get here too.
Hopefully, with any luck, you will get here too.
So I would like to continue on with part two of Reason and Emotions, and of course you know that I am perfectly content to do it this way, and that I do want to talk about Reason and Emotion, because of course I don't have my sunglasses on, so you'll know We're all about the passion as it stands.
The part that I'd like to talk about now is, if we do accept that passion is an essential part of communication, then...
I think we do need to understand how we can go about integrating reason and passion together.
And I've touched upon this in one other podcast, but I'd like to go in a bit more of a methodical sense about this at the moment, just so that you might have a plan of action that might help you in this area.
Certainly this is the way that it helped me sort of come about with this stuff, and hopefully it will help you as well.
So, for reason and passion, the central reason, the central rationale behind why these things are so important, I think, is that you need passion in your debates in the same way that you need grooming when approaching members of the opposite sex, or the same sex, or, I guess, farm animals if you're that way inclined.
And you really do need to...
Have a passion in what it is that you argue.
Because you could say, yeah, okay, well, so what if I don't have a nice haircut?
So what if I don't change my clothes?
So what if I don't shower?
I'm still the same person deep down.
So what if I don't brush my teeth as often as I should?
I'm still, I have a soul independent of my mere earthly existence.
And again, I'm using this pretty metaphorically, but I think you get the idea.
That I have a soul independent of my mere earthly existence, and so people should get to know the real me, and they shouldn't be worried about all of these trappings, and it shouldn't matter whether I have nice clothes on, and it shouldn't matter whether my socks match, and it shouldn't blah blah blah blah blah.
And I do know people who make this argument, and at some level, I sort of understand why they do that, because we do all sort of want to be loved for who we are, independent of our earthly trappings and our looks and our status things and our hygiene.
Might be not hygiene exactly, but our grooming and so on, that it feels shallow to conform to these kinds of standards.
But the problem is that there's a significant lack of empathy in that formulation.
And I'll talk about it for a minute or two, because to me at least it's directly analogous to what goes on in the reason and passion conversation.
And if you understand that you know yourself very well and other people don't know you at all.
We're just talking about sort of, you know, if you're a single guy looking for a woman.
You know yourself very well.
You know all about how deep and wonderful you are.
But somebody who is just looking at you for the first time doesn't have any clue about who you are deep down, right?
They don't even know who you are shallow down, so to speak.
But they do have to form some sort of criteria About whether or not they want to invest time in getting to know you.
And if you have, you know, greasy hair and your shirt sort of buttoned up wrong so that the buttons don't match and you've got the collar half up and you've got, you know, your jeans are dirty and your socks don't match and you're wearing like one high heel and one sandal or something like that.
Then what that communicates to other people is, I don't really want to spend the time investigating whether or not this person has high self-esteem, whether this person has empathy, whether this person has sensitivity, whether this person, you know, is whatever.
I mean, whatever criteria you're looking for as a woman when you're looking at a guy.
You will see a guy who has these markers, right?
I mean, they're pretty significant markers of not putting a lot of emphasis on self-care or grooming or whatever, if you have all of these things that I've told you, greasy hair and so on.
And sure, it certainly could be the case that you do have very high self-esteem and you're a wonderful guy, despite the fact that you look like a train wreck.
You could have all of these markers, and that would be wonderful for you, but the problem is that it's pretty counterintuitive to anticipate that somebody is going to have these characteristics, a high self-esteem and so on, and that this would be co-joined with greasy hair and buttons up wrong and so on.
Now, given that other people do have a rather limited capacity to invest time in getting to know people, right?
You can't spend your life getting to know everyone and their dog because it's simply a matter of economics, right?
Even if your desire to know everyone was there, your capacity to know everyone would be pretty limited because, of course, every moment you spend getting to know someone is the moment you're not spending to get to know somebody else.
That's why we don't all have an infinite number of professions, right?
Because if you spend time learning to be a doctor, you're not spending time learning to be a lawyer, and so on.
So, given that we have a pretty finite amount of time in life, the question is, how are we going to spend it?
Who are we going to get to know?
And it is certainly vaguely, theoretically possible, I guess, that someone could be a great person and still have greasy hair, but I think that you would find statistically that people with very poor grooming...
Do not have high self-esteem, that that would be a pretty, a law that would be certain enough that you would not want to spend your life trying to get to know everybody who was really poorly groomed, Just to find the one sort of needle in a haystack guy who had high self-esteem.
And you certainly would not expect that somebody who was really poorly groomed would have any kind of significant...
sense of empathy towards others.
The reason being that if you have empathy, then you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes, right?
So if you have empathy, you can stand in front of a full-length mirror, look at yourself, and say, okay, let's say that somebody didn't know me at all.
What conclusions would they draw about me based on my first impressions?
And if you have empathy and you're sensitive at least to the cultural norms around you, but if you have at least a basic degree of empathy and sensitivity to the cultural norms around you, then you can at least understand that if somebody didn't know you and you, you know, were dressed really badly and so on, this doesn't mean expensive or not, I'm just sort of talking appropriate, then they would say, gee, I'm guessing that this person has another self-esteem and so on.
Even if you said, well, here's a great, wonderful, wise guy, despite the fact that he dresses poorly, you sure as heck aren't going to find somebody with empathy and social skills because somebody who's empathetic would look at themselves and say, well, how do I look to other people if they don't know me?
And the answer is, you know, pretty bad.
And there would be a lot of pretty logical conclusions that you would then draw about that person based on their grooming, their appearance.
So, without wanting to labour that point completely into a fine dust, let's say that we can understand that the same thing may be true, I'm just sort of putting it forward as a maybe, the same thing may be true in terms of Arguments about philosophy, about ethics, about politics, about relationships, or any of these sorts of things.
The same thing might be true.
It might be true. There are a near infinite number of arguments in the world that you can spend your time investigating or not investigating, right?
I bet you there's some website out there where a secret society of leprechauns is expected to take over the earth.
Are you going to spend lots of time investigating and refuting that theory?
Well, my guess is not so much, because time is limited.
Maybe if you have an infinite amount of time and resources, you could spend your eternal life investigating every conceivable theory or approach or proposition that was out there, I mean, I don't think a lot of us go back and reread the arguments for the benefit of slavery, of which, of course, there were volumes upon volumes upon volumes written throughout human history.
We don't go back and reread those and say, gee, I wonder if this case is still valid.
Maybe I've missed something in being against, in being sort of not pro-slavery.
Maybe I've sort of missed a key argument.
We don't really spend our time doing that.
And so, when it comes time to evaluating arguments, you have to have some criteria by which you're even willing to begin the process of evaluating an argument, right?
So, you know, just to combine these two metaphors in one glorious ultra-super mega-metaphor, We could understand that if there's a crazy knotted ruster bearded guy wearing one shoe and a bathrobe on the street corner screaming out some theory, that we're not going to spend a whole lot of time investigating that theory.
Even though if he's screaming out, the government is out to get you, and they're just a bunch of crooks and thieves, even though that proposition may have some logical validity to it, we're still not going to spend a whole load of time investigating it, because the markers are pretty bad.
The markers are, if this man is speaking the truth, it is only accidentally, with the amount of truth value that a parrot might have who's been taught to squawk that two plus two is four, pretty bolly, give me a cracker.
So, when it comes to inviting other people to evaluate what it is that you have to say, you need to have some markers that are going to invite people to even give you the time of day, to even give you 30 seconds or a minute of their time and intellectual energy Trying to decipher and figure out whether it's worthwhile investigating anything that you have to say.
I mean, this is a very important thing.
You just have to look in the mirror, speak your argument, and ask yourself, if I did not know the content of this argument, would I be interested?
If I didn't know the content of this argument based on the form of my presentation, would people be interested?
So, I mean, I obviously take a non-academic approach, and you can think about it if you've made this to podcast 419.
If you've made it this far, you can ask yourself, well, assuming that you're not tied up in some horrible prison being tortured with endless repetitions of the big chatty forehead at work, if you have made it this far and you found that, obviously,
the content of what I had to say was less important at the very beginning than the form, Right, if I had sort of started off by saying something like, well, this is DeFan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio, I have some theories about the government and that it's bad and Not good.
Well, I mean, even I'm driving myself crazy doing that, right?
So... Okay, let's go back to talking more rapidly at a more rapid pace, much like a fax.
So... In this way, there's got to have been something at the beginning that made you kind of want to keep going.
And yeah, I think there's something to the quality of the arguments, but there's something else, right?
Maybe there was something personal.
Maybe, what is it, as one poster said this morning I read, he said, If I had to listen to you complain about your mother one more time, I thought my head was going to explode.
And then he went on to talk about issues he had with his mother, and of course there's no projection in that.
But maybe it was the sense of humor that you felt that I had.
Maybe there was a lightness of spirit or an energy in communication or something.
Or maybe you just spent a couple of podcasts trying to figure out what accent I was trying to fake really badly.
And of course, unfortunately, it is actually my own.
But there was something in these communications that made you want to keep going.
And I think that there is a blend, and I'm trying to analyze myself here, but there's sort of a blend of things in the way that I communicate that I think invites people to keep pressing on.
Obviously, there's some self-deprecation.
There's a great deal of passion, right?
I mean, not always, but I actually listened to one of my podcasts just to check the sound quality, an early podcast.
And it's a bit groany, but, you know, it was okay.
It was about the...
Fleeing Eden was the one.
And a couple of you knows too many, but hey.
So, yeah, there's energy, there's passion, there's curiosity, there's a sense of humor.
Even if I'm the only one laughing, there's some jokes kicking around.
And there's also self-deprecation, there's funny voices, there's trying not to take this stuff too seriously, which of course is, self-deprecation is something that a lot of people misunderstand in North America.
It's a bit of a British thing that a confident person can make fun of himself, and a non-confident person is a bit more brittle in this kind of area.
But there's something, and you know, you can go on to a bunch of different ways that I've managed to keep it interesting enough that, you know, people, if you've now listened to like 250 hours of me talking, anyway, then there's something that I've done that has made it interesting enough.
And I would say that it is the connection, primarily sort of what got you going and what kept you going in this arena, was the connection between My head and my heart, right?
The passion that I'm able to bring to bear and willing to bring to bear and the vulnerability sometimes as well to the realm of ideas.
And I'll give you a sort of short synopsis of how I, short depending on how the traffic goes, a short synopsis on how I came about being able to do this and maybe it will help you.
Well, as I've always said, the first thing you want to do is you want to act empirically.
You want to base your understanding on what is observable and measurable and empirical and so on.
And there is nothing more empirical, nothing easier to understand empirically than your own beliefs.
There is nothing easier to understand empirically than your own beliefs.
Because all you need to do is map what you really believe based on your emotions and your actions.
If you want to know what somebody really believes, then you look at what they do and what they say, of course.
But for yourself, you can also look at how you feel.
How you feel is going to be very important around your virtues, around what you believe to be virtuous or what you believe to be good or evil.
So, if you believe that standing up for the right thing is important and is a high value and a high virtue and so on, and then you get shortchanged at a convenience store and you say nothing and wander off and then get mad at yourself, well, obviously you don't really believe that standing up for yourself and standing up for what is right is really that important, right?
And I'm not saying that the person shortchanged you out of any kind of malevolent intent or anything like that, but if you gave somebody a $20 bill and they gave you change for a $10, and if you don't say anything, or if you order one drink at dinner or one beer at dinner, you get charged for two, if you don't say anything to the waitress and say, look, I only ordered the one beer, could you take this off the bill, please?
Be polite about it.
But if, based on your behavior, You obviously don't recognize or you obviously don't really believe that standing up for yourself is the right thing to do.
Now, maybe you get false internet courage in chat rooms and so on, get all flamey and tough speaking and so on, but if in your life you kind of let people walk all over you, then that's what you believe, right?
Pumping yourself up with false appeals to philosophy and universals and the argument for morality or this or that, it doesn't really mean anything.
You have to work not by what people say, but what they do.
And you have to work not by what you say you believe, but how you actually act in the feeling that you get.
So, if somebody yells at you and you instantly cave and apologize and mumble and stare at your feet and go to a bathroom stall and burst into tears...
Then you may talk tough about courage, but courage isn't really your thing.
And courage doesn't mean that you're not scared.
It means that you act despite being scared, even if that means that you burst into tears while yelling at the guy.
That's still pretty damn courageous, in my humble opinion.
So you have to sort of go empirically and work empirically.
If you want to know what you truly believe, then all you have to do is work empirically based on what it is that you actually do and how it is that you actually feel.
So, if you believe that, yes, I am a Howard Rockian photocopy and everybody should stand up for themselves and everybody should get corrupt people out of their lives and everyone should be brave and courageous and a libertarian, you know, demigod of pure strength and striding, and then your mom calls up and guilts you into coming over for dinner, then all that means is that you don't really believe that, right?
Because your emotions are what you really believe.
Your actions are what you really believe.
Everything else is just... It's like wind in empty sails.
Wind in musts, not even wind in sails.
So, the first thing that you need to do when you want to figure out how to integrate your reason and emotion is you need to figure out the degree to which they're not integrated.
And that's pretty easy to do.
You just look and say, okay, well, how do I feel in these situations and what do I end up doing?
And that doesn't mean always, right?
There are times when we feel weaker.
There are times when we feel stronger.
You've got to sort of throw out the time when you acted in honestly, bravely without feeling a shred of fear.
And the other time where you felt an unusually high amount of fear in a particular situation and didn't act as brave.
Like, you can throw off the highs and lows and you can just sort of work with the mean or the average.
But fundamentally, you can't figure out what you believe based on how you act.
So, if you say, well, I am above the cliches of family virtue, and then you cave when your mom guilts you, it obviously does mean to some degree that you're a hypocrite, but that's also not the end of the world.
That's not uncommon and something we all face from time to time, and there's nothing to sort of beat yourself up over.
But it is an indication that you don't really believe it.
Sort of fundamentally. Now, if you believe that everyone should get rid of corrupt family members, and then you feel a great deal of fear and guilt when your mother tries to guilt you, that's perfectly understandable, as I've said.
We're always going to be to some degree emotionally helpless with regards to our parents, because they just had 20 years of first impressions of controlling us.
We can't just sort of wish that away.
Well, we can wish it away, but I guarantee you it won't actually go away.
So... From that standpoint, it's important to understand that there's how you actually act, which is core beliefs, right?
Core beliefs produce emotional reactions.
Not surface beliefs, not what you kind of think, not what you wish you thought or acted, not how you wish you felt, not what philosophers tell you is right, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
You have to look and to understand, to map your own core beliefs based on how you feel and how you act.
That is how you're going to figure out the actual real honest-to-goodness state of your emotions, not what you wish you would feel in some fantasy world of perfect integrity and perfect emotional connectivity to your beliefs.
So once you have done this sort of curiosity, right?
It's all I'm really talking about is curiosity, which is a pretty common theme, as I'm sure you've begun to figure out by Podcast 419, say.
Once you've begun to figure out, and you've been curious about your own emotional reactions, your own emotional responses, and you've begun to be curious about what actually happens to you emotionally, Then you're really starting to make some progress towards actually understanding what you believe.
What you believe deep down, right?
What you believe deep down, you will absolutely get from your emotions.
You will not get from examining your conscious beliefs.
I mean, you will eventually, once you get the two in line, but you will not figure out what your core beliefs are by reading philosophy or by arguing with people or anything like that.
You look at it based on your emotional reactions.
And so, once you've done that and you've begun to really figure out your emotional reactions, then you really are in an exquisitely wonderful and horrible...
When it comes to the unconscious, it's really one or the other in general.
You're in a wonderful position to begin to map the gap, to map the gap between what you want to believe or what you think you do believe and what you actually do believe and act on.
And you can sort of look at this, you know, like an anthropologist or an archaeologist, right?
So, if my mom calls me up tomorrow and guilts me into coming to her funeral, if my mom calls me up tomorrow and guilts me into coming over for dinner, and I agree to go, and I go, and I come home, well then all I need to do is look at myself and say, okay, what does that mean about what it is that I truly believe?
What does it mean about what it is that I truly believe?
Well, it means that I really do truly believe that my wishes mean nothing, that other people's wishes mean everything, that bullying is a very effective way to get what you want, but that I am only allowed to be a victim and never a bully.
These are all of the sort of core beliefs that I am worth nothing and that everyone else must have the right and indeed, nay, maybe even have the responsibility to bully me and push me around.
And it can't even really be called bullying and pushing me around because it's such a basic absolute that I have to obey whoever wants me to do X, Y, or Z. You know, you can sort of come up with these sort of core beliefs.
And so one of the ones that I had when I was younger was, you know, my will and my preferences mean nothing.
My will and my preferences mean nothing.
And, of course, the way that that belief was inculcated in me was not too subtle.
It was that my beliefs and my willpower meant nothing.
Nobody ever asked me what they thought should happen in particular situations.
Nobody ever asked me and said, you know, do you want to go to boarding school?
Do you want to go to Canada?
Do you want to do this? Do you want to do that?
Where would you like to go on vacation?
What kind of clothes would you like to wear?
What movie do you want to go and see?
I was just sort of carted around like a sort of mute ancient dog and just propped up like an empty sack of nothing.
And of course, that's pretty obviously aggressive, right?
It's obviously pretty aggressive to say to somebody, you know, you can't express any preferences.
And of course, whenever I did express any kind of preference, my mom or my brother would just get angry at me.
And of course, it wasn't the anger that I feared.
I mean, I'm not made of such glass that people getting angry makes me afraid.
What makes me afraid is people hitting me.
And I have no recourse, right?
It's important to understand when you're a kid.
You grow up being afraid of people yelling at you because the yelling used to always lead to beatings, or the threat of parental withdrawal of affection, or any such significant threat against your being.
We're not afraid of people yelling.
We're afraid of physical pain, and the yelling would always lead to that.
And so, one of the things that I grew up with was, my preferences mean nothing.
My opinion is worth nothing.
And if I try to assert myself, I'm going to get beaten up.
And this was not an irrational core belief that I came up with.
I didn't sort of pluck it out of the stratosphere just for the funsies of it.
It was something that, you know, we have a natural desire to assert ourselves.
Just look at any two-year-old who's not, say, regularly beaten up or humiliated, and you'll see that that is in fact the case.
But... Once we get exposed to many, many years of being yelled at and hit and abused for the simple act of attempting to have an opinion and act on that opinion, once we have gone through that process for quite a long time,
Then, you know, lo and behold, miracle of miracles, we somehow end up with this opinion that our opinions are worth nothing and we should just be there for the pleasure of others.
And we get inculcated within us, of course, a terrible, terrible terror of self-assertion.
Self-assertion equals self-destruction.
Or, well, destruction at the hands of others, of course.
But that fundamental metric is something that's very hard To outgrow.
You know, 20 years of first impressions is a tough thing to outgrow.
I found it to be impossible.
I have managed to manage and diminish my own fear of self-assertion, but...
I have not managed to eliminate all fears of self-assertion.
I've managed to find methodologies by which I can be more assertive and make it more pleasurable for the other person for me to be assertive.
So I can be assertive in a way that is joking, and I can be assertive in a way that is...
I can even be assertive in a way that is tough.
But I'm telling you, like, I'll be perfectly honest with you that if somebody really calls my bluff, you know, I'll probably fold like a badly pitched tent.
I mean, it's a bit of a bluff, me being tough and me being assertive, and I can do it and I can thump the table in meetings, which maybe I've done twice in my entire career.
But it is a bit of a, like, if somebody really pushes me, I would be very unsurprised if I would end up folding.
And so you can repair, but you can't renew.
You can't be as if you were never injured.
You can go through physio and you can learn to walk again, but you can never be the person that you could have been if you weren't injured.
And that's why your parents are so bad.
Anyway, I don't have to get into that too much.
But it's important to look at how you act in situations of crisis, how you act when you need to confront someone, how you act when you discover that something is wrong, how you act when your needs are dismissed or you are humiliated or somebody ignores your preferences or somebody tries to guilt you.
How do you react? Now, when somebody tries to guilt me or manipulate me or control me, I will actually get angry.
And that doesn't mean that I then confront without fear, because I feel both fear and anger, but it does mean that I at least notice that my rights are being violated.
Or that my personal space or my integrity, that it's being violated, right?
That's fairly important.
At least you have to notice that something's wrong before you can fix it, right?
We can't fix what we don't acknowledge.
And if you don't notice that your personal space or rights are being violated, then you're going to have a very tough time defending yourself at all.
So I'll give you a minor example that happened this last weekend.
I had entered Christina into a contest to win a free day at the spa because I'm cheap.
Anyway, what happened was we got the call and Christina was told that, she said, you haven't won the full prize of a day at the spa, but you have won an in-home pampering.
And she asked what that meant.
It's like, oh, we'll come and we'll give you lotions.
We'll show you how to, whatever. We'll analyze your skin and blah, blah, blah.
And so she said, okay, I guess that sounds good.
And so when she hung up, I asked her and I said, gee, is this, are they just basically coming by to sell you stuff?
Like, are they going to be pitching you should buy these products?
And basically what you've signed up for is an indefinite sales call to your own house.
That is supposedly being given to you in the guise of a prize.
And she said, no, I don't think so.
It wasn't too clear, blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, so I should have stuck with it and helped her to whatever, right?
You don't want to be stuck into one of these situations where they say, it's 45 minutes, like, we'll give you a free TV if you spend 45 minutes letting us pitch you a timeshare or something, and then you end up being there for three hours and you get some crappy 12-inch TV that's worth like 50 bucks.
And so, anyway, she wanted to cancel it because it was our last weekend before I went back to work, but she ended up forgetting to cancel it.
I suggested cancelling it in the morning, but then she forgot again, and so basically what happened was this woman came by.
It was supposed to be 45 minutes.
She ended up staying for an hour and a half.
I was working upstairs, and it basically was a sales pitch.
You should buy these products.
I'm going to rub them on your skin.
Of course, your skin can only absorb so much whale blubber before you start blowing seawater out of your nose.
And then Christina came, and I thought, because it was going on and on, I thought, okay, well, I guess this is good and worthwhile, because otherwise Christina would have ended it.
And she's normally fairly assertive this way, but for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here, she wasn't able to process this one, and she got kind of exploited, in my view.
And so did I. Because, you know, we had to split up her Saturday, you know, it was one o'clock, it's not the most convenient time for somebody to come by, and it ended up being an hour and a half.
So when Christina came up and said, yeah, it was kind of like a sales pitch after I probed her a bit, then I got sort of angry.
And Christina, after we had a long chat about it, Christina recognized that there was a whole series of steps, you know, because she said, well, gee, I want to be able to just order these people out of my house and say, you know, this is a total ripoff.
You people have completely misrepresented what this is.
You basically are setting me up for an Amway or a Tupperware pitch.
And you've done it in the guise of me receiving a prize, which I'm obviously not getting.
Like the woman didn't even leave any samples, right?
So you didn't even get the kind of crap that you'd normally take away from stopping by a cosmetics counter when you have the option to walk away at any time.
It's a little bit different than somebody sitting in your house that you kind of have to order out.
And she said, you know, I really want to have...
The ability to be able to order these people out of my house to say, if this woman doesn't want to leave and says, no, no, no, I want to show you more products, say, no, this conversation is over, you are now going to get up and walk out of my house or I'm going to have to call my husband down and we're going to have to remove you forcibly.
Right? And I don't know if I'd have the cojones to do that, but of course the whole purpose of self-esteem and the whole purpose of assertiveness is to prevent you from getting into those situations, right?
As I said to Christina, it's sort of like if I come to you as a patient and you're my therapist and I say, You know, I keep getting into these fist fights, so what I've done is I've learned jiu-jitsu and several kill shots so that I can crush people's trachea when they start aggressing against me.
I think that's a good solution, don't you?
And, you know, a good therapist would say, well, you might want to wonder why you keep getting into these fights rather than how you can fight them better, right?
Because obviously it's better to prevent getting into a fight compared to, say, having to jam your...
The heel of your hand up somebody's nose and do awful things to their brain, or to punch them with your knuckles in the trachea and break their windpipe.
So, prevention, of course, is by far the better part of cure, and so I think any competent therapist will tell you that the purpose of assertiveness is to figure out, or the purpose of mental health is to figure out how to avoid getting yourself in these situations, rather than To try and figure out how you can best be really aggressive within these situations to reassert your rights.
So if you're a woman who says, you know, I met this guy in a bar and he seemed really cute and all, you know, and so he wanted to come over to my place at two o'clock in the morning.
And we were both kind of drunk.
And he came over to my place.
And we were sitting up chatting.
And we had some more drinks.
And then he said, oh, he was too drunk to drive.
And he didn't have any cash on him for cab fare.
And could he crash at my place?
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't feel comfortable about that.
So, you know, basically, how should I have acted to get this guy out of my place at 4 o'clock in the morning when we're both hammered?
Well... Of course, the best answer to that is not, here's how you get the guy out of your house at 4 o'clock in the morning, but here's how you don't end up with the guy in your house at 2 o'clock in the morning, right?
That would be a more sane approach, right?
I mean, we're stuck now with the problem of how do we get rid of the state, and of course, once we do manage to peel this And,
of course, the answer is to not have a state at all and to have DROs and blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, when you start to look at yourself and the issues wherein you have a problem, then you can start to work more at prevention than cure, and this can give you the space to begin to begin to...
I'll just repeat that until the end of the podcast, if that's alright.
To begin to work at prevention rather than cure, it is very unlikely that you will be able to bring your self-esteem up and be able to unite your values and your emotions when you're in a state of constant caving due to overstressors.
So if you're a woman and you have trouble being assertive, or maybe you even seek out danger, you are going to have a very, very tough time Making this work, you're going to have a very tough time learning assertiveness if you keep bringing drunken, boundaryless guys back to your house at 4 o'clock in the morning.
That's going to be a very tough time or a tough way for you to be able to begin to be assertive.
What you want to do is to begin to be assertive by, say, not going to bars and picking up guys.
That would be the first place that I would start, if I were that woman, to be assertive.
Other than exploring the whole multiple orgasm thing, which we can get into another time.
Probably not on webcam.
But you want to figure out how to avoid getting in these situations to begin with, right?
So if every time you talk to your mom, you feel like shit, then the first thing you want to do is not try and figure out how to talk to your mom and not feel like shit, but not to talk to your mom, right?
To remove the stimuli, and then you can begin to explore the core values, the core beliefs that you really hold, Which may be, you know, my mom is right.
I'm a bad son for not wanting to talk to her.
Virtuous sons always enjoy talking to their mothers.
I'm bad, bad, bad, naughty, naughty, naughty.
Let me set up a good self-spanking machine for myself and take care of business.
Well, that's not going to be very productive, right?
You're not going to be able to break out of that cycle.
If you are an abused woman in a bad relationship, you don't figure out how to roll with the punches, you get the hell out of the relationship.
And once you're out of the relationship and the negative stimuli stops pounding you between the eyes and causing you nosebleeds and spraining your arm, then you can begin working on the esteem issues that got you into and kept you into that relationship to begin with.
That, to me, would be a pretty helpful approach.
So, when it comes to debating with people about freedom, right, of course you need to be free yourself.
You need to really believe in freedom.
And if you have in your life significant hypocrisies and compromises with regards to your values, right, so if you sort of supposedly Really value freedom, but you are enslaved to the bad moods of your mother or father or sibling,
or if you are embedded in a bad, exploitive, corruptive, brutal, vicious, violent, degrading, humiliating, or disrespectful relationship, then clearly you're not that into freedom.
That's not that hard a one to figure out.
You're really not that much into freedom if You are mostly enslaved in your personal relationships.
I don't think that's too complicated a thing to get into.
Once you begin to really live by your values and get the bad people out of your life, then you create kind of a breathing room where your unconscious will get that you're really interested in taking these values seriously.
If you begin to ditch people out of your life, that will be something that your unconscious will get behind once it figures out that you're really interested in freedom.
And of course, this is why I say, and I know it sounds completely mercenary, but it is also true, That donating to Free Domain Radio will, in fact, help you take philosophy more seriously and will help you get free from bad relationships because it means that you're actually putting, you know, 50 bucks or, you know, 70 cents a day if you sign up.
It means that it's at least that important to you, right?
It's as important to you as a cup of coffee, a good cup of coffee every two days, right?
So, that's some ways that you can begin to go about getting more in line with your values, and I hope that this is helpful, right?
If you can bring your passion and your reason together, then you'll be an incredibly effective communicator, and people will want to hear what you have to say, because you really believe it yourself.
You can't convince anyone of anything you're not fundamentally convinced of yourself.
And if you have all these contradictions, these gaps in your relationships, and your gaps in your commitment to freedom, and huge gaps between your reason and your emotions, then all you're going to do is you're saying to people, I want you to really believe in this to help me believe in it a little bit more.
And that's never going to sell anyone on anything.
So, I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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