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Sept. 19, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:46
421 Humiliation

Thanks to a listener for an excellent topic - the genesis and evolution of humiliation

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Hello, hello, hello.
It's Steph. We start in the dark today.
This is Free Domain Radio 421.
Not 421 in the afternoon.
It is in fact 421 episodes since we began.
I'm still rather amazed and frankly a little frightened of my own verbosity.
But we shan't panic.
So I'd like to talk today about...
Humiliation. And humiliation is a fascinating and powerful topic that is something that was suggested by a listener on the show on Sunday, the Colin show.
And I think it's worth having a chat about.
Now, I actually have had a chat about it.
I did have a chat about it this morning.
And lo and behold, sadly and unfortunately, my...
My computer was not plugged into the power outlet.
That is fundamental to getting the power to the webcam and to the computer.
And don't panic, my lovelies.
I will, in fact, not be doing videocasting for a whole lot longer.
It is a real pain in the neck when it comes to getting these videocasts out.
And I have enough to do with my new job and enough to do with the audiocasts and the board and so on.
A whole new set of beeps for everybody.
So I am not going to be very likely to be doing videocasts in the car for too much longer.
After all that fuss and bother of getting it all set up, it has in fact turned out to be oh so much of a hassle.
So we won't be doing it for much longer, but today we shall.
just to lure even more YouTubers and Google video heads over to the magic world of Free Domain Radio and our podcasts.
So then, it was a really bad drive-in this morning.
It took me over an hour, hour and ten minutes to get to work, because there was this massive accident and so on, all associated with the public roads, as you can well imagine.
And so I was in traffic and stuck, stuck, stuck.
So I noticed that the computer had turned itself off because there was no power.
Or at least it was running on battery, which the webcam managed to drain oh so most efficiently.
And so I'm like, okay, well I'm stuck in traffic, so I might as well start again.
So I start again, and then I find out that the power outlet, which is plugged into the cigarette lighter and so on, has sadly come out of the cigarette lighter, so it all crashed again.
And you lose everything when you crash in Windows Movie Maker.
Lose it all, I did!
So this is, I guess, take two and a half, let's say, of the topic or question of humiliation.
So... I guess it could be relatively indefensible if I'm not relatively succinct, so here we go.
Alright, there are three, count them, three approaches that children in general tend to take when faced with the problem of intense parental humiliation.
And intense doesn't mean that there's just a lot of it, because to humiliate someone is to indicate a particular personality structure on the part of the person who's doing the humiliation, That you never get just a little bit of humiliation from people, right? The same way that you never get just a little bit of violence from people, or you never get just a little bit of rage from people, especially by the time they become adults.
If they've retained violence or rage as a coping mechanism by the time they've become adults, then it's embedded, baby.
It's like shrapnel in their soul, dug its way deep into the marrow.
And they need a moral transplant in the way that those with leukemia need a marrow transplant just to keep functioning.
Which is what we're all about, babies.
So, when you experience humiliation, and we'll just talk about parents, this can happen from older siblings, it can happen from teachers, it can happen from whoever you're exposed to, uncles, aunts.
We'll just talk about parents to keep it simple, but you can spread it as wide as you like.
When you have experienced humiliation as a child, there's generally one of three coping mechanisms or solutions that...
You can take, or approaches that you can take.
Now, the first one is the handy-dandy world of disassociation, or sorry, dissociation is the more technical term.
And dissociation is when you feel that the presence of humiliation or contempt or rage, but we'll just talk about humiliation, which has a few particular flavors of its own.
When you feel the humiliation, you space out, you distance yourself, you have an out-of-body experience, you give up your will, you give up your preferences, you give up your choices, you simply become like a clear water going into a convoluted glass.
You just wrap yourself around whatever Whoever has the most power in the moment, you simply conform and comply in a kind of wide-eyed, fixed-smile, empty-headed kind of way.
You become a sort of living ghost of conformity, and this relieves a certain kind of pressure in terms of humiliation, because the purpose of humiliation is not to force obedience, right?
This is sort of what is often misunderstood, particularly by children for obvious reasons.
The purpose of humiliation is not to teach obedience.
Because then, of course, the humiliation would let up when the obedience was fulfilled.
The purpose of humiliation is to destroy the soul, to destroy the self.
Obedience is just the cover story.
Obedience is just the argument for morality that is used to cover up What a certain therapist, a certain psychiatrist has called soul murder.
Scheingold, I think his name was.
Soul murder. It is the constant and overweening desire to destroy any presence of a self in someone else.
So it's not obedience that is demanded, but self-annihilation.
So when a child is faced with that, one strategy is dissociation, to give up yourself, to give up your identity, your preferences, your choices, your willpower, and to become sort of empty and conforming.
And that's one strategy that is used to bring this about.
Now, another strategy that is used by children is to become an abuser, right?
To become an aggressor against someone else.
Usually, of course, a younger sibling.
This tends to spiral up the birth order in pretty specific ways.
But another approach that is taken that is quite common is for, let's just say, an elder brother for the sake of argument.
An elder brother who is experiencing extreme humiliation And...
Can't bear it, right?
Children can't bear humiliation because it means that they're in the cage with a sort of rabid lion for the next 15 years, right?
The children just can't stand that.
I mean, it would be unbearable for an adult to think, hey, I'm going to get locked in a cage with this psycho for the next 10 or 15 years, and it's unbearable even more so for children because they're dependent and can't get away.
Of course, as I've said before, if you are an adult woman in an abusive relationship...
You can move to Singapore, you can get out, you can go to the cops, you can set up yourself independently, but you can't, of course, do any of this stuff if you are a child.
You're really stuck in this rotting cage we call a family.
And so, when you experience humiliation...
As an elder brother, we'll just take this as an example again, not to offend all elder brothers, then you have an option that's not really available to the youngest in the family.
Let's just say two brothers. If you're an elder brother, you have an option that's not really available to a younger brother.
And that option, of course, is to turn and pass down the humiliation to the younger brother.
So when you experience an assault which weakens and debilitates you, an assault of humiliation that weakens and debilitates you, then you have an option over and above just zoning out, over and above dissociation.
And that option is to turn around and attack, to reproduce the humiliation, to regain your sense of strength and superiority and efficacy and power.
By turning around and attacking the younger sibling, to humiliate the younger sibling.
And that is another way in which you restore the equilibrium, for want of a better phrase, the equilibrium within your own soul.
We all know this particular metaphor, the husband yells at the wife, the wife yells at the oldest son, the oldest son yells at the youngest son, and the youngest son kicks the cat.
That's all true, except for generally the youngest child does not kick the cat, but the youngest child takes either the dissociation route or takes the other route, which I'll talk about, which is the route of...
Masochism, right?
So when you're humiliated, if you have somebody else to kick around who's younger than you and dependent on you and your approval in the way that you are dependent upon your parents and your parents' approval, then you can kick the shit out of the younger sibling emotionally or physically To restore your sense of power and efficacy.
But if you are a younger sibling, you are going to end up in a situation wherein you are either going to dissociate or you are going to become masochistic.
See, of course, children can't do what they should do.
I mean, should in a totally ideal universe.
In an ideal universe, you look at the person who's yelling at you as a child, and you say, well, this person is just spraying a fine effluvient of their own psychological shit on me, and it's not my fault, and it's not my issue, and it's directed at me, but it's got nothing to do with me.
I'm just a convenient dumping ground.
For all of their bullshit, neuroses, and self-hatred that they've been too lazy or too stupid or too unwise or too self-righteous to deal with.
That would be, I think, the ideal way for children.
But, of course, children can't do that because that would reveal to them that their parents, who have total control over them, children are effective slaves of parents.
It would reveal to the children that their parents who have total control over them for the next 10 or 20 years are sociopaths and cruel and crazy and narcissistic and destructive and this and that and the other.
Not a pleasant prospect for your average tot.
Your average wee puppet.
So... You are not going to expect that children are ever going to be able to do that.
Children take everything personally, right?
The parents are fighting. Children feel bad.
The parents are cold.
The children feel angry towards themselves.
And, of course, what happens for elder siblings is that when parents are angry, the elder siblings blame the younger siblings.
I mean, this is the inevitable cascading waterfall of shit that pours down the family hierarchy.
So, the third route that those who are humiliated can take is the route of masochism, right?
So, there's indifference, or not so much indifference in an active sense, but dissociation.
There is sadism, or cruelty, towards those who are dependent on you as an elder sibling, towards the younger sibling as the elder sibling is dependent on the parents.
And, last but not least, there's the wonderful world, Of masochism.
And masochism occurs when the shit that people are dumping on you because they're too stupid or immature to deal with their own issues, you believe that those people should be idealized and are virtuous.
In which case their anger and aggression towards you results from you being a bad person.
So you are now a bad person.
Dissociation is just like checking out of the hotel.
But if you believe that your parents or your elder sibling are right and good and moral and only looking out for your best interests, you know, my dad was tough but fair.
My mom, yeah, she was aggressive, but man, she was a saint.
It was only for my own best interests, right?
That tends to be pretty directly children who grew up, or children who grew up to be adults either way, children who are going to end up being masochistic.
And they are going to end up reproducing bad relationships and bad, destructive, horrible, violent in one form or another relationships within their own adult lives.
And the likelihood, as I'm not even going to guess the instances, but the likelihood is that they will then end up being run around by their own children and And unable to set limits on their children, thus producing brats who are aggressive, and the whole cycle sort of starts again.
So, this sort of unholy trinity of responses to humiliation, dissociation, sadism, and masochism, It produces some pretty significant effects as adults, right?
So, of course, the spaced-out person, this is the child who is just not quite there.
Pleasant. It's almost like not guarded.
This was my particular approach, of course, when I was a child, so I can speak about it with some degree of at least personal authority, I think, that this is the child who's just...
It's pleasant and we'll play Monopoly with you and we'll run around the yard and play soccer, but just not quite really there.
Just not... not there.
Not active, not curious, not assertive, not...
just not really there.
You know, when the table needs to be set, they'll jump up and set the table and they might grumble a little, but they're just sort of fundamentally empty ghost-like shells who just...
I mean, and there's a great deal of sadness if you're around these children, of course.
There's just a great deal of emptiness, fundamentally, in the souls of these children.
You can't get access to them.
You can't have a direct conversation with them.
You don't get any sense of impression, right?
They're like fog, a pleasant fog, and not entirely without interaction, but just not really there.
And these people grow up to be exploited as adults, right?
Because the one thing that is true, I think, fundamentally and in a very sad way, the one thing that is true, I think, is that children are...
The markers that you receive when you're a child give very strong...
Forward-looking kind of invitations to people in the future.
And that is a very, very sad thing.
I was listening to a lecture by Dr.
Phil the other day.
And Dr.
Phil was talking about his sister-in-law or something like that.
And Dr. Phil was saying that his sister had told him this story.
His sister's in an airplane.
And his sister says that, you know, the stewardess, she looked at me and I was standing up trying to fix something around my seatbelt.
And she said, hey, miss, sit down now!
In a sort of very aggressive kind of way.
And Dr. Phil said, I couldn't understand.
I asked her, I said, well, what kind of vibes are you putting out that people think that they can treat you that way?
So when you're a child, you're helpless, but when you're an adult, there's a very complex...
Set of signals and interactions that give people the sense of whether or not they can humiliate you.
Because it's certainly true that when people become humiliated, then they have a very unstable relationship with humiliation.
They either succumb to it and fall off the planet and castigate themselves later, or they end up being overly aggressive and trying to humiliate others.
Whatever you don't accept, you end up reproducing in pretty horrible kinds of ways.
So if you don't accept the pain of having been humiliated, then you have to idealize those who humiliated you.
If somebody punches you in the face and you then think, oh boy, that person who punched me in the face is just about the best person ever, and I couldn't even imagine that there would be a better person than the person who punched me in the face, then it seems quite obvious that you're going to end up in a situation then it seems quite obvious that you're going to end up in a situation where you are going to end up punching I mean, this is, I think, kind of inevitable.
And this whole problem of idealization followed by the reproduction of that behavior is a significant, significant problem that people constantly reenact within relationships, right?
As Dr. Phil says, right, that which we do not acknowledge, we cannot fix.
And if you idealize brutality...
Or minimize its effects, then you are going to end up reproducing it, right?
What we idealize, we reproduce.
This is the very fundamental power of the argument for morality, that what we idealize, we end up reproducing.
It's inevitable, and that's why it's so important to really look over your values very, very closely to make sure that you don't end up in this situation where you end up idealizing something that's bad and then reproducing it.
So, to go back to the story that I was talking about in the last podcast about Christina this last weekend, a question that I had for her was, what signals did you give off in your interaction with this woman where she felt safe coming to your house under false pretenses and And giving you what was supposed to be a pampering session,
but turned out in fact to be a product demonstration and a sales pitch for like an hour and a half.
What was it that occurred that allowed this woman to feel that you weren't going to throw her out on her ass, right?
Because people who are sort of invasive or rude or disrespectful of you They themselves are very afraid of being humiliated, right?
The aggression covers, it masks a great hole, a great fear of being...
Aggressed against, of being humiliated.
So given that somebody who comes to your house under false pretenses, pretends that you've won a gift but ends up just trying to sell you stuff for an hour and a half when they say it's only going to be 45 minutes, this kind of aggressive and rude and insensitive person is very much afraid of being humiliated.
So of course my question was, what signals were there out there between you guys that...
Had this person pick up that she could come to your house and she could ignore your requests that the interview end, that she could ignore your requests for a definition of what was going to happen, that she could ignore your requests that she wrap it up, that she move on, and she could ignore, and I said to Christina, she could ignore your constant statement that you were not interested in purchasing what it is that she had to sell.
So, how...
Was it that this woman did not feel that you were going to end up just saying, look, I'm going to stop this right now.
You have come to my house under false pretenses.
This is not a prize.
This is a sales pitch.
This is dishonest.
This is disreputable. This is not how an honorable person or a decent person does business.
You have now wasted my time.
You have split up my Saturday, and it's not a prize at all, and you are going to leave my house this instant.
Now, pack up your stuff and get out.
Right? That's not yelling at someone.
It's not calling them names. But you can be very firm.
Now, this, of course, would have been very humiliating to the woman who came to her house and pitched Christina for an hour and a half.
And don't get me wrong.
Christina is normally very firm.
There was a whole combination of circumstances which led up to this, which we can get into another time if it's even relevant.
But Christina is normally very firm in this kind of way.
But she just, you know, she had a...
She missed the boat a little here, as we all do, heaven knows, from time to time.
But people really, they probe, they test body language, they test eye contact, they test in general how it is that you perceive yourself, how it is that you perceive others, your self-esteem, the way that you navigate and negotiate things.
This all happens very, very quickly between people.
I had a colleague, oh, this is some time ago, he taught me something very, very interesting.
The CEO, and we'll just call him Bob, the CEO and Bob went to go and see a vendor.
And then later, there was a couple of meetings that the CEO had with the vendor alone, and then the vendor called up Bob and was disrespectful to him.
Not hugely, but it was there.
And... What was very interesting about that, which Bob taught me quite a good deal about, was that Bob did not get angry at the vendor.
Bob did not get angry at the vendor.
This is an important thing to understand.
Bob got angry at the CEO. And he said to me, he said, the reason...
I went right into the CEO's office, I sat down, and I said, tell me.
How did you talk about me with this vendor so that the vendor felt that he could talk to me this way?
How did you represent me to this vendor so that the vendor felt comfortable being rude to me?
That's a very, very intelligent way to respond to that kind of situation.
Because, of course, if the CEO had said, oh, Bob is great, Bob is my right-hand man, I don't make a decision without consulting with Bob, and this sort of stuff.
If the CEO had said that kind of stuff, then the vendor would never have been rude to Bob.
And so, in some way, the vendor had received the communication from the CEO that the vendor could be rude to Bob and not only get away with it, but that it would be a positive thing to do.
And this guy had a good self-esteem, and we won't sort of get into all the details, but the other thing that's sort of important to understand...
About how you create this environment, how you design how people interact with you, consciously or unconsciously.
How you invite people into your life is very significant, and humiliation produces terrible, terrible after effects in this sort of scenario.
But... Bob, in terms of the view of the vendor, right?
This is a very subtle thing that's important to understand.
Now, when the vendor heard the CEO, and we never got confirmation, but you can be sure that it happened.
When the vendor heard the CEO speak about Bob disrespectfully, in one way or another, Oh, that Bob, he's always horrible.
Yeah, that Bob, he's a nice guy, but kind of scattered.
Whatever happened, whatever comments that the CEO put out about Bob, in the vendor's sort of evil, manipulative, calculating, false self, unconscious corner of hell, in his mind, The vendor said to himself, oh, okay, so Bob is working for the CEO who doesn't respect him.
So Bob must be, to some degree, a masochist.
Because why would you work for somebody who didn't respect you, unless you were, in fact, some sort of masochist?
And so the vendor, I believe, felt perfectly safe disrespecting Bob because it's not just that the CEO made some individual or disparaging group of comments about Bob.
It's that Bob was willing to work for a boss that did not respect him, who did not respect him.
And that says an enormous amount to the vendor about Bob's level of self-esteem, level of confidence, and it says everything that the vendor needs to know about Bob's family history.
So the environment that you're embedded in is very, very important in terms of what it communicates to other people.
So So, if you come to me, not that you would, but if you did come to me and you complained about the perfidy and falseness and manipulation and unpleasantness of your family, and then you said,
and I'm going over for Sunday dinner, Then I would know everything that I needed to know about your level of self-esteem, about the connection that your values had to your emotional life.
I would just get you from top to bottom, back to front, A to Z. And I would know that if I bullied you, you would fault.
Because how could you not fault?
You've already told me that you are enslaved to people that you despise.
So anything that I do is going to be tiny compared to everything that your family has done that you have reported to me.
So every time you tell a story about yourself to people, every time people see you operating in an environment, every every time people see you operating in an environment, every time people see the values that you claim versus the stories that you tell in the life that you live,
any gap between all of these things will be an absolute invitation for people to enter your life and exploit you.
You are sending out massive signals.
You've got, you know, take me!
Written in big scrolling neon letters on your forehead.
If you haven't dealt with your family history, if you haven't dealt with your history of humiliation, if you haven't dealt with whatever you haven't dealt with, then it's going to reproduce itself in your life and it's going to be a constant invitation for other people to enter into your life and to take advantage of you in one form or another.
We all want to go to work and be the guy who thumps the table and get things done, but you can't be that guy.
I'm not saying that's the right guy to be, but you can't be that guy if you can't do it with your parents.
If you can't be decisive with your parents, then you can't conceivably be decisive in any other area.
If you can't be decisive with your loved ones, with your whoever, quote loved ones, with your spouse, and decisive doesn't mean bullying or yelling or swearing or anything like that, but make your needs known, negotiate, navigate, all that kind of stuff, then you're going to be constantly inviting other people to come into your life in an aggressive way.
And your response is always going to be disproportionate to what is actually occurring.
So, there's no way, if you've gone through a childhood experience of humiliation, and I have never met a single human being who hasn't, because society and family is so corrupt these days, but if you have gone through this childhood experience of humiliation, then compliance or aggression is going to be Not assertiveness, right? That's the opposite of both.
Compliance and aggression are going to be your two fixed ways of being, right?
You're not going to be able to be assertive because you're either going to knuckle under people's demands or you're going to yell at them because they'll manipulate you and then you'll yell at them and then you'll look like the crazy, over-aggressive, over-assertive guy.
So... You're simply not going to be able to have any kind of measured or rational response to somebody who is messing with you or who is invading your space or taking over your whatever, whatever. Not because they want anything other than to humiliate you.
They're acting out their own childhood shit.
So you're either going to take it personally like they're screwing with you and they're not.
They're just knee-jerk reacting.
It's got nothing to do with you.
So you're either going to take it too personally and you're going to, like they're screwing with you and you're going to explode, or you're going to dissociate and comply and then hate yourself later.
Now, the interesting thing about humiliation, and again, this is the power of the argument from morality, the interesting thing, the fascinating thing about humiliation is Is that the fundamental aspect of humiliation is that it is a universal rule that applies only to you.
It is a universal rule that applies only to you.
It's a fundamental paradox at the root of humiliation.
And what I mean by that...
Is that when Christina was told as a child, you have to be nice, you have to be polite, you have to be considerate of the feelings of others, which is something that we're all told, but I think women get it a little bit more in the neck than men do.
So, Christina was told, you have to be nice, you have to be considerate towards the feelings of others, you have to be consideratory, you have to get along with people.
Well, that is a rule that is an absolute that is applied to Christina.
She is not allowed to break out of that rule.
Anytime she steps out of that rule and gets angry at something or gets frustrated or is snarky or whatever, right, when she's a kid, wham!
Right?
She is smashed back into place.
And so, whenever there's If you have this rule within yourself that says you must always be nice, you must always be considerate the feelings of others, it's bad to not be considerate and to be nice and to respect the feelings of others and blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah. All this shit that gets shoveled at children and especially girls.
You must always act in this conciliatory manner.
Well, of course, the fascinating question which pops into every child's mind at the beginning and gets pounded out through successive abuses is, alrighty, so the rule is you must always be conciliatory towards other people.
That's the rule. That's the rule.
That's the rule. Then what happens when somebody is not consideratory or respectful of my feelings?
So you see what it means when I say that it's a universal rule that applies only to you.
Because if it wasn't a universal rule, then it wouldn't have any of the power that is innate to the argument for morality.
If it wasn't a universal rule, it would have no power.
It would just be, obey me because I'm bigger.
Then you might grumblingly obey, but you'd end up hating the person for bullying you.
But if you say, well, I represent a universal moral rule called be nice to everyone, which you must obey or you are bad.
And if you are bad, I will punish you.
if you do not respect the feelings of others I will punish you and so of course if when somebody else sorry if when you don't respect the feelings of others are not nice and conciliatory then you get punished in an ugly way then if it's a universal rule then
Then, for Christina, this woman who came into her house under false pretenses, said she'd won a prize, but in fact was taking away her time by giving her sales pitches, this woman was clearly not respecting Christina's feelings and preferences.
This woman was not being nice.
And if Christina, as a child, was punished, For not being nice.
Then surely, if it is a universal rule, then Christina has the right to punish others when they are not nice.
But, of course, that's never how it is.
Oh no!
Oh no! Oh no!
Oh no! The rules are never for the bullies, but only for the victims.
The rules are never for the bullies, only for the victims.
But the bullies say to the victims that the rules are universal.
You must be good.
You must be nice.
You must obey. But of course, the person who's saying these things in an ugly and vindictive kind of way is neither being nice nor considerate nor obeying their own rule.
Right? The policeman can come and collect taxes from you because you must pay your taxes.
It is your civic duty.
Right? But if you say, well, if it's my civic duty to pay taxes and it's your civic duty to collect taxes, then surely it is also my civic duty to collect taxes and your civic duty to pay taxes so everyone has the same civic duty of paying and collecting taxes so I should theoretically be able to collect my own taxes and pay them to myself or at least go to the policeman's house and collect his taxes at the point of a gun.
But no! It's not universal!
Everybody must obey the state.
But what about those in the state?
The rules don't apply to them.
We all know these stories about The congressman who received the plaintiff letters from parents whose children have been arrested for some minor drug possession who've got 20 years in prison who then find that their own child and who say, oh, well, there's nothing I can do to help you.
The laws are the laws. We can't show favoritism, blah, blah, blah.
And then the senator's own son or the congressman's own son gets arrested for two grams of cocaine possession and they work every political muscle in their body to get this child off.
With, you know, 100 hours of community service and 3 months probation.
Because the rules, they're not for the rulers.
They're just for us.
But they have to convince us that they're universal so that they can tap into the power of our desire to be good.
The power of the argument from morality.
So, the fundamental, the fundamental aspect of Of humiliation is to believe in a universal moral rule that applies only to you.
To believe in the universality of an absolute constant and universal moral rule that is both universal and applies only to you.
Right? That is absolute isolation from the species.
That is bottomless self-hatred, self-denigration, self-loathing, self-abdication.
And it is so fundamentally and cowardly irrational that to get the vast mass of human beings to believe this load of shit Can you picture the sea of blood that human children have to wade through and are dunked under and drowned and strangled and cast adrift in?
The violence, the horror, the abuse, the denigration, the humiliation.
Now that you see the fundamental irrationality Of this proposition that you are subject to a universal rule that applies only to you.
Can you picture how much abuse must be heaped on children for them to think that this is true and good?
Can you see what tentacled fingers are fastened around the natural airways of healthy children to choke them into this kind of incoherence?
The degree of irrationality in the world is the degree of abuse that children receive.
The degree of aggression in the world is the degree of abuse that children receive.
Thank you.
And this is the most common of all.
You are subject to a universal rule that applies only to you.
You will be clubbed into submission...
With the argument for morality.
Oh, but you can never wrestle this club from the hands of the people who beat you and use it yourself!
Good God, no!
You pay your goddamn taxes!
You shut up, get on your face, and obey!
Because it's universally good to obey.
But you never get to be the one who commands obedience.
That is not for you.
That is never for you.
It's universally good to obey, say our masters.
Who do you obey?
You say to our masters.
They say, well, we obey you.
We serve and protect you.
Great! Here's an order!
No, no, no, no.
We don't take orders. We give orders.
We serve you by being your masters.
Great, can I serve you by being your masters?
No. It is a universal absolute, but never reciprocal.
Never to be reciprocated.
Crush, crush, crush, crush!
It's all they do.
Crush, destroy, confuse, disorient, and humiliate, humiliate, and humiliate.
This is why we have nihilists in the world.
Because ethics is humiliation.
Morality is the destruction of any self-esteem and any kind of identity.
Crush, crush, crush!
It's all you get.
Club down with universal absolutes.
grind into a fine, bloody, powdery mist with universal absolutes that are completely solitary to the individual and can never be reversed.
So, once you understand the prevalence of this belief that there are universal absolutes that only apply to me and are once you understand the prevalence of this belief that there are universal absolutes that only apply to me are.
Getting people to believe this involves an absolutely unbelievable amount of mental torture.
An absolutely unbelievable amount of mental torture that we all went through.
And if you don't believe me and you have access to children, go up to them with a candy bar, sit down opposite them, And when they ask for a candy bar, say to them, no, it's evil to eat candy.
Only bad people eat candy and then eat the candy.
And see what the children say.
Try it. Try it with a four-year-old.
We're not talking quantum goddamn physics here.
Try it with a four-year-old.
Sit down, take their Halloween candy, and pop it into your mouth while saying, it's very naughty to eat candy.
Only bad people eat candy.
I'm not going to give you your candy because only bad people eat candy.
And eat the candy. See how long it takes for them to figure out that something quite awry is occurring.
They get it at four years old!
Completely, utterly, totally, instinctively, deeply, and yes, my friends, rationally!
If a four-year-old gets it passionately, deeply, and rationally, what kind of horrors does that child have to go through In order not only to believe the exact opposite,
not only to call the exact opposite good, but to forget the reversal.
Right? It's like a woman Doesn't have to be told that being raped is evil and bad.
What kind of mental torture does a woman have to go through to not only think that rape is good when she instinctively knows that it is evil, not only to think That rape is good.
But also to forget that she ever thought it was evil and to forget the transition that occurred.
How much abuse...
This is the story of 1984, if you've read it, of course.
That the torture that Winston Smith has to go through in order to go from hatred Of Big Brother, to love of Big Brother, and to forget the transition.
Well, starved, whipped, beaten.
I mean, this is the story of how our relationships to ethics completely reverses itself.
And once we understand that fundamental reversal, that instinctively and at the age of three or four years old, children perfectly understand that if you children perfectly understand that if you claim that something is good and something is naughty, that you can't then appropriate those actions for yourself.
That a universal rule must apply to everyone or rank hypocrisy and a negation of the standard and a negation of the authority of the standard giver is inevitable.
Children understand that perfectly and intuitively.
It comes right after the first pleasurable bowel movement.
Ah, that first pleasurable bowel movement.
Lovely.
I swear to God, if my commute gets any longer, I'm going to need some adult diapers.
So, that's where we start, which is pure integrated, non-hypocritical intellectual integrity or instinctual integrity with regards to ethics.
To be transformed into its complete opposite, to retain the power of the absolute, while retaining none of the defensiveness of the absolute.
This is all I've been arguing for, for the last ten months.
If you're going to accept absolutes, then by God they'd better be absolutes, otherwise they're just going to be used to exploit you.
If you're going to accept moral standards as absolute, then they're going to crush you into conformity in one form or another.
And the only defense you have against being crushed into conformity by universal absolutes is to make them reversible.
So that with every obligation, with every duty, with every form of obedience comes a weapon called integrity and universality.
Which means that people cannot use ethics to force obedience from you, to crush you under their heel and have you lick it in pleasure and joy at your obedience, but instead to have this wonderful self-defense called, I don't accept hypocritical standards.
That way you can be sure that you will subjugate yourself to what is good and virtuous and true.
And not to the mere sociopathic, psychotic, sadistic will of others.
And that really is, of course, the only antidote to humiliation, is universality.
Okay.
Because once you get that you were humiliated, and it was wrong that you were humiliated, Then you can get angry at people who humiliated you.
And you do that by reversing all of the standards.
And of course, if your parents humiliated you and you're still in touch with them and you're on the fence about this, all you need to do is to start humiliating them and see how they like it.
And if they don't like it, then you have all the answers you need to know about their level of integrity and the fact that they just used the power of...
Universality, which is embedded within every human soul from birth onwards.
They use that power to force obedience from you by claiming that you were obeying universal standards that were in fact standards that only applied to you and were to use your natural integrity and virtue to humiliate and crush you, which is pretty damn evil as far as I stand.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I hope that this has helped excavate some of the horrors of Humiliation for you and helps to clear up some of the, I think, very basic standards that we need to understand when we look at our families and our histories and our capacity to be humiliated.
Our capacity to be humiliated arises directly from our desire to be virtuous, which all children are born with and all children are incredibly susceptible.
As all adults are, to the argument for morality.
And that's why I'm working so hard to get you to the point, hopefully, that you understand that ethics are, if they are to be universal, they must be universal and reversible.
And anybody who claims otherwise is simply out to pick your pockets and crush your soul.
And I hope that that helps you get these kinds of people out of your life because they are pure poison and you will not survive continual encounters with them.
So thank you so much for listening.
I really, really appreciate it.
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