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Sept. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:34
422 Maternal Passive Aggression

From a listener post - how too many mothers control, their children...

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. Ten past eight on the 20th, I think, of September 2006.
Four days left to be not forty.
So I'm going to start with a letter that is a very common kind of letter that you will see coming out of your parents, and particularly from your mother, should you decide that Your relationship with your parents is not something that you can rescue,
and that of course is not specifically always a merely rational decision, but is also often a decision that arises from your emotions, from your feelings.
So, this is a typical kind of letter.
It's very brief, so I can read it while I drive on these absolutely deserted suburban streets.
But this letter goes like this.
Hey, name.
I just wanted to tell you that I love you, and that I will always love you no matter what.
I am very hurt and sad that you are so angry with your father and me, but I know that I can't make you want to be close to us.
This is a fascinating letter which I have received numerous times sent in by listeners.
Who get it.
I mean, who really, really get it.
So I'm not going to explain anything to the people who are going through this, because they certainly do understand it, and there's nothing more that I can add to that, to this understanding, except to say that...
When you look at the history of these kinds of families, I think that it can be very important to really look at what goes on with these kinds of families,
the kinds of processes that occur, and to understand that when you begin to no longer accept You've got to love these people who sit right in the middle of a lane and won't let you take a right-hand turn and then slowly drift over just in time for you not to be able to take the right-hand turn before the traffic comes.
Ah, the joys of driving with my fellow human beings.
But the constant manipulation...
I mean, I think it's really important to understand the incredible power Of this kind of self-righteousness.
You know, I have to tell you, if I really loved Christina, which I do, but I mean, assuming that I really love Christina, then if she came to me and said that she was really angry with me about something, I would...
I would throw all ego aside.
I would do anything to find out what was occurring for her, what I had done, how to fix it, because that, of course, involves Love.
And that involves trust.
Because I don't believe that Christina is a big one for manipulating me.
In fact, she very, very, very rarely does it.
And when she does it, we notice it, and we talk about it, and we fix it.
But if she were to be really angry with me about something, I would completely and totally...
Subjugate myself to whatever it was that was going on for her.
And there would be no question of me trying to talk her out of her anger.
This form of subjugation is what love is and what trust is.
You don't want to be wary and guarded and fearful of constant manipulation from people who are in your life.
Because that's got nothing to do with love.
That is just being, it's like being in a cage with a rabid animal, or as Woody Allen used to say, there's a, I think a quote in Revelations is, the lion shall lay down with the lamb.
And Woody Allen says, and yes, the lion shall lay down with the lamb, but the lamb won't really get much sleep.
Which I think is quite true.
But... You don't want to be in relationships where you can't trust and subjugate yourself to someone else.
Relationships where you can't trust and subjugate yourself to someone else are really crippling.
Trust is a very, very powerful thing.
Trust is not something that you will.
Trust is something that is earned.
Trying to will Loving someone or trusting someone is epistemologically identical to attempting to will a paycheck by sitting in your room.
I guess you could imagine that you get some money, but it ain't going to have any currency anywhere.
It ain't going to have any real coinage anywhere.
It's going to be the worst kind of imaginary fiat monopoly money.
And I think that this question of subjugation is very, very important, and it sort of bases itself around our own histories of how we were treated, of course, when we were children.
So I will be talking about childhood, though I may not be yelling as much as yesterday.
Who knows? Actually, is it really bright out?
No, it's not, actually.
You can get some eye contact.
So... When we are children and we are bullied by our parents and our teachers and our priests and so on, the cops when we're teenagers, when we're children and we are bullied in these kinds of ways, What happens is we grow up with an extraordinary hostility that may be subterranean and may not be.
An extraordinary hostility towards anyone who tries to control, sort of to quote, control us.
And this is something I've referred to before, which I call the angry will.
And the angry will is Whenever someone says to you, you should do X, that what occurs for you is that you are being bullied and controlled and manipulated and that it is a personal kind of subjugation.
I remember once...
Boy, it's got to be eight years ago now...
I took a completely retarded spill off a bicycle and I cracked my forearm.
I had a hairline crack along my forearm.
And, of course, given that I had a hairline crack along my forearm, I was very careful with said forearm to not do any further damage to it.
I didn't need a cast, I just needed a sling, and I just wore it for a week or two, and everything's been fine since.
I still lift weights and play squash, and of course it was my left arm, and I'm left-handed, so it was not insignificant for me to get that thing back to full functionality, because that's my racket sports hand.
So... And those who are on the audio, who are missing out on the glories of the Freedom in Radio video, you just missed me digging some sleep crap out of my eye.
So I just want you to be aware of the worlds of entertainment that you're missing by simply listening to the audio.
And I just, you know, to lure you back to YouTube, you do get to see the fabulous specimen of me digging for gold in the corner of my eyes.
And that, you know, that has entertainment value that can scarcely be measured.
And I actually do believe the last part is true.
Sorry. It's just my way of saying that I'm getting more comfortable with the camera.
Let's hope that I'd end it.
I don't get too comfortable with the camera, or Lord knows what's going to happen.
For God's sake, man, it's okay to do your podcast with your shirt on, but don't stand up and show what else you don't have on.
But I remember being in the doctor's office when I went in for my second set of x-rays after about a week.
And There was a young guy there who was in a full cast, so I guess he'd really broken his arm.
I don't know if it was a twist break or what.
There was a guy who was in a full cast, and his arm, strangely enough, wasn't getting any better.
And I can't remember how it came out, but it did come out that he had been snowboarding with a cast on, like with a broken arm.
And, of course, the pressure hadn't broken the cast, but I'm guessing that the pressure and the this, the that, and the other had caused a significant lack of healing to occur.
I'm just going to be paranoid.
Check on my power, which is okay.
I check it just before I start, but I want to make sure it doesn't come loose, because that's a real drag.
It means that I lose podcasts, and what happens then is that the next podcasts are always kind of yelly, I guess.
I don't know. But the doctor was incensed, of course, and gave him a pretty long, and I thought...
Thoughtlessly stern lecture, right?
This is the great temptation of people who are in authority, is to give a stern, commanding, hierarchical, top-down lecture to recalcitrant and wayward boys and young men.
And, oh Lord, doesn't it make your eyes roll when you are a recalcitrant and wayward young man, because the doctor doesn't realize that it is because of and in the anticipation of these kinds of lectures That this boy is harming himself or at least preventing his healing.
So he doesn't realize that by giving this young man a stern and authoritarian lecture on how he has a responsibility.
It was almost like you have a responsibility to society to get better.
It was just this sort of nonsense.
And you are consuming society's resources without allowing yourself to heal.
This is irresponsible to the first order.
You know, this kind of stuff. And didn't realize that this was almost going to guarantee that the man was going to further take off wind sailing and skydiving with his cast on.
Because he wasn't sitting there saying, help me understand why it is that you're not acting in a way that's going to make you healthy.
I'm concerned not so much about your arm, but about a general pattern here that might be occurring.
And I'm not a professional, but I think that you probably should seek a little counseling.
Because this is significant and it's going to show up in a bunch of areas and I, you know, I am concerned and, you know, without recognizing that this is somebody who just, who just has been malnourished as a child, right?
He has been overly bullied by overly authoritarian people and he's doing that which will recreate it for him because he became, as we talked about in 420, he became a little bit more on the, um, On the masochistic side of the equation, when it came to dealing with his past, and so now he is seeking out the kind of humiliation that comes from, quote, defying authority figures and provoking a lecture.
And the doctor, of course, was probably an elder sibling, or at least a sibling, who went on the sadistic domination side of the fence when faced with extreme humiliation when he was a child.
And so these two were just playing out childhood roles of, I'm naughty, I'm lecturing, I'm bad, you're bad, you know, all this kind of stuff.
And it is rather sad to see, and it is sad to see just how the family photocopier just reproduces itself minute after minute, after hour after hour, after day, after year, after epoch, after human civilization, after human civilization, until we actually take the argument for morality and apply it to the supposedly sturdy trunks of family relations and find that they are in fact jello trees of near pure vapor.
And yes, that would be a good name for band.
It's alright, I haven't used that joke in at least 100 podcasts, so it's almost like it's new!
You know, if you've been married for a while, you will notice that you run out of historical stories, and your spouse, if she doesn't love you, she'll scorn you for repeating your stories.
If she loves you a little bit, then she will smile and pretend that she's hearing them for the first time, and if she loves you a lot, she'll say, oh gosh, I'm so sorry, we've already done this one.
You know, and you'll laugh about it.
But, um, uh, that's, uh, it's the same thing as true with my jokes.
I mean, this is why it's good. I guess it's good if people aren't listening to these things in sequence because they'll realize that not only do I continue to use the word criteria and criterion incorrectly, but, uh, the jokes are not, uh, not almost the newest.
Anyway, it's okay.
So, You could see in this young man's eyes, as the doctor lectured and berated him for being irresponsible and to the first degree, young man, you know, son, all this kind of stuff, you could see both the pleasure and the hostility in this young man's gaze as the doctor dressed him down, and you could see Bill O'Reilly does this kind of stuff from time to time as well.
And, uh, it's pretty funny, uh, of course, because I, uh, I mean, I'd like to think that I have, uh, more than a few, uh, uh, more than a few bits of truth food stuck between my intellectual teeth.
And, you know, remember early on in the podcast when I was good with metaphors?
That was kind of fun, wasn't it?
I don't know what's happened. But, uh, maybe it's the pressure, the constant pressure of the all-seeing eye camera.
I don't know. But, um, I think that I've worked some things out that are useful, and I really don't feel confident enough to dress too many...
I don't know if I've dressed too many people down at all.
Maybe a couple of determinists, maybe one marine from the incredible courage bubble of my internet office.
So, I just find, to me, sort of dressing down people is just funny, because there is so little actual wisdom in the world that all impositions of rules is simply bullying and destructive.
Right? Because, of course...
This doctor who is preying on the taxpayers through the coercion of the state in the wonderful socialist medicine world of Canada is lecturing another person about misusing resources from the healthcare system when he is benefiting from and being paid by and was trained by a completely socialist system that does nothing but allocate resources incorrectly.
But of course, if you were to turn on the doctor and say, wow, that's interesting, so you feel That people who are involved in the misallocation of healthcare resources are fundamentally irresponsible and should be almost yelled at.
And if the doctor says, yes, it's very irresponsible to misuse and misallocate health resources.
If you're going to take the cure, take the goddamn cure.
Then, of course, it'd be like, okay, so you're involved in this socialist bullshit system that completely misallocates resources, that makes people wait months or years for surgery, that means only people who are insiders can get specialists, and so you are fundamentally about a thousand million billion times more corrupt than this young man, so you should be and so you are fundamentally about a thousand million billion times more corrupt than this young man, so you should Of course, the doctor would never accept that.
He'd never go, you know, that's true.
I really get angry at the misallocation of resources, and now that I've had a conversation with you about socialist calculation, I understand that I'm participating in a totally corrupt scheme that misallocates resources, and I can't believe how hypocritical it was for me to get angry at this young man when I am participating in a system that is far worse!
That's never going to happen.
He's just going to find excuses, right?
Because the rules never apply to the rulers.
They never apply to those in authority.
They only use his clubs to smash those who are younger and dependent into submission in a personal way.
Submission in a personal way.
When it comes to this whole question, I guess we're going back to the topic of humiliation.
I'm still working on the letter that I was reading at the beginning.
I'm circling it a little bit just to get a really good landing.
You've got to get just the right angle.
What happens when we're raised by bullies is we become resistant to rules.
And that's if we take either the dissociation.
It really only happens if we take the dissociation route.
And it certainly would be very interesting if you did experience, as we all did experience, certainly in public schools, if not in our families.
And yes, we experienced it in our families.
And I'm not saying this because all families are innately evil or anything like that, but it's a simple fact.
It's a simple rational fact that parents do have to teach rules to their children.
I mean, there's simply no other way to raise children than to teach them rules, if you're going to be a parent.
So parents do have to teach rules to their children.
There's simply no way to get away from that.
And given that parents do have to teach their children rules, and nobody has a clue about rational rules, or almost nobody, let's say, then of course hypocrisy and bullying of one form or another is going to be the inevitable result.
If you have to teach someone about mathematics and you have no clue about mathematics, you're just going to make stuff up and you're going to make it stick with some force of personality and you're going to take the dominant beliefs about mathematics because you have to make up some semi-consistent rules even if they're not logical.
They need to be consistent with some sort of first premises.
So you're just going to pluck the nonsense out of the cultural atmosphere and you're going to club your kids with it to get them to obey it and you're going to use excessive Emotional force, if not physical force, you're going to use excessive force precisely because you don't know what you're talking about.
Right? The people, if you remember the character Cliff Clavin, I think it was, the postal worker, or the postman, from the sitcom Cheers, he was the blowhard.
Who had to have a useless fact and a useless and strongly fought for opinion about everything under the sun because he knew nothing, really.
He was an idiot. And because he was an idiot, he had to present himself as a know-it-all.
Sorry, because he was a know-it-all, which is to say know nothing, he had to present himself as a very, very wise man.
And this character, of course, would not be funny If he were the CEO of a large company, because then he would have some credibility, would have achieved at least some level of professional success in his life.
But he was only funny because he put himself forward as the wisest and smartest man in the known universe, and yet he was a postal worker, right?
Which is always the question that comes about with people who claim to know so much and to be so wise.
You know, it's a reasonable thing to ask that if you'd have all this wisdom, How's it working out in your life, you know, as a whole?
And this just means that...
It certainly doesn't mean that I've always been successful, good heavens.
I've had more failed relationships than I have remaining hairs on my head, which doesn't look like a lot, but if this camera was coming from the back, you'd still see a few stragglers hanging in there.
But... It is really a question of applied wisdom, right?
I mean, if you really do have wisdom, then you compassionately argue for something, then you have some sort of success.
Wisdom is supposed to lead to some sort of success in your life, I do believe.
And so...
It's the overcompensation that is always occurring in parental instructions and orders.
Because parents fundamentally don't have a clue about any sort of morality or any sort of ethics, and it's almost too much to ask for them to invent ethics from scratch, because philosophers are still working it out 2,000 or 2,500 years after it being invented, or discovered, I would probably say.
It's far too much to ask for parents to invent this, and so they have to teach their children some sort of rules.
They have no clue fundamentally about the rules that they're teaching, and so they have to substitute bullying for certainty.
This is always the case, right?
Insecure people are either over-compliant or over-aggressive.
There's no possibility when you're not in the sort of satisfying seat of truth, there's no possibility that you're going to have a measured response to anything.
Like, for instance, if you don't have a natural talent for acting, you'll be an over-actor or an under-actor.
I tended more towards over-acting, as you may have noticed from the God of Atheists audiobook.
But there is no measured response.
There is no mean response in the Aristotelian mean sense when you lack knowledge.
When you lack knowledge about what it means to be courageous, then you will be foolhardy or cowardly, but you won't be sort of anywhere in the middle.
When you lack knowledge about sound financial management, you will either be a spendthrift or a miser.
You will generally tend not to be somewhere in the middle.
So, parents don't have a clue about what they're teaching their children, so they have to end up bullying their children.
Or, you may end up with parents, and I don't know that I've talked to any libertarians who have this history, although of course I haven't asked the history of every libertarian I've talked to.
Oh, getting bright. Excuse me, just so my pupils don't end up being those full moon saucers.
But it would be interesting to see if there are libertarians out there whose parents raised them with no rules, right?
I mean, I was sort of raised with random savage bullying, but at least from my mother, no particular rules.
I mean, I really was a wolf child when it came to rules.
I sort of had none, so to speak.
So I think that this combination may have given me some level of insight into both the nature of bullying and also the need for rules to be discovered rather than enforced from elsewhere.
So parents don't...
Don't know what they're talking about, end up bullying their children.
That's pretty inevitable. Or they end up on the other side being complete libertines and letting their children get away with whatever the children want, which creates an enormous amount of stress and basically turns the children into bullies because the children just get whatever they want through acting out.
But what happens from all of this is that because you associate, and rightly so, it's not sort of made up, you associate...
Being bullied with rules, right?
Then what happens is you either adhere to the rules and become a bully, or rules equals bullying, so you either respect the rules, adhere to the rules, and become a bully, or...
You attempt to retain some level of personal independence by rejecting the rules and feeling hostile towards those who talk about rules.
And of course, I get a fair number of emails from people who think that I'm telling them what to do and that I am trying to impose my will upon theirs, right?
So this was the whole cult debate that we had a while ago.
And this is just a number of other emails, you know, basically it's the who do you think you are emails, right?
Who do you think you are to tell me what to do kind of things.
And these are people who've been bullied and who now associate all rules with subjugation.
To return to the original letter, should I in fact jog people's memories?
Yes, I'm stuck in a lane with no traffic.
I think we can manage this.
Just think of it as people who are on the highway looking for directions, right?
It's not any more dangerous than that.
Don't worry about me.
I just wanted to tell you, says this gentleman's mother, that I love you, and I will always love you no matter what.
I am very hurt and sad that you were so angry with your father and me, but I know that I can't make you want to be close to us.
Well, I think that this is very instructive, and if you want to understand your mother's relationship to rules, We can say rules, right?
If you want to understand your mother's relationship to rules, you just need to sort of mull this letter over for a little while, and I think it will all be pretty clear to you.
When you say to your mother, as I believe that you did, and as I certainly recommend, If you sit down with your parents and you say to them, I am not happy with our relationship, and I am not happy with our relationship for the following X reasons.
And if through the process of saying that to your parents, they scorn and reject you in one form or another, and this will either take the form of outright aggression, like you ungrateful little shit, Or, you know, if you're talking to your mother, it will probably take the form of bewildered and hurt, complete incomprehension.
Complete and total incomprehension.
What did we do?
Tell us what we did!
You know, this kind of stuff. Which is exactly the same as what your father did.
It's a total fuck you, but it's a passive-aggressive one.
And what's happening is you're saying, after your parents have spent...
Your entire life giving you rules of behavior, you are giving them a rule of behavior.
My God, this ties in beautifully to what we were talking about yesterday.
It's almost like I have some sort of master plan.
Anyway, that's to be determined by you, I guess.
Coffee break. Java.
So... When we are looking at what happens with people who give you lots of, lots of, lots of rules, I think that it's important to try to sort of figure out what happens when you get to be an adult.
And this is, of course, very instructive and very important to understand with your parents, What happens, since your parents have said that there are all these rules that you should obey, and they don't say obey these rules just because, right?
They don't say obey these rules because that's just social convention.
They say obey these rules because these rules are good, and it would be a good thing to obey these rules, and you want to be a good person and obey these rules, and only good people obey these rules, and blah blah blah blah blah.
So they've used the argument for morality, and...
They've basically said to you, we have rules, we can't prove them, you must obey them, because we say so.
Right? We have rules, you must obey them, we don't understand them, obey them because we say so.
I mean, that's sort of basically what parents are saying.
You can see, I don't know if you can see through the back of the webcam, I've left the private road where I was going 120, and now I'm on the government road where I'm going 20.
And they steal more of my time.
And they steal more of my car's fine running.
And they make me, they steal more of my sleep because I must get up early to deal with the problem of the government roads.
Anyway... So, this sort of four-part process that goes on from parents to children at all times, which is, we have rules, we don't understand them, you must obey them because we say so.
That's sort of one, two, three, four.
The reason that I'm saying to you that you should go and talk to your parents and say that you're not happy with the relationship and say that you want to change is because I want you to see how non-reciprocal these rules are.
I need for you to see the fact that the parental rules that were imposed upon you are mere bullying, that your parents use the argument from morality, and yet it's never supposed to apply to them.
I mean, it's fabulous when you think about it.
Just what an incredibly tight, enclosed, and well-run system this all is.
I mean, it really is quite magical in its corruption.
And of course, this is why it's lasted for so long, and this is why it's so essential that we work to see it clearly for what it is.
Because as an adult, surely you are now part of the same moral circle as your parents, to some degree, let's say.
And so, when your parents say, we have rules, we don't understand them, you must obey them because we say so, the natural question, which I think would then come from that, is, okay, I am now an adult.
I have a rule. And the rule is, I want you to do X. I'm not happy.
That's the motivation for the rule.
And the rule that you're saying to your parents is, I want you to change.
I want you to stop berating me.
I want you to stop disrespecting my opinions.
I want you to actually act as if you really did love me and listen to me and this and that and the other.
So now you were attempting to impose your rules upon your parents.
Now, of course, the fascinating thing is that your rules are actually rational.
That actually sort of makes sense, I think.
I mean, I think if you're asking for consideration, empathy, sensitivity, and regard and respect and love, I don't think that that's...
That's not an irrational thing to ask from people who claim to love you.
And I think that's... That's a fair statement, I think.
That if people claim to love you, it's kind of okay for you to ask them for respect and regard and all this now.
All these other goodies. And...
So... When you then sit down with your parents and you say to them, I now have a preference, right?
I have a rule, which is that I'm not happy.
I have a state. I'm not happy.
I have a rule that in order to be happy, I need this to change in the relationship, right?
So you are attempting to change their behavior as your parents attempted to change your behavior for many years and took the total moral right to do so and to do it in usually a manipulative or aggressive way.
Now, of course, if you did sit down and try and manipulate your parents into being better and you bullied and you yelled at them, what would happen is they would condemn you for being a bully, right?
And then you couldn't attack them for being bullies because you would be doing the same thing.
But when you've introspected and you've realized what's wrong with your relationship with your parents and you sit down reasonably to discuss it with them, then you're not acting as a bully, of course, right?
And because you're not acting as a bully, it's quite reasonable, I think, for you to...
Sorry, just checking out the traffic ahead.
Yes, I think I will exit. I am still working out a decently speedy way to get to where I need to get to when it comes to figuring out...
My route to work, so, you know, you have to sort of try, it's like water going down a hill, you try a whole bunch of things to figure out the best way to get to work, and so I'm just sort of futzing and futzing that way.
So, when you're sitting down with your parents in a sort of rational way, and you're saying, well, I would prefer X, Y, or Z, then...
You are really saying to them that you now have rules that you do understand them, and they should obey them because you say so.
And it's fascinating always and very, very instructive to see what happens with that when this all comes to a head, when you end up with this stuff all being...
when it ends up being revealed, exactly what happens with your parents in this kind of situation.
So, what you find, of course, is that your parents...
Won't subjugate themselves to your rules at all.
At all, at all, at all, at all.
And this is how you really viscerally get what we were talking about yesterday, that the rules are not for the rulers, in this case your parents.
They're not for the bullies. They're only for the victims.
And once you get that, you will really get a sense of just how enormously corrupt a situation you were in.
Not relative to what's common in society, because this is society.
This isn't a part of society.
This isn't a deviation from the norm.
This kind of sickness and hypocrisy is the norm, in the same way that religious hysteria was the norm in the Middle Ages and in the Midwest and South of the United States in the 21st century.
But this kind of abuse is the norm.
I mean, this is what is defined as normal.
And the reason that people hate confronting their parents and fear confronting their parents and worry about confronting their parents is exactly because of this sort of stuff, right?
When this gentleman's mother writes to him, I am very hurt and sad that you are so angry with your father and me, and I love you and I will always love you no matter what, right?
This is a club, right?
This is a total fuck you from the maternal unit.
And, of course, this is somebody who would rather be right than happy, right?
This is a mother who would rather be right and cling to her illusions of having been a good mother and a loving mother and so on, rather than actually have her son in her life.
And this kind of angry, willful, bitchy narcissism is exactly what you need to see, and I'm absolutely, totally sorry.
That you have to see it, and it's not your fault that this is the way that your mother is.
This is just normal.
This is what people live in.
This is how they live. This is not something that is considered or different, is not considered between people.
This is just what is. This is, again, like the fish in water saying, what water?
And I'm so sorry that you have to see this angry will, and that you have to see how little your mother loves you.
How little your mother loves you.
How little she is willing to listen to your request for a change in behavior.
I'm absolutely sorry, and it is totally heartbreaking to pierce this illusion of parental virtue and parental affection, and to see your parents for who they really are, which is a bunch of angry narcissists who are only interested in bullying you and have absolutely no interest in you as a human being and you as a person.
I'm totally, totally sorry that you have to see that.
That is totally heartbreaking and absolutely essential to see.
Absolutely essential to see.
This woman could have you in her life.
And it would actually be pretty simple.
She'd just have to say, I don't understand.
I want to understand. I'm going to give you four hours.
I'm barely going to interrupt except to ask for clarification.
I'm going to take notes.
And I want you to tell me about everything that you're unhappy about and discontented about.
And, you know, I can't promise what I'm going to do with all of that because I don't know what it is.
But, you know, for a couple of hours of sitting down and just listening to you, a couple of hours, a couple of hours, not the end of the world, right?
Nobody's asking this woman to go into ten years of therapy.
But, for the sake of a couple of hours, this woman could have you in her life, right?
This woman who...
She loves you so much.
Would have to spend a couple hours just listening to the problems that you had with the family unit or the problems you had with her, and that would be pretty much the sum total of what she would need to do to at least keep you in her life for now.
Is that an evil and horrible and unreasonable thing to ask?
Well, I personally don't think so.
I think asking a mother who claims to love you no matter what Would, I think, at least be curious and open about what it is that you had complaints about, what it is that you disliked about the family unit and about what happened.
If you love someone, if you fell down as a child and skinned your knee, Then she would leap to comfort you, to give you a band-aid, to give you some polysporin, to clean it off, to give you a kiss, to put your feet up, to bring you a glass of milk and some cookies.
If you injured yourself physically, then she would do anything.
If you got ill, even as an adult, she would bring you soup, she would come by, she would do all of these things, right?
So it's not that she's incapable of sacrificing her own interests, right?
For the sake of something which is problematic within you.
Her own interests, so to speak, in a very general way.
But it's not that she would not be able to change her behavior to conform to something that was a requirement or a request or a need from you.
She would absolutely do that.
I have no doubt about that, that she would tend to you if you were sick.
And that if she could, she would lend you money if you were broke.
So she would absolutely do all of those things.
But the one thing that she won't do and will never do, I'm sad to report, is listen to you if you have any problems with her and a preference that she change her behavior.
And, of course, the reason that she can't do it is because rules equals bullying.
Preferring that somebody else change their behavior never equals objective standards or values.
It always, only, ever equals bullying, shame, degradation, and humiliation.
So she can't submit to your wishes.
Because she was a bully.
This is the price that you pay for being a bully.
If you didn't pay any price for being a bully, then who would ever not be a bully?
It's perfectly inevitable.
It's perfectly inevitable. And something that's just so important to understand.
And if we do want to rid the world of bullying...
If we do want the world to become a better place, yes, we can study the theories of Aristotle and Rand and Rothbard from here to eternity.
But what's much more important is that we stop sanctioning and supporting the bullies within our own life.
I mean, that's all I'm really saying in all of these podcasts about the family.
If you're really interested in virtue and you want the world to become a better place, start in your own backyard.
Right? If you want the world to be free of weeds, then sitting down and designing perfect fantasy gardens free of weeds in some other dimension a thousand years in the future might be kind of fun, but it looks a little silly when your own garden is overrun with weeds.
I hate weeds, I want weeds to be gone, you say, stalking around your garden full of weeds that you can simply bend down and...
Pull the weeds and have at least rid the world of some local weeds.
Right? So that's really all I'm saying.
But of course I know that there's a lot of pressure and problems in this sort of area.
I totally understand. I totally get that.
But I still think that you should do it.
I know that it's a very hard thing to do.
I know that confronting this fundamental problem of the non-universality of supposedly universal rules, of the non-reciprocity of supposedly universal rules, is a very painful thing to deal with.
I totally get that.
I mean, I know that I get that because I've done it.
And it was the hardest thing I've ever done.
But once you do see this, that all the rules that you were taught, you were taught by bullies, who were so cowardly that they wouldn't even openly bully you, but that they would use an argument for morality and rely on your desire for virtue to cause you to bully and castigate and subjugate yourself, that they said you were obeying what was right, when in fact you were just obeying them.
Once you see this, then you can withdraw your sanction from these bullies.
And once you can withdraw your sanction from these bullies, then you are kind of doing something for virtue.
As I say, we're not going to be able to ditch the state, but at least we can ditch the corrupt authority figures in our own lives.
And that's going to actually have a huge amount more effect on our freedom than working like crazy to ditch the state and then going over to family dinners with people that you despise.
It's a very important thing.
So I hope that this has been helpful in terms of giving you some insight into these kinds of letters.
I can certainly guarantee you that with almost all the situations you're involved with in defooing or getting rid of your family of origin, that you're going to get passive-aggressive fuck-you letters like this.
And I hope that this helps you understand why they're so inevitable and why they're so horrible and controlling and why they certainly confirm that you don't want people like this in your life.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, I will talk to you soon.
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