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Sept. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:41
434 Maternal Addictions
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Good afternoon everybody.
It's time for us to settle in for a nice long juicy chat.
It's 5 o'clock, actually, just after 5, and Christina is seeing patients until 6, and for a variety of reasons, I must take the public roads this afternoon.
So, just sit back, and to make yourself comfortable, I'll speak softly and gently as you tuck the old headphones into your ears.
And then you will wake up just as we're concluding.
And I hope that you have a wonderful, wonderful nap.
So, since I have a long time to chat with you this afternoon, I'm going to ramble.
Yes, of course, because it only happens when I have a long time to chat with you or a variety of semi-fixed topics that I ramble.
But there are two general topics that I'd like to start off with.
The first one is, you know, a very heartbreaking and sad and difficult and sympathetic post on the board.
A gentleman is talking about his process of defooing and is getting right to the creepy heart of a seriously dysfunctional emotional family structure and Oh, I'm so sorry.
It is a very, very difficult and painful thing to go through, and I just wish there was some way that it could be made easier, other than constantly reaffirming that if the family is that disturbed, absolutely you need to get out of this situation, and big hug my brother.
It is a very, very tough thing to be going through.
And he described, I'm not sort of giving anything away here, I think, but He described how his mother had finally pressured him into, or applied pressure to him which he succumbed to or gave into, chose to give into,
that his mother had Got him to come out for dinner and became, as he sort of reaffirmed his need and desire to take some space from the family, she became very broken-hearted, broken down, sad, and very clingy, very sentimental.
And he began to get a creepy kind of feeling that If there were no differences, or not significant differences in age, to somebody who was just observing this scene from across the restaurant or whatever, that it would look almost identical to a breakup.
And a romantic breakup.
And of course this was...
Very unappealing.
Obviously, he shied away from this as something to hold onto mentally.
It is a staggeringly appalling thought, of course, to think of.
Oedipal or seductive behavior coming from one's own mother.
And it is something that we do tend to shy away from.
Although, you know, to be...
Not to wake you from your napping, but to be brutally frank, the sexual exploitation of children, either in an emotional or a physical sense, should not be any great surprise to people who are simply working empirically.
When you simply work empirically and you try to bring as few prejudices as possible, or propaganda things or emotional attachments, when you try to work cleanly and objectively, well, there seem to be very large segments of society that are Not exactly based on, but where the sexual exploitation of children is pretty central, right?
I mean, there are brothels that have, in many parts of the world, there are brothels where tweens, pretty much, or women who are just coming into puberty are available for sexual rape.
Paid rape, I guess you could say.
There is the clergy.
I think that the number of priests...
The Catholic priests who have been charged with the sexual exploitation or molestation of children is now upwards of 5,000 priests, right?
So, I mean, it could really be thought of as a pedophilia club with a couple of crucifixes thrown in as bait and distraction.
There's all of that sort of stuff.
In sports, there is a fairly large contingent of coaches who have ended up being involved in or preying upon molesting children.
I certainly know a number of people who went through some pretty creepy stuff in the sports world.
And there's the general round of stepfathers and stepmothers, of course, who don't have the same biological bond and so don't have the same kind of inhibitions around sexual exploitation of children, particularly when they come to be teenagers.
And so there's all that kind of stuff.
I'm sure more will sort of pop up.
There are teachers and, you know, there are prefects in boarding school and teachers in boarding school and boarding schools themselves.
And there's the military where there's a lot of homosexual rape that goes on and rape, of course, of children and of women as part of sort of the spoils of victory.
There's all that sort of stuff.
And, of course, the Navy, as Churchill memorably put it at the turn of the last century, the British Navy needs to evolve from its current position of focusing on rums, sodomy, and the lash.
So, as far as the sexual exploitation of children goes, either from parents or from other figures in authority, it's...
It's mind-bendingly not rare.
And this, again, we try to stay away from the sentimentalized view of childhood that has been handed over by people like Walt Disney and the general protestations of parents that they simply live and breathe to serve their children.
Once we get rid of that kind of nonsense...
in our own minds, then we can begin to work with the actual facts of the situation, which is that an appallingly large proportion of children are exposed to some sort of premature sexual experience or premature abusive experience that involves sexuality of which is that an appallingly large proportion of children are exposed to some sort And all of this is part and parcel of childhood in many, many countries.
In the Muslim world, in India, it's incredibly common.
I mean, I've never met, I dated an Indian woman for a number of years, my sister-in-law is Indian.
I've never met an Indian child who has not had some premature sexual experience from some damn person in their family or extended family or coaching circles or whatever.
And of course, there's lots of reasons for all of this, but it is the main reason, of course, why these status societies and these theocratic societies continue is due to the rape and sexual and emotional and physical abuse of children.
This is what, as I've maybe mentioned once or a million times before, this is what keeps all this stuff going.
That's why focusing on the state is very much like...
Focusing on the effect rather than the cause, then it's not going to get you very far, as we've pretty much found for sure in the old freedom movement.
Now, I hope not to make anybody uncomfortable, but I might as well be perfectly frank about my own history in this area, particularly with my own mother.
And this is not something that I relish talking about, of course, but I don't want our good friend on the board to feel that this kind of maternal relationship These romantic feelings involved in one's conversations with one's mother are necessarily entirely unique to himself.
It certainly has been my experience that my own mother was extraordinarily inappropriate when it came to sexual boundaries within the family.
So she would walk around naked until my brother and I were into our mid-teens and finally just begged and bullied her to stop doing that.
She would leave pornographic magazines around, and I don't even know where you could get these kinds of pornographic magazines from, but they involved sort of mother-son incest and just very strange kinds of, not good old healthy porn, but some pretty sick stuff.
And I mean, I don't have to go into all of the details.
There was never any inappropriate touching and so on.
But definitely when I was going through puberty, it was a heavily charged atmosphere of sexual inappropriateness in my household.
And my brother, of course, has experienced the same thing.
And By the by, I think that my mother, in a heroic attempt not to become a completely evil person, managed to squelch this kind of incestuous impulse within herself, which caused her, you know, it was around this time and shortly thereafter.
That this mental collapse that she experienced, which she never recovered from, occurred.
And I think that she herself, as a pretty girl, she's a very attractive woman, as a pretty girl who was in orphanages during a war, I can, of course, as I've talked about before, only imagine the kind of sexual predation that,
in a time of sheer state of nature chaos that was occurring at this time, I can only just imagine the kinds of horrors that she went through in her own childhood and the fact that she was able to...
And again, I have no proof of any of this.
It's just a gut feeling, so please don't take any of this as anything I would stand before a court and swear to.
But my gut feeling is that she managed to head off her own incestuous impulses She decided to denormalize her own history, but did not dedicate herself to any kind of self-knowledge.
And of course, because of her physical abuse, she was unable to sympathize with herself.
But what happened in the end was, shortly after this time of intense incestuous energy within the household, she went to bed and basically never got up again.
I had a mental collapse, proved unable to work, was institutionalized, and the whole merry tale of the beginning of my independence began.
And so when it comes to maternal romantic bonds with children, I've got to tell you, I just...
I don't find it to be too shocking.
I don't find it to be too shocking.
I don't think that you should look at it as the deepest and darkest and loneliest pit of evil.
It, of course, is extraordinarily wrong to impose any kind of sexual energy upon children.
But I would not view it as an incredibly lonely and solitary horror that you have gone through or that you may be or have experienced.
This is just not that uncommon really at all.
A friend of mine when I was a teenager had an extraordinary...
Now, this is a single son with single mom, right?
And a single son with single mom is a true recipe for Oedipal disaster.
And I have never known anybody who was in that kind of familial configuration who didn't turn out to be completely messed up and unable to have any kind of adult relationships with members of the opposite sex that don't involve the transfer of money.
And not in the benign dating way either.
But... The bonding that can occur between a mother and son, you just have to read your D.H. Lawrence, right?
He's got a mother's and son's story about all of this.
You can have a look at a very intense series of bonding, a very intense maternal bond in lots of different art forms.
Room of the View pops to mind if you look at the kind of claustrophobic maternalism that goes on in Tennessee Williams plays, particularly at Glass Menagerie.
It's very, very tight and claustrophobic.
I obviously can't do much to put myself in those tight little high heels to figure out what it looks like from the female side of things, but...
I certainly can imagine that a woman who is dissatisfied with her own adult sexual life is going to throw her emotional energies and she's not going to perceive it as anything sexual because I do believe that it's all projected at this level of the unconsciousness, but... She is going to throw herself into an overinvestment into her child's development.
And there's simply no way that you can be heavily emotionally invested, overly emotionally invested in a member of the opposite sex without there being some...
Protosexual or unconsciously sexual overtones there.
And so when a mother is both immature herself and possibly went through childhood rape or childhood molestation herself, which remains the great unspoken of far, far too many people, Then she's not going to have sexual boundaries between adulthood and childhood, between parent and child. And so she is going to gravitate towards the son.
And God knows, I mean, I'm out on a limb here.
God knows what happens with mothers and daughters.
Although that seems to be a pretty intense relationship too, but in a slightly different, sort of more competitive and controlling kind of way.
But the mother who has not established a parent-child sexual boundaries because perhaps she was violated or had none of those boundaries when she was a child.
I mean, children should grow up free of any taint of sexuality other than, you know, I guess relatively healthy and benign self-exploration.
But certainly from any outside adult, it should never have anything to do with anything.
But... A mother who did not have these boundaries established when she was a child, who then does not have satisfactory adult sexual or romantic relationships.
...is absolutely at risk of over-investing particularly in her sons and for there to be a sexual spillover from the dissatisfied adult relationships to the over-entwined child relationships.
So when this gentleman posted this...
A conversation with his mother where he took a look at how it looked from outside.
I mean, that is a fantastic thing to do to begin with, and that's something that you should be very proud of, right?
The ability to look at your interactions using the third eye, right?
It's called the third eye.
I mean, I sort of use that term just to mean that it's the observing ego, right?
It's the ego that evaluates what it is that you're doing, compares it to other things, compares it to standards, and so on.
And it's how you rescue yourself from disapproval.
Put the third eye out there and have a look at it, right?
So when I was talking about somebody who was upset that I was angry at people who abuse children, and he came in and sort of went at me pretty strongly about this supposed abuse that I'd poured forth, To him, I was able to use a third eye and say, okay, well, if I was a third person looking at this kind of interaction, how would it look?
And you can also do this.
I did this when I did the love cast on evolution and Christians, right?
How would it look to a third person who was evaluating each claim?
So... It's very, very important to understand that it's an incredible sign of progress, psychologically, to be able to have a look at your relationships using this kind of third eye paradigm.
So you're able to remove yourself from the entwined, claustrophobic, subterranean, underwater interactions that are going on within your family, And you are able to have a look at it as if you were an outsider and reading the emotional content of the interaction.
This is very different from dissociation, right?
Staying in and not having an observing ego, staying in these kinds of claustrophobic interactions and not having any way of judging them, that is dissociation.
But being able to pull back and have a look at this and trying to figure out what it looks like from the outside That is actually the true self.
The true self is what does that.
The true self can observe with uncanny accuracy what is occurring in interactions, and the dissociation keeps the true self from performing that third eye recording function to give you an objective view of what's going on.
So when he began to picture this from outside the biosphere, the tight little claustrophobic biosphere of many family interactions, when he began to Observe this interaction.
Then he got it.
He got it right away that there was a claustrophobic and sexual slash at least romantic kind of intensity to the relationship.
And this is obviously stomach-turning to him.
It certainly explains his own relationships or lack thereof with women, right?
Because when you have gone through this, and I don't think I've gone through it to this degree, but certainly I understand and have gone through it to a large degree, when you go through this kind of claustrophobic experience, Over involvement of the maternal, then you associate women with a lack of identity on your part, right?
To be around a woman is to evaporate, to dissolve, to turn to vapor, to not have any say of your own.
You actually can't have a relationship with women if you don't work on these issues and you've had this kind of claustrophobic, overbearing, and semi-incestuous maternal relationship.
You simply can't, right?
You can't interact with women because women are...
To be around a woman is to be erased, right?
So, of course, it's maddening.
It's like, you know, you're dying of thirst and every time you reach for the glass of water, it vanishes just before you get there, just before you touch it, right?
So, this feeling of being overwhelmed by women, and what happens, of course, is that you have avoided...
The pain and emotional horror of being smothered, right?
Putting the old S in mother.
You've avoided that pain as we generally tend to do when we're children by universalizing it, right?
So this is not my mother, the deviant weirdo.
This is all women.
This is femininity. This is, you know, and of course I've gone down that road myself and it does tend to be a self-fulfilling prophecy because, you know, we train people how to treat us and what we What we believe in our core is what we create in our life in terms of relationships.
And so if you believe that this is the case, then of course it is going to end up being the case.
If you believe that all women are claustrophobic and overbearing and selfish and petty and manipulative and sentimental and blah blah blah blah blah, then you are going to tend to sift through the evidence of all types of women and you are going to end up choosing a woman who is that way inclined so that you won't have to confront The pain of having been mistreated so badly by your own mother.
So this dinner, to me, makes perfect awful sense.
And you're not alone in this.
And if you've gone through this kind of stuff with your own mother, I knew one guy many years ago.
His mother was pretty young, and he was, again, single mom, single son.
He had no capacity to interact with women at all.
And his mom went to a gym, and she got all the aerobics instructors to come over, the female aerobics instructors to come over.
And they had a Senza party, or, I don't know, the Victoria's Secret party, where they're all sort of trying on negligees and lingeries.
And that's just a bizarre thing for a mom to do.
I invite all these aerobics hotties over to try on...
No, when your son's around, I mean, that's just very sick, right?
It's very unhealthy, very deranged, very destructive.
And, of course, the mother's full-blown sexual insanity and inappropriateness found full flower in her son, who was unable to have anything to do with women except with the financial flavor.
And my own father, I write about this in Almost, my own father, of course, went through the same kind of thing, that his mother kept him in her bed, Until he was, I don't know, eight or nine, he would sleep with his mother and he said to me once, you know, she would get up and I would see her pendulous breasts hanging inside her housecoat and so on as she changed.
You know, extraordinarily inappropriate, greedy, destructive, venomous, vicious, evil on the part of the mothers.
But children are helpless, and children can never fight back, and children can never say no.
And so, you know, greedy, empty, destructive, false self, empty, anti-souls end up bleeding and sucking and the soles dry of their children.
And it is wretched.
And of course, my dad had the most terrible relations with women.
I guess all I need to say is that he married my mom.
That should really be enough for you to get a picture of that.
So that's another example of what I know about or what I felt or experienced or seen in the realm of maternal over-involvement.
And... The woman's capacity to bond is a very great and powerful thing, and like all forces of biological instinct, it is designed to do great, wonderful, powerful, and nurturing things.
So the mother's ability to bond with the infant, and this is all a very powerful and good thing, and heaven knows we all need it when we're young, helpless, and pooing ourselves.
So that bond that women have a sort of powerful instinct for is a great thing.
I mean, this is part of the survival of the species.
Just as a man's desire to defend his family is a very positive and good thing, it's just that it's, you know, the man's desire to defend his family translates into preemptive strikes, translates into let's start a war by scaring the crap out of people through, you know, war, global warming, whatever, right?
So, these instincts that we have for self-defense, for self-protection, for all this, that, and the other, they are all incredibly wonderful and powerful things that nature has provided for our common survival and flourishing.
And bad people exploit all this kind of stuff on a pretty continual basis.
And that is how we end up with such a horrible mess in the world.
And they do it through the argument for morality, right?
They don't do it through rational argument.
They don't do it through direct emotional bullying.
Because what human beings most of all want is to be good.
That's our major, major goal in life.
And that's the most fundamental subterranean gravity power well of the human condition.
And that's what makes us so prey to being manipulated.
So when this gentleman from the boards had this dinner with his mother, and his true self, his observing ego, his third eye, said, dude, this is exactly like a breakup.
up.
This is exactly like a romantic breakup.
Well, obviously the observing ego is good, and the fact that he was able to experience that perspective, obviously it's pretty horrifying, and our natural tendency is to clamp down on that stuff pretty fast, but it is an incredible progress.
It's an incredible degree of progress to be able to feel that, to be able to experience that, to be able to understand that.
That is just amazing.
And you should be enormously proud of the progress.
I know it sucks. I know it feels like crap.
I know it feels wretched.
And it feels very close to madness.
At least that was certainly my experience when confronting this kind of maternal incestuous feelings.
It feels very close to the ultimate humiliation and emasculation of the male.
It feels very close...
To being the image that I sort of had when I was working through this kind of stuff was of a limbless child in a thundercloud.
And that meant to me that when you are a very young child or a baby or a toddler, I don't know exactly what age it was, Your mother can do with you what she will.
I mean, frankly, she's alone with you.
You can't talk about it.
You can't remember it. You're totally dependent on these.
It's an Abu Ghraib situation, to be perfectly frank.
There's no accountability. There's no whatever, right?
And... So, your mom can do with you whatever she wants, right?
I mean, one of the roots of violence against women, of course, is absolutely wretched, and as I've mentioned before, one of the things that is never asked, one of the central questions that's never asked, So, misogyny is always considered sort of a male problem.
But this is a very interesting question, and we talked about this a couple of months ago in the cycle of violence, so I'll just touch on it here.
But it's an essential question to ask.
How is it that a man grows up with such extraordinary antipathy towards women?
And the fact that we have such an enormously difficult time seeing female violence is very, very important.
Because When we look at a woman who grows up and has a strong degree of hatred towards men, Then we do kind of understand what that means.
We do sort of understand that the history of a woman and her relationship when she's a girl to her father is going to have a very strong conditional aspect.
On how she is going to experience her father as she gets older.
This is not rocket science or brain surgery because, of course, we have become quite comfortable as a culture looking at male evil, male violence, male corruption, and the problems that fathers bring to bear on families when the fathers are bad.
So we generally have an okay time with all of that.
Where we have a significantly problematic time is when we look at the opposite side of the fence and we have a man who grows up with an extraordinary amount of hatred towards women.
So when a woman grows up and hates men, we know that she's had an asshole father.
This is not the hardest thing in the world to figure out.
But when...
When a man grows up with a hatred of women, we don't suddenly think, oh, well, of course he had a jerky, difficult, horrible mother.
We say, ah, society is to blame.
It's the patriarchy. It's the culture.
It's, you know, he must have learned how to and why to hate women because his own father mistreated his mother, right?
So it's always got to come back.
It's always got to come back to the men, right?
So This guy ended up hating women because his father taught him how to hate women by being a bad, nasty, jerky father.
And in this way, the women are protected, right?
The women are protected because the blame gets to fall back on the man again.
And there's no particular problem with it, of course, except that the cycle of violence then continues, right?
Women are as capable of evil and violence as men are and have far more opportunities for it in terms of the power disparity that occurs between a mother and her child, right?
We understand that the kind of power disparity that occurs at Abu Ghraib It's problematic and can't be managed and can't be made better.
But we have a very different belief or understanding of a mother with her infant or a mother with her toddler, although the power disparity is even greater and the potential for abuse is higher.
But this power disparity we simply can't see.
We can see the power disparity Between a successful, well-regarded, rich husband in the past, right?
Not so much now. And his wife who doesn't work and is not educated and so on.
We understand that power differential.
We also, nicely, understand the power differential between a boss and his secretary.
Right? We have no problem with sexual abuse, sexual harassment legislation and so on.
So, that we...
We have no particular problems with, but somehow we have massive problems seeing something as fundamental and as obvious as the greatest power disparity that exists on the planet is between the primary caregiver and the child, and almost always it's the...
It's the mom and the toddler, right?
That's the greatest power disparity, the greatest place where abuse can occur, and the root of a good deal of the world's violence.
Does this mean that women are in...
No, of course, right? I mean, this is not women's fault at all.
In terms of, like, sole responsibility, that would be silly.
But I think we're kind of missing the whole point of understanding power disparities and abuse if we simply focus on men and their capacity to abuse, and we forget...
That the greatest power disparity is between a mother and her toddler, and that the world is full of violence, and the world is very dangerous in terms of power disparities, and it must have something to do, in a fairly primal way, with this issue.
I'm not inventing anything radical here.
I'm just, again, extracting the principle, which we have with the woman and her father, who grows up to hate men, And I'm extracting it and reversing it, right?
And saying that it might be, of course, something to do with whoever has the most exposure to infants and toddlers and children that has something to do with the violence that's in the world.
And this is not to take away the personal responsibility of adults, but I just think it's kind of important to understand the cause and effect just a little bit before going charging off to sort of blame men for all the violence in the world.
And not really have any understanding about the role that women play in it, because I think that's...
If we miss that, right?
But what's happening is, your true self in this particular...
I mean, just talking to this gentleman, right?
Your true self in examining this moment with your mother is giving you the facts, unvarnished empirical facts.
Unvarnished empirical facts.
The... The true self is not what Ayn Rand would call a social metaphysician.
The true self deals with reality.
The true self does not deal with propaganda.
The true self cannot be fooled by the droning and blathering opinions of other people.
And the true self is scientific and empirical and really doesn't care about all of the emotional manipulations that go on in society to get us to believe X, Y, or Z. The true self, at least my true self, and I think it's pretty universal, the true self says, I really don't care what people think.
What are the facts? What are the facts?
And the facts are that there's an extraordinary amount of mother-son semi-incest going on in the world, and it has a lot to do with loneliness and bitterness and feelings of being overwhelmed and lack of connection with others and feeling of being It's incredibly humiliating to be your mother's hand puppet, so to speak, for a man.
And this, of course, is a lot of rage against the father in this kind of way as well.
I know we've been talking not too flatteringly about women, but let's have a look at the fathers here as well.
I think that's quite important.
Basically, in these kinds of families, the father can't handle the mother.
And I don't mean handle, I mean, don't take me wrong, I don't mean like a rabid dog or anything, but the father can't meet the needs of the mother.
So, of course, the father in this case could say to himself, gee, I can't meet the needs of this woman.
Maybe we need to go to counseling.
Maybe we need to go to therapy. Maybe we need to deal with this, that, or the other.
Maybe I need to at least go to personal therapy, and maybe I'll end up leaving her.
But first and foremost, I have to recognize this basic fact that I can't meet this woman's needs, and that's scary to me, that's overwhelming to me, blah, blah, blah.
And it's something that I need to do something about.
Why? Well, because I've kind of had children.
You know, you'd kind of want people to do this before they have kids, but very few people seem to get around to it.
So, I think you'd kind of want to say, okay, so what I need to do is I need to sort of sort this out because I can't meet this woman's needs.
What happens, though, is that these men totally chicken out, these cosmic assholes, they totally chicken out from this challenge, this problem of not meeting their wife's needs, and they basically throw her the children.
In order to make their escape, right?
If you're being attacked by a dog and you've got a piece of meat on you, you're going to throw the meat to one side, hoping that the dog's going to chew on that and leave you free to go to the garage and take up a hobby.
And what these cosmic asshole dads do is they basically say, well, I can't handle this crazy woman, so kids, go and talk to your mother.
Go be with your mother.
This is how he damns the flood of female overwhelmedness on his part, is he just stuffs this sort of estrogen, this cracking estrogen wall with the souls of the children.
And he just sacrifices it.
Of course, this is how it all reproduces itself, right?
And, or, you know, for too many of these men doesn't reproduce itself in that they don't want to get married or have kids, for, you know, reasons that are fairly obvious, although when pulled apart, must be open to, should be open to change.
But these men, they don't, you know, my dad said this to me very openly, right?
He said, I couldn't handle your mom.
Your mom was, like, terrifying.
Your mom was, like, emotionally volatile.
She was aggressive.
She was just terrifying.
And he said, I mean, the guy said this to me with, you know, zero consciousness.
Like, this was a perfectly reasonable explanation to him.
Well, I had to leave your mother a son because she was terrifying and overwhelming and, you know, impossible to manage.
Right, man? The man said, completely openly, with wide-eyed innocence, he explained to me that the reason that he left my mother was because she was terrifying and violent, and, you know, I should have been fine.
Okay, he, as an adult who was 35 years old and 40 years old and had a doctorate and was an independent professional and a damn good income earner and all this, he, with all of his adult freedoms and independent income and so on and professional career, He was unable to handle my mother and so had to run away to Africa.
But me, as a 18-month-year-old baby, or a 12-month-year-old baby, or however the hell old I was, I should have had no problem, right?
I should have had no problem.
This is just amazing, right?
But this is part of the whole narcissism and brutality that these kinds of family structures are just loath with, right?
Can you imagine if I was babysitting your kid and your kid was like...
I don't know, three years old, and I took him for a walk, and we got attacked by a dog, and I ran away and climbed up a tree, right?
And I came back to you, and I said, oh, yeah, and your kid gets mauled, right?
Really badly. And I come back, and I say, well, yeah, I mean, I had to climb the tree.
There was a huge bloody dog there.
It might have bitten me. I mean, isn't that deranged that I would...
That I would make that with no indication that maybe I had a responsibility to protect your helpless child, and not just my own skinny white ass.
That's just amazing to me, but this stuff is so common that it's hard to even see until you just sort of wake up, dig the propaganda crust out of your true self eyes, and just stare in an empirical and logical way at the world.
And empirically and logically, women are claustrophobic.
Far too many mothers are claustrophobic and semi-incestuous.
And far too many fathers are distant and have thrown the children to the mother in order to shut her up from nagging at him.
And the mother has then taken all the resentment and sexual neuroses and so on and stuffed it all into the children, usually into the sons.
And this is the kind of squalid, mastodon-laced tar pit That we have to climb out in order to make the world a little bit of a freer place.
A lot freer for us, but a little sort of freer in general.
So, the fact that there was violence from the father in this kind of environment, to me seems almost perfectly inevitable that there's then going to be a seductiveness or romance in a sort of horrible, the most horrible kind of way, don't get me wrong, romance with the flowers and chocolate or anything, but it seems to me perfectly inevitable that the mother is going to have incestuous types of feelings that are completely unmanaged.
And that she is not going to have any sense of the child as...
This is the big problem with narcissistic parents, or just about all parents, that they really don't have any conception of the child as an independent agent with needs of his or her own.
So, your mom's sitting across the table from you, And you're saying, I need some time off.
Your mom is in no way, shape, or form able to process that you have needs.
The only thing that is processing for her is that she doesn't want you to stop seeing her.
That's all that she can process.
She also knows that she has nothing to offer you.
So she knows that she has nothing to offer you.
And she knows that you want to leave, right?
So, I mean, the only sort of way that I can talk about this that might be helpful is if you can imagine that you are an entrepreneur and you are running a company and you have a very productive salesman, Who just does every good kind of sales thing in the world.
But you've squandered all of the money.
You've squandered all of the cash.
So you're sitting across from this salesman.
And you know that he could get better job offers, better working conditions and so on.
But you've blown all of the money that he'd made for you.
You'd squandered all the goodies.
And so what happens is you have no money to pay him, but you desperately want him to stay.
I mean, this is where your mom was at.
This is where all parents who face a defooing are at.
They've squandered all the goodwill of their children, of which there is an enormous amount.
Their children are incredibly forgiving and heavily bonded, so for a child to consider defooing as an adult is a pretty significant squandering of goodwill.
And so the parent has, you know, you as a business owner, sitting across from the salesman, you have zero money to pay this guy.
In fact, you're hoping that he's going to work for you to pay for a couple of years.
You know that he's going to need to work for you really hard for a couple of years just for you to pay off your debts.
And you also know that you're very likely to just use whatever income he brings into the company to run up more debts and gamble and wine and women and whatever, right?
And you're sitting across from this guy and you have nothing to offer him.
You've squandered all the money he's made.
You haven't paid him in a while.
You're out of money. You can't pay him with any new money.
You're close to bankruptcy.
And you kind of need him to just feed your habit, right?
You need him to sort of work with no self-interest just to feed your irrational, self-destructive financial habits.
You've got less than nothing to offer this guy.
You've got a negative. Work, no pay.
And so how are you going to get this guy to stay?
Well, you're going to try every emotional trick in the book.
You're going to use guilt. You're going to say, oh, remember when we built this company?
Remember how great it was?
I really want to build it up again.
I love that company.
We've been going through a rough time, I know, but you've done fantastically, and we'll turn this thing around, and we'll get back on it.
It's going to take some hard work, but I'm willing to do it.
You're going to say all of this kind of nonsense.
You're going to appeal to his sense of loyalty.
You're going to appeal to his guilt.
You're going to appeal to his greed.
You're going to appeal to...
You know, you'll never get a better job than this.
You'll never, you know, I've really brought you along and you've really specialized in this market.
You'll never be able to, I mean, you'll appear to his sense of fear.
You'll try anything to avoid the basic fact, which is that you have nothing to offer him.
Right? I don't need my boss to call me up and cajole me to come into work every day.
I don't need my boss to call me and cajole me into going on a business trip and try and sell some software.
Because I get bonuses and options and I get paid a good salary.
Because he's actually offering me value so he doesn't need to manipulate me.
Manipulation is all about creating an artificial socialist-style market of central planning where your parents hold all of the economic cards and you actually don't get anything of value.
And, of course, what they try and do is what I've called negative economics in the past.
What they try and do is, instead of having something positive to offer you, what they do is they inflict a negative and then offer to relieve it, right?
So they'll create guilt within you, a sense of obligation.
We go way back.
You can see this in Willy Loman.
In Death of a Salesman.
I mean, he's a really crap salesman.
And he's unfaithful to his wife.
He's a really bad father to his children.
Of course, we're supposed to feel sorry for the guy, right?
So he sleeps around on his wife.
He can't sell anything. And he's a really crappy dad to his kids because he just projects all his failure fantasies onto their incredible successes, which, of course, never materialize because he's overcharged the ambition matrix.
But... He's got nothing to offer, right?
So he says at one point, Willie Loman says at one point to this guy who's firing him, but I named your son, right?
Because he was around a long time. I gave your son his name, right?
And so, you know, he's supposed to get a job forever because he came up with a name that this guy ended up using for his kid.
I mean, that's just sad, sad, sad, sad, pathetic and ridiculous, right?
So, when you have nothing to offer someone, you end up having to go with wild, extravagant manipulations.
And the degree to which somebody is trying to rip you off is the degree to which you know that you can measure it, right?
The sonographer measuring exploitation is sentimentality, right?
Appeals to sentiment and guilting.
Manipulation is the topography of exploitation, right?
I mean, because people just want to sort of hide the basics.
So, The fact that your mother is sitting there manipulating you and crying and feel sad and being down and being broken and implicitly asking you to fix her, it's because she has nothing to offer you and she knows it.
So, you know, run.
Run, run, run, run, run, run, run.
You can't go back into your history and make your mom into someone who was a good mom.
And even if you could, it's far too late for it now.
So I would just say they blew it.
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