All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 22, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:39
470 The Statism of the Self

I take on the Tyranny of Stef

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon everybody.
Hope you're doing well with Steph. It's 1237 on the 22nd of October 2006 and It's cleaning time in my bathrooms.
Hope you're doing well. I just have to do a little bit of housework before the 4pm show that's on today, and I just wanted to sort of share a chant that I was having with Christina, which I think is kind of interesting.
It's personal and political, I guess, at the same time.
A bit more personal than political, but I thought it might be interesting to share.
Because it's sort of an issue that both Christina and I have, and most of the people that we know have, and so I thought it might be worth chatting about, just, you know, throw it out there and see if other people sort of face this same issue as well.
And I'll go into it in a little bit more detail, well, let's be honest, an excruciating amount of detail on Monday morning's podcast, but while I'm cleaning away, I thought it might be worth having a chat about it today, just sort of get the topic warmed up, I guess you could say.
So, the topic is this.
I don't know about you, but I have kind of an exciting and complicated relationship to work.
And ever since I was young, and we'll talk about the genesis of it a little bit more tomorrow, but ever since I was young, I've really sort of felt that days have to be spent in productive activities.
These are sort of my beliefs.
I'll get into my actions in a little bit, but my beliefs are that days sort of have to be spent in these productive activities and that, you know, time cannot be well wasted, as the old comedy phrase goes on the comedy network.
It's time well wasted, which is sort of a very interesting phrase.
And you really do have to kind of follow this Work ethic.
Get things done. Be productive.
Life is short. Every day, one day closer to death, as the song goes, right?
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.
That's from Pink Floyd, and they talk about plans that either come to naught or half a page of scribbled lines, which is also what I fear, I guess you could say.
And so I really do feel that I have to get productive things done.
Time is short. If you have something to contribute, you need to spend your time contributing it.
I mean, my sort of typical day on the freedom side is, you know, podcasting in the morning, compiling, posting, hitting the board a couple of times a day, writing articles, podcasting in the afternoon.
I spent when I had a month off, I spent it doing the philosophy introduction to philosophy series.
It's on YouTube and all that kind of stuff.
Like, so for me, I certainly wouldn't say that I'm a workaholic, which might mean that I'm a really bad one who can't admit it.
But I sort of in my mind compare myself to people who sort of make movies or whatever.
And to me, that seems like, you know, those kind of...
18-hour days and also when I was an entrepreneur, the kind of work that I got involved in was, you know, I mean, it's kind of like a sandals resort hands-up time for everything in my life compared to that sort of phase of my existence.
But I do kind of have this...
Both belief that I need to work fairly constantly and at the same time a feeling that I don't work hard enough or in the right way and maybe you sort of have this feeling as well or maybe it's just Christina myself but for me I sort of think well you know okay I was as a novelist I certainly love the stuff that I write and some people who've read it seem to love it too but certainly I was not successful in the general sense of getting Myself published and being a full-time writer and so on.
I did get a book published, but sales have certainly picked up, and I certainly appreciate the freedom owners and other people who have bought copies.
I really appreciate that.
I'm glad that you enjoy it.
But as far as the writing goes...
I mean, I worked very hard at it, but it wasn't the kind of thing where I work with the high degree of extraordinarily, what I would say, almost anal precision that some writers work in.
And I think particularly of Ayn Rand here, who worked for five years on the Fountainhead and took a job in an architect's office to learn more about it.
And she also...
I've worked for, I think, 13 or 14 years on Atlas Shrugged.
And you can see that precision in the books, I mean, without a doubt.
That level of precision, the level of, like, no word wasted and everything's there for a reason, nothing is accidental and so on, that Ayn Rand did or sort of achieved in her novels.
To me, that would be like a prison sentence.
I mean, the idea of working on a book for 14 years would absolutely make me want to open a vein.
But then I sort of think, well, maybe it's one of the reasons that I wasn't successful in that particular field.
Was because I didn't spend that much time.
I mean, I can sort of write the first draft of a novel in like three months if I have a good idea.
And I mean, there's rewriting and so on.
I rewrote The End of Revolutions about three times and just four a couple of times and so on.
But I mean, by the ending, I mean sort of last half.
But I sort of wonder, you know, like, is it just not really enough work to achieve that sort of kind of success and so on?
But then at the same time, you know, this is sort of the back and forth.
Oh, and there's one other, I think, Bud Schilberg and Ilya Kazan, who worked on the script for a movie, quite a libertarian movie in a lot of ways, called On the Waterfront.
With one of the finest acting performances in film history with Marlon Brando.
This is the famous, I could have been a contender sort of movie.
And, you know, I read the biography of Ilya Kazan and he talked about how he just works over and over and over and forever and forever and ever on rewriting the script and opening it up again and so on.
And so I just...
Think about that level of sort of dedication and rewriting and focusing and rewriting again, which I've never really been able to do.
I mean, I can write a lot and I can write quickly, but I've never really been able to stand, you know, okay, let's start again.
You know, let's open it up and pretend that we know nothing and start again.
And maybe that's a kind of quality that I don't sort of have the patience To sort of achieve.
So I sort of swing on that pole and then start to think, well, gee, I should have done more or less in particular areas with my writing.
And start to work down that road.
And then, you know, this is the back and forth.
I think this is not particular to me.
I think it's actually quite common for a lot of people to work with these kinds of issues in terms of judging the quality of their own work.
But then, you know, I switch to the other side and I start to say, well, but, you know, one of the problems is that Ayn Rand's novels and her work as a whole was lacking something quite important because she certainly did not achieve what she wanted to achieve in terms of You know, making the world a freer place and so on.
I remember somebody, I can't remember who, it was probably a member of the collective who, you know, on reviewing Atlas Shrugged Sense, you know, said, you know, now that the case has been made so strongly, You know, all government regulations will be dismantled within a year.
You know, it's all incredibly optimistic, you know, to the point of sort of almost foolishness kind of stuff.
And, you know, when you think about that level of, in a sense, cold discipline, which is what you get a lot, at least what I get a lot from Ayn Rand's books, fantastically intellectually stimulating, well-written, and her use of metaphors, you know, can be very powerful.
But, you know, kind of like a cold, a bit of a cold universe, a sort of cold, judgmental universe.
And so I don't know that she really achieved what she wanted in terms of sort of the glowing humanity and certainly she did not achieve what she wanted in terms of actually having an effect on the world in a fundamental way.
In fact, Given that there's a certain influence of libertarianism within some of the neocon movement and in certain of the sort of Reaganite things, that her work was actually hijacked by people who are far better at manipulation than she was, because, you know, all art is a form of manipulation, which doesn't mean that it's bad.
But, I mean, you know, antibiotics is a form of physical manipulation.
It's certainly not bad. But her work was kind of hijacked by the government is the problem, not the solution, small government crowd.
And then it was sort of co-opted by sort of the Washington or political power elite and was turned into quite the opposite, right, of what it was intended.
So she actually ended up furnishing weapons for her enemies, which, you know, is a horrible kind of...
A horrible kind of negative irony that sort of occurred.
And so, you know, she didn't achieve what she wanted.
And I would also say that when I sort of think about this level of sort of discipline and so on, that she also didn't achieve her stated values and goals In her own life, right?
I would assume that, for Ayn Rand, that freedom was a fairly important consideration for her life's work and so on, that she wouldn't say that she was trying to enslave people or bully them or anything like that, but that freedom was important.
The realm of morality is a very dangerous realm to get into as a thinker because there is The tendency not to be what I sort of consider a jazz ethicist.
Let me try that again.
A jazz ethicist.
And what is this word that always makes you sound like you're drunk?
Ethicist is one.
And judicial is another.
It can also say judicial. It always makes you sound like you're a little bit French drunk, which I'm not because it's not two o'clock yet.
So morality is a dangerous world to get into because it is a realm of sort of ultimate bullying in a lot of ways.
There is a very dangerous realm to get into because the temptation, since everybody is so vulnerable and susceptible to ethical arguments, the temptation is to be kind of a bully and so on.
And it's certainly a temptation that I've had to fight with myself.
I think it's a temptation that Ayn Rand fought, if she really did fight it, I don't know, but definitely lost her and sort of look at the later parts of her life where she had these kangaroo courts and would...
You know, had these mock trials of people who were considered to have broken with pure rationality that was defined as her and that everyone had to love her because we all love rationality and the highest rationality is the highest thing we should love.
Ayn Rand was the most rational, therefore everyone had to love her.
Like all of those kind of narcissistic culty kind of syllogisms, I don't think that she kind of achieved what she wanted, right?
So achievement in the world is something that I view with some suspicion because It doesn't seem to try.
It's never really translated into the founding of Libertopia or Ancapistin or whatever you want to call it, or even any kind of significant movement in that direction.
So I have this kind of uneasy and complicated relationship with work.
So, you know, for instance, and the reason I'm talking about this, I had a dream last night, and I don't really do my own dream analysis all too often, but I thought I would do it now.
It's not really much to analyze.
It was a pretty explicit kind of dream.
So, yesterday, and of course I know that you're completely fascinated by all the tiny minutiae of my day, but it did have kind of an effect on my thinking that I had a good chat about with Christina this morning.
But, so yesterday, I woke up, and I'm trying to wake up at a decent hour on the weekends, because otherwise I have an executive meeting sort of Monday mornings at 9 o'clock, and it's a long commute, so I have to leave kind of early, don't know what the weather traffic's going to be like, and so on, so...
So I try not to sleep in too much on the weekends because it kind of messes up my schedule.
Once you get around 40, you'll know what I mean.
Anyway, so yesterday, then I woke up and we went to, we were buying furniture, right?
We got this big house, which we kind of moved into two years ago, and it's sort of only half furnished, and we kind of need to, now that I've got a good job and I've got a big pay raise and so on, it's time to sort of spend some money and be a good capitalist consumer.
So we went and, you know, dropped obscene amounts of money on furniture at Ethan Allen because we've had this woman come in and sort of give us a view of, you know, the big picture view of how we can decorate this house.
And so we kind of did that, was there for a couple of hours, and then we ran some errands and so on.
And what happens is, for me, I start to feel a little bit like...
You know, I think, okay, so I've done these little things which need to get done in life, which are important, and I like to have a nice environment and so on.
But I start to feel sort of uneasy, and it's kind of interesting for me.
And I start to feel like, okay, well, great.
So now I've done some, you know, Minor stuff that needs to get done in my life, but I haven't, you know, I haven't built an edifice of freedom for the ages with my day.
I mean, I know that sounds a little ridiculous and possibly a little grandiose, but this isn't really how I'm going to be honest about how it works for me.
So I'm like, but I haven't written an article or I haven't done a podcast that's going to, you know, have some influence on people's thinking.
I just, I haven't achieved something of grandeur with my day.
I have just done some...
You know, some errands. So then, I don't know, I watched a prison break with Christina, and then, you know, I sort of started to look into doing some work and so on.
But so I'm sitting there watching the prison break, thinking, well, you know, this is kind of like a rest, right?
But, you know, really, what am I resting from?
I mean, I did some shopping, and I ran some errands, right?
And some groceries and crap like that.
And so, you know, have I really earned my rest?
You know, have I really earned the right to sit here and watch a TV show, you know, in the middle of a sort of Saturday afternoon?
So then I'm like, okay, well, I'll go on the board and I'll sort of ask and answer some questions.
And there's a rousing debate going on about whether I think that all Christians are homicidal.
So, you know, go on and put my two cents in about that.
And, you know, then I sort of earned a little bit more rest.
So then I had played a video game for about, I don't know, 20 minutes or so.
I had a rousing game of Unreal Tournament, 2004, a great game.
And then I'm like, okay, well, look, now I've really got to get something done in the future.
I've not really moved the course of freedom forward at all.
I haven't written any big manifestos.
I haven't converted anybody else, for want of a better phrase.
I haven't moved the course of freedom, in a global sense, forward with my day.
Part of me starts to feel kind of uneasy and kind of lazy, like the day was sort of badly spent and this and that and the other.
I sort of find that to be kind of uncomfortable, frankly.
It doesn't feel like a very comfortable situation to be in, to sort of be in this world where I kind of have to buy leisure through work.
I mean, and I know what sort of fundamental economic sense, in order to consume, you've got to produce.
And I don't mean sort of that, going to work or anything, but that I sort of have to buy leisure and sort of just enjoyment out of...
In sometimes a fairly excessive amount of work, Sort of in the cause of liberty.
Doing a podcast while I'm cleaning my bathroom doesn't count because I don't really find the bathroom that stimulating to clean, so I might as well sort of have some intellectual fun while I'm at it.
But I sort of really don't like that idea that I have to sort of buy my leisure by contributing to whatever cause.
The cause is not necessarily freedom, or it certainly hasn't been For large sections of my life, you know, the cause was, you know, I have to go and write.
When I took a year and a half off and self-funded myself to write two or three novels, actually four really, I mean, that's sort of when I met Christina, and I was like, oh, I have to go and work, and I have to write.
I'm self-funding, and I'm sort of paying myself, and I have to be disciplined, and I have to go and write.
And, you know, when I went to go and sort of start writing, it was great and so on, but sometimes I don't really feel like doing it, especially on a beautiful day.
I'd rather go to the park or something.
So I just sort of been thinking about that over the last little while about, you know, what relationship do I have?
To my leisure.
Is leisure something like in that good old Protestant work ethic kind of sense?
Do I get leisure because I have done something grand with my day and then I get to sort of relax?
What does that sort of mean in the realm of freedom?
And I'll sort of give you another example that's sort of come up for me lately.
I've kind of noticed when I'm at work that...
I mean, I'm very productive and I've done a lot sort of in the month that I've been there and I'm sort of pleased with...
and other people seem to be pleased and that's all good.
But, you know, to be perfectly honest, I get a lot done, but I sure as heck don't work continually, right?
I mean, like most people who are in...
You know, creative roles or positions or whatever, there's a fair amount of downtime and at least faff time, sort of as I call it, sort of junk time that's important to be creative, right?
So I'm sort of learning a whole new marketplace and writing a bunch of articles and redesigning a website and coming up with marketing content.
And so this is all fairly creative stuff, for me anyway.
And I find when I sort of look at my work day, it's like, okay, well, I'll get in and I'll check my email at work and then I'll Check out who came to visit the Free Domain radio site, have a look at the numbers of hits on my YouTube videos, and then I'll work for like an hour, hour and a half, and then I'll check my personal email and see if anyone's on MSN, or if anyone chats with me, I'll chat with them for a few minutes.
And then I'll go back and, you know, sort of work, and then I'll grab a coffee, and then I'll, you know, maybe it's lunchtime, and I can eat a yogurt or something.
So, for me, looking at...
My sort of ebb and flow of my work life at an office, so I'm being well paid to do stuff, I would say that, you know, the actual sort of typing for the corporate cause is really only occurring about two-thirds or maybe three-quarters of my day.
And this doesn't count things like meetings and travel and so on.
That's just, you know, what am I doing, right?
Well... I've sort of begun to think as I'm trying to work this idea that I'm going to learn about myself through empiricism and what I actually do rather than just through language.
So I'm sort of looking at it and saying, well, I am very productive and I sort of produce an enormous amount of good stuff, stuff that's useful, quicker than most people or just about anyone else that I know.
And I do that while working and then taking a break and working and then taking a break.
And if you've ever tried to write when you're not inspired, I mean, holy crap.
Now that's some heavy lifting, right?
When you've got to come up with something and you just, you know, I've never really had a sort of weekly article or daily article, but, you know, if you don't have any ideas, well, I guess I have the podcast.
Maybe I shouldn't talk about that, and I don't really have that many problems with the podcast, but I certainly have been in situations where I've had to write and have no idea what, you know, nothing's coming to me, right?
Creativity's kind of like you've got to watch the pot and wait for it to boil, so to speak, right?
You can't sort of will it. So I've sort of kind of figured out at work that that's how I'm creative, right?
That if I sit there and stare at the screen and type straight for eight hours a day, I'm not actually that productive in a sort of end result kind of way because the stuff that I'm coming up with isn't as good as sort of when I take breaks and let my unconscious mull in it for a while and come back and so on.
And that also has been the case for me with creative writing.
So for me, work, you know, that's not like, I don't know, like moving.
You don't sort of say, okay, well, I'm going to pack a box and then take a break.
Like stuff which is, and then take a break and then come back.
Stuff that's like really kind of core as far as creativity goes, where you have less sort of willpower over it than you would like to have sometimes.
You know, it's like trying to will your dreams, right?
I mean, we all want happy dreams of pumpkins and chocolate and so on, but sometimes that's not really the way things work.
Work out at night, and that's often usually to our benefit.
But as far as creativity goes, I'm sort of trying to work with the idea so that I can sort of look at how I work empirically and just not sort of assume, oh my god, I'm lazy.
I'm stealing from the company because I'm checking my personal email or writing a reply to someone on the board, but what I'm doing is taking a break.
From the creative work that I'm doing, what that lets my unconscious do is to sort of play around with it a bit and then when I go back to it, I've got some new ideas and I can sort of work faster or get things done.
It's either the same time or quicker and there's less rewriting and so on.
So, I mean, I don't think that's just rank self-justification for doing personal things at work, but I have sort of noticed that I am very productive through taking these kinds of breaks.
And so that's sort of what I actually do, but my values, you know, sort of the conscious values, don't exactly coincide with that, right?
So sort of consciously I'm much more strict with myself and say, well, I'm at work, I should be doing work for the company, I shouldn't be, you know, but I still kind of do it, right?
So I kind of have a conflict there.
And what I've sort of realized, as I've mentioned, is that I'm going to start working with, I've started working with the idea that This is how I work.
This is what works for me to get productive things done.
People don't really care, fundamentally, how you get things done.
They care that you get things done.
For me to sit there and be sternly looking over my own shoulder saying that this process or methodology for me of producing my creative work is Is bad or, you know, I shouldn't be doing this or I should be doing that, but then going ahead and doing it anyway.
It's not like I'm so stern with myself that I view personal email at work as a kind of crack that I just can't touch because it will ruin my life, you know?
I'll sort of have this standard.
And the same thing is true for me, like in terms of I'm not a morning person, never have been since I was a little, little kid.
And I really hate this farmer's virtue world where it's just considered to be better to get up early, right?
The hours between like 6 and 9 in the morning are just automatically better than 5 and 8 in the afternoon or whatever as far as work goes.
But, you know, that's sort of the world that we live in and so on and all conditioned by state schools and so on.
So... So I've always sort of disliked that.
And for me, I'm just much more productive if I get that, especially morning sleep for me is just delish, right?
So if I can get that extra 45 minutes in the morning, I'm much more productive during the day.
So I don't aim to get to work by night.
I've got 55 kilometers to go to get to work, so if traffic is bad, Well, as you can tell from the podcast, sometimes it's a fairly lengthy old drive.
And if I sort of leave at quarter to nine, get to work sort of 20 past nine, that works out beautifully.
But still, I mean, it's so ridiculous.
I'm 40 years old.
And I've told this about them during the interview, that I'm not a 9 o'clock guy, and they're perfectly fine with it.
Nobody has said one word, and I did this at my last job, worked at three years, nobody said one word.
A couple of jokes, you know, about don't schedule a meeting for Steph at 9 o'clock.
Never anything negative, but still, when I walk in at, you know, quarter past 9, or if the traffic's been bad, sort of 9.30, and work late and so on, but I feel...
Like I'm doing a bad thing.
Like I feel like I'm going to get criticized.
I feel like I'm kind of sneaking into work.
And it's a very hard feeling to shake for me.
I sort of talk myself in and out of it.
But, you know, I'm stuck in traffic and it's 9 and it's 9.15 and so on.
And I feel bad.
And nobody has any complaints about my work.
And, you know, I'm getting more jobs, better pay, more responsibility, career is going fine.
But still, you know, I'm still in this mode, and we'll sort of talk about sort of where this came from for me.
You know, obviously, if this is not of any...
If I'm the only one who feels this, then you don't need to listen to Monday Morning's podcast, but I had a chat with Christina about sort of the origins of it for me, and I think they're common enough that we probably all have this feeling to some degree.
We're going to get slammed by somebody on authority for, you know, quote, taking liberty, so to speak, right?
But... I live in a minor, naggy prison of these kinds of rules, but at the same time, I break them all the time.
That's the paradox for me.
That's what's a little bit hard to understand, what I'm trying to work out.
If I genuinely do believe that coming into work at 9.15 or 9.20 or whatever is a bad thing, Then why do I do it?
Why don't I just get up at 7 instead of like 8 and get to work on time and spend more time with my lovely audience podcasting in the car and so on?
That's sort of the paradox that I'm trying to work with, the sort of misalignment between values and actions.
And, you know, this is a prison of my own making, right?
This is sort of why I sort of try and focus on the personal stuff as well as the political stuff.
I mean, this is a prison of my own making.
And I have a lot more control over working through this kind of stuff than I do trying to figure out how to shift the behemoth of the state from my back and so on.
At least I can look at my own sort of petty tyrannies, right?
The tyranny of me, the totalitarianism of the self, that I can sort of have a little bit more More effect on.
So, when I think about my commitment to, you know, Libertopia or whatever, trying to get communications out about freedom, and this vague and unsettling, for me at least, paradox that I feel I'm enslaved to some degree,
not to a huge degree, but to some degree, I feel enslaved by my commitments to freedom.
I mean, this is funny, right?
I mean, for me, it's kind of funny, because it is such an absurd paradox, but it seems so absolutely inevitable, for me at least, and for other people as well, but...
I am duty-bound to move the cause of freedom forward.
I'm obligated to be free.
I mean, it's really quite ludicrous when you think about it.
And, of course, it arises.
I won't talk about the proximate cause.
I'll just talk about the general principles that would cause something like this to arise.
It arises, for me, from a fundamental mistrust of the self.
Something that's very, very basic and very, very powerful.
And the fundamental mistrust of self that occurs for me in the realm of work If I give an inch, I'll take a mile.
I'm my own sort of southern, what we have here is a failure to communicate kind of southern god with mirrored shades and a bullwhip.
Because for me, it's like, okay, well, if I don't have a work ethic, if I don't sort of say, well, this is my commitment, this is my goal, this is what I'm going to do, this is my values, this is my life's purpose, and so on.
If I don't have all of that, and if I don't nag myself To do stuff in line with my stated general objectives about my life and all this kind of crap, right?
If I don't do all of that, then fundamentally sort of what I believe is that I'm going to end up sitting on a sofa eating bonbons, you know, weighing 350 pounds and get nothing done, right?
I barely even rouse myself to To give myself a sponge bath once a quarter kind of thing, right?
And I don't know if other people have this kind of feeling.
Like, if you don't have discipline...
Then you're, you know, just some overweight civilian turd, you know, in the sort of military sense, you know, you're just sort of some lazy, good-for-nothing, sit around, do nothing, be kind of like a guy in a sort of wife-beater sleeveless tea, drinking beer and fighting and scratching and doing absolutely nothing with your life.
And I really do.
It's not a very powerful vision for me, but I'm just trying to work from my behavior backwards to try and figure out what it is that's going on for me in this realm.
But I think I really do believe that in the absence of a kind of stern discipline with myself, I'm going to be a lazy, good-for-nothing bum.
And so the sort of The virtue that I pursue, and this is a bit of an exaggeration, but there's a lot of truth in this for me, that I'm sort of concerned that the virtue that I'm trying to pursue in my life is really arising from a kind of fear.
It's not really arising from the joy of virtue for its own sake and so on, right?
Virtue is its own reward and so on, because if that were the case, I wouldn't have this kind of Sergeant Major self-improvement standing over me saying, you know, what you doing with your time, boy?
Are you moving the cause of freedom forward?
Or are you just picking your nose and eating some Cheetos?
That's not a guy that I really want in charge of my brain.
That's really not a very relaxing and positive relationship to have with virtue.
And it turns virtue into a kind of stern, cold, mask-faced responsibility that doesn't really jibe well With the values that I sort of believe in and the values that I act on, right? I mean, this is the funny thing.
I don't act as if I have this, you know, Sergeant Major self-improvement yelling his commands at me.
I kind of act, you know, like the Rastafarian libertarian for the joy of liberty kind of guy.
That's how I act and that's what I believe.
But somewhere in between the action and the belief is this shadow, right?
And it means that, for me, that I act this way.
I can act sort of in a relaxed and positive way.
And I believe that that's a good approach, that, you know, morality is not about slavery to...
Freedom is not slavery to morality, sort of fundamentally, right?
That it's about sort of pleasure.
And there is a Rastafarian, to categorize that in religion a little broadly, there's a Rastafarian aspect.
To liberty and pleasure and so on.
But for me, there is this shadow in the middle which gives me some real pause and concern about my relationship to work and my relationship to discipline and my relationship to sort of getting things done.
And my habit at some level and in some context, and not uncommonly, like a couple of times a day when I sort of think about it as clearly as I can, you know, my tendency to bully myself.
Sort of what I'm fundamentally sort of talking about is that I have a tendency To sort of bully and scare myself with, you know, kind of got to get things done, right?
So the reason I was sort of talking about yesterday was that I did not move the cause of freedom forward, unless you consider that I was liberating characters from Ethan Allen.
I didn't sort of move the cause of freedom forward.
I ended up doing a show which I think was very good with Christina in the evening, sort of Ask a Therapist Part 2 or Number 2.
So, you know, I did good things, good work, and so on.
But I was uneasy about not doing that work, and that's not what I want in terms of being free.
I don't want to substitute.
Okay, so I don't have my corrupt asshole family in my life anymore, and I don't have friends in my life who are not positive, pleasurable relationships where there's no compromise around any kind of fundamental values.
Or, you know, if they're sort of acquaintances that we have stuff that's fun to do that is enough of a shared value that we don't have to get all philosophical all the time.
But I don't...
So I don't have those tyrannies in my life.
I can't do that much about the tyranny of the state and the, you know, positive demographics of the Muslim world versus the negative demographics of the Western world.
There's not a whole lot I can do about that because I'm married.
And... So in a sort of very fundamental way, I really want to sort of spend my time and energy focusing on the tyrannies that I can do, sort of do something about.
And for me, that has a lot to do with this kind of personal tyranny of...
Of a kind of workaholism, or of a kind of, you know, have to be using my time in a sort of wise and productive manner, or I'm, you know, lazy and bad, I'm going to end up, you know, 350 pounds, bonbons, that sort of whole scene.
So I really am going to try this thing and kick around with the idea for the next little while, a sort of a experiment, to see what's going to happen if I don't...
I mean, when we talk about the virtue of people independent of a centralizing authority, which is the basic idea, of course, behind anarcho-capitalism or a stateless society, If we talk about this,
that people will be virtuous in the absence of a centralized authority, I wonder if I might not try and make encapistan or libertopia out of my own particular environment, like if what's going to happen to me If I actually do try to live by the principles that I suggest as a society.
Because, I mean, we're all a multiplicity.
We're a multitude. We're an ecosystem.
Personality is a whole bunch of things put together.
The I is, at least for me, more of a we than an I. And so I actually can do quite a bit to simulate society just within my own personality and within my own soul.
And so I'm just sort of curious to try this out.
On for size and see what happens if I actually become a libertarian utopia of me.
Just to sort of run this experiment by and see if my consumption of bonbons skyrockets and I have no real desire to do anything and I don't...
I mean, I'm going to go to work and so on.
I don't want this experiment to end up with me being homeless.
But I wonder if I might just not be able to have that kind of freedom within my own life that I hope to replicate for society as a whole.
Because, of course, if I do end up in a situation where I'm eating bonbons and not doing anything, then it might have some impacts on my political philosophy, you could say.
Anyway, wish me luck.
I'm going to go off and start working on this aspect of things, and I'll keep you posted as I go forward.
Thank you so much for listening.
Oh, and just on a final note, this is going out to the listener who feels that I might have some remaining pride barrier after Valley Girl Sunday last week.
This is just for you.
Oh, my God!
I think I just shotted my panties!
▲
Export Selection