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Oct. 27, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:53
478 Freedom From The Fears of Others

You and the world, in a nutshell

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the 27th of October, 2006, and it is 5.30 in the afternoon, just heading home, actually heading to the gym.
We'll see if I make it or not, depending on what the traffic is like, and let me tell you, it's bad.
Actually, this is interesting.
I have been asked to stop podcasting by the government, and video casting is really quite remarkable.
It turns out it actually has nothing to do with the IRS or the police or the military or any of the other sort of status institutions that I regularly flail at.
The agency which is most offended is actually Tourism Canada.
It's interesting because they say that me, with this sort of podcasting, the video casting really, showing what Canada looks like is not only causing substantial drops in tourism and immigration, but also a fair number of Canadians who are watching this is sort of sinking home exactly what it's like to live in Canada.
And they're leaving too, so the tax base is being eroded.
So I think that, strangely enough, I actually thought that it was going to be the content of my video cast that was going to have some effect in undermining the power of the state.
It turns out that it's just the view around my forehead that is the most dangerous and powerful political weapon that I have.
So just in case you're wondering, it's six degrees cold and wet, rainy, and unpleasant here in Canada for the 400th straight week.
Okay, we had a nice summer, but it's been a while since it's been sunny.
It's just this kind of chilly inside of a refrigerated ping pong ball situation that's going on.
So, we are closing an era in Free Domain Radio.
Which I wanted to chat about for a few minutes before going on to this podcast.
I did this podcast this morning, but unfortunately the power cord had worked its way loose from the computer after I put it in the car, and we died sort of half an hour into it just before I got to work.
But no matter, it was a ramble fest anyway, unlike this one, so we'll not consider it a great loss to the intellectual canon of the Western world.
So the end of the era for the time being is that I'm going to quit the videos because they really were just sort of a time-sync experimentation to see what it was going to be like.
I've been getting good response in the YouTube community, so please don't think this is the end of the journey for you.
I'm going to continue to do audio podcasts as time goes on.
But the videos are just too time-consuming, and I'm afraid that...
I also can't quite get the quality that I want, so in terms of the video, I either record a 640x480 with this Microsoft LifeCam USB 2.0 and a pretty fast notebook, and it's still kind of shuddery, and it sort of starts after 50 seconds or so.
I haven't found a way to bypass it.
What that means, of course, is that the video is kind of jerky, Not in the way you might think.
Or maybe it is the way that you think.
I'm not sure. But the video quality is a little bit jerky, unless I go down to 320 by 200 resolution, which is, you know, Doom quality resolution, where things aren't jerky, but they're kind of blurry.
So jerky or blurry, not really the option that I want.
And naturally, when I do the video, I don't actually have any control or have not found any way To have any control over the audio quality.
So I am losing audio quality and I don't believe gaining an enormous amount of video quality.
Plus, you know, overall there's a reason why The Daily Show has their graphics and it's not just...
Dan Stewart lashed to a chair, squinting into the rain.
So I just don't think that there's an enormous amount that's added through the videocast here.
Well, although they have been great fun, and it's certainly been a lot of fun to see the podcast in action, for me at least.
But I'm not going to continue.
They're too time consuming.
I don't get the audio quality and I don't get the video quality I want.
And the only other way that I could do that would be to put a true video camera in the car, which would actually involve getting another computer because I need one to record the video and one to record the audio because my camcorder doesn't have an audio input.
And so it's starting to become a little kind of ridiculous at that point.
To me, it's like, speeding officer, I can't be.
I've got three surfaces in the trunk.
So they're too heavy.
I simply, look at all this traction.
And of course, I would basically get one car start before the battery would drain, so I'm not going to go down that road and pretend that this is some sort of studio with visual capacities.
So, anyway, just so you know, it's not that I'll never do any other video cast.
It's just that I'm going to wait until...
I, of course, want to continue on with the series on philosophy, but donations are going to have to accelerate in order for me to quit this day gig and do this full-time.
But I really want to do a series further on politics.
I would love to do a video series on economics.
And I would most love to do a video series on aesthetics and art, which, of course, as a novelist and poet and artist and playwright and essay writer and a really bad short story writer, I've never had any luck with that medium, I have some very decided and hopefully not wildly mad ideas about art that I would like to get across, but I need to sort of be sitting and reading and talking about stuff.
I did a little bit on Shakespeare a while back, which was fun.
But that kind of stuff I would like to do on video, but that's going to have to wait until I have...
Basically until I can do this full-time, which I imagine is still at least 6 to 12 months away.
So it's not that I won't ever do any videos again.
It's just that they're going to be the incrementally slightly more produced, slightly better visual quality that occurs when I'm in my home studio rather than my car studio.
So I just wanted to mention that to the people who are watching on YouTube.
Watch no more or come by and get involved with the podcast and the board.
The audio will continue, but the big chatty forehead is now going through the sunset phase on your video screen.
Thank you so much for watching us.
I really appreciate it. Not counting the 10k video views and so on.
So I'm obviously thrilled.
And thank you so much for everyone who's getting the word out and supporting this and that and the other.
And we shall now continue on with today's topic.
Today's topic is about superiority.
And it's something that I think is a very, very important and essential topic to talk about because it's something that in our hyper-egalitarian, the tall nail is the one that gets hammered down, the tall poppy is the one that gets chopped off.
In our hyper-egalitarian, worshipping of the false god of democracy kind of culture, superiority in any sort of fundamental way, not inconsequential and stupid ways like prettiness or sports ability or whatever, any kind of real superiority arouses an enormous amount of hostility in people.
And I'd sort of like to talk about...
that as an idea because I think it's something that's really worth getting a handle on for us, we libertarians and we intellectuals.
I mean, I can tell you some things about yourself That I simply know because you're listening to or watching this show, I can tell you for sure that you're very intelligent.
I can tell you that you at least have an IQ of 120 to 130, and I would imagine that higher would not be outside the bounds of possibility.
And for those of you who don't know, you probably do, but IQ is not, it's asymptotic, it's not linear.
So an IQ of 130 is not 30% smarter than an IQ of 100.
It goes up asymptotically and It is an enormous difference.
You know, I was talking about this with Christina last night and shocked her, which of course is not easy.
Stumping her at times with idiocy is not impossible, but shocking her with my opinions is not the easiest thing in the world to do.
I said that, you know, people who are really smart, you know, they're kind of massively different from the average, or massively different from the average.
And, you know, to what degree is Stephen Hawking a better physicist than I am?
Well, frankly, there's no real measure.
I mean, it's really, really big, is the phrase.
Certainly, in managing people, I've noticed that, you know, a really great programmer is like a hundred times faster and better than an average programmer.
So, in terms of abilities, human beings, you really can't compare.
And I said, you know, there's more difference between a really smart human being and an average human being than there is between, like, a chimpanzee and an ant, right?
This is what shocked her.
She may be right. Maybe it's an unreconstituted, primeval, Neanderthal opinion.
But this is sort of the reasoning that I have that...
Well, ants use tools.
Ants have a social structure.
Ants communicate. Even the bees do that little dance that says where the honey is and so on.
So, you know, forms of communication and language, social organization, structure, and so on.
I don't really see...
I'm sure you can tell me exactly where I'm wrong in this, but I don't really see a massive difference between, say...
A chimpanzee and an ant in that way.
And a chimpanzee, obviously, to a person of average intelligence is a big leap, but boy, you know, it sometimes feels like the biggest leap is between average intelligence and great intelligence.
And the reason that I'm talking about this is certainly not out of any vanity, it's just a particular ability, but really it's for you to understand that false modesty is a form of hypocrisy as great as false vanity, or vanity is itself false, false self-esteem. False modesty is very dangerous, very bad for your mental health, because It tends to make you blame yourself for things that are not your fault.
You then have to come up with a story about why you don't connect with people, which is entirely based on false premises.
To take an example, because what Christina said, we were talking about how we were both kind of alone and lonely when we were children and teenagers and so on, and how nobody really interacted with us and so on.
And... I said, well, why do you think that was?
And she said, well, obviously, I was different from people, smarter than people, and so on, and deeper than people around me.
But the problem is that she also felt that she said, I'm the one common denominator in all of these sort of not-so-positive social interactions.
I'm just not the common denominator in that way.
So, since I am the one common denominator, I must have some role or responsibility in the matter.
And I said, well, I understand that there's a lot in psychology that makes sense as far as that goes, right?
So if somebody continually breaks up with girlfriends and, you know, has bad relationships and blames everyone else, then you have to say, and it's a fair thing to say, well, you, sir, are the one common denominator in all of these failed relationships.
Therefore, you need to take ownership even if you don't feel like it and so on.
So, I mean, I understand that.
That makes perfect sense to me.
But I don't think that really works in this context.
And I doubt very much, given that you were a loner and not understood and felt not close to people and had nobody interact with you, pretty much, except in a negative way, when you were a kid, you will have had the same question, which is, why does everyone else seem to have a social life and get along with each other?
And sort of can bide the time talking about, you know, haircuts, the weather, politics, and nonsense like that.
Not like political theory, just like who said what in a mayoral race.
And why is it that everyone is so happy and content with what I consider to be a life of semi-swinish, retarded ignorance, and I'm not, and I'm not, you know, every time I open my mouth, people look at me funny, and, you know, all of these kinds of things.
So I just learned to sort of shut up and read books, and, you know, you have to have a story about why that is the case when you go through that.
And I'm here to tell you that unless your story is people are generally retarded, your story is wrong.
And I don't mean that they're retarded in the technical sense.
I just mean relative to like really smart people who think about ideas and philosophy, they're kind of retarded, right?
Just like next to Stephen Hawking, I'm a retarded physicist, right?
So the skill set isn't even close, right?
I mean, it's not even remotely close.
So as far as Stephen Hawking goes and physics go, I'm sort of somewhere between the ant and the ape, right?
So I have no problem with that.
That's just a fairly, you know, he's a near infinitely better physicist than I am.
And I recognize that.
And of course, looking for respect for philosophy or philosophers is a very hard thing because most of the public philosophers are themselves paid, retarded, fool mongrels simply out there selling off our freedoms for the sake of tenure and small pensions.
So, given that I know that you're smart and I know that you feel very alone, or at least certainly did in the past, and maybe you do now, the fact that you're very smart, very verbally acute, very curious, very intellectually stimulated, very restless, very smart, the fact is that you have very little in common with people around you.
And I'll sort of tell you the most fundamental thing that you don't have common.
Before I sort of tell you what may be some solutions to it, The thing that you really don't have in common with anyone around you is that you know that you don't know.
You know that you don't know.
And the things that you do know, you have good reason for knowing.
The one thing that is very true in life, and if you take nothing away, if this is the last YouTube podcast or videocast that you look at and you never hear me again, just go with this one if you don't mind.
Because this is sort of the most important thing that I can say to you at this moment.
The one thing that is very true in life is that everybody knows the truth, and they punish people who threaten their illusions.
Everybody claims they know the truth when they don't really, and they punish people who threaten those illusions.
I'm going to use a golfing metaphor, not because I'm any kind of big golfer.
It's just that it's going to be fairly widely understood, especially among my Scottish listeners.
But... Everybody thinks they're this great golfer.
Everyone thinks they totally understand the game.
Everybody thinks they're just this fantastic golfer.
And if you listen to them talk, as we talked about in the silent movie metaphor of a while back, if you listen to people talk, they're just incredible.
You know, they can put Tiger Woods to shame, Jack Nicklaus to shame.
They are just incredible golfers, right?
And this is all you hear about when you're a kid, is how great a golfer your parents are.
And of course, other people and adults and the government, of course, are the ultimate golfers and so on.
And then you actually start to play golf yourself a little, and you start to learn about golf, and you realize, wow, this is a really tough game.
Lots of different clubs, you know, you've got to square your shoulders, you've got to not jump out of your swing, you've got to, you know, it all comes down to these tiny little connecting wacky clicks that, you know, it's just really, it's a tough game.
It's a Zen kind of ecosystem skill set game.
And then you sort of look at other people once you realize how difficult Golfists, you look at all these other people, and they're all telling you that they're these fantastic, great, wonderful, perfect golfers, and frankly, they're holding their golf clubs upside down, they're blindfolded, they're on a glacier, and they're swinging at a boat anchor with a tree or something.
You can sort of stack as many silly metaphors as you want.
But they're not even playing golf, and they have some vague idea that you're supposed to hit something with something and get it somewhere.
But it could be baseball, it could be any sort of other sport, and they're not even playing a sport, and they have no skill anyway.
But they all think they're Tiger Woods.
And this, of course, is simply because everybody thinks that they're an expert on moral philosophy.
Everybody will tell you what's right and what's wrong and what's good and what's bad and what's true and what's false.
Everybody thinks they're an expert.
Now, deep down, they know that it's total bullshit, that they don't have a clue But, you know, this self-important pomposity of human life that occurs in the absence of real knowledge, and it's not their fault that they don't know.
It's their fault that they pretend that they know, but it's not their fault that they don't know.
Why would they? It's horrible to invent ethics and philosophy.
It's a murderously difficult intellectual task, and most people have no hope of doing it whatsoever, and you could pay them a million dollars an hour, they'd never be able to pull it off.
But... Everybody thinks that they're this grand expert when they really don't have any kind of clue.
Now, what happens is though that they get that they don't have a clue, but they're terrified of being exposed.
They're terrified of not actually having a clue.
Now, what happens when you've got a bunch of these...
Neanderthal ignorant ass clowns out there pretending to play golf by swinging a bush at a cantaloupe.
When Tiger Woods really does walk on the scene, You know, balancing and thwacking that little ball on the, I don't know, the nine iron or whatever, the putting iron, whatever the hell he uses.
Now, he really knows how to play golf.
And he knows how to play golf because he's recognized that golf is a very difficult thing, and it's more important to be good at something, to be good at something, rather than to just talk about being good at something.
And so he's spent the time and years and years to practice and so on.
And of course, to some degree, it's innate, right?
I mean, there's an old Carson video, I've never seen it, but I've heard about it, of Tiger Woods at the age of two We're doing these amazing golf things, right?
So you can talk all you want about hard work will turn you into a tiger, but you will just end up being eaten by the carnivore of workaholism and not end up as a tiger.
So, wow, that's a complicated metaphor.
Let's not stop. Let's keep moving, shall we?
There's been a bump in the car as we drove over a metaphor.
We'll just keep moving.
But when a really skilled person comes along who has attained skills by not pretending that he has skills, then people feel resentful towards that expert.
So everyone who thinks they're a great golfer feels resentful that Tiger Woods has shown up.
Why do they feel resentful?
Well, of course, they feel resentful because deep down they know that they're lying.
This is an important thing to understand.
This is exactly to a millionth degree what is occurring in your life and will occur for the rest of your life.
And this is the most important thing to understand from really what I've been saying.
Your relationship to society, your relationship to others, your relationship fundamentally to yourself, if you don't get this, then you're going to be very unhappy.
And I want you to be happy.
I want you to be happy, happy, happy.
And wherever we have significant errors in our thinking, unhappiness seeps in like sweating groundwater through a bad basement wall.
I'm actually tied together all right.
And I want you to be happy.
And the best way to be happy is to understand the reality of the world around you, especially the social world around you and why you've been so rejected and why you're ignored and why everyone looks at you whenever you speak like you've grown a third horn or something like that.
Well, the reason that people who are bad at golfers who think they're great golfers get irritated when Tiger Woods comes around is for two reasons.
They know that they're bad golfers.
And two, they know that he's a really great golfer.
So those two collisions, they know that they're...
Well, I guess it's three. One, they know they're bad golfers.
Two, they say they're good golfers.
And three, they can get away with it until a really great golfer comes along.
And so they resent...
Tiger Woods showing up.
Now, they can't openly resent Tiger Woods showing up.
This is very important. They can't openly resent Tiger Woods.
Because, you see, if they openly resent Tiger Woods, then it becomes pretty clear to them that they're resenting him because he's good.
Which means, of course, that they then have to start processing the fact that they're not good and have just been lying about it all their lives.
So, they can't openly resent.
An open resentment would be a fair fight.
I hope you understand what it is that I'm saying, right?
If people openly resented you for being intelligent and philosophical and interested in ideas and interested in values and linguistically acute and all these things, if people openly resented you for that, then at least it would be a fair fight.
And you could say, well, you know, they dislike me because of X, Y, and Z. We'll sort of get into that as we go forward.
But that's not what happened.
People simply ignore what you say.
I mean, I can't tell you the numbers of times that this has occurred to me, and I know, I just know that I'm not alone in this.
I can't tell you the numbers of times that people have been discussing a particular issue or problem or this, that, or the other, and I put my two cents in, or, you know, it's probably worth considerably more than that, And...
Sorry, I just have to grab my phone.
I don't think I'm going to make it to the gym for the class to meet my wife.
A little bit of housekeeping.
A little bit of housekeeping.
I don't know where my phone is.
See the kind of quality that you may not be continuing to experience in the YouTube world?
It's shocking, isn't it? Ah, there it is.
So, hey, at least I'm not doing this at 100 miles an hour.
I'm going 5. So, that's all right.
But, um... You really have to sort of understand that this situation is entirely disastrous for you from an emotional standpoint if you don't kind of get why people can't give you a fair fight.
They can't give you a fair fight because if they really listen to what you're saying, they're going to get very angry.
Now, if they get angry, then they're going to give themselves away.
It's like those couples who really do care about each other, and like, I don't know, Gabby and that guy on Desperate Housewives, they really sort of do care about each other, but they're trying to convince each other that they don't, and so they can't get upset about it.
So it escalates and so on, right?
It's that kind of, I'm not going to give you the satisfaction of knowing that I'm upset by what you're saying, and if I do get upset, if I do get resentful, At Tiger Woods, I'm then a little bit closer to why.
I'm a little bit closer to understanding why.
And that's not a good thing for people, right?
I mean, when you've lied about ethics to yourself and to others and your knowledge of them and your knowledge of the truth and so on, when you've done all of that for so long, Then getting close to the truth of what's actually going on for you and how much you've lied and the fact that you have bullshitted and misled your kids and married the wrong woman and wasted your life in futile self-braggadocio,
when you get that, People will become self-destructive, become suicidal.
They will do anything to avoid that knowledge.
There's no ego strength to deal with a fundamental error of that kind.
It's a very hard thing to deal with.
So they feel this vague unease around Tiger Woods.
It can't ever grow into conscious Dislike.
Because then they'd have to say, well, why do I dislike it?
And then they would have to start to say, well, why do I dislike this guy who's a good golfer when I'm a good golfer and claim to love golf?
That's a contradiction that when it rises to the surface, people just can't handle.
Anyway, I think you get that. One more time, but in Spanish.
So this is why people just don't interact with you.
Maybe at a very surface level, and if you've got a good sense of humor, you can tell a good story, and you can do some minor chit-chat, you'll have that whole stuff going.
But this is why people don't interact with you.
And if you feel pain about that, it's because you don't recognize that basic fact.
It's not because you're smarter that people don't interact with you.
It's not because you're Weird that people don't interact with you.
You're not weird. I mean, obviously there's weirdness that's associated with thinking that it's all your fault and so on.
And you're right in disliking people, but not for the reasons that you think, right?
I would say.
I mean, I'm just going out.
I know them here.
People don't like you because...
You have retained the capacity for curiosity, which means you have retained the capacity for ignorance, which means you have retained the capacity for knowledge.
Ignorance, curiosity, knowledge, that's the general step.
That's how you get wisdom.
You get wisdom from ignorance combined with curiosity.
That's what leads you to, if you think you know, then you're totally shut off from new knowledge and it becomes a defensive thing.
that causes you to attack those who really do know, right, when you pretend to know to yourself.
It causes you to feel uncomfortable and to wish away, right, and so I shouldn't have used the word attack, that sounds too proactive, and it's a contradiction with what I said before.
You want to wish away these kinds of things, right, so if you're, if you've told, I don't know, some mail-order Russian bride who's never seen a golfer that you're an incredible golfer, and yes, it's supposed to take ten hits to get it in the hole, And then Tiger Woods comes along, you can't, you know, to this woman that is worshipping the ground you work on because you got her out of Vladivostok or something, you can't say to her, let's have a game with Tiger Woods, right?
You can't go up to Tiger Woods and say, let me show you how it's done, because he'll just laugh at you, right?
And you can't have Tiger Woods just join you, and you can't even watch her Watch Tiger Woods play because then she'll go, wait a minute, he's doing it in like two shots and you're taking ten and it's supposed to be low.
So you're not good at this thing that you're telling me you're good at.
I mean, nobody wants to see that, particularly in their children's eyes, right?
So what are you going to do?
You're going to have to be friendly to Tiger Woods and try and approach him as some kind of equal, although you know deep down that you're horribly deficient and you're just terrified of getting caught, right, in this deception that you have parlayed upon people, and particularly perhaps even upon yourself.
But deep down, right, deep down, fundamentally, you'll just be desperately, desperately, desperately wishing that Tiger Woods would just go the fuck away.
Right? This is what's really going on in your gut when you're lying to the hot Russian Vladivostok babe telling her you're the best golfer ever to get her to go out with you or whatever and Tiger Woods shows up.
The last thing that you want is for Tiger Woods to hang around but you can't push him away because then you look kind of weird, right?
So you just want this person, Tiger Woods, to go the fuck away and let me get on with putting the moves on hot Vladivostok, Russian babe, and fur.
So this is the tension that you evoke in people.
They want you to go away and don't expose them.
And they know you can.
And they know that you don't know this.
And they know that you feel hurt by them not wanting you around.
I mean, it's like if Tiger Woods wanders onto the amateur golf hour, you know, hands tied behind their back, swimming with a golf club in their mouth, school of self-delusory, perfect golfers, and he wanders then from hole to hole saying, hey, you guys want to play with me?
And everyone's like... No, that's fine.
Just if you could keep moving, that would be great.
Because they don't want him around.
He exposes everything.
Now, if you don't get this, and if you don't get how ridiculous it would be for Tiger Woods to wander around, you know, retarded, blindfolded, one-armed golf idiots course of self-delusory fantasy, and if Tiger Woods just kept saying, you know, I don't know what it is.
People just don't want to play golf with me.
Can you imagine how ridiculous, like, at what point would you sort of want to just take that frickin' Nike hat off his head and swat him up the back of that golf-obsessed cranium and say, Dude!
Okay, I got it.
You're a good golfer. You're a very good golfer.
You're an excellent golfer.
But you know what?
You're pretty retarded when it comes to understanding people.
Because you keep wandering around.
The best golfer in the universe...
Wandering around, wondering why nobody wants to play golf with you.
And why? And you know that everyone is pretending.
You hear them in the clubhouse, oh yeah, I can sink a hole in one every time.
Yeah. Oh yeah, I know exactly what there is.
I invented the name golf.
Golf's my middle name.
I was named golf by Senior Golf Von Golfinator, who invented golf and is golf, fundamentally.
Everyone's just talking about that.
They're all talking about how much they know about golf, and you actually do know about golf and you can sink a hole in one or two, and then you're just wandering around going, you know, I just feel so hurt that people don't want to play golf with me.
Of course they don't!
Of course they don't. For them, playing golf with you is a complete and total nightmare.
It is the worst thing in the world that could ever conceivably happen to them would be to be stuck in a golf game with you.
It would completely detonate their entire sense of themselves.
And they would do anything.
They would pay any price, bear any burden, give up a kidney with a spoon to avoid being seen playing golf with you.
And you... Idiot savant that you are and that I am.
I did this for many years too.
We wander up to these people and it's like, hey guys, let's play some golf!
And they don't seem to want to play very often.
Oh my god, the amount of unhappiness that I gathered to my pitiful, under-functioning brain in this area.
Oh, it's just heartbreaking, but it's pretty funny too.
Of course they don't want to have anything to do with this.
Because they're all bullshitting, right?
When it comes to sort of philosophy and truth, right?
So, I don't know. A number of people that have emailed me and posted on the board.
You can find all these things on the board.
They're sort of up there saying, Oh, you know, I sat down with this guy at work and we started talking about Iraq.
And he seemed to get really uncomfortable and didn't want to talk to me.
Really? I can't imagine why.
I mean, this guy thinks that he's competent to talk about a war, and he's just some dipshit from accounting.
Who's a good accountant? I got no problem with that.
But, you know, he's no philosopher, and you have some recent ideas about the state and about morality and so on, especially if you've gotten this far.
He's like, I don't get it.
He didn't really want to talk with me.
And I guarantee you this also occurs with your family, right?
This is why, you know, ditch the poor retarded buggers, right?
Just put them out of your misery.
Because when your family isn't having a dinner with these people who have raised you with all these moral absolutes that they claim to know and understand and that they're full of wisdom and can tell you what to do and all this, I guarantee you...
They don't have a clue!
Oh my god, they don't have a clue!
And... And so you're sitting there at dinner, and you want to talk about your values, and you want to talk about philosophy, and you want to talk about your ideas, and you want to talk about what's important to you.
And they would, like, they're smiling, I'm sure, you know, like this sort of fixed, empty Ken doll and Barbie grin.
And they're like, can somebody please stab this guy in the thigh with a fork so he shuts off?
Because they don't want to know.
I mean, they don't want to know, but most fundamentally, they don't want to know that they don't want to know.
Because they think they know.
They've spent their whole life saying, oh yeah, ethics?
Oh yeah, politics?
Oh yeah, I got it all down.
Hey, you look up a picture of a philosopher in the dictionary, that's me staring right back at you.
I mean, this is what everyone says to parents.
They don't say, well, we don't have a clue about ethics, but this is what social conformity is, because they don't want you to bounce that argument back when you get into peer group pressures later on in your life or in your teens.
So parents, right, they teach you with all the lazy absolutes of perfect morality, and then when you start asking them questions, they don't want to say, I had to tell you something.
I mean, what was I going to do?
Just let you raise yourself like some sort of wolf child, like some sort of Lord of the Flies denizen?
No, I had to tell you something, and I had to tell you that it was, that it was, I don't know, that it was real, that it was true.
I couldn't tell you nothing.
And of course, your teachers sort of went into full disclosure, right?
They can't tell you, well, I don't know, I'm just paid to keep your little shits in a square, and so shut up and sit down, right?
And I've got to get a pension, and I like having summers off, so don't ask me any questions, right?
No, they have to pretend, just as governments do.
That they have a clue what's going on from an ethical, moral, or philosophical standpoint.
I'm going to call my wife.
Just give me a moment.
Hi, I've got no hope. I've got no hope.
No hope, darling.
I'm not even at the 427. Yeah, so I'll just come home.
What you got? Lovely.
Thanks, Princess. Bye. And I really want to sort of turn you loose or cut you loose from this prison of exclusion.
Because you've really got to get that philosophy, and in particular the realm of ethics, radically different from every other field of human knowledge.
Radically and totally and completely different from every other field of human knowledge.
So you can get people who've done very little other than read a newspaper or read a couple of books and listen to a few people who believe that they can credibly talk about philosophy and ethics.
And politics and so on.
Like they really believe that they have something to say.
And this is not the case with other fields of human thought.
I don't saunter into the ER room and say, yeah, give me a hacksaw.
I've seen a couple of episodes of Scrubs.
I can do what you need me to do.
Suction, subdural hematoma, this, that, and the other.
It would be incomprehensible for me to do that.
Similarly, I don't generally apply for jobs as an airline pilot and say, yeah, I ran a couple of flight simulators on my old 8-bit Atari.
I mean, it had a joystick.
What's there to it? Right?
I would be laughed out of the place.
I don't say, oh, yeah, you need a bridge design to...
I played a couple of games of SimCity, and I know a little bit about math.
I'll work it out.
I'm good. I'm good.
And of course, that's not even what happens.
People don't even say, well, I don't have much education in this, but I'm good.
In the realm of philosophy and ethics, everybody thinks they're an expert.
Everybody thinks they're a great golfer, and great golfers are incredibly, incredibly rare.
And nobody...
I mean, they know it deep down, but nobody wants to admit that.
They don't have a clue.
And the world chokes on imaginary knowledge, right?
This is a very, very important thing to understand.
And don't participate in this.
The world chokes on imaginary knowledge, right?
The world expires, and usually in rivers of blood, on...
Fantasy that is mistaken for truth.
Religion, state, race, culture, religion, family.
The world dies in the poisonous fog of imaginary knowledge.
The basic simple reason why the world is in such a mess and getting worse is because people won't fucking admit that they don't know shit.
They just won't admit that That they don't know.
But deep down they know that they don't have a clue and that it's mere vanity and fear the terror of not knowing something as fundamental as how to live.
The terror of not knowing something as fundamental as how should I live.
People just make up all sorts of shit.
Patriotism. Serve your country.
Be a good father. Be a good mother.
Who knows what that means? We don't know.
I go and provide and I tell my kids what to do and that's called being a good parent.
I'm a good employee. I conform.
I buy stuff. I have sex with people.
I take drugs and that makes me enlightened.
I mean, people don't have the slightest clue about how to live and that's a really terrifying state for people to be in.
It really is like driving blindfolded.
It is absolutely terrifying, and people won't admit that they don't know.
They won't admit.
If you don't know, then knowledge is ego.
The sense of self is based on knowledge, which is first based on ignorance, which breeds curiosity, which breeds knowledge, which breeds curiosity, which breeds validation, breeds knowledge, and eventually you get wisdom, which is where you want to be.
But people simply won't admit that they don't know, and so we're trapped as a species in this blood-soaked, hysterical, nightmare world of imaginary absolutes, of people knowing deep down that they don't know and being completely and totally terrified and angry about that.
And angry about that.
Because it means that not only...
They're terrified because they don't know what they're doing.
They're guilty because they know they're lying to people.
They're insecure and nervous because they're afraid of being found out, which is what people like you bring to the equation, you bastards.
And they're angry because they were lied to.
And they're resentful of people who do know because they fear exposure.
You've got to get what it's like on the other side of ignorance.
Real ignorance is not not knowing something.
Real ignorance is not Not knowing something.
I mean, there's so much, I don't know, it's ridiculous.
Real ignorance is thinking you know something and being emotionally invested in that knowledge.
So, I love my country.
I'm a good patriot. That makes me a good person.
That's real ignorance.
That is pig, slave, moronic, retarded, destructive, violent, evil, decadent ignorance.
And that's, you know, mostly the world that we live in.
Because people are robbed.
People are robbed by false philosophers, right?
I mean, the world is run by false philosophy.
The false argument for morality runs the world.
And people are robbed.
People are robbed by false philosophy.
And false philosophers who sell off freedoms for nothing, beads, change, little articles in magazines, and so on, right?
I can't invent the proof that the world is round, right?
I can't fundamentally, if I'm in the Middle Ages, like just me as a human being, if I was just magically born in the Middle Ages, I would not have the ability To work out the mathematical proof that the world is round by looking at the shadow of the Earth on the Moon and measuring sticks in two different locations and measuring the speed at which a ship's mass disappears over the horizon, all that kind of... I would not be able to work that out.
But, now that it's been worked out, I get it.
Right? I get it.
I don't know smack about quantum physics, really, but I know that it has something to do with how my computer runs and I can use the computer.
Right? So, it's not that everybody has to be philosophers in order for the world to become a better place.
But that's not the case at all.
But philosophers got to start doing their goddamn job.
And teaching people.
Because you don't have to invent knowledge to use knowledge.
I don't know how the hell my car works fundamentally, but I'm driving it.
I have no idea fundamentally how...
I mean, other than vague abstracts, a microphone, a computer, right?
Just read iPencil about how limited human knowledge is.
But that doesn't matter. I can use all of these things.
I don't have to invent it.
So it's not that people have to become philosophers and all is hopeless.
But philosophers, we've got to get that we are not excluded from the human race.
The human race is excluded from our truth.
And we have to really emotionally get it.
We want to be empirical, right?
We want to be empirical. We want to be scientific.
And that means, you know, looking at the evidence of what goes on around us and working from that and not, like, refusing the easy and mystical answer of I'm just weird or people are just bad or whatever, right?
But really understanding that it is our capacity to have the ego strength to accept our own ignorance and thus be curious about the truth and to pursue it and to build and so on.
That is fundamental to our natures.
And it is entirely We're alienating and irritating to the false self, fools and liars around us.
Again, it's not primarily their fault that they're fools and liars.
Certainly not their fault that they're fools.
In the same way that I'm a fool relative to Stephen Hawking in physics, it's not my fault.
I studied other things, right?
But working empirically means that you don't make up imaginary answers for observed phenomena, right?
And the observed phenomena that you've experienced in your life is nobody wants to talk to you about ideas.
Nobody wants to talk to you about ideas.
They will do anything to obscure, reject, cloud, mask over, obfuscate, hide, obliquely, go in some other direction.
They will do anything to prevent you from talking about ideas Other than telling you that they don't want you to talk about ideas, because that would be a clue to you, right?
They want to keep you in the dark.
This is their unconscious. This is their false self.
This is all this nonsense, right?
This is the egoless vanity of the false self, which prefers to imagine virtue than achieve it.
It prefers to portray virtue than be good.
And it's terrifying. It's a terrifying life.
It's a life of pure paranoia and hostility and fear and anger.
And fundamentally of dissociation.
Don't envy these people at all.
And if you don't envy them, it's going to be a lot easier not to resent them.
That's complicated. We can talk about that another time.
But just work empirically.
You have this experience.
Nobody wants to talk to you about ideas.
Nobody, nobody, nobody wants to talk to you about ideas.
And yet they don't openly reject you and say, stop talking about ideas.
You make me feel weird.
I feel uncomfortable.
It's like the cops.
Show us on the doll where the philosopher tried to talk to you about ideas.
But you don't make up answers for these things.
You don't say, well, it's because I'm bad at communicating.
You know, I'm the common denominator here.
It must be my fault in some manner.
I have to find some different way of approaching it.
Nonsense. Don't make up answers for observed phenomena.
That's not scientific. It's not logical.
It's not philosophical at all.
And it's easy. So just blame yourself.
It's lazy. I mean, if I'm Albert Einstein trying to explain the theory of relativity to a whole series, I go on a tour around the whole country to explain the theory of relativity to little children in grade 2.
Actually, it would kind of be fun, and you could probably get some ideas across to them, but fundamentally they would not understand it.
When I was done. And I'd say, well, gee, I must be a bad communicator.
It's like, no, you're just not perceiving reality, which is that these people can't understand it.
Not only do they not have, likely, the physical capacity, like Einstein's brain was, the mathematical section was significantly larger than the average.
He was built that way.
So not only do these kids not even have the physical capacity, But they already think they know the theory of relativity, and they're afraid of being endlessly mocked and humiliated and put down and bullied if they ever admit that they don't know the theory of relativity.
They can't do it. They're incapable of doing it.
They resent you for being there.
They're frightened of being exposed.
They know that they're going to end up with a life of perpetual humiliation if they ever admit their ignorance.
what chance do you think you have?
Right?
And once we get reality, then we don't have to have extremes.
Extremes is fantasy breeds extremism.
Fantasy breeds extremism.
Rationality does not.
Because reality isn't extreme.
Is there such a thing as extreme gravity?
Of hysterical and fundamentalist condensation?
No. Reality just does what it does.
Rationality doesn't breed extremes.
So once you get the facts about reality, then you don't have to be an extremist, which means that you don't either have to blame yourself for nobody wanting to talk about values and ideals and philosophy with you.
You don't have to blame yourself for being a bad communicator, for being weird, for being excluded, for blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you also don't have to blame and get angry at others.
Any more than you would blame and get angry at a two-year-old for not being six foot tall.
They can't do it.
And they've been heavily mined and seeded against you so that they think that everything that you're saying is wrong and bad and destructive and evil and yet they can never call it that because that would bring questions of knowledge and ignorance into view which they can't deal with.
So, I'm just sort of urging you, and it's a very fundamental thing to talk about and to understand your relationship to the world.
That your fundamental relationship is not with people, but with the world.
Because there's no possibility of you having relationships with people who don't already themselves have relationships with the world.
We, we can only meet In reality.
We cannot meet in fantasy.
That's why Christians are so lonely and destructive, fundamentally, and their relationships are so shitty.
I mean, in all religious people, it just popped into my mind.
We cannot meet in fantasy.
We cannot meet in imagination.
Sorry, we can meet a little bit more in imagination that's rooted in reality.
I've talked about this a couple of hundred podcasts back.
We can't meet. We can't be intimate with each other.
We can't communicate with each other except through the medium of reality.
And if people deny and reject reality as an enemy, you can't have a relationship with them.
You can only aim at reality and truth and logic and empiricism and science.
You cannot aim at people.
Because you can't ever get to them except through logic and empiricism and reality and science.
You can never aim to be accepted.
You can never aim to get connected with people.
Never, never, never.
You can only aim over and over and over again to understand and to connect with reality.
And then you'll look up and find there are some other people in the room rather than trying to have conversations with pictures on the wall.
The platonic forms is the ultimate isolation.
And so you need to accept reality.
The reality is just working empirically from your own life.
Nobody does want to talk to you.
And it's not your fault.
And in many ways, fundamentally, it's sort of not their fault either.
It's just bad philosophy. Has muddied the water so we can't see each other.
But when you get that, when you sort of really absorb that, It's not your fault that you can't communicate with people and it's not their fault that they resent you for trying.
It's funny. You can lighten up and let it go.
Lighten up and let it go.
Because you're a hero for truth, right?
You're a soldier from the future sent back in time for a retroactive abortion.
Oh wait, that's a different story. And when you focus on connecting with reality, then you can connect with like-minded people and you can let go of your resentments for the inevitable isolation that comes from being a thinker in a corrupt culture.
You don't want to spend the rest of your life feeling angry at a tribe that resents you for living.
Well, they wouldn't resent you for living, they resent you for speaking.
For having that temerity.
For being that dangerous.
You are an IED. And it's very, very important that you just understand what it's like for people on the other side of listening to you.
So that you can stop hurting yourself by trying to communicate with people who would lose everything if they listened to you.
And I've talked about this before.
before.
I won't go into this in any detail.
Right?
People would lose their entire self, their entire identity, their entire community Now, you have the strength to handle that.
And I'm just saying, you don't have to have that much strength to handle it.
It doesn't have to be a cross that you bear and drag around, your isolation.
Once you recognize and get that you're just superior.
You're just stronger. And it's fundamentally irrational to go around as a weightlifter expecting a bunch of pencil-neck computer server operators to come and pump iron with you and enjoy it.
Especially if they think that they're supermen already and can lift trains and trucks and automobiles.
They don't want to come to the gym with you because then it'll be revealed how weak they are.
They want to think that they're strong.
They don't want to come to the gym with you.
They don't want to talk about ideas with you.
They don't want to play golf with you.
Because they get in their gut that you're good.
And that you would expose them.
And if you'd been born with their abilities and their capacities, you'd probably be exactly the same as they are.
I know I would be. So look to reality.
Look to the future. I know it's tough.
I know it feels lonely.
But that's a fact.
You can't change your nature.
You can't reach in and change somebody else's mind, change their nature.
That's a fact. This isolation, this difference, this genius that you have, that's a fact.
Nothing you can do about that other than throw yourself off a cliff.
Don't do that. So that's just, that's a natural fact.
In the kingdom of the blind, you can see.
And that can be tough.
I get that. I totally understand that.
I've lived that for decades too.
But don't add petulant incomprehension and repetitive self-torture to the mix as well.
Because we all know being a philosopher can be fantastic.
It's incredibly joyful.
It's incredibly beneficial. It's wonderful.
And it's incredibly hard.
So don't make it harder with this petulant incomprehension of why people don't want to talk to you, and for God's sake, don't make it harder by still trying to have conversations with people when you damn well know in advance, and now I told you why, which you knew all along anyway, they don't want to talk to you.
Stop beating your head against this wall.
Because that's really interfering with your joy of philosophy.
And I don't want you to have that joy diminished because it is the most fundamental and powerful and beautiful joy in the world.
I don't want you to have that diminished.
I don't want you to lose that.
That's a rare, golden, godlike gift that you have.
To listen, to process, to understand, to think, to reflect, to grow, to be curious, to gain wisdom, to bring virtue.
Well, that's the very stuff of life.
And I don't want that sunlight tarnished with these silly moth-like shadows.
You have to get that you are a golden god among men and to love it and to enjoy it and not to fall into resentment.
And not to fall into a repetitive attempt to join with the herd, which you just can't do.
You might as well try and burrow into an anthill and mate with the queen.
Trust me, that's no fun.
Very itchy. And she smokes afterwards.
Don't try, don't diminish yourself for the sake of an imaginary connection you will never achieve.
Don't rob yourself of your greatness.
You don't serve the world by being small or trying to fit into a tiny little box.
Because that's what it's like. Fundamentally, that's the metaphor.
It's like I'm holding up a little jewelry box for you and saying, can you get inside, please?
And you get all screwed up by the question.
And you feel like, geez, why the hell does everyone want me to get into this little box?
And then you keep trying to get into this little box and you can't do it.
And then you feel like a failure. No, anybody who asks you to get into a little box, anybody who asks you who doesn't want to talk about ideals with you, They're just, you know, functionally retarded relative to what you can do.
So go and enjoy the exercise of your mind and stop being an expert squash player who's playing with somebody in diapers and getting frustrated because you're not enjoying the game.
Come on, pick up the racket.
Stop drooling. Oh, did you poop again?
Come on, we're trying to play here.
Stop that. Right?
Stop that. Recognize reality.
Recognize reality. They can't do it and they hate you for trying.
So stop trying. Stop with the trying.
You're never going to change.
You won't be able to change people.
And if you want to get what that's like, look at if this means something to you and this is illuminating to you what I'm saying.
Look how you didn't get this for however long you've been alive even though the signs were totally and perfectly clear.
And I say this as somebody who myself did not get it for 30 years or so.
Once you get that you can't even get that, and that's a tiny little corner of knowledge, how is it that you're expecting people to get stuff that you can't even get to a much greater degree?
If you can't see the truth about your relation to them, how on earth are you going to reasonably expect them to get the truth about their relationship to life, the universe, morality, God, society, and everything?
That's what I mean by having some humility.
And I know you're a golden god and humility and blah, blah, blah.
These two things are interrelated.
We'll talk about those a little bit more later.
Maybe on the Sunday show I'd like to talk about the question of love that was raised by A listener earlier this week.
You know, I'm glad that I had a long drive.
I hope that this has been very helpful, and I think that it's been an exciting podcast or videocast from which to withdraw from the magical world of YouTube and to return to the not-so-visual world of podcasting.
Not that my YouTube videos are a whole lot more visual, especially in the dark where it's like, vague shape, talking with background.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I hope that I've been able to leave you with some route towards a more peaceful acceptance of who you are and where you fit and where you don't fit, most importantly.
And I hope that this will bring you some peace of mind.
with regards to your life, your role in society and so on and that you will be able fundamentally to love the gifts that you have rather than being frustrated that other people don't have them and resentful that they reject you for the gifts that you have.
These gifts are fantastic and magical and you should enjoy them and they should not be a source of frustration and pain and anger.
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