All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:21
501 The Physics of Freedom - Two Essential Principles (originally 500)

Two of the greatest gateways to freedom

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everyone. We have made it to podcast half billion.
Oh, wait, sorry, half thousand.
Five hundred. And thank you.
Thank you so much for staying with us.
This, dare I say it, nearly endless yet never quite indefatigable journey.
I really appreciate it.
It is wonderful to have so many new friends joining us and that we are having some wonderful conversations.
And I have learned such an enormous amount from the people who have joined in this conversation.
So thank you so much to everyone for coming on board.
And also, thank you to the gentleman who found my dream analysis helpful yesterday.
I appreciate that.
I always like it when I can get somebody to or entice somebody to take their inner life with what I think is the seriousness that it deserves.
We are, each of us, a treasure.
So I wanted to release two little nuggets of possible wisdom into the intellectual stratosphere and see what it does in terms of the global warming of the human heart.
Let's see what we can come up with and hopefully it will make some sense to you.
I've had a lot of questions about God.
God is still heavily embedded into people's minds.
And this is true even of the people who are not from America and were raised in these fundamentalist households and so on.
There's a lot of questions about God.
I wanted to talk about why I believe, in a kind of oblique way, believe it or not, not tangential, oblique, it's a big difference, but I wanted to talk about why God and the state have sort of stand and fall together, but I'm going to talk about it in terms of general principles that apply to things other than religion.
So these are sort of the two things that I think are kind of fundamental to anarchism, to what I consider to be a rigorous and honest view of the world.
And I think they'll be very helpful overall in your life.
I haven't talked about them before, except one of them in a sort of flyby manner.
So without further ado, the two principles that I would like to I'll talk about today.
The first is that no one, no one is smarter than you are.
And the second is, no one cares about you.
How's that for a motivating statement?
But, you know, bear with me for a few minutes and we'll see if we can't chew some useful cut out of this grass.
Okay, let's not try any metaphors today, because they seem to be stepping on metaphors the way that people in pratfall movies step on rakes.
So let's just wait for that to warm up a little, shall we?
So the first principle that nobody's smarter than you are, I think this is absolutely essential to understand, and it's very, very heavily associated with religion.
I mean, how many of us in our hearts sort of feel...
I sort of feel that there is this group out there somewhere who is just so much smarter than we are and so much wiser than we are that Trying to go up against them is sort of futile.
They just have possession of so much wisdom and intelligence that of course they should be in charge.
Of course they should be running everything.
They're just so much smarter than we are.
I remember when I was first dating Christina and began to expose my ideas that...
I said, well, do you think that Jean Chrétien, who was the Prime Minister of Canada at the time, that I said, do you think he's so much smarter than everyone else that he should tell everyone what to do?
You know, I said, I didn't even talk about the gun in the room at that point, but I said, you know, do you think, like, do you honestly think that he's such a smart guy that he can tell you what to do, you know, with your life, your time, your mind?
And she said, well, no, I don't think he's that smart.
And I said, well, what do you, you know, Why do you think then he should be in charge?
And she said, well, you know, I assume he's got all these advisors who sort of float around and tell him, you know, the right things to do.
And there's this sort of group of people who, in a sort of combined way, have all of this intelligence around them.
And I thought that was fascinating because I said, well then, shouldn't you be voting for the advisors rather than the guy and all that?
And this is not an uncommon belief among people that there are just this cabal or this group of people who are just so smart that they should just, of course they should be in charge.
No one could even come close.
They're just so brilliant.
And I'm sort of here to tell you that that's not the case.
For every mountain of knowledge that someone has, they have a near infinity of canyons.
The topography of human knowledge has significant spikes, of course.
There's singers and songwriters and physicists and biologists and business people, and they have these significant spikes of knowledge.
Right? So I look at sort of my investment knowledge versus, you know, Warren Buffett's or...
Is it Jimmy Buffett? Warren Buffett's...
And I'm like, wow, you know, he's so far above me, blah, blah, blah.
Right? But then, of course, if we were to look at my knowledge of philosophy versus his, then he would be like, oh, my God, that's, you know, a long way up to the forehead.
And... If we simply focus on our canyons and other people's knowledge, then of course we're going to look at them as being so much smarter than we are, but it's important to understand, to extend the metaphor, and I'm playing with fire here, to use another metaphor, but every mountaintop is excavated by creating canyons, right? Every accumulation of knowledge is created by getting rid of other possibilities of knowledge.
So, all the time that I've spent learning philosophy and doing podcasts and uploading videos and so on, it's all time that I haven't spent reading more about philosophy and economics and all the other things that are fun to read about.
All the time that I have spent learning about the software business is time that I haven't spent learning about every single other business in the world.
So, It's just important to understand that everyone is specialized.
Everyone is specialized. And yes, there are other people who've got lots and lots of knowledge and accumulatedly the world is a genius, but no individual person is a whole lot smarter than you are.
I'm saying this to you who are listening to this, Podcast 500.
Of course, I'm fully aware that you're smart.
You simply couldn't get this far unless you had more than a couple of brain cells rolling around the old skull.
And so I'm just sort of here to tell you that, yeah, you can look at Einstein and say, my God, what an incredible genius when it came to math and physics.
But, you know, read about the man's personal life.
I mean, he was completely retarded and brutal when it came to his personal relationships.
And you can find that this is not sort of to look for sunspots on the sun or warts in everyone and this and that.
That's sort of not what I'm talking about here.
It's just having a fair and balanced view of the possibilities and realities of human nature.
Which is that there are people who have extraordinary skills and those extraordinary skills are combined with extraordinary deficiencies.
So Jack Welsh, one of the best CEOs of all time, his approach to managing GE added billions of dollars to its market cap and the whole company around.
But, I mean, the man's had like two or three marriages.
And works 80 hours a week and travels, you know, eight months of the year.
Right? So yeah, he's a great CEO. I would absolutely love to get business advice from the guy.
But when it comes to relationships, he's completely retarded.
So it's just important to understand that everybody who has an excess has concomitant deficiencies in other areas.
This is something that's very, very important.
I mean, if there's only one thing you're going to get out of these podcasts is that you are equal to everybody else.
That's the whole basis of anarchy.
Yeah, my doctor knows a whole lot about the body, and all that time he spent studying the body, he didn't spend doing other things, learning about other things.
Every piece of knowledge is an infinite chasm of ignorance, because it's the one thing you chose to learn versus everything else you could have learned.
So there's nobody out there who, on aggregate, is smarter than you are.
So I just, you know, I think that's a really, really important thing to just sort of sit down and ponder.
There's nobody out there who is smarter on the whole than you are.
Because you know a whole bunch of things that they don't know and they know some things that you don't know.
But it all kind of comes out in the wash.
And I'm not saying that that doesn't mean that there's no differences in human intelligence and all that.
But working empirically and logically, given that human resources are finite and life is short, that everything that somebody learns is a whole bunch of other things that they don't learn.
That nobody is smarter than you are.
Now, if you find that uncomfortable, if you're not comfortable with that, that's fine.
Then we can go one step closer to something which I would say is irrefutable, which is that even if you think that there's lots of people out there who are smarter than you are, I would absolutely guarantee you that nobody is smarter than you are about you.
About your needs, your requirements, your preferences, what makes you tick, what makes your life work, and what makes you happy.
Nobody is smarter than you are about you, right?
So that means nobody should tell you what to do as long as you're not telling other people what to do using force or fraud.
I think that's just something that's so, so important to kind of sit and mull about.
Because don't we, all of us, feel that we're kind of in this world where there are these gods striding somewhere in the heavens, whether you are secular or not.
Whether you believe in minarchism, that there are people out there who are just so titanically wise and greater than we are and just know so much and are so wise.
Despite the whole lesson of Socrates, which is that the wisest man knows that he knows almost nothing.
And it's true. I know almost nothing relative to the sum total of human knowledge.
Think of all the languages I don't know.
Think of all the disciplines I have no clue about.
It's lunatic, right? I mean, I have an infinitesimal slice.
I'd like to think that it's the most important slice, but I have a nearly infinitesimally small slice of human knowledge, right?
So, you know, even if somebody has double my knowledge, they have double.0000001%.
That certainly doesn't give them the right to rule over anyone else, right?
And I've mentioned this before, but in the book All Too Human, which is well worth a read, it's from George Stephanopoulos, who was an aide to Clinton during his White House years.
When you look at that book, there's one page in there, and it's worth reading just for the incredible hubris that these people have about everything that they think they know.
But there's a page about all the meetings he was attending, all of which would require a lifetime specialized study, and he's sort of waltzing in there and telling people what to do with the mass might of the military, and it's absolutely hilarious.
It takes a special kind of hysterical vanity and entitlement and narcissism to think that you know so much better than everyone else not only how life should be lived in general, but how they should live in particular.
And I would suggest that we all have this vague feeling that there's this cabal out there who knows so much better than we do how the world should be run.
Obviously because of our parents and obviously because of teachers, but I would say that fundamentally it's because there's a standard or a yardstick out there of divine intelligence, of perfect knowledge, of perfect virtue, of omniscience, by which we measure ourselves and find ourselves infinitely small.
Anything that is finite next to an infinite is the equivalent of non-existent.
It's infinitely small, which is exactly the same as saying it doesn't exist in a sort of practical manner.
And so all of our intelligences don't exist, and there's this yardstick out there which is that there is a perfect intelligence.
And, of course, the only reason that we know that there's a perfect intelligence out there is some people have access to it.
And, of course, this is the vanity of central planning, of our increasingly fascistically socialized economies, which is that there are some people who are smart and wise enough to go out and have wars and order economies around and rack up massive debts.
And we fundamentally don't feel this as an incredible violation because there is a standard out there.
Of knowledge that dwarfs our own brains to insignificance and creates the vague impression that there's this incredible fount of knowledge and wisdom that's out there that some people have access to and I don't.
Of course that's going to lead you to submit yourself to a kind of leadership.
What people desperately want, who want to rule over you, is for you to get the vague belief that there are these incredibly smart and wise people out there to whom you are as nothing.
And so you don't have the confidence to say, who the hell are you to tell me what to do?
I mean, come on.
Get a life. Get a grip on yourself, man.
Don't run away with these stupid narcissistic fantasies, you know?
Get real. Get lost.
Who the hell are you to tell me what to do?
I mean, it's a very, very important thing.
Who are you to tell me what to do?
About my own life and my own self and my own time and money and energies and so on.
And so this idea that there's this collective intelligence, this God-like intelligence, this social intelligence, this leadership intelligence out there that is wise in every field, that knows all, that, you know, I mean, it's a really, really desperately unhealthy, vicious, dangerous notion.
And if you get rid of God and you get rid of the state, and of course you puncture the moral illusions about the high ethical nature of families simply because they're families then There's really much less cover for this ridiculous idea to hide under.
You get rid of God, then of course there's no perfect intelligence.
You get rid of the state and the idea that there is this cabal of people who are just so wise they can tell everyone else what to do and so much wiser that they can use violence.
In the pursuit of that and not be corrupted and end up with everything being better off.
This is why people, if you get rid of God, they tend to run more to the state.
You get the socialists or the communists.
And of course, if you get rid of the state, then they tend to run to God, which is why you have some libertarians or market anarchists who have a strong religious bent.
Because this fantasy that I am nothing compared to this incredible intelligence and wisdom that's out there somewhere, This is a very hard thing to get rid of because when you get rid of any place for that ridiculous notion that there's somebody out there way smarter than you, once you get rid of the places where that can hide, then people have to deal and emotionally handle the basic fact that they were crushed.
As I talked about or rather shrieked about in the podcast on humiliation.
So people want to normalize their own crushing.
So they have to create this fantasy of benevolent power somewhere.
Somewhere. Either in the state or maybe in their family or in religion, among the priesthood, in God.
Somewhere. There's a good reason why they were crushed, and that's because there's this great, fantastic, wonderful, wise, brilliant intelligence out there somewhere that should absolutely tell everyone what to do.
So, of course, it was right that they were crushed, because they were wrong and small and nothing, as nothing relative to this great intelligence.
So, that's why people are very uncomfortable, right, with sort of three central pillars of abuse, right?
The church and the family.
That's why I sort of methodically, like an onion and with the accompanying tears quite often, am peeling back these layers.
To cause the undergrowth in which this fantasy hides and corrupts and destroys us, exposing it layer by layer, right?
So you start with the idea of the state, which is nice and safe and abstract and so on.
And then I moved on to religion so that we could peel back that.
And then I knew that if I peeled back religion and you'd already accepted the stuff about the state that you...
And then, of course, we start working on the family and your personal relationships and so on.
And all of it is really designed to get you to understand that there's nobody out there who's smarter than you are.
There's people out there who are more specialized than you are, and that's great.
And you're more specialized than they are.
But there's nobody out there who's smarter than you are.
And this is true, and this is sort of a tiny little intellectual meat in the sandwich of the two ideas I wanted to propose this morning.
But this is true of personal attributes as well.
I'm going to tell you a little story about a guy I'll call Fred.
Now, I used to play squash with Fred, and Fred was a player.
He was a good-looking guy, a little bit short, but a very good-looking guy, very athletic and so on.
And he had this weird, bizarre confidence that I sort of admired at the time.
I was quite a bit younger at this point in my life.
So I went to a bar with Fred, and Fred chats with me for a few minutes, and then is like, alright, let's go talk to the women.
Now, I can do that kind of stuff, but I can't do it without nervousness.
When I was a single guy, I would make myself go up and talk to women, but I would always feel nervous about it and sort of weigh it in the balance and make money and all that kind of stuff.
But he was just like, that's it, let's go talk to these women.
So I went over, and of course I sort of went along and started chatting with the women too, but they were pretty cold and unfriendly, right?
And he was, you know, he was chatting in a friendly manner and so on.
He wasn't, like, sleazy or anything.
And he said, okay, girls, let me sort of get something straight here.
Like, I'm coming over, I'm walking up to you, and you're being kind of cold, right?
Do you guys have boyfriends?
And they said no. And he said, okay, so you kind of came to a bar because you don't have boyfriends and then you seem kind of like upset or mad or cold because a guy came up to talk to you, right?
And I bet you, I said, I bet you that you women...
I was sort of complaining that there aren't any nice guys in Toronto.
Well, I'm a nice guy who's come up to talk to you, and you're totally giving me the cold shoulder.
So, you know, I'm not going to stay talking with you because I don't want to impose myself on you, but I just kind of wanted you to get an awareness of what this looks like from my side.
You're going to complain there are no nice guys, and I'm a nice guy coming up to talk to you, and you're totally brushing me off.
So, you know, good luck with all that.
And he turns and walks off. Of course, my jaw is hanging down around my ankles at this point, right?
Because I was just like, holy shit, you're my new hero!
I mean, it was like amazing, I thought.
And anyway, so, of course, what I do is I say, well, gee, you know, I kind of have to screw my courage to the chatting place, so to speak, and I have to sort of make myself go up.
So, oh, man, this guy's so much more outspoken, he's confident, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, of course, I feel small relative to this guy's confidence, right?
So then a couple of weeks later, I go to a Halloween party with the guy.
He's running a party at a big warehouse, and he's one of these kinds of guys, very social.
So he's running a party at a big warehouse, and he's got a girlfriend, and the girlfriend is tired and goes home, and he's like, sorry, I've got to stay, I've got to clean the place up, make sure we get the deposit back, so you go back to my place, and I've mentioned this story once before, but I should talk about it briefly in this context, but...
And then he was telling me this story later, and he said, you know, and there's this woman dressed up in Halloween as a slutty nurse.
I've been trying to get to talk to her or get her interested in me for months.
And, you know, she's all over me after my girlfriend leaves, right?
So I'm like, okay, hang around, let me clean up, and then we'll go back to my place, right?
And I said, but dude, there's already a woman in your bed, and you're bringing another woman home, right?
And he's like, yeah.
And I said, well... Given that we don't live in the world of penthouse, what did you think was going to happen?
And he's like, well, I just figured, I'm Fred, it's going to work out somehow.
And so he brings this woman home, and of course there's this big ugly scene.
The girl he brings home, the slutty nurse dressed up woman, and it storms off, and then he talks his girlfriend down, and they end up going to bed together, and so on, right?
Oh, it was a mistake, she misunderstood my intentions, she just makes up all this stuff to shut his girlfriend up, and so on, right?
And then he gets hit with a bad flu virus, and he's in bed for like five days, doesn't even get up to answer the phone, but he hears a series of messages from the slutty nurse woman who left, right?
The next message is, the next day is, you know, damn it, Fred, you know, that was incredibly insensitive and rude what you did, you're dragging me home, you've already got a woman in your bed, I can't believe you did that, you're such an asshole, blah, blah, blah, click.
The next day, it's like, well, you know, I maybe came on a little bit strong in that phone message.
I was upset.
I was angry. What you did was a bad thing.
But I certainly didn't mean to call you an asshole.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Click, right?
He doesn't call it back because he's sick, right?
Next day, you know, beep.
Hey, I'm surprised I haven't heard back from you.
I know that I was upset when I called.
But, you know, give me a call.
We can talk about this.
Blah, blah, blah. Click, right? Next day, beep.
Hey, you really haven't called me back.
What's going on? I mean, did I come on so entirely strong that you'd never want to talk with me again?
So it kind of went on like this, and he eventually called her, she came over, and they went to bed together.
And so I'm listening to this with a kind of horror in my heart, right?
What a nightmare existence, right?
Where these are the people that you are hanging out with.
These are the people that you're going to bed with, right?
I mean, this is pretty much a nightmare.
So it became sort of clear to me on hearing this story that Fred was not confident, but rather sort of mildly sociopathic, right?
That it was not out of confidence or the overcoming of a kind of fear that he was able to go up and say all of these sort of, quote, outrageous things.
But rather because he simply felt no fear, right?
He simply did not have that apparatus.
He simply did not have that emotional capacity to feel fear.
And so he gets locked into these nasty, ghastly little relationships where people just bet each other and betray each other and are offended and then want to sort of merge in a hysterically nasty way with the person who's abused them.
I mean, this is a nightmare of abuse, this whole situation, right?
It became clear to me that my admiration for his brazenness or outspokenness was it came at a price for him.
So he was able to say whatever he wanted.
Because he had no real capacity to process consequences, right?
And there's lots of other ways in which you could define the semi-sociopathic personality, but what I thought of as courage was actually a form of significant dysfunction, right?
So, again, even in personality traits, you can probably find lots of ways in which this can be But the fear that I feel and the shyness that I felt when I was younger and the fear that I still feel in putting ideas out there sometimes and confronting people is all very healthy.
And to wish yourself away from that is to wish yourself away from wisdom and compassion and sensitivity.
So even when it comes to other people's personalities, like we may admire the courage of Hollywood stars getting up there and acting and crying and going on in front of a camera, well, the majority of them are certifiable narcissists.
They're entitled. Just as this guy said, well, I'm Fred.
I just figured it would work out.
Why? Because I'm Fred. It's like, well, why the hell should it work out for you?
Because I'm Fred. I'm just entitled to all these good things happening to me because I am who I am.
Well, that's narcissism.
That's entitlement. That's politicians.
Why should I get to tell everyone what to do?
Because I'm me. There's no rational empiricism behind that.
So anyway, I just want to point it out.
The second thing, which I'll do a little bit more quickly, is that nobody cares about you.
This is a very fundamental thing to understand.
A very, very fundamental thing to understand.
This doesn't mean that you're not worth anything.
You're a treasure. You're a golden god of philosophy.
I got that, and I fully support that.
But nobody cares about you.
Christina doesn't care about me.
Qua, me. Right?
Because me, qua me, me just in relationship to myself, I don't exist for her.
And how could I? She doesn't sort of sit in my brain and get my continual flow of thoughts and imagery.
Thank God. But Christina doesn't care about me in relation to me.
Right? Because that never exists to her.
The only thing that exists for Christina is my conversation and my actions relative to her.
That's the only thing that actually exists for Christina, for my wife.
So if I have a dream and never tell Christina about it, she doesn't care about the dream because she doesn't know about the dream.
There is no me, just me, in my relationship to Christina.
There's only the me that talks to Christina and acts around her.
I have a fight at work and I don't tell her, which is incomprehensible, but if I didn't, then she doesn't care about it.
Not because she doesn't care, but because I haven't told her.
Now, yes, there are all these things that are going to occur, like if, I don't know, I did some bad thing and never told her, it would have an effect and so on, but she doesn't care about me except in relationship to her.
And I don't care about her except insofar as she acts and affects me, acts and speaks and so on.
This is another very fundamental thing to understand about the world.
And again, this is where religion totally screws people up.
Because in religion, there's this God that just leans forward, cups his chin in his hands and says, so, this is all about you.
I care all about you just in relation to you.
Not in how, whether you pray for me or not, that I'm going to get endlessly fascinated by every detail in your life and I'm going to judge you from top to toe.
And everything's just all about your life in every spiritual, psychological, emotional, imagistic detail of your existence.
That is my main, total, absolute concern, saith God, to the mere mortal.
I care about you, not just in relation to me, I care about you in relation to you, right?
Because you've got this infinite intelligence that pokes around in your unconscious and knows your motivations and knows that if you don't lust after a woman in action, but you lust after the woman in your heart, that that's moral, that there's a moral ramification to that, and so on.
So, this whole process or situation all is...
Complete fantasy. Because there's no God, there's nobody who cares about you except insofar as you affect them positively or negatively.
It's a very, very fundamental thing to understand about society and about your relationships.
Nobody cares about you.
They care about your effect on them, not because they're selfish, but because anything else would be impossible.
Anything else would be impossible.
Asking someone to care about you, just you, is like asking them to digest your meal.
Or saying, you know, I've got a really full bladder, could you go and pee for me?
It's completely impossible.
People don't fail to offer to pee for you because they're selfish, but because it's impossible.
And that's what I'm arguing about. Nobody cares about you, just you, quite you.
Because it's impossible.
You simply can't do it.
And, of course, the idea of God is the idea that somebody in authority just cares about you and is totally obsessed with you and every time you sigh, every moment of your life, you have their full attention and they're just really so concerned with bettering your life and making you a better person and they have no needs of their own.
I mean, I know the relationship with God is sort of quasi-reciprocal.
They're supposed to worship the ultimate virtuous human being.
Of course, if I ask for that kind of worship, I'd be dismissed as a deranged cult leader, which sadly is not the plan until next year.
But this is so important to understand that nobody cares about you who are you.
Now, your parents were supposed to do a little bit more of that when you were younger, and I got all of that, right?
There's a reason that we need that kind of stuff, right?
The parents are not supposed to say, well, it's inconvenient for me to get up and, you know, bathe my or feed my kid at two o'clock in the morning because your parents are supposed to put aside those needs and focus on your needs and all that's good and nice and fun and great.
And that occurs at a sort of practical level, but it really doesn't occur at the level of the emotional side of things, which is sort of where it really does need to occur, but doesn't.
So, I would say that it's very important to really get this principle that nobody just cares about you.
Nobody cares for me.
And this is very, very important.
Because if you have this fantasy, and I'm not saying you do, but if you do, it's a very common fantasy to have.
But if you do have this fantasy that there's someone out there who cares about you just in relationship to you, Then you're going to be susceptible to all forms of manipulation.
If you think that you're sort of fundamentally special and that people just care about you, quite you, then you're going to be susceptible to statism, to religion, to all kind of tomfoolery around this sort of exploitation and so on.
And because of this fantasy, people genuinely do believe that the phrase public servant means something.
They genuinely, they do believe in their gassy, farty, nonsensical, false self, anti-hearts, that there's this group of people out there who just care about them.
That there are all these politicians saying out there, I want to make your life better.
I'm really concerned with improving the quality of education of your child.
I'm really concerned about protecting your job.
I'm really concerned about improving your income.
And if people believe that there's this group out there that is just all hot and bothered about improving their lives and making their lives better, then they're going to be enormously susceptible to this kind of mealy-mouthed bullshit that comes out of the mouths of priests that comes out of the mouths of public school teachers that comes out of the mouths of politicians And it's a real kind of horrible hangover vanity from emotional pain and being ignored when you're a kid and not being tended to or treated with respect as a kid.
But it's another fundamental thing to really, I'd say, work hard on to process and to figure out and to sort of absorb.
Nobody's real smart relative to you.
Nobody knows a whole lot more than you do.
And similarly, there's nobody out there who cares about you.
And this fantasy that there is, This is what gets you exploited by governments and by churches.
This fantasy that there's just this group of people out there who don't have their own self-interest, they don't mess things up from that standpoint, that all they really do is they care about you and making your life better and so on.
And that is a really, really bad fantasy to have.
It's a really dangerous fantasy.
This is the kind of fantasy that gets people killed.
So when George Bush says, all I'm interested in is protecting you, because people believe that George Bush is like a public servant.
I'm not saying you do, but maybe you do.
But they don't sort of sit there and say, well, that's not true, because he doesn't care about me, because I don't have any effect on George Bush.
Okay, maybe when he wants my votes he'll make me some promises, but I don't have any effect.
I have no relationship with George Bush, therefore he doesn't care about me.
Because there's no caring about people in the collective abstract.
That doesn't mean anything, right? So how could George Bush tell me why this is sort of the two things are rolled up, right?
Since George Bush has no knowledge of my life and I have no effect on George Bush, then, you know, as a simple logical consequence, George Bush can have no concern for me.
It would be logically impossible.
Again, it's like saying, George Bush, can you take a dump for me?
Because I had some Indian food last night and I've got to tell you how you do a little lift off there.
Right? It's just logically impossible.
for George Bush to care about you because George Bush doesn't know you and if he doesn't know you there's no possibility that he can tap into some sort of general and collective psychic network of needs and desires and preferences and end up in a situation where he's going to actually care for you.
So these two things which are heavily supported by religion The two things, it's why when people end up not having a state to hang this fantasy on, then they'll switch to religion.
And if you get rid of religion, then they'll switch to their family.
But there's got to be someone out there, some group out there, some structure out there that knows a hell of a lot more than they do and cares an enormous amount about these people.
This is a stunted aspect of childhood that so many people get stuck in.
And, you know, it's sort of my intention and through these podcast series to just keep peeling away the layers of these onions and to just help you get out of this pit of kind of like self-loathing, right?
If you think there's all these people so much smarter than you are, obviously your opinion of yourself goes down enormously.
And at the same time, this tends to inflate This vacuum of narcissism that leads us to believe that there are people out there who care about us just for ourselves, which is just not true.
Right? So the self-esteem deficiency caused by thinking that other people know so much more is sort of one thing.
But it tends to work hand in hand with the other hyperinflation.
Deficiencies lead to hyperinflation in the personality.
So the self-contempt that is associated with thinking that there's all these brilliant people out there who just know so much more than you do is...
Well, along with having all these smart people out there who know so much more than I do, there's this associated situation where these infinitely smart people really care about myself.
Narcissism and insecurity are two sides of the same coin.
Narcissism is the superstructure of self-loathing or insecurity.
I sort of wanted to, and now we're at the decimillennia of the podcast series, I kind of wanted to sort of talk about that whole thing, which I've been sort of playing around with for the past couple of hundred podcasts, sort of lay it out on the table for you so that you could, I think, see this stuff a little bit more clearly and sort of what it is that I'm working on and trying to get at here.
So I hope that this is helpful.
I just wanted to thank you once more for joining me on this amazing and wonderful journey that we've been on.
It's been a complete and total thrill for me and will continue to be a complete and total thrill for me.
Of course, I'm going to put in a plea for donations so that I can do this stuff full time.
And I think that I would certainly like to do more speeches and contact more people.
I particularly like to run a program for younger people, all that kind of stuff.
But that's going to require the coughing up of a few shekels, and I'm very sorry that the government's taking it all and has left so much less for you to give to me, but I certainly appreciate anything that you can send my way.
▲
Export Selection