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Dec. 12, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:58
553 Stef's Dishonor
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Good evening everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 5 to 5 on the 13th of December 2006.
Hope you're having a fabulous day.
Hope you had a fabulous day and I hope that you're enjoying your evening.
I wanted to talk this evening about a topic that It is sensitive to a lot of people, I guess, myself included.
And it is sort of the question around dishonor.
And it is something that comes out of the topic that we were talking about this morning.
But I thought that I'm going to try and make the case for a particular kind of action that is in my experience was the most unpleasant and difficult aspect of becoming or being So I'm going to do my best to make the case and see if it strikes any chord within you.
I certainly am very sensitive to the hardest part of ethics for myself, and I'm not going to even for a moment imagine that it's...
Maybe it is easier for other people.
Maybe I shouldn't jump the gun that way.
But this was the hardest aspect ever.
For me. And so, without any further ado, let's jump into it.
So, dishonorable things.
So I'll talk about dishonorable things that I have done in my life.
Things that I'm not proud of.
Things that I would have gone back and changed.
And the effects.
I didn't talk about the effects, I guess.
But more importantly, the emotional impact of reversing those things was really hard.
And... So, I'm trying to think back to the very earliest ones.
I don't think I really did anything particularly bad when I was a kid.
I was a pretty honest kid.
I guess, well, you know what, I don't want to consider this to be dishonor on my part, but for sure, I was always in a state of mild anxiety as a child.
Well, not just mild anxiety, but I always felt like, you know, I borrowed a flashlight and lost it, and my mom hadn't figured it out, and I was just, you know, desperately hoping for enough time to pass that she wouldn't remember that I'd been the last one who'd had it, right? So, especially if it had been a, you know, I need this to go to the...
I need this flashlight to go to the woods with.
No, you're just going to lose it.
No, I won't. Away I go, and naturally I lose it.
And so hoping and praying that enough time would pass that I would not be nailed for it in a sort of immediate kind of way.
That kind of stuff occurred.
I don't consider that to be my dishonor, though.
That's more on the dishonor on the part of my family and my mom in particular.
But there was that kind of stuff that sort of went on for me as a kid.
But what was much more...
I guess when I sort of hit my teenage years, 11 or 12, you know, those kinds of ages, as I've mentioned before, and I'm not going to go into much detail here, but it was a pretty black time in my life.
My brother was in England for a couple of years.
That part wasn't black.
I didn't really miss him, but what was black...
Was that my mom basically collapsed and mentally collapsed and never recovered and would spend weeks in bed and so on.
So it was a pretty dark time in my life.
And I was also running with a pretty nihilistic crowd.
One of my friends later died in a motorcycle accident.
You know, just had these sort of pretty significant kinds of problems and we would hang out by the train tracks and And so on, and just no money, no future, no, you know, I mean, I had a job, of course, right?
I mean, I've sort of been working since I was 11, but there was a pretty nihilistic approach to, I had a pretty nihilistic approach, and of course, as I've mentioned before, I went through...
A process of believing.
I didn't really even think about rules.
You know, I certainly, when I was a kid, I sort of innately had a kind of honest approach to life.
But then when I sort of hit puberty and all of this stuff that was going on, and I felt just extraordinarily isolated from the regular world, right?
I mean, this is something that if you've not been through it, it's really, really hard to get across.
I've never really... I think only once on my personal website, there's a short story called Bedrooms I Have Known that talks a little bit about this, but there is a real sense of interstellar isolation from the world when you're going through this kind of stuff, and you're going through some really, really difficult stuff.
And it was like I was one kid with one crazy mom, right?
So I didn't even have any siblings with which I could go through this together with.
Of course, I... I didn't really imagine that my brother would be one of those siblings, and as it turned out, that was in fact the case when he came back.
But it was just me and my mom, and I would go to school, and I would be involved.
I was still on a swim team, and I was involved in this kind of stuff.
But there's just a sense of absolutely both atomic in terms of size of your soul and interstellar in terms of distance from people.
You're both tiny and incredibly distant.
You are an atom at the edge of nothing.
And that had a very large impact on me and my perception of society because I would say that the clues were not hard to come by, right?
I mean, I ceased to wash for them.
Not totally, but I ceased to wash.
My clothes were, you know, messed up.
I was hungry a lot.
I mean, it was a very, very dark time.
And the amazing thing, of course, was that nobody said or did anything, right?
None of the people whose friends I knew and so on.
And what happens is then, when you go through something like that, and there may be other lessons that I have yet to be aware of from this time, but this is sort of what I get looking back on it, that when you go through something like that, there is a...
what is revealed, or what was revealed to me, and I wasn't processing this consciously at the time, but I'm looking at it sort of through the filter.
Well, not through the filter, through the evidence of what it is that I did.
But, and I hope these don't sound like excuses.
I mean, I'm just sort of talking about my experience and reading back on what must have been going on for me because I was not introspective at this time in my life.
I mean, how could I have been? I was too young and far too many stressors going on, to put it as nicely as possible.
But, What I really felt in my gut was that society and virtue and caring for people and concern for the helpless and all of the mealy-mouthed moral nonsense that people spewed out all the time.
Everybody wants to be good.
Everyone talks about it. We've got the welfare state.
We care about the poor.
And I would literally have...
I mean, it's so hard to explain just what this does to a kid emotionally, but I literally would have teachers in social studies classes or whatever who would be lecturing about how Canada really helps the poor and really cares about the poor and so on, and the less fortunate and the helpless and so on.
And here I was, like an 11-, 12-, 13-year-old kid going to school, listening to all this stuff, and nobody...
Nobody did anything.
And that's, of course, the great danger that's at the heart of society that tempts us with nihilism, particularly as I talked about two podcasts ago with the risk of what happens when we give up on God.
But the life of ethics, the life of virtue, the life of compassion, it's certainly from my...
As a child, it seemed to be nowhere in society.
It seemed to exist nowhere in society, not in any of the institutions.
My mom called the cops on me one night because we were having a fight and the cops just pushed up against me and lectured me about it.
There's a generation gap and you've got to understand your mother.
And no one asked.
No one asked, how are you?
What's going on? Not anyone who's incident.
None of the teachers, the principals, my mom never showed up for...
Not one single parent, teacher, interview or anything like that.
There was never anything like that.
I had to forge her signatures because she was barely coherent for good stretches of time in this period of my life.
I would forge her notes to be off school if I didn't feel like going in.
I was just struggling to get by, pretty much.
A test would come up. I would just have a real tough time studying for it, let's say, and concentrating.
And there was no...
There was no...
nobody cared.
Lots of people had a view of this.
It wasn't, you know, as I've mentioned once before, a friend of mine's father who was a doctor took me aside and introduced me to the joys of deodorant because I wasn't bathing as much as I should have.
I mean, it was a real wolf child at this point in my life.
So it's really hard to believe in the virtue of society when you are going through a tough and not too subtle time of things being tough.
It's very hard to believe in the pious Moral platitudes that are constantly echoing back and forth the canyon of the heart that is society.
Everybody's shouting from their little cave walls, hovels, about how virtuous they are, and the echoes just echo back and forth, and there's no content to any of it.
It's just people like to preen in front of a moral mirror, but they don't actually like to do anything particularly moral.
It's self-congratulatory and so on.
And so I had a very hard time looking back based on the amorality or the increasing amorality of my actions.
I had a very hard time believing in society and virtue and so on.
Now, there was lots of talk about virtue, of course, right?
I mean, there always is talk about virtue in society.
But, to me, it was all just, as Hamlet says, what is this quintessence of dust?
This nonsense that people say that is enraging, right?
Because it's just a bunch of people preening themselves in front of a mirror how good they are while over their shoulder, you know, children stumble off towards destruction.
And they say, oh, I do nothing but care for the little ones, and so on, right?
So I really got a sense of the profound indifference that people have towards the suffering of children.
And the funny thing was, too, and I shouldn't say funny.
It wasn't funny at the time.
It doesn't feel that funny right now.
Was that I was always blamed, right?
Everyone recognized my ability.
I shouldn't say everyone, but I would get this constant comment, you know, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. So there was this...
Not only was there no curiosity or no desire to probe into why this obviously bright and energetic child was cratering emotionally and barely showing up mentally or emotionally for class and so on.
There was no curiosity about this.
But also there was a blame.
There was blame of me in this...
In this situation, right?
So people would say, well, basically they'd say you're just lazy, right?
You're just lazy. And of course, it's kind of funny, right?
It's like... It's like a bunch of people in a boat who are sailing along.
It sort of seems this way, though I'm sure there were other people in this bad or if not worse situations than I was.
It's like you're sort of waterlogged and you've been clinging to a log for days in shark-infested waters or months, sometimes it feels like, and these people go by and In a yacht and they're dancing and there's water to drink and food to eat and places to sleep and shelter from the sun and so on.
And you're sort of sunburnt and waterlogged and your skin is flaking off and you're terrified the whole time.
And, you know, they just go past and say, good God, man, put some sunscreen on.
I mean, don't be so ridiculous.
Take care of yourself. Have some self-respect.
Have some pride, man.
And they throw me a towel and say a lot.
Actually, I didn't even get thrown a towel.
Ha ha! But it really, I mean, it shouldn't laugh, because it really does feel that way, that this is the sort of lack of empathy that I keep talking about for others, and a feeling that where people are is a function of who they are, rather than their circumstances, and therefore...
Those who are raised in positive or productive or...
Actually, I shouldn't even say that because, of course, a positive and healthy and productive parenting would be to help the child as the child gets older to understand how rare that is and how few people have that opportunity.
But it seems that the rich kids feel that they are virtuous and strong and so on for being rich and they take all of the false self-esteem that comes from having the toys that they did not earn And that the poor kids, there's something wrong with them, and they're lazy, and this and that.
And certainly in my situation, that was something that was kind of implicit in a lot of things, just because nobody did care to examine.
And there's a reason why people don't care to examine the suffering of children, because of their own suffering, naturally.
And also because it's really hard on the vanity.
To look at the suffering of children, to look at how hard it is for so many kids in this world, it's really hard on the vanity because you get a sense of how damn lucky you are.
And that's hard.
It's like having empathy for the Muslims.
The kids beating their heads against the tables in the madrasas and chanting out all this nonsense.
It's hard to have sympathy because that just tells us how lucky we are, and yet we choose, many of us, and have this tendency to choose virtue that is unearned, or to choose our circumstances and call them virtue, right?
To ignore the circumstances and say, well...
I'm in the yacht, and I am not sunburned because I'm smart enough to use sunscreen, and this idiot who's been clinging to this log is not clinging to a log, or if he is, it's because he put himself there, and he's just not as smart as I am, and so on.
And that is, you know, the wreckages that constantly sail past our bows are, I think, people that we need to reach out to, right?
I mean, that we need to have compassion for, and we need to nurture, I think.
At least I think that's something that could be a good thing to do.
So sort of the upshot, I don't have to get into it.
I'm sure everybody understands it if they've been there, and if they don't, maybe they get a sense.
I don't want to sort of go on about this whole show, but...
What came out of that for me was basically a totally amoral existence.
No, I shouldn't say totally.
A largely amoral existence.
So if I wanted a bike, then the crew that I was in, we would just figure out, you know, I'd find most of a bike in the garbage or something like that, and then I'd need a wheel, right?
So what would I go around with my friends and we'd look for bikes that were left out that had wheels, and we'd take them.
And I think this only happened once for me.
I also went through a shoplifting phase.
I stole some candy bars.
I stole a model train from the Gameways Arc, I think it was.
Later went out of business. I fell bad.
I apologize if you're listening to this.
I stole a remote control car set.
And then I got caught and nothing bad happened.
And then there was this moment where I was about to steal some sunglasses and I just realized that this was...
I was frightened of basically where I was heading and what was going on for my soul.
Although I don't put it consciously that way, I was just frightened of getting caught.
But I think at a deeper level, because that was a new feeling for me, I was starting to have some fear of the consequences of where I was heading.
And all of this, you know, I was still working hard, two jobs, paper route, all this kind of stuff.
So there was that aspect.
But my friends were nihilistic, right?
And, you know, not dumb kids, but definitely not heading in a good direction.
So I went through that, and then when I began dating or began my sexual or romantic life, I was not faithful.
I was faithful to...
I guess, let's see, I was going out with one girl, and then I kissed another girl at a dance.
She found out that she dumped me.
I ended up going out with the other girl for about six months.
And then later, in my early 20s, I was unfaithful to one other girl, but I confessed and took my lumps, so...
It wasn't exactly honorable, but it also wasn't too vile from that standpoint.
So I did those kinds of things where it was really just about...
I was just sailing along, no will, just whatever particular thing took my fancy in terms of pleasure, and no real sense of the future, no real sense of where it is I wanted to end up in life.
And that is a...
It's a pretty revealing course to go down.
It really does give you a sense of when people talk about being good, it seems almost impossible for them to actually be good, to act good, to really try and take care of the helpless, or at least even to have sympathy or empathy for them.
Because later on in life, and this would be much more recently, I talked to one or two of the parents who were around when I was a kid.
And it really is amazing.
The blindness doesn't go away.
This is not something where you say, well, I can't have compassion now because it's not practical and we can't get Steph away from his mom and who knows what's going to happen.
She's volatile. She's dangerous.
She's suing people. We don't want to get involved.
Whoever knows. But it's not even that.
I don't think that that is even the calculation that occurs for people when they see this kind of suffering.
I really don't think they do that.
I think that what they do is...
They don't feel. It's like out of sight, out of mind.
Because literally, a woman who's a friend of mine's mom, who I saw a couple of summers ago, she asked me how my mom was.
You know, with a big smile on her face.
I mean, that's really quite astounding when you think about it.
And this is not the only time that this has happened.
People, they genuinely don't feel.
And the Lord knows what they went through that ended up with them in that situation.
But it's not that they didn't want to know.
They didn't know. Their heart did not transmit to them I mean, how can you, you know, it's the Pigpen character in Charlie Brown, right?
How do you blame Pigpen? He's got parents who are supposed to teach him about this kind of stuff.
How many of us could invent the human language on our own?
And how many of us could invent and understand and process all of the various social norms that are out there and in what proportion and with everything else that's going on?
I guarantee you that none of us could do that.
So if we're not taught, then why are we blamed for not knowing, right?
But we're blamed for not knowing because other people want to believe that they know because they're smarter rather than they know because they're taught, right?
It's like, how do you hold your salad fork, right?
Well, there's no logical consistent way to say, well, I hold this fork and then this spoon is the soup spoon and this other spoon is the dessert spoon or whatever.
All of the tiny little delicacies of table manners, particularly the upper crust of England, how would you know?
You don't know. You're taught.
This is not 2 plus 2 is 4.
Even that, for many people, has to be taught.
But how would you know?
There's no way you would know. But people want to believe that they know because they're smarter or better or more virtuous.
And so when the poor kid comes in who doesn't know which way the salad forks go, they snicker, they think that he's an idiot.
I mean, this is a cliche that's old and Dickensian and true in many ways.
And for me, learning some of the nicest, the niceties of business transactions and how to interact and how to close sales, all very delicate, all very complicated.
But people just love to think that the things that they happen to get taught, they just knew because they're smarter or better or more virtuous.
And the people that aren't taught things are just stupid and evil, right?
So if you grew up in a Muslim society, you're not taught about secularism.
You're not taught about rationalism.
How many of us could have invented libertarianism or Aristotelian logic or Ayn Randian logic?
How many of us could have invented logic?
We're all hanging off the coattails of those who came before, and yet we love to translate all of this stuff into virtue for ourselves.
So in saying that I wasn't going to talk about it some more, clearly I talked about it some more.
Now, I did manage to wrestle back some of this amorality within my life and make a stronger commitment towards virtue.
That happened when I was 18 or so, 18 and a half.
It certainly happened when I was younger, a little bit younger.
I was 16 or so, I think.
15 or 16 when I read...
The Fountainhead, which had an enormous impact on me, but only at an intellectual level.
Then when I was 18, I think it was, I read Nathaniel Brandon's The Psychology of Self-Esteem, a very good book.
I certainly would recommend it.
And that helped a lot for me in terms of beginning the process, which has been a long and difficult process, of integrating the feelings with the emotions, with the reason, right?
I didn't want to live on one leg.
I didn't want to hop around on intellect or just on emotion.
It leaves you sort of unbalanced.
But I wanted to be able to integrate these two things and that sort of got me my lifelong...
Study and pleasure in psychology and so on.
So I've definitely gone through that process.
So I began to sort of rescue myself a little bit from some of the more gross amoralities that was in my life.
And during this time, I never went through any particular phase of hedonism other than maybe a little bit of promiscuity, but not that much.
But I never took any drugs.
I never have. I didn't smoke.
I went through a very short phase of binge drinking, like a couple of weekends, but I just hated losing my Sundays.
The pleasure just wasn't worth it, and I never was able to self-erase.
As far as I understand it, that's the purpose of drinking, and I was never able to achieve that, so that only lasted a short amount of time.
The last time I got drunk was, I guess, almost 20 years ago now, maybe 18.
So I went through a little bit of that.
Other people I knew went through a lot more of that, particularly with drugs.
But it was just, you know, anything goes, right?
There's no particular reason why you would limit your appetite.
And look, don't get me wrong, I didn't limit my appetite because I had some sort of virtue.
It's just that the rewards of indulging my appetite, other than the sexual realm, was not...
The rewards were not high enough, right?
So getting drunk was kind of fun.
Being drunk wasn't that much fun.
You know, getting the spins and feeling sick was definitely not fun.
And feeling nauseous all Sunday was definitely not fun.
And I've never, I mean, life grinds to a halt when I have a headache, right?
So that was never particularly appealing to me.
But I certainly did some dishonorable things, right?
I mean, I stole. I hung around with a pretty bad gang, although, I mean, no criminals or anything, but I guess we would have been if we'd been caught.
And I was sexually indiscreet when I was a teenager.
And that was not...
It was obviously very bad for the people who I... The women that I did that to.
And then I began to sort of pull out of it.
And I was out of the range of my family and so on.
But then when I... That's sort of a...
I'll skip over a phase. And I came back and sort of...
Oh no, there's one other phase.
When I was 16, I was 15 and I wanted to get a job in a daycare because it paid really well.
I needed the money, of course. And I lied on the application.
I said that I was 16 because you had to be 16 to get the job.
And unfortunately, when I went for x-rays, they had to have my birth date.
So I gave that to them and then I went and confessed to the woman.
And I hated it. I hated it.
I hated it.
Confessing, right? I mean, to confess that I lied to get this job.
For two reasons, right?
One is that I expected to be attacked, right?
Because in my family, whenever you confess wrongdoing, people would just shit all over you for weeks or months, and it would never, ever go away.
It would be a forever story, as families are so wont to have, right?
Oh, just like that time when.
That time could be 20 years ago, and it just makes you want to strangle people.
But you don't, because you're afraid of the government.
But I hated it not just because I had to go in and admit that I lied, but I hated it, I think, even more fundamentally because of why I had to lie, or why I felt I had to lie, which was that I desperately needed the money, and I wasn't making enough or why I felt I had to lie, which was that I desperately needed the and this job paid more, and I hated it because I really, really needed the money.
That's why. But I had to go in.
I mean, I could have just blown past it.
Maybe she never would have checked the birth date and done the calculation.
It's likely she wouldn't have. But I went and confessed, and it was actually okay.
It was actually okay.
I went in and confessed.
I ended up getting the job, and I kept the job for two years, and it was a good job to have.
I worked there after school.
I got to leave school slightly early to go.
And I also worked there in the summers, which was a lot of fun.
The kids are great fun to spend time with.
But then things were not too bad as far as the ethics went until the dark times in my late 20s and early 30s.
And I'll just touch on this story briefly.
But this was really the dark days of dishonor that propelled me into the much deeper study of ethics that resulted in The argument for morality and my break with the vestiges of statism and the despairing plunge into the dark side for me was my susceptibility to financial corruption and to corrupting others.
And the story is in The God of Atheists.
There's nobody who's read that who doesn't know all these details, but...
I basically, as you know, I started a company with my brother and we grew it to a couple of million dollars a year.
And we sold it and I was basically...
And I knew that the board was corrupt.
I knew that they had lied.
And I continued to sell shares.
And I claimed that I just didn't know and I worked hard.
So even though I knew that the business management was corrupt and false...
I continued to sell shares and make money.
And that was a pretty wretched thing to look upon in myself.
And of course, it's not something that can be undone.
You can't...
When you've made some money selling shares, you can't exactly go and find the people who bought those shares and give them their money back, right?
Because the shares peaked.
They started off at $0.08.
They peaked at $2.40.
And I sold a bunch on the way up and I sold a bunch at the top.
And then they crashed down and basically evaporated and so on.
And so it was a pump and dump, right?
As I sort of found out the technical term for it later.
And I gave myself all the excuses in the world, right?
I gave myself all the excuses in the world.
I worked hard. It wasn't my fault.
The software worked. The technical team was great.
Blah-de-blah-de-blah. But nonetheless, my conscience got me, right?
I mean, you can...
You can squeal, right?
But you're still on the spit. And my conscience got me, and it was a very, very hard time in my life.
I mean, this is, for God's sake, not self-pity for me, right?
The people to be sorry for are the people who bought the shares of the company that I co-founded.
But... My brother, and this is not excuses, this is just sort of where I was thinking, right?
I mean, the ultimate responsibility for this is mine, as far as my own actions go.
But my brother was, you know, that it's perfectly legitimate, that yes, they're selling a story, but that's what stock promotion is all about.
And, you know, so my brother, who was, you know, had 10 years of experience relative to me more in business, was the one leading me down the garden path.
And, of course, this process of getting this money, making this money, and then selling the stocks and so on, it was...
It was a wild time.
It was a wild time in my life.
And I'm certainly glad to have gone through it for the knowledge that I gained about my own capacity to exploit others, right?
Because it's very easy to moralize when you don't know your own dark side.
And I know that I can be occasionally prone to that moralizing, and I try to avoid it.
But if you don't, if you project your own capacity for corruption onto everyone else, if you pretend that you don't have a dark side...
And you are just a good guy and everyone else is a bad guy, then it's very hard to have sympathy for others.
And it's usually just not true.
And so when I got the hang of my own capacity to corrupt and to...
To rip people off, right?
I mean, to participate in that ripping.
I mean, my job, I was doing a good job.
I was creating software that people wanted.
We were selling it. But the senior management, the board, had promised stock options to the employees at a certain amount, and then they came down and they were at a much less advantageous amount.
So I was already aware of that when I began to sell my shares and to profit from what these people were doing in the marketplace.
And I don't hate myself for doing it because I was not conscious of the corruption that I was...
That's the time that it's the most dangerous, right?
When you're not conscious, right?
And of course, when you are looking at a big pile...
When you've grown up poor and you're looking at a big pile of money in the face, it's very hard to want to be conscious of any corruption or any nefariousness that might be going on in the generational transfer of that income.
So I said, well, these people know what they're doing.
And my job is technical.
My job is to run the software group.
My job is not to run the finances.
I can't be all things.
I can't learn about everything all the time.
So my... My job is to work on the technical side, and it's a little bit of a head in the sand, without a doubt.
It certainly would have been asking quite a lot for me to understand all of this, not just emotionally, but from a financial standpoint.
There was a lot of skullduggery that later came out, but nonetheless, all sort of caveats aside, I went for the money.
I went for the money, and damn...
Damn the consequences to others, fundamentally.
I mean, fundamentally, this is where I went back to the age of 12 or 13, and an amoral state of maximizing resources of mine, maximizing my resources without really analyzing the...
The moral content of what it is that I was doing.
Was I initiating force against anyone?
No, of course not. Was I defrauding anyone directly?
No, of course not. But this is why I said dishonor and not evil.
This is sort of what I meant with the prostitution debate.
It's dishonorable. It's not evil.
It's just dishonorable. But what happened was I simply ceased to be able to sleep.
McSteph shall sleep no more.
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.
Sweet nature's bomb.
It's been a while since I played Hamlet, or since I played Macbeth, but that process got me...
Basically, I had to make a long story semi-short.
I left the company.
I left my girlfriend.
I ceased to see my brother.
I ceased to see my mother.
All within the span of six to eight months, I think it was.
And I was in therapy because I couldn't sleep.
And so I know how hard it is to make these choices.
I didn't sort of wake up one morning and say, What ho?
I think I'm going to be a healthier human being.
I'm tootling off to therapy now.
Cheerio. No, it was a situation of desperation, right?
I mean, I had been chugging along.
Life had been working well. I'd been very successful.
Actually, I shouldn't say I'd been successful.
I shouldn't say very successful because there's lots of people out there who made a lot more money than I did.
I had been successful and I had achieved things that I had never dreamed of.
And so things were chugging along, right?
And I thought, yeah, you know, my mom's still crazy, but I'll be a good son and see her once a week for lunch.
And yeah, my brother's, something's fishy about that, but I'm not going to examine it too closely.
He seems to keep inflating client expectations and then expecting me to work all weekend to produce one.
You know, there just seemed to be something not, and our CEO doesn't seem to be working very hard.
There seemed to be a lot of fishy stuff floating around.
And some of it, of course, I only found out later.
But I was on a ride, right?
I was on a high, right? So I didn't...
I was seduced into not particularly examining the nature and the ethics of the company that I was keeping.
And I did begin to sort of sniff around and fish around at the edges saying, you know, something's not right here.
We're not making the kind of money that we're talking about.
And at one point the CEO came back and said...
We were selling the system for $100,000 a pop at that time.
And he came back and said, well, I told them we're going to do $5 million next year at the board, right?
And I said, my god, that's a system a week that we would have to implement.
I mean, that was lunatic, right?
Because these were code-customized systems, so it was quite...
I developed a programming platform that worked on Windows and the web, and that's what we were using to develop these applications, and it was not a simple matter back then to get simultaneous code running on the Windows and the web and all that, so I won't have to get into the technicals of it, but it was a challenge, let's say. And...
So I just knew that this couldn't be achieved, right?
And so, you know, those of us who've been in the technical world know how this tale goes, right?
So I said, well, we can't.
That would be a system a week. That would be, you know, it's like, well, you know, basically it's like, well, I'll think about it.
You figure out what you can do on your end, and then it just went away, right?
And I'd go back and say, you know, what's happening with this?
It's like, well, it's still under review.
I've told them that we might have to revisit the number, blah, blah, blah.
You know, you just get the brush off the whole time, right?
And then, of course, what happens is...
Somebody comes to you and says, so you're going to be delivering the implementation of $5 million worth of software, and you realize that the number was never revised, and now it becomes gospel, and that your name is on it, right?
I mean, this is the kind of stuff that occurred.
And this is the kind of stuff that I knew about when I began selling my stock, right?
So this is my capacity to...
To grab and to be bribed, right?
For my honour, right? To be bribed.
Because the honourable thing to do would have been to leave.
But I couldn't. It was unthinkable to me.
I felt that I'd put too much in, that I had worked too hard, that to walk away would have just broken my heart and made me feel like an idiot, right?
Because you think that the money is just millions and millions or whatever, right?
So, that seemed to be unthinkable.
That seemed to be like not cashing in a lottery ticket after, you know, we're playing the lottery with all of your pennies for 10 years.
I guess it was 7 years I was working there.
You know, crazy hours, lots of travel, all the startup stuff.
So you've been playing a lottery with every dollar and then you finally hit the jackpot and don't cash it in.
That would seem incomprehensible.
So I just smoothed it all over in my own mind.
Smoothed it over in my own heart. Came up with vague excuses, focused on the money, and considered myself quite the astute businessman.
And what happened? Well, of course, I participated in the transfer of a very large amount of money from investors to some pretty corrupt people.
And the investors were not apprised of all of the facts, of course, as they never are in these kinds of situations.
So it was kind of like a zero-sum game cash grab.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing wrong with the stock market and this is not about capitalism because what we have in the stock market is not capitalism.
There's a reason why this is one of the first podcasts I did was on stock swindles.
But this was my own capacity to be corrupted and my own capacity to corrupt, to steal from others, right?
It was right back to this amoral situation and my conscience just was like, well, enough of that.
Now you don't get to sleep. Right?
And it took a long time to work through all of this stuff and to deal with all of this stuff.
But it's one of the reasons why I have some pretty significant humility when it comes to ethics, right?
Because once you have looked at your devil in the eye, once you have looked at your own, the cavernous, greedy, nihilistic, more of your own dark side, then it's a little bit harder to be self-righteous.
It doesn't mean that I never am, and I certainly apologize for those times that I am.
But it is a lot harder to just damn other people, right?
Because you know that, you know, they're but for some parts of my nature, some parts of my intellect, some parts of my choice, some parts of my circumstances, some parts of, hey, I just happened to find a therapist who was great for me.
Could have been not a good therapist, which would have made things worse.
So there's a lot of fortune involved in that, of course.
There's a lot of accident that's involved.
The funny thing is, of course, that I ended up Having some of the money that I made, I spent on therapy, which was sort of a circular thing around.
And I ended up not...
Well, we don't have to get into what happened to the money.
It's not really particularly relevant.
But I realized that I have the capacity for dishonorable and corrupt behavior.
And that is something that I can't conceivably make this case.
Strongly enough. And I'm sorry that I can't.
I wish I could make this case strongly enough.
I know that I can't.
But the case that I want to make is accept your dark side.
Accept your dark side.
Apologize to those you've wronged.
Think before, as Ben Franklin says, if you're angry, count to 10.
If you're very angry, count to 100.
Think before you act in an abusive or hostile or corrupt manner.
Um... Be good and recognize that being good means that you have to recognize your capacity to be bad, to be a nasty person.
And I certainly have that capacity.
And the false virtue of me equals good is a very, very dangerous and destructive place to be.
It lends to hostility. It lends to self-righteousness.
It lends to contempt. It lends to vanity.
It lends to the false self-manipulations.
And it lends to fundamentally irrationality.
Fundamentally, it lends to irrationality.
And I... I wish that I could find a way to make the case that...
To think before you act and to apologize to those that you have wronged.
I know so much about how gruesome and difficult it is and how it feels like you're throwing yourself off a cliff.
But if I could throw one message over this wall in the before and the after of accepting your own dark side, apologizing to those that you've wronged, if I could just throw one message on, it would be just how much beauty there is on the other side of this.
How much beauty there is on the other side of humility in the face of virtue and There's restitution in the face of apology or the need.
And if I could explain, and I wish I could, I wish I could, I really wish I could.
My eloquence, such as it is, just does fail me here.
Because it's just a matter of saying it.
I'm telling you that there is such beauty and joy and peace and self-acceptance and self-respect.
On the other side of self-righteousness and on the other side of blaming others for their behaviors and not seeing the role of accident and not seeing the role of your own capacity to corrupt others and so on, there is such beauty and joy and love and self-respect and kindness and gentleness on the other side of just looking yourself in the mirror and saying, I have the capacity to do great harm and I have.
I must make restitution where I can.
I must apologize where I can.
It is such an incredibly powerful and strong thing to do.
It really does feel like you're pulling out your own kidney through your nose.
I totally get that.
That is the death throes of the false self, which never quite dies, but it's the death throes of the throne.
It's the collapse of the throne of the false self.
But I wish, if there was one wish that I could wish, It would be that you take the time to sit and think, and meditation can be good for this, but you take the time to sit and think about things that you've done in your life that you're not proud of and things that you've done that you would do differently and people that you may be able to apologize to and people that...
Because there is no love without that.
At least that wasn't for me. And there seems to be a lot of good anecdotal and some statistical evidence about this, but...
To recognize your own capacity for wrongdoing and for harm and for exploitation, and to apologize to those that you have harmed, and to refrain from the snappy, aggressive, blame others, to some degree, the kind of emails that I was talking about this morning.
But there's much more serious things that can happen from this, although this is a symptom of some much more serious things that are better occurring in these letter writers' lives.
But to refrain from, to stand back from the crack of attack, right?
To stand back from the crack, the addictive crack of attack, which is what everybody has, as well as the best defense is a good offense, and all that kind of stuff.
If there was just a way that I could get you to understand that...
And I don't want to sound condescending in any way, shape, or form, because when you've gone through this process, and it's not like...
I still apologize to Christina at least once a week for being snarky or being snappy or something like that.
And I apologize to you, the listeners, for things that I have done that have offended you, because it's not...
What I'm trying to do, and I sort of work with my frailties as best I can.
But there is an enormous amount of joy on the far side of humility in this regard.
And I hope, I hope, I hope that you will take a little bit of time.
I mean, it's very important to think about how you were wronged, and I certainly understand the value of that.
But it's also important to look at and to understand how you also have the capacity to wrong others.
And to look at that and to choose differently.
To choose differently is really the beginning of building an enormous amount of self-respect.
But it really does have to come, first and foremost, in my experience, from the humility that is required to recognize our own capacity for corruption.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I do thoroughly apologize if it sounded in any way, shape, or form condescending, because I have an enormous amount of respect for almost all of my listeners, but...
Just try this one on for science.
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