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Jan. 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:17
593 You can't _see_ a prison because you _are_ a prison..."

Deconstructing one of my own fortune cookies

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Good morning, everybody. Steph, hope you're doing well.
It is the 11th of January, 2007, 8-11 in the morning.
My wedding anniversary is today, Christina and I's wedding anniversary.
So I wrote her a tribute this morning, and there were many tears, but much happiness.
So I hope that you're doing well.
I wanted to expand upon myself, which I know sounds almost like the infinite universe expanding upon the infinite universe, because the volubility of my speech is rather excessive, but I decided to expand on myself anyway, and we'll see if it does some good.
I used a phrase the other day, which was, you can't see a prison because you are a prison.
And I just thought it would be worth chatting about that for a little while because I don't want to be one of these guys who throws out these fortune cookie things which sound, you know, vaguely profound at the time, but when you break it down you go, huh?
You can't eat spam because you are spam.
Spam. Spam.
Yeah, I don't want to be one of those guys.
The fortune cookie stuff kind of drives me a little bit nuts.
I remember when I was very young.
I was still in high school, because I left high school when I was 17, so I was 16 or 17.
And there was this girl who was a bit of a hippy-dippy, but very cute.
And we were in a play together that I wrote for my theatre class.
And she and I were chatting one night.
I had managed to lure her into my bedroom, and we were chatting one night, and she said, uh, oh, I can't remember, this is the wham time, oh lord, dating myself.
And Wham had these t-shirts called Choose Life.
And she said, yeah, those Choose Life shirts, they're really annoying because they mean like everything.
What could it not mean? And I said, yes.
And by meaning everything, doesn't it really mean nothing at all?
She just gave me a look.
She said, you know, you're kind of full of those pithy statements, aren't you?
It's kind of impressive, she said.
Yes. Because philosophy is all about the truth when you're that young, just like being a singer or being in a band is all about the music when you're that young.
There is a theory, and I think it's not a bad one, that art is a mating ritual that is designed by people who are not as strong.
So to get women when you're not as physically strong or imposing, you come up with art.
And I think that's actually a good thing.
Because artists are generally brighter than He-Man, Strongman, and so it's not a bad thing that women are attracted to artists because at least that ups the old IQ gene pool a tad.
It certainly beats them being attracted to warriors and thugs and brutes and so on.
Zero to tangent.
See, that's how I expanded myself.
Same thing, just with tangents.
Actually, you know, okay, since I haven't really begun yet, let's just do one little tangent.
I was at the gym last night, and Christina was seeing some patients at her home.
And I actually listened to my two podcasts from two days ago.
I did only one podcast yesterday on the way home.
I was trying to remember this phrase, you can't see a prison because you are a prison.
And I couldn't remember it.
I was like, oh, I better do a podcast on that, because that just sounds vaguely cryptic and uber-clever, yet sort of meaningless without explanation.
Then I was driving home, and I was like, damn it, I can't remember the phrase that I'm supposed to do my podcast on.
Of course, I can't search for it, A, because I'm driving, and B, because it's not written down anywhere.
So I went to the gym, and I listened to the podcast from yesterday, or the day before yesterday.
And I heard the phrase, I was like, ah, that's it, as I was doing my treadmill.
But it was actually interesting.
I haven't listened to a podcast of mine.
I did listen to the Jesus part one.
Actually, Christina and I listened to it just to make sure it was what I thought it was before I posted it.
But I haven't listened to a podcast of mine for a while.
And it was very interesting.
Actually, it was good.
It was enjoyable to listen to.
I'm really trying to try and make a commitment to keep them under 30 minutes and hopefully under 25.
So no more tangents.
Let's get on with the topic.
So when I say you cannot see a prison because you are a prison, I wanted to differentiate that from you cannot see a prison because you are a prisoner.
Prisoners can see prisons very well.
So the people who have had the most success, I think, in terms of really digging into and getting value out of this conversational topic or these conversational topics are those people who have themselves experienced in terms of really digging into and getting value out of this conversational topic or these conversational topics are those people who have themselves experienced the pain of being a prisoner,
as the one gentleman, Greg, who wrote about his experience in high school, this interminable slow grandfather ticking clock of stasis towards the infinitely receding line of graduation, Bugs.
He wrote about that and his experience of being a prisoner, so then when somebody comes along and says, the world is a kind of prison and the truth will set you free, and not the world, people, people, but I mean, people are the world that we live in when we're younger and to a large degree throughout our lives.
So if people are the world, then the world is effectively a world.
Sorry. Oh my God.
Oh, what was it? Oh, I was listening to the Alexander Spooner woman.
He raised his rates lower.
I think what I meant to say was he raised the ante by lowering his rates, but sometimes the words, they do not hurt well.
But if people are a prison, then the world is effectively a prison, especially when we're young.
So if you've experienced that sense of being a prisoner, then you are going to understand that and be able to make your break.
If, on the other hand, you have become part of the prison guard, which is not unknown among the people who listen to and come by the boards and email me, Then you are going to have a great deal of difficulty trying to get to be empathetic towards the truth.
So I'm going to go through a brief spinner web, let's just say, start a fairy tale, and I'm not going to say this is so logistically proven, this is a bit of a gut feel thing, so take it with all the grains of salt that you feel like it, but I think it's quite true.
When we are children, when we are very young, and we are raised by narcissists, a narcissist is somebody who cannot see anyone except in relationship to themselves.
So the typical thing from a narcissist is somebody else is doing well or doing better than the narcissist.
The narcissist is going to feel attacked and angry and bitter and frustrated.
And this is very, very common in the artistic community because most, certainly most actors and almost all famous actors are sort of narcissists.
It's a brutal personality disorder, very fundamentally misery-making and negative for the person and also for those around him.
But the narcissist simply can't conceive of other people except in relation to themselves.
And... One example is that Christina's sister sent her a letter after New Year.
She's been involved in the Landmark Forum, which I also took at one point, and if anyone's interested, I'd be certainly happy to do a podcast or two on it.
But she sent an email to Christina saying, you have been silent for two years.
It's been two years since Christina spoke to her sister.
You have been silent for two years.
I wonder if you have anything to say.
And that's sort of a clue, right, that somebody's a narcissist because Christina has been far from silent for the past two years.
And yet it is inevitable that somebody who's narcissistic is going to look at somebody who is not talking to them as silent.
Not as, well, I guess you've got other people to talk to, because she also can't figure out why Christina's not talking to her.
She knows that Christina is not talking to her parents, but she doesn't understand why Christina's not talking to her.
And it really shouldn't be hard for her to figure out why Christina's not talking to her, because Christina's sister is still in touch with their parents.
So, if Christina starts talking to her sister, then her sister is going to tell the parents, and then the parents are going to come by, and there will be much woe.
But it's typical of a narcissist to think that if someone's not talking to them, that that person is then silent.
But it's not silent, it's just not talking to you.
Not talking to you does not equal silence in reality.
Just not talking to you.
But she also can't fathom why Christina doesn't want to talk to her, because that would require that Christina's sister understand that Christina's not talking to her, I mean for other reasons, but primarily because of Christina's relationship with her parents.
In other words, Chris, sorry about this, I just don't want to use her name.
Christina's sister would have to empathize with a relationship that was not directly towards her.
She would have to understand Christina's relationship with her parents, which is not something that is directly attached to her sister, to this woman herself.
And narcissists simply can't do that.
They simply, I mean, you could maybe step them through it, but they'd forget again very quickly.
They simply, the only thing they can figure out are things that affect themselves.
So if you're raised by a narcissist, then what happens is you have to start reading the moods.
And narcissists are notoriously moody.
Because there's a fundamental, primitive kind of selfishness to their personality.
So, if you're narcissistic, there's really no reason to moderate your moods.
Because other people's emotional states don't really exist.
It's the difference, like, if you're driving alone, and the highway is empty, and a great song comes on the radio, you're likely going to lift your voice up and rock a song.
Because there's no one around for you to bother with your singing.
But if you are in a mall listening to the radio on your headphones and a song comes on that you love, it's far less likely that you're going to lift up your it's far less likely that you're going to lift up your head in joyful Thank you.
Because it would startle or alarm or you'd be embarrassed by the reactions of other people.
So, you modify your behavior depending on your circumstances.
If you're trying to talk to someone in a disco, you raise your voice.
If you're trying to talk to somebody in a library, you tend not to so much for fear of spinsters.
So, narcissists, I mean, obviously they don't like to be embarrassed, and shame is their great fear.
So, if they don't have control over people, they tend to be enormously pleasant and charming because they fear negative opinions or attack or criticism or whatever, because that's what they do to other people that they have power over.
But once they have power over someone, they no longer need to moderate their moods and they can relax into a kind of horrible, selfish acting out of their emotional states.
And if you're a child of one of these brutal souls...
Soulless, really.
If soul is empathy.
Then what happens is, you don't get to develop a self.
In any real or meaningful way.
The self being the I think, I feel...
And have those thoughts and feelings respected and have people be curious about your thoughts and feelings just in relation to you.
Not in relation to them, not in relation to what they think, not in relationship to their goals, dreams, desires, aspirations, disappointments, hopes, whatever, but just in relationship to you.
To have somebody clearly listen to you Without imposing their own reactions on everything that you're saying is a very, very, very rare thing.
It's so rare that people pay a lot of money to a therapist just to be able to do that.
just to be able to speak without this instantaneous judgment reaction coming back from the other person.
And that is so rare that it leads me to believe that almost all parents are narcissists, and certainly the Christians are narcissists, the religious people are narcissists as a whole.
That's something we can talk about another time.
The statists are narcissists.
So pretty much everyone, I think except for us brave crew and whoever else is scattered throughout the land who is working out the next stage in human evolution, They're all narcissists.
And so we're all raised, pretty much, by narcissists.
And if it's not our parents, then it's our teachers.
And if it's not our teachers, then it's our siblings.
And if it's not our siblings, then it's our extended family, and so on.
So we all have pretty strong exposure to this.
And I've seen this.
Even a friend of mine who came to visit me this summer had two kids.
And one of the youngest kids was making a joke about poo-poo, which is a phase that kids go through, which I believe ends...
Retirement? No. No, because then you get the depends jokes.
Anyway, let's not worry about that right now.
And so he made a poo-poo-pee-pee joke, and the parents are like, oh, no, don't talk about that!
Don't say that!
It's like, well, why not? What's wrong with poo and pee?
I mean, what's wrong with that?
I certainly wasn't offended.
My wife's a psychologist.
She's not easily offended.
Thank heavens. But...
This reaction that people have to our thoughts and our feelings, at least this kid was allowed to express it and just met with disapproval.
He didn't meet with ferocity.
And it was kind of a joshing disapproval, but of course the kid gets the message and people forget just how much volume is turned up for children for their parents' reactions and responses.
So, one person on the board posted a heartbreaking story about how He went out.
It was a beautiful fall day.
He was a little kid. It was a beautiful fall day and he went out and he gathered some beautiful leaves for his mother.
What a wonderful, sensitive and beautiful thing for a child to do.
And he brings the leaves home to his mother.
And she says, what are you doing bringing all these dirty wet leaves in the house?
Throw them out! Which was heartbreaking for him.
And completely and totally, understandably heartbreaking.
It's not necessarily heartbreaking that a parent snaps at a child.
We all do that, even with people we love.
I have snapped at Christina at least five times in our marriage, and I grovel with apologies.
Not that savagely or anything, but I grovel with apologies.
It is never a standard that you want in your personal relationships.
And it's not so much that she snapped at him, it's that there was never an apology.
It was never recognized or spoken of as a deviance from good behavior.
And of course, although she acted in an appalling and horrible manner, I bet you she still expected him to obey her because she was so right about everything.
So this child's love of nature, who knows?
Perhaps he would have been a Nobel Prize winning botanist if that moment with his mother had been different.
I mean, you don't know these things.
His love of nature, his love of beauty...
And his love of his mother.
Although, I'm not sure how old he was, but if he's old enough to go out and gather leaves, he's got to be at least five or six.
He already knew about his mother at this point, and what was happening was his true self was engineering this to be able to see his mother clearly.
And that's why he remembers it so well, because it was a break in belonging for his mother, a break in attachment.
It's when you know that you can no longer be safe around someone because they snap at you and attack you for trying to do something beautiful and wonderful and then never apologize.
And that's just, well, now I can no longer be safe.
Now I am no longer safe.
Because there's no standard that I can appeal to that my mother will respect that is composed of any kind of decent behavior.
My own one was when I tried to run away when I was six.
I packed up everything, crept out, and didn't make it.
Much violence ensued, and that was when I gave up.
That's when I accepted the prison.
I mean, you have to when you're a kid.
You try to break out to express your discontent, because the avenues that you can use to talk about your feelings when you're a child in a narcissistic family, it's almost none.
There's almost no avenue. There's almost no way to talk about it.
So you act it out in some manner or another.
And I try to run away with the hopes that somebody in the family might say, Oh my God, you're six years old.
You've literally packed some food, you've gone to the fridge, you've packed some food, you've packed some clothes, and you're going to go out into the night, in the middle of the night, and you are going to run away.
I was hoping, of course, that somebody was going to say something must be very wrong for you here, that you will do something this dangerous, this crazy.
Where would you go? You hope that somebody is going to That you're going to raise the stakes to the point where somebody's going to say, well, that's bad.
That's happening. Something bad is happening, and that's why he wants to run away, and so on.
And parents, of course, either react with mocking scorn, or in my case, with extraordinary violence, to this.
And that's then very clear that you are no longer going to have a voice, that you are not going to have any chance to have anything to say, and that you're simply going to be there for the irritated forbearance but occasional pleasure of others.
And it's their moods are all that matter.
Your moods never count.
You never get to be moody when you're a child of a narcissist.
If you're the child of a narcissist and you start acting like a narcissist, well, the narcissist doesn't really like that mirror now, do they?
So the parent will just attack you for that.
Oh, stop moping.
Stop pouting. Don't be such a baby.
When, of course, if the tables are entirely turned, the parent acts out in horrendous ways far worse than what the child is doing.
So it's all just extraordinarily hypocritical.
Now, when you're in this kind of situation where nobody is ever asking you about your internal life, and if you're plotting around and depressed, and God knows I was depressed for a decade, 6 to 16, nobody asks why, nobody cares. What they'll do is occasionally they'll get irritated and snap at you.
Oh, stop sitting around with that long face.
Go do something productive. Here's a list of chores.
Like you're manipulating them or something rather than you're broken.
That they've broken you.
But of course, that's part of the continual breaking of you.
That they will attack you for any kind of...
Anytime you express a thought that doesn't conform with their expectations or a feeling that doesn't conform to their convenience, then you will simply get attacked.
Which means that you have no scope for self-expression.
You're just there to do chores.
You're a slave. Emotional and physical.
Because they really can't conceive of you having an identity outside of their needs.
I mean, that's not quite true.
It's a bit dramatic.
They certainly can conceive of you having an identity, needs and feelings outside their own needs and feelings.
That's why they oppose any manifestation of it.
So, without a doubt, they can totally see yourself, they just oppose it.
And this is why they're morally culpable, right?
If they just acted randomly, then they'd be schizophrenic or mentally insane, and then they wouldn't be morally culpable.
But it's the moment that you express anything that is true and honest about yourself that they attack you, so they totally get when you're being yourself, and they know exactly what to oppose.
I'm not saying they plot it all out, but they certainly can identify honesty and truth.
That's what they attack. So, when you are faced with this narcissistic parenting, at some level you have a choice, and I have no idea why this choice is made in a different manner.
I've talked about it with Christina a number of times.
I've thought about it. I've got journal entries about it.
I just can't figure it out.
It may not be something that I can ever figure out.
It may be something that is figureoutable by someone else, or maybe there's more testing that is required, more rigorous and controlled conditions, but I can't see how those could be achieved.
Or maybe it would be an extensive series of interviews.
I don't know. It could be just a factor of intelligence.
It could be a factor of emotional intelligence.
Maybe that's innate. I don't know.
But we make a choice.
When we're brutalized, we make a choice.
We either curl up and die on the outside while keeping a tiny flickering flame of the true self alive on the inside and become inert and compliant and dead.
Or we become aggressive and start attacking other people.
There seems to be some trend that older siblings tend to become more brutal, but that's not.
I mean, there's exceptions, many exceptions to that rule, so I can't put that down as even a trend as yet.
So we either curl up and die on the outside and become a blank-faced, mute, depressed, compliant individual, which is the best course of action, Because it is better to suffer wrong than it is to do wrong.
And it is better to be attacked than it is to attack others.
The helpless. You can attack people who are not helpless.
And you can certainly attack back.
But to attack the helpless is heinous.
And I don't know why the difference occurs.
I don't know why it is.
I do believe that it has something to do with intelligence.
But I'm not entirely positive.
My brother is certainly very intelligent.
So, I don't know.
I don't know the difference. It could be the availability of somebody to attack.
But it goes something like this, that you get attacked every time you show any kind of true self.
And I think what happens is, if you feel bad about being attacked...
Then it becomes very hard for you to attack others.
Because you feel bad.
But... If you feel...
So if you feel unjustly attacked...
I think this is it. I'm just sort of guessing.
I think this is it. If you feel unjustly attacked...
As I was when I tried to run away when I was six...
I felt that I was being badly treated, very badly treated.
I screamed at a hit and so on.
So I felt, really felt that I was being badly treated.
And I did not feel that I was being badly treated because I was bad.
Sort of the very important distinction, I think, that's sort of feeling it through.
This is not, again, it's not proof.
It's just a way of looking at it that I think makes sense with a certain amount of experience and knowledge that I have.
Maybe you can tell me what you think.
I hope that you can tell me what you think.
If you feel that you are unjustly treated, then it feels bad and you are keeping your true self alive because your true self knows that you're being unjustly treated.
Whatever I did, it wasn't so bad that I had to be treated this way.
I remember getting thoroughly beaten up.
Because I had left a glass of water on a table which left one of those little rings.
I think I've mentioned this before. And of course, so my mom completely freaked out and beat the crap out of me.
I was about seven, I think.
And of course, clearly that was an indication of my value versus a piece of furniture, right?
I mean, this is what the humiliation is all about.
I mean, if I stub my toe on the table, my mother doesn't beat up the table.
But if I leave a glass on the tabletop, which leaves a little ring, then my mother beats me up.
Now, of course, the next day I checked and it had all dried and there was no indication of anything that was wrong.
And if I had been sort of self-destructive, I would have pointed this out to my mother and got another beating.
But it was very clear to me that there's no justification for hitting a child. - Thanks.
But if you're going to pick one, a little ring on a table is not one of those.
So for me, I felt unjustly treated, unjustly attacked.
And that made me feel bad and sad and angry and depressed.
Because I got that I was in a prison.
And I was not in a prison because I had committed a crime.
I was not in a prison because I had committed a crime.
That's, I think, the fundamental difference.
Thank you.
If, on the other hand, I had thought I'm in a prison because I am bad.
Then my experience would have been very different.
I'm in a prison because other people are bad.
It's very different from I'm in a prison because I am bad.
in the former, you're sort of like a political prisoner.
And so you feel that Peter Gabriel singing songs about you and Amnesty International is doing things for you and you hold on to your self-worth and your moral integrity is not violated.
Because if people put you in prison unjustly, then you're more like Salchanitan than Manson.
Now, what happens then if you feel that you're put into prison because you're a bad person?
I'm going to go ahead and get it.
Then that is the opinion, of course, of your parents.
Nobody beats up a child and says, well, that's great, I'm sure glad that he's small and can't fight back because it really feels great to pound my fist into little bones.
Nobody says that. They say, this child is bad.
This child is impossible.
This child won't listen.
This child resists. This child is stubborn.
Oh, stubborn. Always stubborn.
Stubborn is always thrown around.
Anybody who disagrees with a narcissist is stubborn.
Right, that's a projection as well.
Of course, the narcissist is the most stubborn individual on the planet, because they won't change unless they feel like it.
No appeal from others or to reason will ever sway them.
and then they call everyone else who disagrees with them stubborn.
So, if you feel that you're in prison because you're a criminal, then you must morally respect those then you must morally respect those who've put you in prison.
Thank you.
It must be good that you're in prison.
You must be a bad person.
And it's good that you're in prison.
This is sort of the before and after of Winston Smith in 1984.
You deserve to be in prison.
You're bad. And your parents are good and long-suffering and are just trying to help you, just trying to do the right thing by you.
That's why they beat you up.
That's why they scream at you.
That's why they yell at you. That's why they humiliate you.
Because you're a bad person and you must be broken.
You are full of the devil. You are evil by nature and must be broken.
And that's what I mean when I say you can't see a prison because you are a prison.
Or, in a sense, another way of putting it, not quite as elegant, is you cannot see...
Prison guards because you are a prison guard.
You cannot see tyrants because you are a tyrant.
Or you cannot see tyranny because you have internalized tyranny.
And for you to then, I mean, the moment for seeing tyranny has passed because you've already judged that they're not tyrants, but they're just, stern but just overlords of virtue, your parents or whoever.
What then happens is, since we are all inevitably, like mass to mass, we accelerate towards virtue, like mass towards a gravity well, if you believe that your parents' actions are moral and just,
that to attack the helpless, to brutalize the helpless is moral and just, Then you will inevitably, when you are confronted by somebody who is weaker, you will terrorize them, because that is moral and just.
And the argument for morality rests on the fact that human beings will inevitably...
We are moral computers.
We will inevitably do what morality...
What the morality we accept holds as the highest value.
We will inevitably do that.
Self-justification is self-programming.
What we justify in the present...
It's the future we create.
Inevitably, like we're laying down railroad tracks, going left, right, up and down.
We're laying down railroad tracks through our justifications in the present.
And whatever we defend in ourselves today is who we will be tomorrow.
Whatever we defend in the present is who we will be tomorrow.
So if we believe that we were justly imprisoned, then we shall become tyrants in the future.
If we hold on to the pain of being unjustly imprisoned, then we have hidden a key in the cell.
And we just have to find it now that we're older.
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