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Jan. 29, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:03
625 Self Protection Part 1 - Theory

A brave listener struggles with self-defense

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Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It is the 29th of January, 2007.
Just five o'clock.
Just heading home. I hope you had a wonderful day.
And I'd like to talk about theory and practice.
Theory and practice.
We've had a very interesting, for me at least, conflagration of...
Thoughts and emotions and images and so on.
And I'd like to talk about those from a particular listener's viewpoint.
I just think it's very interesting because this is the listener who is wrestling with self-protection.
And you can see the progress, I think, occurring within his psychology based on two things, which I think are well worth talking about.
So this is Nate. I hope you don't mind if I use your name.
But here's the theory.
In terms of where he's at in this process.
He posted, I pointed a friend to Podcast 600.
They referred to it as whiny and cynical.
They also said they lost all interest in it.
I'm really confused, he says, as to why someone would feel this way, because I thought it was pretty dead-on accurate for most families I know, especially my own.
They claim that their family was great and not like that at all.
Is it possible that they just didn't realize it was all a sort of act, that it was all a sort of sarcasm in a brutally honest sort of way?
And then Greg responded, whiny and cynical is not an argument, it is a reaction.
Why do you suppose they reacted that way?
If they were curious, don't they think they would have asked, why is this podcast so thick with sarcasm?
Sorry, one sec. Or, what was the intended goal of this approach to family criticism?
Podcast 600 is a caricature, no doubt, and there's a reason for it.
If they have some sort of reasoned criticism of the approach, it would be interesting to hear.
And... Sorry. Nate wrote back and said, yeah, they expanded on it saying it was upsetting because their family wasn't that way, and they didn't know anyone else whose family was that way.
I think it's sort of odd considering they have two friends who are Christians with children.
I mean, sure, it isn't like all families are like that, or even that all bad families are bad in that way.
Sorry, just do my merge here.
Marge, merge, merge, merge.
This is just one example, I think, of the more subtle ways families that are very brutal with the argument from intimidation.
Sorry if I misread that. And I said, really, you think it's odd that they didn't get any meat out of the podcast, even though two of their friends are Christian children?
I said, really, you think that's odd?
Do you feel that truth is very hard for us, but very easy for other people?
And he replied, I think truth is very difficult to reach.
Some truth is very heartbreaking and uncomfortable to accept.
I'm just trying to figure out why on earth, if this person had such a great family, and if they knew of no other people who were like this, why they would find it whiny, cynical, and uncomfortable to listen to.
Personally, I found it to be very funny, because I identified with just about all of it, either because it was exactly like my family or like friends of my family.
The friend Mark I was talking to you about earlier, this is on the Sunday show, seems to demand compromise on certain ethical principles because his father is a Christian and is active in historical preservation.
There's a good synonym for Christianity, historical preservation.
I can only imagine that this other person may be defending or in denial of.
Sorry, I can only imagine what this other person may be defending or in denial of.
That people will compromise on principle to defend their parents is a very important part of our discussion here and I think this person is doing just that.
Well, that's the theory.
That's the mental aspect of what he's working on.
And then he posted a dream, which I think is very illustrative, so that you can see what's happening at the conceptual level.
You can see what's happening in the realm of action, reaction, concept, and dream in this person.
And I think it's pretty universal what's going on.
It certainly was my process, and it was Christina's process, and it's the process of the other few people that I've talked to who've gone through this individuation.
So let me start by talking about this Podcast 600.
Now, Podcast 600 is a high number for a reason.
Because if you haven't gone through the theory of philosophy and you haven't gone through some deconstruction of the state and some deconstruction of authority in general, some deconstruction of religion, then...
Podcast 600 is not going to make much sense to you, except at a very, very deep level, which is what I think happened to this person.
Now, I'm not saying that Podcast 600 is some massive keystone of human freedom.
It was fun to do, and I think there's some good stuff in it.
But it's not the most passionate, not the most imaginative of the podcast.
But I think that it is...
Something that, if you don't have grounding in the theory, it isn't going to make a whole lot of sense to you, right?
You don't start a child off with the last pages of Einstein's theory of relativity.
Not that I'm claiming the intellectual equal or anything, but you don't start off with the very advanced stuff.
There's a reason why it's podcast 600 and why I didn't make that podcast zero.
So Nate is challenging himself or is challenging those around him because he's got this issue wherein he's aiming for self-protection.
His unconscious is desperately trying to rouse his capacity for integrity and self-protection.
And it is a difficult and painful process to go through.
So what I think is very interesting is if you have a look at the general framework, Nate, of what it is that you're doing when you send a podcast to a friend of yours whose friends are Christian who have children and so on.
I think that the one thing that is always so hard for us to grasp and to really live is that the principles and ideas really totally, completely and fundamentally matter.
They matter almost more than gravity, almost more than hunger, certainly more than sex.
And it's very hard for us to understand that because we live in a world Of society.
And society is whatever people want it to be.
They make it all up. It's bullying.
It's controlling. It's parasitic.
It's, you know, not, I don't think by nature, but certainly in the current context.
So we live in this world of society.
And in this world of society, everyone's friendly to Christians.
People clap each other on the back.
They seem happy to see each other.
They have dinner parties. They roll around.
And yeah, sometimes they get divorced or sometimes their kids get messed up and so on.
But people are happy and chatty and listen to music and play badminton and all this kind of stuff.
And that's what is occurring really at the surface level, or in a sense the inconsequential level of life.
Now, underneath all of these manicured lawns, Blue Velvet started off with this shot.
The manicured lawn goes down to the bottom of the lawn where all these insects are fighting and dying.
And there was a particularly chilling post that I saw today about an insect dream that I would try to get to soon.
But below these manicured lawns, below this hearty, hail well met fellow, clap on the back, firm handshake, have a burger, conviviality and geniality of life, is this massive and tectonic war of principles and of values.
And as I've talked about before, it is really, in the modern world, because values are so irrational, it's really only possible to have a community if...
You are willing to completely erase any possibility or any visibility to any kind of deeper values or rational values.
Community is self-erasure.
I don't think that's the case innately.
I don't think that's the case in Freedom Aid Radio's community, but I think that the community of society as a whole, so founded as it is on the triple irrationalities of politicians, priests, and parents, that To be in a group is to erase the self, and yet we have a natural hunger for community.
It is one of the grand tortures of history, and I think it's less tortuous in the modern world than it is pretty much at any time throughout history, so we can at least be glad about that.
But there's a lot of advertising, a lot of surface tomfoolery that goes along to make people sort of think that values don't matter.
So there's Democrats who get married to Republicans.
And there's people who are religious and people who are atheists.
And everyone is supposed to be tolerant.
And there are people who are into astrology and there are people who are into astronomy.
And they're supposed to respect each other's beliefs.
And there's this massive, to me at least, corrosive, soul-destroying, integrity-evaporating kind of everything-goes in society.
But unfortunately, or I guess fortunately for those of us who are learning about the truth...
Ideas, ideals, principles really do matter.
They really are what runs the world.
They really are at the core and at the depth of just about every relationship that you have beyond the most superficial.
So, this gentleman sends Podcast 600 to a friend of his...
Who has very little self-knowledge, if any.
Very little, if any, self-knowledge.
Who reacts in a very primitive, dismissive, contemptuous kind of way.
And who then says, well, it disturbs me because it's nothing like anything that I've known.
And we'll get into how silly a statement that is in a moment or two.
Now, if we accept that we all know everything about everyone, and I believe that that is a valid thing to say and a valid approach to take to the world, we already know everything there is to know about everyone, five seconds after we meet them.
If we assume, and this is the true self that is...
Causing this action, right?
The true self is groping.
It's doing the massive reach around the false self to try and get to reality.
To try and get to reality.
Reality is founded on principles, as we all know from our understanding of science and scientific laws.
The world runs and is founded on principles.
However freaky they may get at the quantum level, they're still principles, because, as Richard Feynman said, quantum measurements are so accurate that it's like measuring the width of North America down, or predicting the width of North America, measuring down to the width of a single human hair.
And that's quite impressive.
So however freaky things may be down at the bottom level, certainly at the perceptual level, at the level of the senses, reality is stable and runs according to objective laws, and so on.
So...
So...
The true self recognizes these principles, right?
Because all of the principles that we have in philosophy are derived from rationality, which is derived from the objective and universal properties and behaviors of matter and energy.
And so there is the true self, which is what recognizes and connects with these real values, these real principles, these real and objective principles in the world.
And we allow the true self to do, you know, important things like drive.
We don't drive wondering whether that truck is really a truck or just our imagination.
Or if we do, we should stop driving.
So... We let the true self do things like play tennis and drive a car and flinch from a backfire and duck when there's a low ceiling and so on to process and respond to reality.
We allow it to read the text on a computer screen.
We allow it to command the fingers to type back a coherent and linguistically sound, if not logically sound, response.
In the middle of all of this lies the shadow.
As T.S. Eliot, I should read that poem.
Actually, I've been meaning to do that for a while.
And the shadow is the false self, is the absolutely psychotically distorted mirror, the funhouse, weird, distorted mirror that we hold up to reality to forgive the crimes of those around us.
To quote, forgive.
To pretend that nothing happened, as we've talked about before.
So as I'm driving right now, I am holding the steering wheel.
I'm holding a microphone. I'm checking my rearview mirror.
I'm checking all of these sorts of things.
I'm looking ahead. And I've put sunglasses on because it's still quite bright.
So all of that is a direct connection with and perceptual processing of reality.
And since I'm traveling at 110 kilometers an hour in a 6,000-pound car, it is very important that I have that direct connection with reality and do not second-guess it.
So we have that.
But where insanity is, where social metaphysics are, is in the minds of others.
In the minds of others.
So, excuse me.
It is when we talk about reality with other people.
It's when we talk about history with other people, both personal.
It's when we talk about values and philosophy with other people that we enter into the shimmering, quicksand, smoggy fog of madness, rejection, repression, projection, all of these sorts of things.
Reality can't deny, and we can't deny reality, but human beings can deny us and deny reality to us.
As long as it's self-reporting.
I've always mentioned a number of times, self-reporting is a very difficult and dangerous thing.
So Nate knows everything there is to know about this gentleman.
And I can tell, even not having met his friend, I can tell quite a bit about his friend.
His friend has other friends who are Christians who are raising children in the Christian cult.
So that says really a whole lot about this human being.
That he has friends who are Christians and who are raising their children in the Christian cult, who are inculcating and inflicting the mass psychosis of religious faith on their children.
So these are slavish, pious, pompous conformists and all this other sorts of ugly stuff.
Everything that you can imagine that I've talked about as far as religious infliction, not instruction, but infliction and what it does to the Tender minds of innocent and helpless children.
This is who he is friends with.
What do you think that person's degree of self-knowledge is, just given that little fact?
Just given that little fact, what do you think that the person's degree of self-knowledge and understanding of the harm of conformity to craziness is?
What do you think? Just roughly guessing.
Well, I can tell you exactly. It's not very well developed at all.
It's not very well developed at all.
In fact, this person is going to be hostile towards the truth.
Now, if somebody that I really cared about...
If my wife, if Christina said to me, I want you to listen to this podcast, and I listened to it, and she said it's hugely important to me.
It's very powerful for me.
And I didn't have any clue what was going on.
What kind of human being would I have to be to say to somebody that I love or who I... I mean, if you don't like love as the description of a male friendship, you can substitute whatever you want, but have some regard for, some affection for, some respect for.
But I'm going to use the term love because I think that it works in male friendships as well.
If I turn to Christina after she held out trembling something that was very, very important for her, that moved her, That was powerful for her.
That clarified the world for her.
If she held it out, trembling for me to listen to it and understand it.
And I turned to her and said...
I listened for like three minutes and said...
It's totally boring and whiny.
I couldn't even finish it.
Totally lost my interest. Who cares?
What kind of asshole would I be?
If I felt all of those things...
And I immediately turned around and crushed Christina's outstretched hand, reaching to give me something that was of great value to her.
If I immediately turned around and crushed it and scorned it and threw it down, what kind of jerk would I be?
A rather large one.
Because even if I felt...
That what she had asked me to listen to that was very powerful was whiny and cynical and so on and so on and so on.
My fundamental curiosity or my fundamental response would be not to say this thing that you have on bended knee asked me to listen to because it's so important to you.
I would not say this thing which you've asked me to listen to is so freaking boring and whiny I couldn't get through 30 seconds of it.
Or three minutes, or whatever.
What I would say is I would say, she'd say, what do you think?
And I'd say, well, I'll tell you what I think in a bit, but let me ask you some questions first.
Tell me why this is so important to you.
Tell me why this moves you.
Tell me what about this moves you so much and stimulates you so much or makes you think or makes you feel, whatever.
Tell me about your experience of this thing.
I didn't have exactly the same experience that you did, but that's not important.
What I do want to know is you wanted to share something with me that's important to you.
Very important to you.
And you took a risk in doing so because this is just some podcast, right?
It's not like, go read this book by Thomas Aquinas, where at least there's some validated credibility to the general process.
But listen to this crazy guy in Canada or whatever, right?
I'd say, well, what about it is important to you?
Tell me what it means to you.
If I care about my wife, if I love my wife, and she wants me to listen to something that's very important to her, I don't scorn and mock it and say, oh, I couldn't finish this, too boring, too whiny, who cares?
So this is the continuity that inevitably follows from somebody who has a lack of self-knowledge.
When something makes them feel uncomfortable or upsets them, They're going to try a number of strategies, and we've gone through this in Psychological Defenses Part 1 and 2, so we'll just touch on them briefly here.
But the first thing they're going to do is they're going to minimize and scorn.
When something threatens, you know, somebody says, listen to this, it's very powerful and it's very important, it's going to make you feel uncomfortable at a very deep level, but what you're going to experience at a conscious level is boredom and hostility and scorn and so on.
And you are then going to say, it was boring and whiny and bad and sarcastic and negative and yawn, who cares, I couldn't get through it, it didn't hold my interest at all.
And why would you say that?
Because you wish to crush what was occurring for you.
I mean... Podcast 600 is not useless.
I mean, it's certainly not uninteresting, even if your family wasn't like this.
Even if you say, well, you know, this is an interesting expose or a sort of tongue-in-cheek examination of Muslim families or hyper-patriotic families or military families or whatever.
There's certainly, even if you and your friends, there's certainly no shortage.
If you all had good families, there's no shortage of people out there who've experienced this kind of stuff that Christina and I describe in Podcast 600.
And for sure, if you've got Christian friends...
Right? Then you are going to be embedded and enmeshed in this.
And you're going to be blind to it. That much is easily understood, not from having them listen to Podcast 600 and Scornet, but rather from the fact that they have Christian friends.
So clearly they're blind to this kind of conformity.
There's no question, no doubt about that.
And I would say that, Nate, you knew this.
You knew this completely and totally and utterly.
So you have to go beyond the surface of what it is you were doing.
And I'll tell you what you were doing, if you don't mind.
I'll be blunt and tell you what you were doing in a few minutes.
But I wanted to mention something just before we get there, which will be helpful, I think, to other people who are trying to share their love of philosophy with others, whether it's to do with this show or other things or whatever.
But I'd like you to get this, if you don't mind.
I'd really, really, really like you to get this, because I truly believe it, and I think there's excellent, excellent reasons for believing it.
We are not behind other people.
We are not playing catch-up to a healthy world.
We are not Broken people struggling to piece ourselves together and join the healthy march of the whole-limbed.
We are not such shattered statues attempting to reassemble ourselves and join the magic and marble-based topiary of perfectly formed human beings.
We are not broken.
We who listen, who have this conversation or other conversations around philosophy and psychology, we are not broken.
We do not go into therapy to fix ourselves and return ourselves to the healthy majority, to return to the fold of the healthy majority.
That is not why we go to therapy.
If you want to get a gold medal, you get a coach and you train.
But you are not getting a coach and training because everybody else already has a gold medal and you need to catch up.
It is because you wish to surmount the common goals and aspirations and achieve something singular and extraordinary with your life.
That is why we go to counseling on therapy.
That is why we have deep and meaningful conversations.
That is why we talk about philosophy.
That is why we learn about logic and economics and art and psychology.
And all of those other good things that are the topics of this conversation and other valuable conversations.
We are not broken.
We are not sick.
We are not smashed.
We are not limbless children being hurled around in a thundercloud while everybody else marches on healthy limbs in tight formation.
We are not broken.
And everything which is hard for us is hard for everyone.
Thank you.
That's why I ask the question, do you think that the truth is just very hard for you, but very easy for other people?
Because there is a self-loathing and a hatred of ideals and ideas and philosophy and truth and reality fundamentally in that proposition.
If you have a friend and you've listened to...
I'm just going to take this conversation.
I'm not saying it's the only one that's of value, of course.
But if you have a friend and you have struggled through the enormous intellectual challenges of 600 of these podcasts...
And you have struggled and you have worked and you have kept a journal and you've gone to therapy and you've posted on the board and you've asked questions and you've been in the call-in show.
And you are really working for the gold.
You are struggling and striving and falling and climbing and falling and climbing.
And it takes you 600 podcasts, let's just say, for it to click.
And maybe it took you 500 or 400 or 300.
It still clicks even for me.
And I only say even for me, not because I'm smarter.
It's just because I've been working with ideas.
These ideas are a lot longer than most of them.
Anyone who's been listening, these specific set of ideas.
And it still clicks for me over and over again in different ways.
20 years. So...
If you have struggled through these podcasts, and you have struggled through all of the enormous challenges that accumulate to you as a result of trying to live with a basic level of integrity, nothing highfalutin, nothing magical, nothing perfect, but a basic level of integrity like, what does it mean to be treated well?
All the stuff that we talked about in Ask a Therapist number 10.
If you do that...
Spend months or years struggling with these ideas, learning about yourself, learning about your history, defooing all of this.
And then you say to a friend of yours, Hey, listen to Podcast 600.
What are you saying? What are you saying?
You're saying that you're stupid.
Because it took you months or years, hundreds of podcasts, journal, therapy, call-in shows, posts on the board...
But somebody else can just pick up the thread at Podcast 600 and be fine.
You're saying you're retarded.
That the truth that is so hard for you is, hey, just dip into Podcast 600, listen for 50 minutes, and hey, let me know what you think.
What would you say to somebody who had trained for months, or actually let's just say years, who had trained for years to become an expert ski jumper?
Jump a good quarter of a kilometer, 200 feet in the air, perfect skis touching their noses in that forward arch.
And this person had struggled for years and years to develop their form, had been practicing for hours and hours a day.
What would you say to such an athlete when they said to somebody, you know, I'm going to go ski jumping this weekend.
Why don't you join me?
Go down the quarter mile run and do the quarter mile leap.
And this other person, I think, would rightly say, what are you talking about?
And they'd say, no, come, come ski jumping with me.
It's like, well, don't you need a lot of practice and preparation?
No, just go down the hill.
Well, what I would say to this athlete is that you're trying to kill someone.
You're literally trying to get someone killed.
And that's not very nice.
It's not very nice at all.
You don't take people to the top of these double black diamond ski runs when they've never been on a ski, when they slip in the parking lot and cut their lip because the parking lot has a few snowflakes in it and they have no balance and they're drunk.
And they're blindfolded.
You don't take them to the top of the goddamn hill and say, hey, go for it!
Unless you're feeling very hostile towards them.
So, I can tell you what it is that you're trying to do to your friend by saying, hey, go listen to Podcast 600.
You're trying to get rid of him.
You're passive-aggressively trying to get rid of this person, and you can't say to this person, look...
First of all, you can't say to yourself, and that's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that. This is a journey, right?
But you can't say to yourself, look, these guys are...
This guy I know is friends with people who are raising Christian children and so on.
That's not good. That's really against what I know to be right.
What I know to be honorable and decent and virtuous behavior.
Even at a basic level, right?
I have more respect for a drug addict than for somebody who inflicts religious beliefs on children.
At least the drug addict is only hurting himself.
How would you feel about somebody who was a drunk driver who kept drunk driving and you knew for sure that they were going to maim People and put them into wheelchairs.
Not kill them, but maim them.
And you would say, hey, you know, the next time you go drunk driving, you're going to maim someone, and they say, I'm fine.
Would you feel good about that?
Well, no. This is exactly what happens with Christian parents, religious parents, when they inflict the horror and nightmarish irrationality and self-hatred of religion on their children.
They're drunk driving, and they're smashing other people up.
up.
They walk away unscathed because they're defending their own injuries by reinflicting them on their children.
But the children get smashed up and basically spend the rest of their lives in intellectual wheelchairs as cripples.
So you are attempting to assert a kind of self-protection and you are attempting to assert it by dropping the FDR bomb on people.
If you take someone to the top of an enormously difficult and complicated ski jump and they've got their skis on backwards and they're facing the wrong way and they're in a fuzzy hat and a thong and you push them down, I would say that's a fair degree of hostility.
If you take somebody who's embedded in relationships with Christian people and ask them to listen to Podcast 600, that's very aggressive.
It's very hostile. And the reason that you're doing that is because you don't believe in the values that you're living by yet.
And that's fine. That's fine.
There's nothing wrong with that. It is a journey.
But you need to see how people are reacting to something that's important to you.
You need to see how they're going to treat you.
Is someone going to say, well, you know, I didn't quite get as much out of it as you did, but tell me what you got out of it, because that's something that's very important.
If Christina loves the ballet, drags me to the ballet...
And she loves it. Tell me what you love about it so that I can learn, so that I can appreciate it.
So you need to see how this person is going to react to something that you love, that you are sharing with them, how they react to you.
And you need to see that because the true self in you knows that this person is a jerk.
But your false self doesn't believe that values and virtues mean anything.
Or that it's accidental or that it's random.
That somebody can be great friends with Christian parents and really appreciate, get and understand podcast 600.
Not so.
Personality is as inexorable as gravity.
Personality is as fundamental as the speed of light.
You cannot be good friends with Christian parents and really get the depth of Podcast 600.
Or even if you don't think it's deep, even get the interest, even get the empathy of Podcast 600.
You just can't do it.
You're asking the impossible.
You're taking a fish out of a fishbowl, you're putting it on a plate, and you're saying, swim, fishy, swim!
Right? It's not going to work.
Not going to work, my friend.
And once you really begin to understand that personality is all that you need to know about somebody and you only need one or two clues.
I hit my daughter.
It's all you need to know about that human being and their relationship to reality, to empathy, to sympathy, to virtue, to rationality, and their emotional maturity and how they're going to react when questioned or criticized in this area.
So you are assiduously working as hard as you possibly can to get rid of this, quote, friend.
And I would only say that the reason you want to make it conscious is so you don't go through the process of thinking that you're retarded, because you're not.
You're very smart. So if it's tough and a struggle for you, To understand these ideas as it was for me, as it is for the thousands and millions, I believe, of people who will come after us.
Yeah, it's really, really hard.
And it's not hard because we're stupid.
It's not hard because we're stupid.
It's not like modeling.
If we look like the Elephant Man and we're having trouble getting runway jobs, yeah, there's going to be some people who are going to walk into that runway audition and get the part.
It's not like singing.
If you sound like one of those American Idol rejects and you go for some musical, you're not going to get it.
Someone else who's got a great voice, never had any lessons, is going to come in and get it.
It's not like that. Philosophy is not like that.
There are no shortcuts. And if you think there are shortcuts, obviously you're going to leave those shortcuts open for yourself.
But it's a fundamental self-humiliation.
And attack upon your own capacities and integrities to say, well, you know, it took me years and hundreds of podcasts, but you can just start near the end.
You don't have to go through the process.
You don't have to go through building the case.
Just pick up the most fundamental criticisms of parenting that is going to have a very strong effect on Christians, particularly, and that's why it was designed.
That's why I didn't do it with violence.
That's why I didn't talk about hitting children.
That's why I didn't talk about any of those sorts of things.
I didn't talk about abuse.
I didn't talk about verbal abuse.
I talked about pleasant and positive parents who were simply slaves to conformity and fantasy.
Of course that's going to have most effect on a Christian.
So he's going to say, well, I hate it.
It's boring, whiny. He can't say I hate it.
It's boring, whiny. I didn't get through it.
Well... Let's just say he's a stereotypical Christian fantasy guy, right?
Who's very interested in making the world a better place.
And he's going to say, yeah, you know, I bet my family wasn't like that, but I can really see that there are lots of families that are like that.
That would be empathy, right?
If you hear about child rape and you get really horrendously uncomfortable, it's not because your family never had any inappropriate sexual moments, right?
If you get very uncomfortable and upset and can't finish it, it's because it's triggering something in you.
And you know this.
You know this. You want to deal with these issues.
You're hungry to deal with these issues and to grow.
As we all are who are involved in this conversation, you're hungry to surmount the merely human, as it is defined hitherto, to become something greater, something deeper, something wiser, something more wonderful.
The Ubermensch. And you want all of this, and it's still hell.
You want it all.
Very badly. You want to grow.
And it's still hell.
But what if you don't even want to grow?
You know that dropping the FDR bomb on people, especially an advanced one like 600, you know exactly what that's going to do.
It's going to blow them right out of your orbit.
Of course it's going to provoke. Completely opposing ideas to yours, and scorn, and immaturity, and hostility, and defensiveness, and projection, and minimization, and anger.
So that this fine Christian gentleman has no empathy, even if his own family was great, for anyone else who's had a more difficult kind of thing.
And then they say, well, it's upsetting because my family's not like that, and I don't know any families that are like that.
In other words, Nate, you're crazy.
You're crazy. It's culty.
You're stupid. Right?
Well, I would say that as you start to march towards the goal of self-protection, which is really just believing in facts, believing in principles, the principles of personality first and foremost, right after moving out of the way of a falling piano,
we need to judge those around us and know whether we can be secure and safe, open and honest, Tyrannies, right?
Their own hatreds and hostilities.
I think it's good, and this is a step forward from where you were before, right?
First off, no self-protection, which is real conformity.
You conform to other people's expectations.
And next, you begin to question the hostilities and attacks towards other people.
I think that's great. Where you need to get to next is you need to try and move fast this phase as quickly as possible.
Because this phase is where you're taking passive-aggressive action to protect yourself.
Right? So, you know, your true self knows that this guy is full of nonsense and is going to do nothing but be barnacles on the foaming hull of your progress.
This guy is just going to retard and be tripwires and landmines and so on.
So, you know you've got to get rid of him.
You know that you've got to get rid of him.
But you're having a tough time processing the values because it's a great leap forward to process the values that say, I can't have these people in my life anymore.
This is where I'm going.
This is not being treated well by this person.
I'm not being treated well by this person.
I'm not having any luck talking to them about it.
So I can't have... These people in my life anymore, right?
It's a very hard thing to do based on principle alone.
It feels, you know, you're just throwing people overboard and you become culty and exclusionist.
And it's all, you know, all the stuff that people talk about when it comes to these kinds of ideals that if you, you know, you should not get rid of people because that's culty and separate you from your friends and your family, all that kind of stuff, right?
All the stuff that we've known about and processed already.
But you know that this person has to go.
And their reaction to you sharing something that you love with them is a perfectly concise and wonderful confirmation of the theory that you know deep down is true, which is that they have to go.
They must go.
And so now you're moving from reaction to passive-aggressive but proactive.
Which I think is wonderful, fantastic, good for you.
But you don't want to do this under-the-table, hand-solo sniping.
You want to start to move towards what are the values that you can use to judge whether people are worth having in your life or not.
What are the values that you're going to use?
What is being treated well for you?
What is being treated rationally, consistently?
What is morality? I mean, this is all the basic questions.
And as you start to move forward and answer those questions, then you won't need to do these passive-aggressive provocations like dropping the Podcast 600 bomb on some guy who's friends with Christians and is totally enmeshed in primitive family values.
You won't need to do any of that stuff.
You will be able to be more proactive.
And make decisions about friendships rather than provoking friends to act in ways that are negative or hostile or scorning you or diminishing you.
You don't have to humiliate your way out of a bad relationship.
You don't have to self-diminish your way out of a bad relationship.
You need to sit down and trace through what happened here.
So that you can start to get self-protection without passive aggression.
So you can start to get self-protection without self-humiliation, without having to paint yourself as subconsciously, as retarded or to be bewildered by why it is that people who are friends with Christians come back with odd hostility and weirdness when you point out something to them that's quite true.
So that you can use these ideas to help yourself.
Because I know at the beginning it just feels like you're carrying a 90-pound pack, right, and trying to Donation drought was broken today.
If you could send a few more rain clouds my way, I'd really appreciate it.
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