All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:27
627 Saving Others Part 1
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hello everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. We're back to, I hope, at least some decent-ish sound now.
Sorry about the sniffle-muffle-cast from this morning.
But I didn't want to lose the thread of what it is that I was talking about.
And that meant that I had to rely upon my trusty Zen Vision M, which is a fantastic thing.
And, of course, the quality is not always the best, but if any of those who remember the stuff that I recorded in Washington in November of last year, I'm sure that you can quite easily remember just how bad the sound can get in these podcasts.
And anything that's vaguely audible, I think, is something that we should view as a good thing.
We should be proud of. Now, I wanted to talk this afternoon, with your kind, kind permission, about the problem of the stragglers.
And stragglers is kind of a funny word to use, of course, because they vastly outnumber we ice cutters, we forward scouts of the new thinking.
But I still think that it's important to have a chat about this, because as I can sort of feel, there's a liftoff that is kind of happening for a lot of people because of these late podcasts.
See, it only took 600 or so for me to make myself clear.
Could I have been more concise?
Yes, but what fun would that be as far as bandwidth went?
But I feel that there is a coalescence of understanding that is going on among the people who listen to this, and I really am hugely excited by that.
I think it's fantastic. Flashpoint!
We grow! We grow!
But, of course, as we do grow, there is the challenge of the stragglers, those in our life who will not grow, who refuse, who resist, who undermine, who are hostile or indifferent or cynical or contemptuous or sarcastic or whatever.
You know, the bag-o-tricks of those who wish to remain unfree and whose own freedom and our freedom are as nothing to the maintenance of their defenses and the erection of their sad stories as cathedrals shadowing the bag-o-tricks of those who wish to remain unfree and whose own A little bit of cold medicine apparently makes me mildly poetic, so I'll try and wrestle the metaphors down.
Thank you.
It is an absolutely heartbreaking situation when we truly understand the limitations of what we can do with respect to others.
With what we can do to our families, to help them, to bring them forward, to make them think, you can't make anyone think.
We talked a little while back about the diamond-hard obsidian biosphere exoskeleton of the family, and that really is composed of nothing more than The diamond-hard, obsidian-like exoskeleton of the defenses.
Defenses which cannot be penetrated.
So, when you do make the great leap forward, when you do make it to the moon and back, when you do see the Earth from space and then return to the two-dimensional surface dwellers who have no perspective, you want to bring them with you.
You want to bring them with you.
We go through the stages of thinking that everyone's healthy, and then that everyone's healthy but we're sick, and then that everyone's sick and we're healthy, and at that point, once we've gone through all of that challenge,
perhaps with a short stop off on everyone's sick, which is the danger of nihilism that we were talking about this morning, but when we finally do recognize the cure, The great eagerness that we all feel is to rush out and administer the cure.
Rationality, empiricism, science, logic, philosophy, depth, analysis, self-knowledge, all of the juicy wonders of the inner scape.
We want to administer this.
We have achieved relief from depression and demons.
We have achieved relief from fear.
And we have achieved relief from the greatest curse of humanity, which is smallness.
Smallness, smallness, smallness.
And we'll talk a little bit more about that later.
The greatest curse that we face is smallness.
And it is the most horrifying and...
The claustrophobic cancer of the species is this addiction to smallness that people have.
Oh my God! The moment they see anything of any grandeur, it is other than grandeur of the spirit, grandeur of the soul.
They can look at Rambo's bulging muscles and want to go and work out, but they can't look at a virtuous soul or somebody who's reaching for higher than the treetops of the stars.
Sometimes it feels like Without wanting to claw them down to mere socially sanctioned, quote, reality.
And smallness is the great temptation of the species and it is the great temptation of the false self.
The false self is tiny.
It's a windbag full of pompous sails.
But it is also exquisitely and depressingly tiny.
And you'll notice this whenever you talk about anything great in your life or anything great that you want to achieve that is achievable by you.
I know that I have been called the dream crusher because I want to crush people's aspirations and dreams.
But I really just want to crush aspirations and dreams to do with the false self.
Somebody was... Commenting today that, hey, how come you, how come the skateboarders get all of the, how come you're hassling all the skateboarders?
You seem like some old guy sitting on his lawn and saying, hey, kids, get off my lawn!
You damn kids!
Kids these days, suspenders, very short suspenders and pants up around my nipples.
I understand that, and I'm certainly looking forward to that in my future, though I think I would invite them to talk philosophy.
After watching them practice stupid human tricks on my lawn for a couple of hours, I might invite them to look at something slightly deeper, grander and more beautiful in life than the possibility of flipping a skateboard around twice and landing on it again.
Much good that that does for your soul.
I still think there's better nutrition for our lives.
Oh, are you against hobbies?
You don't like hobbies?
Well, yes. That's right, I don't like hobbies.
Everybody's finally on to me.
The whole purpose of all of this has been to eradicate the evils of hobbies.
So... We want to help.
We want to help other people.
We have experienced great joy and great challenge and great heartache and greatness, right?
We have scope.
We have size. We have grandeur.
We have depth.
We have beauty.
We have terror. We have all of these things that are involved in growing your soul, which is, or rather, recognizing how large your soul actually is, which is much more closer to it.
it.
This is not invention.
This is archaeology.
So, sorry for these clicks, I'm I'm going to turn off the mic when I have to cough or sneeze because I don't want you to get your ear canal infected with FDR rationality viruses.
So we really desperately want to turn and help those behind us.
But there are many, many examples in mythology of the dangers of looking back.
Persephone and Lot, the dangers of looking back are enormous.
And looking back is fraught with danger for us.
And I'd sort of like to spend just a few minutes on this on my drive home and you can let me know what you think.
So, the great curse of human life and the great silent jackhammer into the soul of social convention is really around smallness.
You are not allowed to be large.
You're not allowed to be grand.
You're not allowed to be It's skywardly beautiful.
You are only allowed to be large in the service of others.
So you can be a priest who can preach, you can be a soldier who can kill.
You can only be large in the service of others.
You cannot be large in the service of yourself.
And human beings are, most human beings, are so scarred And fit into such tiny boxes that any size is terrifying.
Any size is terrifying.
People don't feel that they're small unless they're around somebody who's large.
They don't feel that they're hurt unless they're around someone who's whole or who at least knows that he's hurt, which is really the first and most important step.
We are made to fit into such tiny boxes, and if you look at the parents, priests, and politicians that we've been talking about, lo these months, you can, I think, see or appreciate now from this vantage point, from this cliff top, with a great view, I think you can appreciate that people invent enormous and Self-contradictory abstracts.
Not because they wish to worship size, but because they wish to be small.
And I think this is a very, very important thing to work at getting a handle on.
People don't...
Invent gods and states and the virtue of parents and family and the military.
They don't invent these vast things, these vast irrational abstracts, because they wish to partake of and to worship something that is larger than themselves.
Because there is nothing larger than the self.
The entire world that we perceive is encapsulated within the mind, through the senses.
There is nothing larger than the self.
As long as you recognize that there's nothing larger than other people's selves as well.
That fundamental empathy is really the root of virtue, in my view.
But there's nothing larger than ourselves, because it is our self that processes all abstractions.
There is something that validates ourselves, which is reality and logic and so on, but there's nothing larger than ourselves out there that we must bow to.
But people are absolutely addicted to atomizing themselves.
People are absolutely addicted to reducing themselves to mere pinpricks on pinpricks on pinpricks on angels dancing.
People are addicted to creating Infinity to make themselves vanish.
Any finite object in the face of infinity is very close and logically identical to non-existence.
Something that is infinitely small is almost exactly the same as non-existence.
Or as a woman said, I'm listening to this Living Without God.
It's a good audiobook if you get a chance to look for it.
Sometimes the difference between invisible and not there is not as great as you think.
So people create infinity in terms of the state and God and their parents' virtue or authority or value.
They create infinity not because they wish to worship infinity or partake of infinity, but because they wish to make themselves, their true selves, disappear.
So while our true self is in fact far larger than reality, because everything that we perceive in reality must be processed by the senses, and the senses are absolutely the foundation of the true self, as we've talked about before.
The true self connects directly with reality through the senses.
The false self is what makes up all this nonsense to confuse and thwart and shrink the natural human capacities to mere idolatrous slavery towards the infinite others of priests and politicians and parents.
So, this desire for non-existence, which is fundamentally manifested in a worship of infinite abstracts, is a complete inversal of what is And what is real and what is valid for the human personality, which is exactly what you'd expect.
If you wish to control people, you must set them at odds against themselves.
You must set them at odds against their sexuality, against their hunger.
You must set them at odds against all of their natural instincts.
You must set them at odds against their anger.
You must set them at odds against their feelings or needs for self-preservation.
You must continually set human beings at war against each other.
So we are all larger.
We are all the largest things we will ever experience, but that must be erased, because that's self-confidence.
Trust in judgment compared to reality, that's self-confidence.
But that can't be allowed, because with self-confidence comes, who are you to rule me?
With self-confidence in a primary relationship with reality and not to the opinions of others comes that fundamental question that everybody hates to ask and anarcho-capitalism alone answers.
Who are you to rule me?
No one. My relationships with reality, not to your approval.
So you must thwart people's relationship to reality, to their inner and their outer life.
You must make them feel small.
You must make them feel non-existent.
And we all live with this terror all the time.
The human society is an absolute terror and nightmare of self-destroyed people pretending to be whole.
And everyone is terrified.
Look at what Nate was talking about.
Send someone to a podcast.
Podcast freaks them out.
How frightened do you have to be where a few minutes of somebody's half-jokey opinions...
Becomes something that freaks you out and makes you angry.
Everybody's terrified. Everybody's tiny.
Everybody has within themselves the non-existence that is the natural scar tissue of constantly being compared with infinity.
Who are we relative to the state?
We're nothing. We're nothing relative to the state.
Nothing. Nothing. We're not as a single cell to the human body.
You and I, relative to the state, we are nothing.
We are not even as the livestock is to the farmer.
We are nothing. The state never asked me my opinion about anything.
Maybe I'm the blade of grass.
On a 10,000-acre ranch.
Maybe that's me, relative to the state.
But I am, effectively, nothing to the state.
Nothing. Stephen Harper, our Prime Minister, 35 million people in Canada.
What does he care about me?
I don't even exist to him.
I don't even exist to him.
Passes laws, smashes my life, elevates my income, depresses my income.
Creates jobs. Destroys jobs.
Well, actually just destroys jobs.
But who am I to the state?
Who are you to the state? We are nothing.
We are not like nothing.
We are nothing. Who is a Catholic relative to the Pope?
Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing. The Pope and the Cardinals all sequester themselves and come up with the next ridiculously inane slab of Catholic counter-reasoning.
Individual? What, 140 million Catholics or something like that?
God knows how many. 140 million?
Really, you think the Pope knows any of them, really?
You are nothing to the Pope.
You are nothing to the state.
You are nothing to God because God is nothing.
People say, well, I pray to God and God loves me.
Therefore, I am something in God's eyes.
No, you're not because there's no God.
It's all fantasy. And because there's no God, you have to substitute some other rule mechanism, which is religion, which is organized religion.
Or it's just Idolatrous self-worship in the form of paganism or naturism or something like that.
Wiccanism. And who are we relative to our parents?
There you think there would be some sort of opening for us to have an identity.
But of course, to our parents, we are nothing.
We are nothing. To our teachers, when we were growing up in public school, who were we?
We were nothing. Nothing!
Eh, maybe we had a relationship with an individual teacher.
Fine. But to the system, nothing.
Come on, Department of Education has how many hundreds of millions of children?
Do you think that you, as a child, meant something to that system?
You meant nothing!
Nothing! This constant infliction of nothingness upon our personalities is why we raise these tyrannical abstracts over our souls and wish ourselves into less than atoms, less than energy, less than electrons, less than protons, less than neutrons.
Nothing! This nothing is like a stake or a spike that is pounded into our foreheads.
For years and years and years, you are nothing.
And really, the priest and the teacher and the family member is the one who approximately and locally says, you are nothing.
That has to be. But they notice you to tell you that you're nothing.
But the state and the church and God and the educational system as a whole, ah, you're nothing.
You're nothing. You're less than nothing.
So, that's why we're so addicted.
We are treated as less than animals.
We are treated as less than livestock.
Ordered around, told to do things, given chores, given homework.
We don't get to choose.
We don't get to make decisions.
We don't get to interact.
How many children do I know these days who have no ability to carry on a conversation?
Or who, if you do start to talk to them, regard such attention, such curiosity towards them with...
Aghast or shy or wide-eyed or baffled in comprehension.
because they're treated as nothing.
And in order to avoid this pain of being treated as nothing, We go through entire lives continually scrubbing at ourselves, scrubbing at our identities like an obsessive compulsive and a stubborn stain, scrubbing and fraying and bleeding our identities into atoms and clouds of windy blood.
To kill the self, to kill the self, to kill the self.
The self is nothing, the self is nothing, the self is nothing.
How does that work in communism?
We all know. How does that work in Islam?
In the Muslim culture?
We all know. How does it work with the state?
We all know. How does it work with education?
We all know. How does it work with our families?
oh my god do we know we are not allowed to exist in the world and so we become addicted to the abstracts which erase us Because what is the alternative?
What is the alternative? I wrote in a poem once I fell and I'm sorry it's a little crude but I wrote in a poem once I fell out of the hole of my mother into the hole of my mother I fell out of the hole of my mother and into the hole of my mother from the body to the dead spirit How agonizing is it To look just not at your own history,
but at the thousands and thousands of years of human history and the billions of people around the world, and to realize that everybody's natural self is lacerated into atomic non-existence.
It's agony. It's agony.
It's liberating, and it's beautiful, because truth is beautiful, but it is agonizing.
To let go of inconsequentiality.
To let go of smallness.
To let go of non-existence.
To be.
To be.
To live. To speak. To listen.
To learn. To teach.
To grow. To think.
To be. It's not allowed.
And it is the fundamental provocation that turns the eyes of others into arrows.
Just a moment, let me mainline a little more Sudafed.
I think that my metaphor generator is running dry.
Oh yeah, baby.
Oh, that's good stuff. But to be!
Just to be! It's an affront to non-existence.
It is an affront to self-erasure.
It is an affront to the massive walking scar tissues that pass for human souls in our society.
To be proud of yourself and to love yourself for virtue, for compassion, for caring, for wisdom, for strength.
Not allowed. We only have value in self-erasure.
That's the paradox that is put forward to us.
Ellsworth Toohey speaks about this beautifully in The Fountainhead.
Only when you have eradicated the self, young Catherine, will you be able to walk up to the gates of paradise.
Open them up and stroll through.
And she says, but uncle, if I've erased myself, who will be walking through?
And he appreciates that because that is the question.
If I am supposed to be a slave to the state and supposed to worship the state, then how can I be called to have any virtue?
All I'm doing is reflecting the glory of the state.
I don't exist. If I'm supposed to worship God and do God's bidding and ask for Jesus to tell me what to do and every day pray to God, ask what would Jesus do, then who am I? I'm merely an empty vessel filled up with God.
That's not existence. That's got all the existence of a puppet.
That's animation. That's not life.
And relative to our parents, oh, our dear, dear, dear parents and our siblings, relative to our parents, what are we allowed?
What are we allowed?
Well, we're allowed to eat.
We're allowed to nod.
We're allowed to go to the washroom.
But we're not allowed to think.
We're not allowed to question. We're not allowed to criticize.
We're not allowed to be curious.
That is an affront. So we're not allowed any of that.
And this addiction to non-existence, to tiny, tiny, tininess, to hiding out, to scampering, To fleeing, to burrowing like small field mice scrambling around the toes of a Tyrannosaurus.
That is to be our life.
And what is the Tyrannosaurus? Our fantasies.
Our fantasies of infinity.
Our fantasies that we need others who aren't there, who don't exist.
The fantasy that proximity is relationship.
Ah, we went to a movie together.
We're friends. No, no.
No, you're not. That doesn't follow.
That doesn't follow at all. And our fantasy that to be at one with the truth is not equal to being nothing with others.
To being with the truth.
is inferior to not being with other people who are not being.
That is our fundamental fantasy.
To imagine that eating imaginary food will fill us, that is what stops us.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And to imagine that we can have any kind of connection with other human beings without being fully rooted or at least largely rooted in reality and in logic and in self-esteem and in virtue, it's madness.
Because we evacuate ourselves all the time for the sake of the approval of others, for the sake of not ruffling feathers.
We evacuate ourselves. We wish ourselves into non-existence all the time.
All the time. Because we want to get along.
We want to not ruffle feathers.
We want people to like us.
We want people to be our friends.
We want people to respect us.
And so what do we do?
We erase ourselves.
It's like I'm bringing you out to my house and I say, I really want you to buy my house.
And you say, well, I don't know about that.
I don't know if I need a four-bedroom house.
Maybe the lawn's a little bit too big.
I don't know if I want to do all that.
I don't know if I want to do all that mowing.
That seems like quite a lot of work.
I don't know if this is really the right house for me.
And I say, oh, well, hang on a second.
I think I can make it better for you.
I detonate it and blow it into atoms.
And then you say, sold.
That's human interaction in a nutshell.
We want people to like us.
We want to get along with people.
We want people to buy us or join us in our journey, to buy our stories, to buy our value.
And so what do we do? We blow ourselves up.
In the hopes of making a sale.
Well, there's nothing to sell.
And that's what approval is for.
Approval is not to...
Other people do not inflict approval and disapproval on you.
Because they want you to obey them.
They want you to not exist. If you change who you are to gain somebody else's approval, all you've done is erase yourself.
You have not gained their approval.
You have simply erased yourself.
Because you can't change yourself like that on a whim.
Somebody's arguing for the benefit of the Iraq War, and you are strongly against the Iraq War, as any sane human being would be.
You can't change your mind and your emotions and your philosophy to conform with that person.
All you can do is either...
Openly disagree, refrain from speaking, or openly agree.
If you openly disagree, that's honest.
If you refrain from speaking, that's cowardly.
And if you openly agree, that's contemptible.
But you don't get a chance to conform to someone.
You don't get a chance to be approved of by someone.
All you can do is self-erase.
All you can do is pretend that you don't exist, or that your opinions don't exist, or your feelings don't exist, or whatever.
So when it comes to who can come with me, the great temptation is in looking back.
Looking back at the people who've...
There's no one that you've left behind.
You are not moving when you get closer to the truth.
You are not moving.
Other people are moving away.
Because the truth is within you.
You don't go on a big journey to find the truth.
You look at reality, which you've been doing for a number of decades, I'm sure.
And you introspect. And you learn the truth through philosophy and through self-examination and through rigorous intellectual honesty.
The truth is in your senses.
It's in your house. It's in your car.
And it's in your head. And it's in your heart.
You don't go to climb a mountain and leave everyone behind and then say, gee, I wish I could go back and get them.
You're not going anywhere. Instead of running around like a dandelion spore, you're standing and putting roots into reality.
Everyone else is moving away.
You are not leaving them.
They are leaving you. You are not walking away from them.
You are not fleeing or in hot pursuit of the truth and hope that they catch up.
You are standing and rooting into reality.
And other people scatter.
Other people run away from that.
You can't go back and save people because there is no back.
they're all running away from you.
I mean, if you're standing there and everyone just takes off at a dead sprint, directly away from you, in every direction, never looking back, would it never looking back, would it be wise to say to yourself, they must have trouble keeping up.
I'd better go back and get them.
Well, there's no back there.
You haven't moved.
You've stopped doing the mad false self dance.
You're rooted. You're rational.
But you're not climbing a mountain and leaving people at base camp.
That's not how it works. You're running after people who are running away from you at full tilt.
and the only time that they turn and look back at you is in the desperate hope that you're not following them.
Don't be a stalker.
Ha!
Don't be a stalker.
When you begin to become yourself, when you begin to individuate, to detach yourself from the amoeba and evolve, People will flee from you like you're somebody spraying, spraying, I don't know, leper atoms directly up their nose or something.
And so there is no one to go back.
They're not staying anywhere.
And you're moving on.
You've just stopped willing yourself into non-existence.
So you pop into existence.
Well, it's a bit more than a pop. It's like an unfolding.
You unfold into existence from non-existence.
And everybody runs and flees and flies and burrows and tears themselves away from you.
Because that's an implicit attack on their own non-existence.
it's not even that implicit really and if a woman maces you because you're on a date and she just loathes you to death and she's highly offended by something and whatever right You do some terrible thing.
And she maces you and opens the door while the car is moving and does a dive roll out.
Is it worth yelling out the window, don't worry, I'll be back to pick you up.
Here's my number!
So when you begin to unfold into existence and people are ignoring it or scorning it or whatever...
What sense?
What sense could it conceivably make to say, hey, join me?
When people are running away from you as if you're holding a bomb, and sort of epistemologically you are, Hey, well, don't worry, I'm coming with you guys!
It's like, no, they're running away from you!
You know, you're pretty much a false self-suicide bomber.
You've got the explosives, you've got the shrapnel of truth strapped to your chest.
And they're empty armor, right?
Your shrapnel will take their armor off and reveal them to be human beings, but they think they're only armor, so it's death to them, so...
So they run. And you're like the, I don't know, idiot younger brother, which I was too, saying, Hey guys, wait up!
I want to play too! They're running away from you.
Oh, gee, they seem to have lost me.
They seem to have been moving very fast.
Well, I'll give them a call.
I'll wait. I'm sure it was just a mistake.
No, my friends, they're sprinting away from you as fast as they humanly can because you represent death to them, to this non-existence.
And I know this sounds all hyperbolic and very dramatic and so on.
Well, absolutely, I'm totally happy to be proven wrong.
You find somebody that you know and you've known for some time and you sit down and you tell them all about what's happening to you and see how they react.
Prove me wrong. I would be overjoyed if this was not the case.
This has been running for about a year.
A couple of thousand listeners.
Four or maybe five thousand. I mean, this is some of the greatest stuff in the world.
This conversation that we're all having.
How many people out there have the strength to look at non-existence?
To realize that they don't exist and to birth themselves?
Well, not many.
The more people win the lottery than continue in this conversation.
And I can see it, as I said, look through the mp3 files.
Podcast Zero. Hey, that's good.
Lots of people. Podcast One.
Oh, still quite a few people. Podcast Two.
Podcast Three. Podcast Four.
Podcast Five. Oh, they're starting to think of him.
Maybe he's not just talking about the state.
Ooh, I better not do that.
Too much hassle for me.
Too much confrontation with the ghosts around me.
So, those without the self...
There's a line from a really bad Queen song.
I'm the invisible man.
It's incredible how I can see right through you.
I'm invisible, and I can see right through you.
And that's very true. I mean, I'm not saying they wrote it in that spirit, but it's still true.
That if you have non-existence, you are incredibly perceptive towards the level of existence in other people, because it's your major scar tissue.
So, I think that it's just very important to recognize that there is no going back to get people to catch up.
Say to some friend, oh, I'm listening to this podcast.
I mean, you can do it. There's nothing wrong with it.
But be realistic about the expectations and what's going to occur.
Say to somebody, oh, I'm listening to this podcast.
It's about the terrifying depth and wonder of the human soul.
The beauty and glory and fear of self-growth.
Have a listen. Because I'm circling back to pick you up.
Well, this process has already been occurring.
And if they haven't asked, then I think it's fairly clear where they stand.
They have actively resisted these conversations.
Or said, you know, this unfolding into reality, this new self, that this is culty.
There's nothing. It's nonsense.
Oh, you're just a slave. You don't know what you're talking about.
You're cynical. You're in too many dating sites.
Whatever it is. Because everybody wants you to not exist again, so that they don't actually know that they don't.
They don't have to know that they don't exist.
Everybody wants you to vanish.
Everybody wants you to.
And if you're not going to go back into non-existence, they just want you gone.
They just want you gone.
And they're fleeing. They want to be gone.
In keeping with the metaphor, they want to be gone.
If you won't go back in the box, they'll just run away.
And that's the fundamental aspect of self-protection.
There's no evangelizing that's going to change people's minds.
And you really need to look at your own experience of this conversation, I think, to see that.
I mean, I know that I, whatever, talk, evangelize, and so on.
But... I'm just seeing who comes to me.
I'm not going around chasing people.
I'm just seeing who comes to the truth, right?
Not to me. I'm not the truth, but you know what I'm talking about.
Anyway, thank you so much for listening.
I've made it home relatively quickly.
Thank you so much for listening. Look forward to your donations.
The Freedom Aid Radio review is still up on the boards, and we still have some polls.
▲
Export Selection