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Feb. 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
55:28
657 Two Listeners Share their Scars

The historical difference between the wound and the knife...

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. It is 10.12am on Saturday, February 24th, 2007.
Hope you're doing well. I was going to respond to this on the board, but after posting a response using my voice, activated or speak and say software, I tried to correct the word course with cause, and I think it misinterpreted it as close, and closed the browser, which was a bit of a drag.
So I figured rather than redoing it all, I would simply do a short podcast as a response to a fine and noble post and honest post that a gentleman whose pen name is Presto Casso has posted on the board, and sorry for my late response.
Weird Feelings of Guilt is the title of the post, and I think it's a very interesting post, so I'll read little bits of it and let you know what at least my perspective is and see if it makes any sense to you.
Presto Casso writes, I thought in an effort to get the bottom of why I feel the way I do, I'll ask, what's going on with me when Steph talks about the value of virtue?
That our virtue or integrity is what's important, or when he talks about how empty a dishonest or lying sort of life is.
I end up feeling guilty.
I will sometimes think about illegal downloaded music or a lie I told or something like that.
I feel like in some way that I've ruined my chance.
I'm somehow tainted because of mistakes I've made or that I'm somehow a bad person.
It feels very much like a Christian-y sort of guilt and it bothers me when I feel this way because I don't think I should and it ruins the feelings of self-improvement that I get When, let's say, reading something or listening to a podcast, when I also have to deal with nagging feelings of guilt or an unworthy, depressed feeling that just won't leave.
Forgive me if this sounds a bit silly, but I'd like to deal with it if I could.
And I said, thanks for such an honest post.
First of all, none of us are perfect, but if we're mostly courageous in the big things, the little things won't really bother us.
Is there something larger than downloading that you feel you might not be living up to?
How are your personal relationships?
Are you hanging out with openly corrupt people?
I'd look there first. What do you think?
And he replies, It almost feels at times that I've lost the privilege somehow to speak about honesty or to partake of the benefits of integrity.
Or to partake of the benefits of integrity is something I want to be able to enjoy because I know I am not or have not always been that way.
Or how can I talk about the truth if I'm not always honest myself or talk about rigorous standards or the lives of others if I do the same?
I understand the standard I hold myself to is unrealistic, and it frustrates me to feel this way, because it kind of sucks the happiness away.
I wonder if it's not a holdover from the Christian-type life I used to pursue.
Forgive the jumbled nature of these thoughts.
I hope after some time goes by, perhaps tomorrow I'll have a clearer response.
And also let me know if you don't mind what you think about this additional info.
And he got some responses which were all very sensible and then he said thanks everyone for the positive feedback and in all honesty it doesn't bother me as much as it used to.
I realize now that the standards I held myself to were unrealistic and that if I do make a mistake or let's say lie and it doesn't bother anyone else and they think what I've done is nothing then maybe it is nothing and my standard...
And my standard I'm holding myself to is extreme.
But sometimes I still feel a bit bad or down or guilty about things.
I also wanted to share a few random thoughts I had about this over the last couple of days to see what you guys thought.
Here they are. Could my feeling guilty as if I've done something or am not good somehow be a sign of a lack of self-esteem or that I feel or believe unconsciously that I'm broken somehow?
Do you think my guilt and my obsessive-compulsive nature are related, and that I obsess over the potential of being guilty of something?
And one final bit. Yes, I am a bit obsessive about things like checking your door to see if it's locked, or being around sick people, or what I've said to someone, things like that.
Let me know if you feel this may be relevant at all.
Well, brother, we've all been there.
It is very, very difficult to have standards And not to feel that you are, at times, or we are at times, not meeting or matching those standards.
One of the things that, I was just talking about this with Christina last night, one of the things that I've really, really focused very hard on Free Domain Radio, it has been my obsession, to provide morality without severity.
To provide morality without severity.
I grew up in a British system.
I went to boarding school.
There was the heavy duty and the lectures and the lectures and the lectures.
My childhood was always filled with some damn stupid angry man or woman up there pacing back and forth, lecturing us children basically on how selfish and evil we were fundamentally, how irresponsible we were, how giddy, how foolish, how silly.
And there's this general environment when you're a child that adults create Stupid, boring, bad, unmotivating situations, and then blame you for not being motivated or positive or living with integrity.
So school was mind-crushingly dull and petty and false, and so we would goof around.
All the kids would goof around who had any kind of gumption at all because we were so bored.
What are you supposed to do?
And then, of course, despite the fact that I, and many of my friends when I was a kid, loved knowledge.
We read books, we discussed things on the side, but we just never had any motivation in school because school was so boring.
And I had no respect for my teachers.
No respect for my teachers.
And, of course, where you don't have respect, if you wish to have authority and you cannot evoke respect, you must inflict fear.
You must inflict punishment on people.
So this constant lecturing of how we kids were supposed to be responsible and mature and sensible and little Stepford robots, right?
The children are taught to be moral, and what moral always ends up turning out to be is convenient for the adults.
Convenient for the adults.
Tidy, be quiet, go to school, don't cause a fuss, don't think, don't question, don't...
Convenience for the adults and that of course is a causal chain all the way up to we are all taught that to be ethical to live with integrity is to be convenient to the rulers to vote like little sheep to pay our taxes like livestock to volunteer for wars to show up when drafted to be convenient livestock for the rulers and this is true of parents it's true of teachers it's true of priests what is called moral It's always what is convenient to those in power.
And of course, I'm certainly not the first to say this.
Neither will I be the last.
But this is an important thing, I think, to understand when you look at the question of integrity and the question of morality.
So one of the things that I've always, always, always tried to focus on here at Free Domain Radio is that goodness is something that is fun.
That morality is something that is fun.
That ethics...
Must, to really take root in the personality, be something that you want.
Ethics must be communicated without severity.
Ethics must be communicated without severity.
So morality without severity is really one of the central mottos and themes of what it is that we do at Freedom in Radio, because morality, we're all so exquisitely sensitive to questions of good and evil, right and wrong, integrity or lack of integrity.
We are all so exquisitely tuned and sensitive.
So for us, when we're told that we're bad, it's like being pushed down a well when you're a kid.
It's like a mountain falling on a little fern to be lectured about morality and told that you're bad when you're a kid.
And this, of course, is one of the fundamental reasons that I revile, loathe, hate, and wish to destroy Christian teachings, religious teachings, because that is morality with near infinite severity.
God is watching you.
Christ died for your sins.
You're going to hell every time.
You do a bad thing, an angel cries.
I mean, the guilt, the savagery, the destruction, the equation of ethics with severity is something that I've always, always, always disliked.
Ethics without empathy, ethics without joy, ethics without fun, ethics without positive motivations.
Can you imagine? I'll just do this last bit before returning to...
Well, I think this is relevant to the poster, but I'll just do this a little bit.
Just so you can understand, the whole thing is it's so hard to denormalize the abuse we all suffered as children.
It's so hard to denormalize it.
And thank God that we have the free market for that, to be able to compare and contrast these two situations side by side.
So, let's say that...
There's a toy store, two toy stores next to each other, and one of them is fun and bouncy.
He's got clowns and filled with great toys at good prices and And so on, and it's fun, and there's lots of good music, and there's places for the adults to play while the children go and look at the store shelves, and so on.
And that store, of course, is doing very well.
Next door, there's a dingy Soviet-style toy store with a couple of cheap-ass wooden dolls and some half-deflated basketballs, and it's dusty and cobwebby and kind of gross, and not even, like, good gross in the kind of scary Halloween kind of way, just drab and depressing, and everything's overpriced.
Well, can you imagine if the owner of the Soviet-style sad little toy store went around the neighborhood, herded all the kids into a big auditorium, and gave them a long lecture about how selfish and mean and bad and irresponsible and wrong the children were for not coming into his store?
To blame The consumers or the lack of consumption of what it is that you're offering on the consumers is insane.
Is insane.
Can you imagine a store that was going through difficulties getting its customers, writing long lectures to those customers and publishing them as advertisements saying how selfish, evil, bad, wrong, immoral, corrupt and degenerate people were for not coming to his store or her store.
Can you imagine such a thing?
In the free market it's incomprehensible.
It's incomprehensible. It would be a joke.
It would be something you would laugh at.
It would be a sign of mental illness.
But in school, and in church, and in parenting, the three crushing monopolies that are not subject to the free market with regards to children, there, it's taken for granted.
There, doing things any other way would be inconceivable.
So, and we'll just stick with school.
You can reconstruct the arguments for the others, I'm sure.
Very, very smart crew here at Freedom Main Radio.
So, in school, you're herded in, like livestock, and you're sat in rows, and somebody just lectures at you, tells you all of these things that don't have any relevance, don't mean anything.
You don't care. I mean, how often do I use math more complicated than percentages?
Yet I had to study it for year upon year upon year.
And I even would have done that if somebody had told me, well, you study math so that you can learn how to reason, so that you can do X, Y, and Z, which are very powerful.
Learn how to live your life better.
Learn how to live your life more consistently.
Learn how to be happier. Then, yeah, I would have assumed it was like a warm-up at the gym, right?
Then, yeah, absolutely. The study of history was just a boring recitation of names and dates and places.
No themes, no applicability to the modern world.
Mere propaganda. The study of science was just a study of the conclusions of science.
It was not a study of the methodology of science or how that methodology applied to other areas in life.
In fact, I would say to almost all areas in life.
So it's rote studying of conclusions, disconnected conclusions, with no respect for methodology or process or reproducibility of that methodology or process in other areas.
We were not taught anything about political science.
We were not taught anything about economics.
We were not taught anything about law.
We were not taught anything about anything that would make us intelligent citizens, because, of course, we're supposed to shut up, pay our taxes, and sit in rows.
And, of course, we weren't taught anything about philosophy or rationality.
Now, that's not entirely because the school individuals or the individual teaching or the principals or the people who come up with the curriculum.
It's not because those people are just evil and bad and so on.
The system is evil and bad, and certainly the people who take your taxes, whether or not you have kids or want your kids to go to a public school, those people are evil and bad.
It's simply the natural result.
You cannot have a value-based education in a plural society.
You simply can't. Can you imagine if I became a public school teacher and I taught the children that there was no God?
Can you imagine the firestorm that that would produce when the little Sikh kids go home and throw down their ceremonial daggers and rip that crap off their head and just say, oh no, no, my teacher says there is no God.
Can you imagine what would happen?
I'd be crucified.
I'd be lynched.
Can you imagine what would happen to the discipline within my classroom if I was, of course, all the schools are public, and if I was a public school teacher saying that you guys are forced to be here, that your parents are forced to pay for it, and if they don't pay for it, and if you don't show up, your parents will have men with guns show up at their house and if your parents don't go with them to jail, then your parents will be shot before your eyes.
Can you imagine what the truth would do to those kids?
Well, it would set them free, of course, but it would be pretty traumatic.
That's why so much stuff has to be hidden from children because adults are so guilty about the world that they're inflicting on children.
That's why the truth has to be so hidden from children and that's why we have to burrow towards the light of the truth.
Sometimes it feels from the very center, the very bowels of the earth.
So... The reason that I'm talking about all of this is that diffuse feelings of guilt or negativity or problems or challenges of this kind are natural and endemic.
And the thing that concerns me about this gentleman's post, we'll call him Bob, because everyone's name is Bob.
It's easy. It's a palindrome.
So what Bob does is he talks about his feelings of guilt and the phrases that trouble me, or at least that I would question, are He says, could my feeling guilty as if I've done something wrong or am not good somehow be a sign of lack of self-esteem or that I feel or believe unconsciously that I'm broken somehow?
Well, I think that it is an impossible challenge to try and introspect in your feelings without regard to the causes.
And this is something that I went through very early on in therapy.
I had this dream about this raging bitchy woman.
And, of course, being a dutiful student of Jung, I said, well, gee, maybe it's my female side.
Maybe I'm not being sensitive.
Maybe it's this. Maybe it's that.
All to do with my internal processes.
And my therapist said, yeah, it could be.
But let's start with the obvious.
Maybe it's your mom. Maybe it's your mom.
Female side, good lord.
How we try to recreate the world within us so that we let those who have inflicted pain upon us off the hook.
So much easier to invent your own cast of characters than to deal with the real world.
It was for me. Anyway, so...
So...
The last metaphor I'll use is if I sort of were to write a post and say, I'm scared of putting my hand on...
A stove when it's hot and burning myself, and maybe that's because I'm sort of elementally broken or I have low self-esteem.
Well, I think people would say, well, did you ever burn your hand on a stove?
And I'd say, oh, God, yeah, continually.
It's like, well, it could be that you don't want to burn your hand or you're afraid of the stove and putting your hand in it because you have low self-esteem or you're fundamentally broken, or it could be simply because it hurt to do it in the past.
And so the door that I would lean against, the door that I would beat down and smash through and invite you to look through, is the door that says that if I have a wound, it is not internal and it is not merely psychological.
If I have a fear, it is not internal, it is not merely psychological.
It is not self-generated, it is not self-perpetuated.
If I have a fear, or if I have pain, it is because I was frightened continually when I was younger, and it's because I was hurt continually when I was younger.
So when somebody says, could my feeling guilty as if I've done something, or I'm not good, somehow be a sign of lack of self-esteem, or that I feel or believe unconsciously that I'm broken somehow, No! No!
If you look at your emotions in isolation from the circumstances which provoked them, which created them, then It's exactly the same as if your parents cut your little finger off and you look at your hand and say, could it be the case that I'm missing my little finger because I'm low in self-esteem or I'm fundamentally broken?
If you don't get that somebody snipped your little finger off, then it's going to be very hard to understand the causes of your emotions.
You fear punishment for doing wrong because you were punished for disobeying.
Thank you.
And I wish it were that...
Sometimes I wish it were more complicated than that.
There certainly are complicated things in psychology.
I've been puzzling about a dream I had for like a week and I'm still yet to crack it.
There are really difficult things in psychology.
This is not one of them.
This is not one of those difficult things.
This is...
You were raised as a Christian child.
You were given all of these insane rules.
You were told that somebody was always watching you.
You were not given a methodology for thinking for yourself, but you were merely told what was wrong and that you would be punished if you disobeyed it.
And you were told that everything was your fault and that you were fundamentally sinful.
So, the reason that you have, and again, there may be other reasons, but this is the one that I would start with.
The reason that you feel fear and guilt is because you were punished randomly, emotionally, perhaps physically, but either way, brutally, for years upon years upon years when you were a child.
It's not a whole lot more complicated than that in terms of the diagnosis.
I mean, the cure is complicated and we can talk about that another time, which, of course, is embedded in the podcast and so on.
But why are you afraid of the heat on the stove?
Because you repeatedly had your hand thrust into it.
So you have to look outside of yourself for the causes of your emotions.
You have to start with looking outside yourself for the cause of your emotions.
And I only feel passionate about this because I really care about breaking you out of this shell of self-regard wherein your emotions act in isolation from your origins.
And that's just not... It's totally logical, and I did it for years myself, and I'm no high tower stone-throwing here, but it is essential that you break out of your self-regard, that you break out of the isolation, that you break out of the biosphere of regarding your emotions and your feelings in isolation from what provoked them.
If your parents starved you to the point where you grew very poorly, and you were bent over, and your knees were...
Whatever. The cartilage was missing because you didn't get enough protein or something.
And you were confined to a wheelchair, you wouldn't say, gee, I'm confined to a wheelchair because I lack self-esteem.
No, you were confined to a wheelchair because you were abused as a child.
It's not that you lack self-esteem.
It's that you were punished.
Unjustly. Repeatedly.
Brutally. And...
Without that, you can't get in touch with the anger.
And I've talked about this in other circumstances with Christina, but...
It's like you look at the scar and you have no memory of the knife, right?
So you look at this hole in your side, then you say, geez, you know, I got this hole in my side.
It's kind of grown over. I've got some knotty scar tissue.
I get infections from time to time.
Man, it must be because I just don't take care of myself.
It must be because there's something wrong with me.
I don't know why I got this hole.
I got this scar. It keeps leaking.
Well, no, you have a scar because you were stabbed.
And if you only look at the scar as a characteristic or an effect of your own personality, of your own self-generated doubt or self-generated lack of self-esteem, then you're missing the whole thing.
And it's fundamentally inevitable that you're going to miss the whole thing, at least I assume it is, because just about everybody does, and I certainly did.
But if you look at the scar and you look at it in isolation from the knife that went into you repeatedly and Then you view the scar as a deficiency within yourself.
You view the scar as a mark of a problem with you.
No! The problem is not that you have a scar.
The problem is that you were stabbed, my friend.
Do you think, he says, my guilt and my obsessive-compulsive nature are related and that I obsess over the potential of being guilty of something?
Well, I don't think that the relationship that's important is between your guilt and your obsessiveness.
The relationship that's important is between the two of these and being brutalized as a child.
Verbally, physically, emotionally, sexually, who knows?
But you were raised as a Christian, so it's going to be some combination of those things.
The fear of parental withdrawal, the fear of parental disapproval.
You can go watch Jesus Camp and tell me if those kids are going to grow up healthy.
So, don't look at the relationship between your internal states and other internal states, between fear and between guilt and between obsessiveness and between this and between that.
Look at all of these as the impact of violence against your nature as a child.
It's like you're standing in a big crater in Arizona or something.
There's a big crater left over from a meteor impact.
And you're saying, geez, you know, there's this high ridge over here and then there's this deep stuff over here.
I should measure the relationship between the two and so I could learn something about the hole and so on.
And you can go and measure all of these things and you can write down the average size of the pebbles you come across and the...
I don't know if it's recent, the smoke and the heat and the ratio between the top of the crater lip and the bottom of the middle.
You can do all of these things, but you're missing the whole point, because if you don't get that a huge asteroid hit the ground, then you're not going to understand really anything about the crater other than minutiae and self-referential details that miss the entire originating aspect of the situation.
Anyway, I hope that helps. I just wanted to point out that it is a very desperately tempting thing to look at our own states internally, because when we do that, we don't have to confront either the pain of the years of hurt that we went through as children, and fundamentally we don't have to confront those who hurt us.
That's why we prefer, when we have these pains and these aches and these emotional problems, we prefer to look at themselves in a self-referential manner so that we don't have to go out of ourselves, realize how much we were brutalized, and confront those who hurt us.
So I get that there's a payoff.
I totally do. I totally get that there's a payoff.
And I took that payoff a year, so there's nothing...
But once you get how much you have survived, then you can understand your own strength and you won't be focusing on the emotional problems that you have as things which are a diminishment or a lack or a problem or a deficiency just in you.
If you don't get that your kneecaps were beaten to a pulp, then having trouble walking looks like weakness.
It looks like, jeez, everyone else is walking.
I don't know why I'm having all these troubles.
Once you get that your kneecaps were beaten to a pulp when you were a child, any step you take is magnificent.
Any step you take is magnificent and you start focusing not.
Once you get the wounding, once you get the infliction of pain, you can start focusing on what you are achieving, what you are achieving, which is magnificent.
Because people aren't even out of bed, let alone in wheelchairs, let alone walking for the most part.
So the few steps that we can take, the pain that it costs us, the growth that it takes, that's all magnificent.
That's all something we should be enormously proud of.
But if we don't get the original wounding, we won't see the progress that we're making.
All we'll see is the deficiency from a perfect standard, which is illusory.
Okay, there's another short letter or an email that I received that I would like to talk about.
This is Bob, but it's a different Bob.
And this is the sequence that he is talking about with regards to his Bobette, his girlfriend.
And he says this is a 16-step sequence of problems that he has with her, and I think that they're very interesting.
And again, I think they tie into this kind of theme, and we'll talk about how they show up.
One, she shows upset and frustration with me that I've not followed what she thought was your advice.
So I give some advice, and then his girlfriend, and the advice was to take a break from philosophy if it's causing lots of problems in his relationship.
So one, she shows upset and frustration with me that I've not followed what she thought was your advice.
Two, I immediately feel anxiety and fear.
Three, I think that my love of philosophy is being threatened.
Four, I have an urge to defend myself, my love and enjoyment of philosophy and self-development.
I also feel fear of what I would do otherwise.
5. I tell her that you did not mean that I should take a break from philosophy, that I should take a break from talking about philosophy with her.
6. She immediately disagrees, citing what you had said.
7. I cut her off and say, no, I talked to you directly, I know what you meant.
8. She gets upset again that I've cut her off and not believed her.
9. She feels as if I am saying she is stupid.
10. She says to go to where I transcribed much of it and points out where you said it.
11. I begin to question whether or not that is what you meant, but continue to be upset.
12. She then tells me how she feels hurt, saying that she felt I was implying No.
9. She's stupid. 13.
I begin to tell her I am scared of not following her interpretation of your advice.
14. She asks why I attacked her instead of telling her I was scared of following her interpretations of your advice.
15. I apologize profusely.
16. She seems to think that I am overwhelmed with it by having it in my ears.
Audio, books, podcasts, message boards all day.
What would cause someone to show upset and frustration prior to or in conjunction with being curious?
What could be some reasons why she wasn't curious?
Well, I'll sort of start with the end, if you don't mind, and we'll sort of work our way back a little bit.
Well, I sort of have to reiterate this point, which I've made before, and there's no reason why I wouldn't have to reiterate it again, because it's a challenging point, at least it certainly was for me.
What we're doing here is very, very, very, very advanced.
What we are doing here is extraordinarily advanced.
To continue the metaphor that we were just using, There's not a whole chunk of people out there running a marathon while we're struggling to get out of our wheelchairs.
We are not struggling to rejoin the human race because we are broken and they are whole, because we are smashed and they are healthy, because we are unwell and they are vibrant with health.
We are not struggling to rejoin the human race but to advance it.
I'm feeling particularly preachy this morning.
I hope that it's not turning you off.
We're not trying to catch up with people.
We are so far ahead of the pack that they can barely see us.
So when you say, why is it that she wouldn't be curious?
It's like saying to somebody who grew up in a cave in England, why is it that they can't speak Mandarin?
If you view yourself going through this process of self-growth, the philosophy of trying to strive to understand the truth, if you look at this as a process of fixing a brokenness within you so that you can be normal, then you're missing the whole point.
And I hate to put it that baldly.
I don't have a choice that bluntly.
You're missing the whole point.
We're evolving here.
You know, we're growing legs, we're growing lungs, we're becoming mammals.
We're evolving here.
Just look around at the world, how primitive it is.
Crazy religious beliefs, everybody believing in all these crazy things that don't exist.
The virtue of family, gods, countries, races, classes, all of these things.
The world is completely enmeshed, admired in the magical, blinding, corrosive, giddy, druggy fog of mysticism of one form or another.
Mythology, as a board member puts it, the world is run by mythology.
People live in fairy tales.
And as long as they only have reference to fairy tales, then they appear to be relatively normal.
It's normal, right? Compared to what?
That's always the question. Compared to what?
A politician is normal compared to the fantasy of the state.
A politician is normal relative to the fantasy of the voters.
A soldier is normal relative to the fantasy that soldiering is a virtuous and noble occupation.
Sleeping Beauty is perfectly sensible relative to a Grimm's fairy tale.
Lord of the Rings is an absolutely perfect history relative to Tolkien's writing.
Star Trek is perfectly relevant.
It's perfectly accurate relative to Gene Roddenberry's creative fantasies.
It's just relative to reality they're all insane.
Or not insane, but Lord of the Rings is not insane relative.
It's just not true relative to reality.
So Gondor is in the middle to the left of Mordor in every map, so it's consistent.
It's just that Gondor doesn't exist in reality.
So a politician looks sensible relative to one's belief in a country, it's just that a country doesn't happen to exist in reality.
So when we're trying to compare our thoughts and ideas to reality, God forbid, we're icebreakers, we're coming out of the massive entombed igloo that the entire planet lives in.
We're struggling to fight our way free of the fog of social conditioning and fear and conformity and bullying and power and violence.
That runs society. Pay your taxes or go to jail.
Come to church or be yelled at or be disapproved of or be beaten or be dragged there.
Go to school and learn all the shit they're shoveling or you'll get bad grades.
You'll be left behind.
You'll get stuck with the stupid kids.
You'll be put on Ritalin.
You'll be punished. You'll be drugged.
You'll be brutalized. You'll lose your future.
The whole world is run on force and bullying.
The whole world. Children's lives.
are picking their way through cages of predators trying not to get mauled, or if they do get mauled, get mauled as little as possible.
So if you still feel like you are burrowing up to the surface where everybody else is having a great time and being normal and healthy, you don't get the world.
And that's okay, because I still don't get all the world.
I'm still working on it. I'm still trying to comb over this stuff and come up with more truth.
But you don't get the world.
If you think that we are trying to get to what is called normal we are trying to detonate what is called normal because what is called normal is war and what is called normal is the violence of taxation and what is called normal is the brain destroying mental gulags of public schools and what is called normal is a worship of soldiers and cops and what is called normal is a slavish obedience to collective fantasies like countries and what is called normal is begging for a scrap of freedom from rulers through the hollow act of stuffing a piece of paper into a box and what is called normal Is worshipping a dead,
bleeding man who barely existed 2,000 years ago.
And what is called normal is revering priests for lying to and frightening and, more often than we would ever care to admit, raping children.
What is called normal is a Scorsese movie.
What is called normal is sickening displays of mental illness called modern art.
What is called normal or virtuous or valuable is the celebrity party druggie lifestyle.
We are not here to achieve normal.
We are here to detonate normal.
We are here fundamentally in this conversation to totally denormalize normal in the same way that other ethical pioneers before us denormalized normal.
They denormalized slavery, which was normal for all of human history until the 18th and 19th centuries.
Or feudalism. Or the rightlessness of women and children.
Or the nobility of the aristocracy.
Or, or, or we could go on and on.
Denormalizing, detonating what is considered normal is what we are doing.
So do not think that there is a normal out there that through this work you will approach.
And do not think that everybody else is healthy and you just need to get there through self-growth.
That's not even close.
You couldn't be further.
Even if you believed normal, you couldn't be further from the truth.
To never know the truth is to be closer to the truth than to see it and to run the opposite direction.
But the truth is that we're not trying to grow into normality.
We're not trying to fix ourselves so we can run with the herd again.
We are less broken than the majority.
We are evolving. And that is risky, and that is dangerous, and that is unpleasant, and that is essential.
And, frankly, there's a lot of joy in it, at least for me.
So, as to your question, why is she not curious?
Well... Why doesn't she speak Chinese?
Because she's never spent years learning how to speak Chinese?
She was never raised being taught how to speak Chinese.
Do you see the irrationality that is still embedded within the way that you approach this?
That I'm not trying to be harsh. I'm trying to sort of be encouraging and liberating.
Because if you think you're trying to rejoin normal, you're going to stay in the same tomb as the last barb, which is looking at yourself as deficient and broken, rather than recognizing that when you break out of the mold, when you break out of the herd, when you break out of the matrix, it hurts like hell.
But at least you have a chance!
At least you have a chance for happiness and joy.
You join the herd, you stay with the herd, all you have is conformity and approval and hollowness and emptiness and despair.
And unconscious, striking, biting abuse.
Nothing that is worth anything.
You spend your entire time drugging yourself with approval to avoid the fear of emptiness.
That is that most men live the lives of quiet desperation.
That is what is the alternative to the pain of growth.
And once you set a foot upon this course, as I've talked about before, it takes you along.
You think you're stepping on a sidewalk, you're stepping on a catapult.
Bang! Off you go.
So there's no turning back, and that's why you have to recognize where we are.
Where we are, we are evolving.
We are leaving the collective soup of collective fantasy.
We are breaking out of mythology and approaching the real world as best and as strongly and as encouragingly as we can.
We are not running with the herd.
We are not fixing ourselves to run back with the herd.
There is no going back to the herd.
So, when you ask what would cause someone to show upset and frustration prior to or in conjunction with being curious, what could be some reasons why she wasn't curious?
Well, because hostility to a difference of opinion, to that which threatens us, is the natural state of brutalized humans.
It's like, as I talked about recently, if you stick a pit bull with a fork a couple of times an hour for a couple of years, let the pit bull out, it starts biting, savaging, running rampant.
Well, why isn't the pit bull nicer?
I'm not saying you're sticking it, you know what I mean.
Because the pit bull's been brutalized and harmed and smashed up and broken.
And curiosity is a very advanced state to get into.
Curiosity as to difference, gentleness as to opposition, is a very advanced state.
It takes years and decades to get it really under your skin.
I think it's more natural if we're raised that way, but we're not.
It's easier to learn Mandarin from scratch You know, if you're some hunky wasp or something, it's easier to learn Mandarin from scratch, which would take five to seven years, I would imagine, to become truly fluent.
It's easier to learn Mandarin from scratch.
So you've been studying Mandarin for now two years.
And you're with all these other hunky wasps and you're saying, geez, I wonder why.
I wonder why they can't speak Mandarin.
Because you have this fantasy that everyone speaks Mandarin and you somehow missed the class.
So you're trying to learn Mandarin so you can speak everyone else's language.
That's not true. That's not what happens when you grow.
Nobody else speaks Mandarin. This language that we are developing that is connected to reality, that is validated by science and logic and feedback and objectivity, this is a new language.
This is one of the reasons why there's so many podcasts.
It's a new language. So nobody else speaks it.
You're not trying to catch up.
So... When you say to me, well, I'm getting into all of these conflicts because of my philosophy, or my preference for philosophy, my love of philosophy, and my paralysis in the realm of conflict, and then my girlfriend gets angry at me when Steph says,
don't talk about philosophy with your girlfriend, and then she catches me on the board or catches me listening to a podcast or something like that, and then she gets angry at me, Well, that's not a good idea, right?
That's not a good situation to be in.
And you can take the pressure off by not talking about philosophy with her, but if she then says, no, no, what Steph said was to not study philosophy at all, that's, to me, in my opinion, and I don't know enough about the relationship to be certain, but that's kind of primitive.
It's a kind of primitive response.
She is threatened by your philosophy By your preference for philosophy.
And I'm sure that's because it makes you a difficult person to be around at times.
Because you're still learning this stuff, right?
And it takes a long time.
It certainly took me more than 20 years to come up with anything coherent.
I think it's quicker now because I've tried to put some coherence out there of what I've learned.
But... She's not asking you, tell me why this is so important to you.
She's not asking you...
I need to understand these feelings that you're experiencing.
She is getting upset and angry with you because you're not following her interpretation of what I said.
It's not my orders, and God knows I don't give any, but she has turned her understanding of what I said into orders that you must follow, and when you deviate from those orders, you are to be aggressed against.
So of course you're going to feel anxiety and fear.
Why? Because you're being attacked! And then you think that your love of philosophy is being threatened because she's telling you, oh, you're not supposed to touch philosophy for a month or two.
That's what Steph said. I mean, neither of you have any interest in following anything that I say, right?
So she says stop studying philosophy because that's what Steph said and you think that she's attacking your love of philosophy.
So you feel attacked and you react as if she is attacking philosophy.
Your love of philosophy.
And then you argue about what it is that I said, and you check this and that and the other.
And you really do need to sit down with this young lady, and you really do need to talk about, not the details, not the details, but the essence, but the essence.
Don't focus on trivia.
Don't focus on what I may or may not have said.
That is not going to resolve anything.
Of course, I'm not even part of this equation, even in any kind of remote way.
It's something else that you're dealing with, something else that you're talking about.
So, when you say, oh, Steph didn't mean I should take a break from philosophy, just a break from talking about it with you.
Then she goes and, you know, finds what I said.
And then you cut her off and say, no, I talked to Steph directly and I know what he meant.
And then she says, well, you're saying that she's stupid or lying or wrong and so on, right?
Do you get that this has nothing to do with philosophy?
Do you get that this has nothing to do with anything that I said?
Because I can guarantee you that it doesn't.
Your philosophy is threatening her or your love of philosophy or something about your philosophy is threatening her.
So then she says, well, you're supposed to take a break from it.
So she's trying to impose rules upon you.
And then you feel that those rules that she's trying to impose upon you are detrimental to your happiness and your well-being.
So then you fight back.
And then you go and check the podcast, or I guess it was the call-in show, and then you dispute about...
I mean, this is a religious dispute, right?
Like, there's some sort of text that you look for to find the answers.
The answers are not in what I said, and even if what I said was completely unambiguous, it would not solve the problem, which is that you guys don't trust each other.
If you feel, my friend, that this woman...
is hostile towards your love of philosophy and that violates a very basic tenet of yours.
That's what you need to talk about.
You cannot be in love with someone.
You cannot have the potential of loving someone if you feel that they are hostile to that which you value the most.
It's a complete and total logical contradiction.
You can't do it emotionally.
It's impossible.
So, my concern is that philosophy is being used to, and this could be totally right, totally wrong, I don't know, I'm just going to throw it out there and you can tell me if it makes any sense.
You were enormously rejected, and your values, as a child, your values were stomped on, were thrown out, people were hostile towards your true self, as people are always hostile towards the true self, unless they themselves have broken free of the collective madness.
You were rejected, everything that you believed in was trampled upon, and this is a stab wound that you have.
And of course you have it.
I mean, you're very intelligent, very verbally acute, have a great love of wisdom and knowledge, and are a hot pursuit.
You dropped everything and ran towards the truth when you found it.
Sprinted like a madman.
Fantastic. That is to be admired, in my view.
And you're not seeing your mom, right, who rejected everything about you and would continue to do so if she could get her grubby little hands on your soul.
But I don't think you've dealt with the pain of that rejection that occurred for many years from your mom.
And that which we reject, we repeat.
So here you're in a situation where a woman is rejecting you and you are hot-bloodedly reacting to her as if she were attacking you.
You feel that the woman is rejecting your greatest values, as your mom did, and of course it triggers your scar tissue.
Of course it triggers your scar tissue.
What else could it do? If you haven't processed and grieved for the years of rejection, Angry, unconscious rejection that occurred at the hands of your mother, then you are forever going to be stuck repeating this with your girlfriends.
And it's not fair to them, and it's not fair to you.
I'm not saying she's a saint.
I'm not saying you're a saint.
I mean, there's lots of things that went wrong in this interaction, but to cut to the fundamentals...
If you pass a judgment on someone that you're involved with that they are hostile to your deepest values, you can't date them.
I'm not saying that she is hostile to your deepest values because there's too much history mixed up in this.
There's too much that's going on that comes from your mom, that comes from your childhood.
And hers too. She's acting out her stuff too.
Don't worry about that. But forget about that.
That's not your business right now.
You have to free each other from your histories.
You have to free each other from your pasts, from the cages of what went before.
But to do that, you have to recognize that they are cages and that you were brutalized when you were young and you were rejected and you were controlled and you were scorned and you were diminished.
And everything that was of treasure and of value to you was dumped upon, was rejected, was scorned.
And that is going to make you very sensitive To feeling criticized for that which you treasure.
So, you have to let her be free of your past.
And that's easier said than done, of course, right?
I mean, it's what we all want, but it takes a lot of work.
So, whatever you can do to get the money together for counseling, do it.
And keep digging into the issues with your mom.
Now, the last thing that I'll say, sorry about this lengthy one, I'm trying to keep him short, but there's a lot to talk about here, is that you say, why wasn't she curious?
Right? But, my friend, you weren't curious.
You weren't curious.
She shows upset and frustration with me that I've not followed through what she thought was your advice.
I immediately feel anxiety and fear.
I think that my love of philosophy is being threatened.
I have an urge to defend myself.
I also feel fear of what I would do if I don't continue to grow.
In that sense of overwhelming reaction to stimuli, curiosity is going to be very hard.
So, I wouldn't worry so much about her and her curiosity.
If you want to get this into your relationship...
Then you need to display it.
And if you feel like you're guiltily posting on the board or listening to podcasts or reading books on philosophy or self-growth or whatever, if you feel that you're having an affair with improving your soul, then that's going to be a pretty volatile situation to be in.
And then when she catches you, then she's going to get mad at you and then you're guilty and upset and feel attacked.
It's all just history.
It's all just history colliding.
There's no two people in the present there.
There's just a bunch of scar tissue interacting and inflaming and being inflammatory.
So... I think that you need to try and come to some conclusions about this woman, and you can't, you simply can't, in any good conscience, and again, I'm not trying to make morality severe or anything, you can't, in any good conscience, be dating somebody when you think that they are hostile to your deepest values.
It's just cruel. It's just cruel, and it's just going to be endless.
Fights and frustration. And you're going to be wasting your time.
You're going to be wasting her time.
You're going to be hurting yourself.
You're going to be hurting her. You're going to feel guilty about that when it finally hits you.
And you're going to be wasting the time that you could have otherwise been used for growing.
And I know you feel the clock is ticking.
And I know that you feel like you've got to settle down.
But this is not the way to do it.
You do have to grow into this.
I had to. I'm still growing into it.
Other people have to. Christina did.
We all have to grow into this.
You can't rush it.
What you can do is stop inflicting these kinds of interactions on yourself and your girlfriend.
The first thing to do with that is to keep examining.
Write down a journal. There's lots of exercise books out there.
Even if you can't afford a therapist right now, there's lots of ways to do it.
Such that... You can really work on the past issues with your mom so that you don't keep grafting the past onto the present so that you can denormalize what happened before.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to everybody's donations.
I had a nice donation this morning.
I can't tell you. It puts a bounce in my step and makes me want to podcast.
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