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Feb. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:00
659 Politics as Theology

Modern medieval scholastics deify Reagan

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well, it's Steph.
It is 8.20am on some damn day.
24th of February? Something like that.
Anyway, how's this for a paragraph?
And what of Reagan? Of all three figures that sat to Reagan and John Paul II, Ronald Reagan, buoyant and optimistic, would seem to be the one most obviously in tune with his people.
When I first...
Okay, the early section of the 70s in this book this guy's reviewing, The Nightmare Years, in O'Sullivan's admirably blunt designation, now seems unnervingly topical.
He puts a question mark after the decline of the West, but it was pretty much a given in those days.
The Carter administration, he declares, was a post-American administration before the concept of post-Americanism had been invented.
They assumed that the American century had come to a premature end.
It wasn't just that Carter was woefully inadequate to the challenge of the times, but that his inadequacy was presented as a kind of moral virtue.
His promise of a government, quote, as good as the American people, is characteristic of the man both in its vanity and in its casual slur of its predecessors.
One line from a commencement address at Notre Dame captures the style.
We are now free of that inordinate fear of communism which once led us to embrace any dictator who joined us in our fear.
As O'Sullivan notes, that single sentence performs multiple tasks.
It exonerated the Soviets, indicated the United States, and advertised a new hostility towards unrespectable allies.
Who shared traditional views of the apparently non-existent communist threat.
The Carter administration was not homogenous.
It was a freak show coalition of sanctimonious narcissists committed to specious concepts of global justice.
Sixties radicals reflexively attracted to whatever option conflicted most with America's interests and foreign policy realists who'd concluded that the Soviet Union was a permanent but stable fixture of the global scene.
And I'm going to use this admirably instructive passage to put forward a thesis, which I think is interesting, and which you may find some value in if you consume the popular media at all.
I've grown a little bit inured to this kind of stuff, just having read it for so many years, but I think it's really quite fascinating, and What I plan to do when I get around to doing this stuff more permanently is to write a program which translates status nonsense like this into the real terms, like the real words. And really that's...
Almost all of what is required is to put things in their real terms, is to blow away the theology of this kind of language, and to substitute for it a more realistic and real view of the world,
or To not use language to obscure and to dazzle and to create these Gordian knots of emptiness masquerading as meaning, but rather to simply state bluntly what was the case.
So, there's a couple of theses that I'll throw around in this.
One, of course, is that it only takes one...
Virtuous leader to justify the system.
And the hunt that is continually being pursued, or the hunt that is continually on the go, is the hunt for the virtuous leader.
And this, of course, is a complete fantasy.
The hunt for the head of the mafia, who is a great and wonderful and noble guy.
This is why presidential and statesmen and things like that, these words are invented.
The drive to find a political leader who is virtuous, despite all...
Of course, it always has to appear in the past.
It always has to occur in the past.
The desire to find a political leader who is virtuous...
is continual and an absolutely empty quest.
You cannot find a political leader who is virtuous.
It is never going to be mentally healthy or virtuous to seek power over millions of people.
To seek violent power over millions of people, which was true the first day of the Republic, 1776, as it is now, to seek violent power over millions of people is not a healthy task, not a healthy goal, not a healthy personality that wants that kind of power.
That is an empty, narcissistic, vainglorious shell.
And I don't care if you're Washington or Jefferson or Churchill or any of these sorts of people.
You are not mentally healthy if you seek political power.
And that, of course, is looking for a virtuous slave owner.
Looking for a virtuous rapist, you can find all of these particular characteristics.
That occur and they will make no sense, right?
When you put it in those terms, right?
You look for a virtuous slave owner.
Well, yeah, there may be a slave owner who did not beat his slaves and did not sleep with his female slaves or rather rape his female slaves since you can't have consensual sex with a slave.
But nonetheless, this is somebody who still owns slaves and still works within the institution of slavery.
So you're just not going to find these people.
And I would say that the founding fathers, of course, because they had steeped themselves so much in things like Locke's Second Treatise on Government and knew and had experienced the predations of King George to the degree where they had a hostility towards government, but they still created a government.
It's like abolitionists creating slavery.
Less slavery, more limited slavery, but still, slavery nonetheless.
You can't find virtue in political leaders.
You simply can't find virtue in political leaders.
And people will always try.
People will always try, oh, this leader is bad.
This leader, though, oh, is wonderful.
This leader was sort of mediocre.
This leader was good, but not great.
And they're just doing these random rangers.
It's like, what's your favorite song?
I mean, it's got nothing to do with any kind of objective reality.
The objective reality is that these people were the heads of thugs who pillage people for their money, who indoctrinate their children, and there's just no mentally healthy process by which you can arrive at a desire and there's just no mentally healthy process by which you can arrive at a desire So you will see this, of course, this occurs on the right and, of course, on the left, this mad quest for the virtuous leader.
Jefferson was a hero.
Jefferson was a hero.
Yeah, okay, Jefferson was a hero.
Jefferson wrote that all men are created equal, Jefferson owned slaves and raped them.
So a slave owner who violated his own most basic premise of human equality, a slave owner and a rapist.
Hmm. I wonder if we shouldn't go down to Monticello and kneel before his magnificent brain-spanning virtue.
So, I mean, we could sort of go into more details, but...
Reagan? Oh man, that's the most ridiculous thing in the world.
But these people live in a world of words where facts and first principles mean nothing, are completely meaningless.
And that is really sad when you think about it.
It's so inevitable. Political commentators are where religious writers used to be.
I mean, this is where this type of personality that in the Middle Ages would argue about whether Adam had a belly button These kinds of people have now become, the religious writers, the scholastics, have now become political writers, and it's exactly the same formulation.
You simply are bandying about myths.
You are simply writing about, you might as well be writing about, Zeus is writing about Reagan.
You might as well be writing about Anubis as writing about Hillary Clinton because nobody has any first principles that they're working from.
Nobody has any clear definitions of what is occurring and people almost never resort to the facts.
Because facts are difficult. Facts are controversial.
Facts are not partisan.
Facts are emotionally difficult to integrate because they cause quite a good deal of alienation from yourself if you pursue them with relationship to the existing world, your existing social circles, your family, your friends.
So there's this...
Talk in America and perhaps in other places, too, about this cultural war between the left and the right, between the socialists and the, I don't know, religious capitalists or whatever the right-wing myth is.
And it's ridiculous.
I mean, it is exactly the same as the theological war.
Everybody lives in words.
Everybody cherry-picks.
Nobody works from first principles.
The fact that they're just two gangs.
It's just two gangs competing for the same.
And of course, through their ballot access laws, they wish to keep any third gang from coming along because two gangs can survive by preying on two lampreys or leeches that are sitting on your legs sucking your blood can both survive, but both of them will resist a third one coming along that will take away any kind of nutrition.
So with phrases like this, that the Carter administration was this, but Reagan was buoyant and optimistic and turned everything around, and this and that and the other, oh man, it's just a fairy tale.
It's a complete and total fairy tale.
And no reference to the facts.
No reference to the facts.
It's just a story that's been inherited.
It's somebody looking at a picture and saying, gee, Reagan seems to be smiling a lot.
He seems to be buoyant. He seems to be optimistic.
He seems to be this. He seems to be that.
But none of it has any relationship to reality.
Normally, if you wish to judge somebody's effectiveness, you look at their stated goals and you look at their achievements and you measure the gap between.
If you're just willing to look at somebody's efficacy, somebody's basic competence, that's what you would do.
But that, of course, is an uncomfortable thing to do with Reagan for most people who believe in this right-wing, buoyant, optimism, Reagan-changed-the-world kind of nonsense.
Because, as we know, and I've talked about this before, Reagan's stated goal was to reduce government.
And did Reagan reduce government?
No, of course not. The federal government grew by two-thirds under the Reagan tenure.
The deficit completely exploded.
So he just deferred the spending to other people.
And, of course, as Harry Brown used to point out, I think it was Eisenhower who left the White House talking about the dangers of the military-industrial complex.
Well, that's great when you're leaving.
How about doing something while you're in?
How about doing something when you actually have power rather than just warning people about all the things you screwed up and blaming others when you leave power, right?
What kind of sense does that make?
Well, it makes political sense.
It just doesn't make rational or moral sense.
So, something that we might understand about Reagan's tenure is That would be a little bit different than the mythology.
Again, you just work from the facts.
You just work from the facts. Well, during Reagan's tenure, the stagnation and then eventual decline of the average American's living wages and living standards began, right?
Well, because, like a tooth being eaten away from the bottom, he was creating all these massive deficits that began to eat away at economic growth.
And the massive expansion in government that was funded through a hidden tax on the future, which is what a deficit is, Hidden in the present, massive and escalated in the future.
This was something that began the slow decline of America.
Now, Carter, of course, suffered under stagflation.
Was that Carter's fault? Well, Christ, no.
He was just a grinning peanut farmer.
What the hell did he know? That was the fault of the Keynesians, who said that this was impossible, who talked about these stimulus packages, and it was also the fault of the CIA, and it was also the fault of The British in the 19th century because the West had been pillaging and raping the Middle East for 100, 150 years and the Middle East finally got pissed off enough to create...
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, and began to jack up the price from its historical status or historical position.
And that is what hammered the United States with its high oil prices.
And there were other factors which we don't have to bore ourselves with at the moment, but...
No, Carter's just sitting around, right?
Carter's sitting around, and an asteroid hits the White House, and then people say, my God, Carter's incompetent.
Look at this mess of a White House.
Well... All of these things have a long, long, long history.
The hostages that were taken in Iran and kept for, what, 400 days, 450 days?
Well, that is a long history.
You don't get to understand that unless you understand what the British were doing in Iran from the early parts of the 20th century.
You don't get to understand that unless you understand the historical hatred that Iran had when the democratic regime It was toppled through CIA maneuvering on machinery in 1952, I think it was, and the resulting 15 years of rule by a hated, considered to be a largely foreign puppet, and the resulting extremity.
One of the reasons that Islam has such power in the Middle East is that, certainly in Iran, the clerics had some protection from the government.
Because they were clerics and they were considered to have some power with the people, and I'm sure that they did.
And so the clerics were able to speak out against the government much more so than, say, your individual lone newspaper writer or columnist or anything like that.
And so as the only open voices of opposition, because they had the sort of religious shield around them, they were considered to be more upright, more noble, less in conjunction with the realms that were in place in a lot of less in conjunction with the realms that were in place in a lot of And, of course, the religious schools were places where you could go to get some political education as well.
They were shielded, right?
You didn't get a lot of government agents coming in to try and bring down the clerics or the imams because they were considered to be popular with the people and so on.
So it was inevitable that when you put in a hated puppet government, That is afraid to kill the priests that the priests are going to attract the revolutionaries and they're then going to become centers of education and they're going to become centers of rebellion and they're going to become admired centers of opposition to the hated realm.
So naturally when you get a revolution all of this stuff is so perfectly and horribly inevitable.
Naturally, then, when you get a revolution, what happens?
Well, what happens is that the priests become the rulers, right?
I mean, the priests are the untouchables to a large degree under the sort of hated existing regime.
And that's when the regime gets overturned after the priests have infected everyone with religious hatred and bigotry and so on.
You get a theological society.
You get a theocracy coming in.
This is also inevitable, right?
I mean, this cycle of violence is just so wretched and just so...
It's like a pendulum with a knife at the end, just, you know, on a conveyor belt of human beings, slitting their throat.
And, you know, by the hundreds of minutes, it seems, with democides.
So... This kind of stuff, what happened?
Well, people in the Middle East had been pissed off at the West for ex-foreign exploitation for decades, and so they got together and they just started to...
Well, they were dumping U.S. holdings because of the massive inflation, and they raised the prices of everything, and this is just the pendulum that comes back.
This is just the pendulum that you exploit us, we exploit you, you exploit us.
I mean, this is just what happens, right?
And the population are just the willing, blinded, buying sheep that are just dragged back and forth in a big sack behind these racing cars.
And So to talk about Carter doing this and Carter doing that and Reagan doing this and Reagan doing that, it's just hilarious.
I mean, the idea that an individual can make a difference in a multi-trillion dollar agency like the state, oh, it's just hilarious.
And again, I've sort of pumped the West Wing, but I've been watching it quite a bit and spent some time on Sunday watching it before the show.
And you can sort of see this, that these guys have all these dreams.
You know, where is our great society?
Where is our big vision? And all they're doing is bribing people and paying people off and sacrificing this and that and the other to just make it a little bit further or get one more thing through that then collapses the next time around and so on.
And this, of course, there's truth despite the propaganda that came out of the Clinton White House towards the writers of the West Wing.
There's truth despite the propaganda, which is that you can feel all of the crushing of idealism and all of the lack of respect that is provided to the president by people who are simply watching their own economic hides and so on, so that you can see the truth in the show.
Despite the propaganda and the yearning for good government, the truth comes out because the writers are good enough and certainly Aaron Sorkin is smart enough to realize that there is frustration and thwartedness in the system and that power, unless it is brutal, which would cause you to lose sympathy for those who are wielding the power, if power is conversational, then it is always going to be trumped by material self-interest, which is what all the senators and congressmen are displaying, right?
So, So you can sort of see that government can't get anything done, that it's really at the mercy of events.
And, of course, it's just a massive criminal income redistribution fund.
That's sort of what it's all about.
It has all the moral legitimacy of somebody coming for protection money.
So, when people talk about Reagan was good and Carter was bad, I mean, it's just making stuff up.
You might as well be describing dreams that you had last night and saying there was this good guy in the dream and then there was this bad guy in the dream, but it is this projection of a good side of yourself and a bad side of yourself into the nightly canvas of your imagination.
And to say, Reagan was good, and Thatcher was great, and then Reagan gave way to Clinton, who was bad, and now there's George Bush, who's well-meaning but stupid, and there's this.
Oh man, it's just hilarious.
It's absolutely hilarious.
The criminal empires are not run by the people who are passing through.
They're just sort of finger puppets to distract us from the other finger that's going through our pockets and occasionally grabbing our ass.
So I just think there's a kind of theology that goes on in political writing where people just make up causes and effects and that the same people.
I mean, this is what's so funny, right?
It's a couple of years between voting in Carter and voting in Reagan.
A couple of years between these sorts of things.
And does the writer imagine that the American people suddenly became a million times smarter between voting in...
I guess it was Carter in 76 and Reagan in 80.
Was there a massive quantum leap in the political knowledge, economic understanding, on philosophical ethics of the American people?
Did they all spend four years studying rational philosophy and so on?
Is that what happened?
And is that why everything just became so different under Reagan?
Did they suddenly wake up and just go, wow, that's the best thing ever, right?
And then, of course, Clinton was bad, right?
Clinton was corrupt and amoral and vainglorious and so on, right?
So, see, the American people got really smart between 1976 and 1980 when they voted in Reagan.
And then in 1988, they got really stupid again, see, when they voted in Reagan.
Clinton. And then, what, 92, they voted in Bush Sr., 96, they voted in Bush Jr.
But this is the way that this stuff is talked about.
that this is what would be required, would be for the American people to become stupid and then to become wise and farseeing and statesmanlike so that they could vote for a great politician who is going to save them.
And then they get stupid again because then they vote for Clinton, right?
I mean, it's always the voting that's left out of this equation.
Because, of course, nobody wants to talk about that, right?
Nobody wants to talk about the leaders being a reflection of the voters.
I mean, if you're a Democrat, if you believe in democracy, then you must believe that the leaders represent the will of the people.
And, of course, they must represent the combined intelligence, preferences, and wisdom of the people.
And so, when you're insulting a leader, you are completely and totally insulting people.
The voters, right?
Insulting the American people.
And people who make really bad choices, who are stupid as hell.
I'm not saying this is true of the American people.
I'm just sort of saying that this would be the logic, right?
People who make really bad and stupid choices when they're 26 don't often make really great and wise and wonderful choices when they're 30 and then again make stupid choices again when they're 38.
If there are stupid choices at 26 and there are stupid choices at 38, anything that wasn't or didn't look like a stupid choice at any time in between was just random luck.
You don't get to call somebody intelligent or you don't get to call somebody a great golfer when blindfolded they sink a hole in one.
That's just freaking good luck.
So somebody's not a good golfer when they accidentally get a hole in one and then a bad golfer when they get used to slicing and dicing the shots into all eternity.
But this is something that people don't like to talk about.
They'll just rather talk about the good and bad of the leaders so that they can continue the fantasy that government can be virtue, that violence can be good, and they don't realize this.
I mean, if I talk about, I don't know, the movie Norbit or Norbit or whatever it is, some Eddie Murphy monstrosity that's out at the moment, and I say, let's say the movie is really successful, and I say that the movie is completely retarded.
I've never seen it, but what?
Whatever, right? Then, clearly, I'm saying that whoever goes to see the movie and pays their money and enjoys it is also stupid, right?
I can't have a stupid movie, complain about its success, and then say that everyone who goes to see it is really smart, right?
I mean, but with voting, it's even more so.
So this, of course, is a central paradox.
When you talk about good leaders and bad leaders, it's exactly the same as the breathless commentary that goes on about soap operas on the internet or the website, which can actually be quite funny television without pity.
It's just funny, fundamentally, that people...
But they love to talk about this kind of stuff in the same way that theology loves to talk about the evil of Satan and all his minions and the good of God and all his minions or her minions or its minions.
By the way, if you want to sort of have a look at something that's kind of funny...
Somebody posted this in response to someone's posting.
One of the board members, a listener, was stuck on a train with a hot Christian woman who was trying to convert him.
And he said, but I'm an atheist with regards to Poseidon.
And you're an atheist with regards to Poseidon, right?
The Dawkins argument, right?
Atheists just go one guard further.
And she said, I'm not an atheist with regards to Poseidon.
He's just not a god that is equal to the Christian god, right?
So she was, you know, she was just insane, right?
Thou shalt hold no other gods before me doesn't mean you can believe in other gods, just don't make them equal to me.
It's like no other gods means there are no other gods.
It's a monotheistic religion. And so...
What somebody did was posted, there's a Wikipedia, I think it's forward slash, Wikipedia, forward slash list of underbar deities.
And it's pages upon pages upon pages of deities that various cultures believe in.
I just think that's... It's funny.
There's one down there which is...
I think it's Mayan.
And it's the god of a fern root or something like that.
They're really specific in some of their...
Some of these polytheistic religions are pretty...
You know, I have a hangnail on my right middle finger.
I better pray to the two hangnail right middle finger god.
I mean, they really do get pretty specific.
So, I just thought that was kind of funny, but it's theological writing in its essence.
They're just making up deities, ascribing them characteristics, and talking about them as if that means anything.
And that is really very interesting.
And when you sort of grind that through your system, if you care to bother, realizing that religious writing has essentially been reframed for political discourse, you can understand a lot about the kind of manipulation that goes on in political language.
And how it is this mad quest for...
A good leader.
And this also wild belief that leaders are good and then bad.
And it's just good or bad luck, whether you happen to get a good or bad leader.
And I'd like to tie this together with another thought that I was talking about with Christina last night, which was that I can't for the life of me figure out, I can't for the life of me figure out Why it is that people have this desire for someone out there who is powerful to be looking out for them.
So, Bob believes, almost everyone, and we'll just use Bob, believes that there's some thing, some intelligence, some ability, some what, Excuse me, who's out there, who's just working tirelessly night and day, focusing on nothing but Bob's self-interest.
And that is a really fascinating aspect of people's belief in the political process, and of course people's belief in religion, whether this is...
God or the FBI or the police or the politicians or whoever.
But everybody has this wild belief, this mad desire, this faith that someone, someone is out there looking out for their interests.
I've got some vague theories, but I can't really figure this one out, so I'll put it out there if anybody can.
If you have thoughts about this, I certainly would be interested in hearing them.
But it really is a wild fantasy when you think about it.
So, again, not to overly tote the West Wing, but this was a very, very popular show, and it keys into a lot of people's beliefs.
These guys, they sleep on their couches, they just work tirelessly for the betterment of the people, and yeah, they're political, but they're always striving for this, that, and the other, and they're really interested in protecting the country, and they'll even take on sins in a Jesus-like manner, like shooting some guy from a foreign country.
They will take on sins even to protect the people and so on.
And they are just so dedicated and intelligent, not corrupted by power.
Nobody gets corrupted by power in the West Wing.
That's the agony that remains unspoken.
Because, of course, because they were getting a lot of info from the Clinton White House, if they had portrayed politicians in a true light, then they would not be getting any information, right?
The access that corrupts the press, the need for access that corrupts the press, also corrupts anybody who writes about politics in any substantial manner.
So... Oh, and one last thing, of course, this is so inevitable that you almost don't need to say it, but in season three to season four, there's a plot about the daughter of the president is kidnapped, and it seems to have something to do with the fact that the president shot or ordered somebody shot who was part of a royal family but may be a terrorist and so on, so it's retaliation and so on.
And an agent gets shot, and during the invasion of the country that may have sponsored the kidnapping, a whole bunch of soldiers get killed, and of course a whole bunch of other people get killed.
But the only emotional investment is whether the daughter comes back safely, right?
And the fear and the worry and the this and the that and the other is all about the children of the leaders.
And this, of course, is so inevitable that you almost don't need to comment on it, that the leaders' lives and the leaders' children have so much more value.
So the soldiers who get killed, we never see them.
I think we see John Goodman talking to one of them who gets killed, the parents of one who dies.
We don't know anything about these anonymous foot soldiers who get killed, but the moment that one of the leader's children is kidnapped, the whole nation is seized with grief and worry and fear, and the listenership has moved to fear and worry and concern, and there is great drama and so on, because there's a kidnapping and she might not come back safely.
I would rather be kidnapped than killed.
And so this just doesn't even show up on the radar that a whole bunch of other people, like dozens or hundreds of other people, are murdered because of this kidnapping.
But it's really only the children of the leaders that matter, not the foot soldiers, right?
They're the spare change that was pilfered by elves every night.
You wouldn't even notice. So I just think that's kind of funny because earlier on in the show...
President Bartlett says about a genocide that's occurring in some fictional African country.
Why is it that American lives are more important to me than the lives of these people?
And Will Bailey, the aide, says, well, I don't know, but they are.
And I think that that's ironic and funny, right?
Because then, of course, they can't help themselves but go back to the...
The leaders and how valuable the leaders' lives are, but even the American soldiers who get killed on the vengeance for the leader's daughter's kidnapping.
There's no stress, there's no worry, there's no sadness, there's no funerals, there's no bodies, there's no death, there's no history, there's no emotion.
They're just... Just like somebody else's garbage gets thrown out.
You don't even notice it. I just think that's kind of funny.
Sad, inevitable, but funny, right?
That the leaders are more important.
They exist in a different dimension than everyone else.
So this desire that there's people looking out for you, right?
That they're selfless. And this, of course, is the security details that are around the president.
You always see these dedicated people.
This is the banks of FBI workers who are just all about protecting the citizens and they have no lives of their own and they'll willingly lay down their lives and they'll willingly take a bullet for the republic and they're just these selfless robots dedicated to the welfare of everyone else on the planet.
And there is a real desire, a really essential and basic desire in people.
That somebody out there, and hopefully a large number of people out there, and if you can't find that a God, or if you can't find God, then it's the government, right?
And if there is somewhat, to some degree, an inverse proportion to a desire for a smaller government and a belief in God, right?
If you believe more in God, then you have less of a desire for a government.
That's some of the sort of minarchist Christians.
Which haunt the Lou Rockwell sites and other places, who email me with depressing regularity out of concern for my soul.
But if you don't believe in God, in the socialist-communist model, then you tend to believe more in government, right?
Because somebody has got to be out there watching out for everyone.
Somebody's got to be out there watching out for everyone.
And that really is a fascinating belief or a fascinating trend among people.
I don't think it's inevitable.
I don't think it's essential.
It is something that is exploited by government.
I'm not sure that government actually creates it.
I'm not positive, but I think that perhaps to some degree in the public school system...
And the theory that I'm sort of mulling around, let me know what you think, about this.
Because if we can solve this, then we solve government, right?
If we can finally get people to grow up and to recognize that there is nobody out there that is watching out for them.
And that anybody who's out there who claims to be watching out for them is simply exploiting them.
A hand on his heart protesting his dedication and a hand in your wallet grabbing and groping.
So if we can do something to understand and to solve this issue or this problem, we can go a long way towards, I think, undermining the central rationale for the state.
I think that it's a lack of closure from childhood.
That's sort of my theory.
It's a lack of closure from childhood.
Our parents do not look out for us Our parents don't even know us Because our parents are empty.
Our parents are false selves. And false self is the antonym of intimacy.
False self is like those two opposing poles, magnets trying to be pushed together.
They always just slip aside.
False selves can't be alone, but they can't be intimate.
Because they define themselves in relation to others.
When you define yourselves in relation to others, you can't be alone because then you cease to exist.
But you can't be intimate because you can't connect with others because you're just using them.
It's like asking a farmer to be intimate with wheat.
So, our parents did not look out for us.
They claimed to look out for us.
They claimed to take care of us.
And, of course, when we fell down, they put a Band-Aid on our knee.
And when we were sick, they brought us soup and they tended to our physical needs.
And they probably would do so again, should we get sick as adults.
But there for us in terms of being curious about our nature, our personality, what our values are, what interests us, what our deepest thoughts are, no.
No looking out for us there.
No intimacy, no connection there.
No visibility there.
So as children, we don't get what we so desperately need as sovereign and independent individuals, which is for people to be interested in us for us, right?
To be interested in us just for us.
Just for us. Right, so it's the old thing of like a mom comes in to the daughter's room when they're going to church or whatever and doesn't say, do you want to go to church and what would you like to wear?
But says, you need to look pretty because we're going to church.
Now get dressed in this dress or this one of two dresses and now come with me.
Well, that of course is not having any interest or not looking out for the child or having any interest in the child at all.
That's simply using the child as a prop for vanity and social conformity and acceptance and so on.
And the fear of criticism, which the false self can't handle.
It can't handle criticism. It can't handle criticism because it's defined by others.
So if disapproval comes from others, it is the same as annihilation.
And this is where the fight tooth and claw comes out.
And this is where you know when people get hyper-aggressive anywhere in your life, on the boards, in your email box, anywhere, that it's because they're terrified and they can't handle criticism because they're defining themselves in relation to others and not in relation to reality.
So our parents don't look out for us.
They're not interested in us.
But we desperately need people to look out for us and to be interested in us because that's called love, right?
In a sense, it is the gap between what parents claim and what they actually do, that is, the shithole wherein grows the state and the church and the continuing fantasy about the virtue of the leaders.
So... From that standpoint, I think we can understand that we grow up with this great yearning, unmet need of people being interested in us and it not being reciprocal.
Because that's kind of what we need when we're little children, right?
We're not old enough to be interested in our parents, right?
There's a self-regarding phase that goes on in early childhood that's important.
And we learn empathy through other people empathizing with us.
We learn about ourselves through other people being interested in us.
We learn about depth by other people exploring our depth.
Because you have to know depth in order to explore it in others.
And it's the parent's job to really get to know the children and to ask the children about what the children believe and what the children value and what the children want and to explore without judgment, just with curiosity.
But parents don't do that because they themselves are empty and hollow and shallow and this and that.
So we grow up with this great unmet need, which is for people to be interested in us and for us not to have to really be that interested in people.
And I think that translates.
I mean, that translates into God watching out for you and being really concerned with you.
And it translates into this fantasy of these stiff-suited, clean-shaven, blank-faced FBI guys or soldiers or cops or whoever who just live, breathe, eat and sleep your safety.
And what do they ask in return?
Well, a little bit of taxation.
But that's really about it.
They're just dedicated. Just dedicated to protecting your safety.
That's all they think about. And this, of course, is not empirical because we don't see people around this in our real life.
We don't see this in our real life.
And we don't exhibit it ourselves.
I mean, unless you have children and you really are a great parent, in which case, good for you.
You're doing a hell of a lot more than I am to free the world.
But... We don't look out for the security and safety of others.
Certainly not as adults without regards to our children.
We do it with regards to our children, but of course this is the stunted psychological growth.
If we grow up as adults still wanting God or the state to look out for us and to be single-mindedly devoted to our security and safety, then we are asking these conceptual entities, gods and states, to do for us what our parents did not do for us.
And this is, of course, the eternal infancy of the species.
This is why true adulthood is so rare, that people really do keep staring and staring at the state and at God, at these empty holes of hollow hearts, to save them, to protect them, to take care of them, to be interested in them, to make them special.
Because they just didn't get that when they were kids, and we all need it.
And in order to avoid the pain of realizing that we never got it, we invent these other agencies that we believe are going to do it or are doing it, when of course they haven't and they won't and they don't.
The FBI agents are as interested in their own career, lives, income, families, as you are in yours.
The FBI agents care as much about your safety and security as you care about their safety and security.
The policeman cares about as much about protecting your property as you care about protecting the policeman's property.
You can judge the dedication of the state and of God by your dedication.
To others. And, of course, I would argue that it's very unhealthy to dedicate yourself towards others in this way.
So the last thing that I'll say...
Sorry, it's a bit of a long drive. We've got some snow up here, but I'll try and keep this next part very brief.
The last thing that I'll say is that when you look at people's fantasies about the alternating good and bad political leaders, what you're really seeing is the splitting with no cause, right?
What you're really doing is you have a category called leaders that remains constant, And you have inhabitants of those categories that are really good and then really bad.
And if you break this down and get out of the nonsense that it's about politics, which is completely non-empirical, non-rational, then you've got to ask, why is it that people like this sort of category?
Why do they look for virtues in leaders?
Well, because we all have moody parents.
We all had parents who loved us, or claimed to, or at least did nice things for us, and then would be jerks, or assholes, or mean, or cold, or distant, or uncaring.
Moody, right? Moody parents.
And not all of us, but those who are most susceptible to this kind of leader worship, finding virtue in leaders, or who believe that the leadership category, the institution is bigger than the man, the leadership is bigger than the occupant or the inhabitant.
That there's a good leader and then there's a bad leader, but the leadership itself is virtuous, right?
The institution is virtuous, but the inhabitants cycle between good and bad.
Well, this, of course, is just parenting, right?
It's their parents. Mom is in a good mood.
Mom is in a bad mood. Motherhood is a virtue, but mom, day to day, can be a real witch or can be kind of loving and affectionate.
It just depends on the mood. So, this splitting, and of course what children do, as we've talked about before, is they just split, right?
They say, well, there's a good mom and there's a bad mom.
And when there's a good mom, it's because she's virtuous, and when there's a bad mom, it's because I'm bad.
I've done something. That's how you try to gain control over the moodiness of your captors, or of your leaders, let's say, if you don't want to look at parents that way.
And this translates in adulthood to this belief in the virtue of the institution, The priesthood is good, God is good, the church is good, but there are individually bad priests.
The presidency is good, but there's good presidents and bad presidents.
Well, that's exactly just parents are virtuous, mom is virtuous, but there's good mom and there's bad mom, and there's no connection between the two.
It's just, you know, and I can get really angry at bad mom, and I can get really devoted to good mom, and this is kind of very primitive splitting that occurs when you live with somebody When you're under the power of somebody who's moody.
The government is moody in that sense, right?
Good leadership and bad leadership and so on.
Anyway, I hope that this... Sorry, this was a little long, but I just sort of wanted to share some of the thoughts that came to me out of reading this Mark Stein article out of Maclean's, that this just essentially theological kind of approach to the truth is just very, very sad.
It's very inevitable, given the primitive state of people's thinking.
I think we're good to go.
When you're just being mouthed a bunch of empty, complicated, vaguely related syllables.
I look forward to your donations.
I appreciate the call-in show yesterday.
It was a lot of fun. Thank you for taking the time to sit in and chat and listen.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
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