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Feb. 26, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

23:44

660 Emotional Skepticism

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	Hello, hello, everybody.
	I'm going to go for a short walk and see.
	I left my hat upstairs so we shall see if the shining dome of thought can survive Mother Nature.
	I had an interesting post on the board today, as is usually the case every day.
	And on this post was a gentleman who was talking about how he's very happy lately And when he tells people that he's happy, they don't believe him.
	They just don't believe him.
	And I don't think it's because he's in the fetal position at the foot of his mother's portrait.
	So, it's an interesting question.
	When your perceptions of things collide or conflict with other people's perceptions of things, It's always an interesting challenge.
	And most human beings, because we have a sort of fundamental lack of capacity to mediate between truth and falsehood, because there is no compared to what, there is no with reference to reality, there is only with reference to some sort of hierarchical power structure.
	And a power structure must always grow.
	In the absence of philosophy.
	When you don't have philosophy, or you don't have a methodology for determining truth and falsehood, you must have a hierarchy, because how else are you going to get things done?
	If nothing is true, how does anything get done?
	And that's sort of a fundamental issue that is one of the reasons I'm so driven to getting compared to Watson out there and talking about rational scientific philosophy, because you can't get rid of power structures In the absence of objective methodologies for determining right and wrong and truth and falsehood, how are you going to get anything done?
	Who's going to obey who? If you're not obeying reality or logic or rationality or any of these kinds of things, then what are you obeying?
	Well, you're just obeying a whim.
	And in the absence of objective methodology, personal domination is inevitable.
	It's the only way that things can possibly, conceivably, totally, hopelessly work.
	And work I use in the loosest possible sense certainly works better than nothing being true at all.
	So, this challenge that we all have when we face people who disagree with us, and this is a very interesting one because it's other people in a sense denying a subjective phenomenon which is occurring.
	Other people denying a subjective phenomenon that is occurring to the individual.
	And as atheists and anti-patriots and anti-family, from the automatic morality standpoint, I think it's very hard for us to say that we should always take our own inner states as more valid than what is occurring in reality.
	That's not a good idea, because people internally have a state that says God exists.
	They have a feeling. They have a strong feeling that God exists.
	That their mother was a saint, or that the government exists, or whatever these sorts of things go.
	So we can't say, well, I feel happy, therefore I am happy.
	And that is because happiness, of course, is a challenging state.
	And this goes into the drug debate that occasionally flares up on Freedom and Radio, the sort of mind-altering drug debate.
	Not caffeine or nicotine or alcohol, but the really heavy stuff relative to all that.
	And happiness, of course, is a state that we can achieve by winning the lottery in a transitory manner.
	We can achieve by almost being hit by a car I guess if we are a criminal and we think we're about to get caught and we end up getting away to go and prey on somebody else, then we're going to feel a giddy and unholy kind of joy and relief and so on.
	Happiness can either be the achievement of a positive or the withdrawal of a negative.
	So if somebody threatens to kill us and then doesn't, then I guess we feel happy because we were going to die and now we're not.
	So there's happiness there.
	But I don't think that there's a whole lot of, I guess, self-help people or philosophers or psychologists who would say, go and get yourself threatened and then get away.
	Or they don't hire people to pretend to kill you who didn't decide not to kill you at the last minute.
	So, there are some things that we will accept, I think, as valid in this circumstance, and there are some things which we won't accept as valid in the circumstance of sort of what is happiness.
	And I don't want to get into a huge thing on this, It's just that the subjective state itself is not enough.
	You ask anyone on heroin if they're happy, and they're going to say yes.
	You ask them a couple of hours later, or a day later, they're probably going to say no, unless they've got more heroin.
	And they're an addict, I mean.
	So, happiness is one of these tricky things that is not achieved in the moment.
	It can be experienced, a kind of giddy, transient joy, It can be experienced in the moment, either through a massive biochemical outpouring of feel-good hormones and all the good neurochemistry that comes with relief and so on.
	But there are other areas or aspects of happiness that we would think would be more sustainable.
	So when I had a problem with my tooth a couple of weeks ago, I took some painkillers, and then it didn't feel like I had a problem with my tooth anymore.
	But I knew, sort of, I guess I didn't know at that point, but it became clear that it was only masking the problem with my tooth.
	And so when you say that you feel happy, I think one of the tests is that it has to be a little bit more sustainable.
	And happiness is kind of like health, like physical health.
	It's not like you never get a cold if you're very healthy or if you're physically healthy.
	It's not like you never get a cold or any of these sorts of things.
	It's just that when you do get a cold, it tends to last less long and so on.
	This is something Nathaniel Brandon has pointed out in the past.
	So I think that we want to look at sustainability when it comes to happiness.
	And when it comes to figuring out whether or not our internal states are If other people disagree with our internal states, right, so if I feel happy, I go up to someone and say, I really feel happy, and they look at me skeptically, well, of course, a couple of things can be occurring.
	The first is that I'm lying, you know, like those hearty Christians who just are so damn happy all the time, it's a constant pasty white boy grinning advertisement for the joys and glories of invisible sky dudes.
	So, that can be part of an act, and that act can be off-putting to people, and I'm not saying this is the case with this gentleman, I'm just walking through some possibilities for what could be occurring.
	So, it could be that your happiness is fake, it's a one-upmanship, it's showing other people how happy you are so that you can feel superior to them or feel better than them, kind of be in their face a little bit or whatever.
	And that's one possibility, and then at the end I'll talk about how we might be able to tell these things apart.
	So that's one aspect.
	Another possibility is that you genuinely are happy, and you're telling someone that you're happy, but that person does not like the fact that you're happy.
	It does not like the fact that you, my friend, are happy.
	And that, of course, has a large number of psychological The reasons behind it, none of which are particularly positive or pleasant, but all of which are important to deal with if you're this kind of person.
	Irritability is a state of mind that I existed in in a rather chronic manner through my sort of early puberty to mid-teen years.
	So, for sure, if you are going through that with someone, then You need to sort of figure out what their motive is in talking to you about happiness or the lack thereof or somebody who's skeptical towards any positive feeling that you have.
	So this guy's saying, well, when I say that I'm happy, everybody seems skeptical and nobody believes me and this, that and the other.
	But when I say that I'm unhappy, then everybody seems to believe me and has no problems with what I'm saying and so on.
	Or, you know, I can't remember if it's one individual or many.
	Is there a puppy shop today for me?
	I don't know. Ah, well, we'll go down one more street and see.
	Sorry, I'm by the road, so I know this is a little harder to hear.
	So, if you're talking to someone who is generally of a negative frame of mind, or is hostile to joy, or believes that the world is crap, and the only people who are happy are those who are faking it, right?
	Like, if you're around the coterie of people, To whom all happiness is illusion and all unhappiness is wisdom, then if you are happy as a result of achieving wisdom or pursuing wisdom, then you threaten their worldview.
	And of course, what does that mean?
	Well, it means that you're threatening their justification for their parents, right?
	Threatening their justification for the horrors committed by their parents, right?
	So... I have a friend, not a friend anymore, who...
	When my other friend, who is still a friend, his mother died, we were sitting in, we all know each other, and we were sitting in a living room, and he was saying about his own parents, who had a wretched, horrible, ghastly marriage, that the problem was that the apartment was too small.
	It's like, oh, these tiny apartments, and two people who aren't getting along well to begin with, and stuck in this bad apartment.
	What's going on with this long thing about all this circumstantial stuff?
	This apartment, it's small size, and that was the issue or that was the problem.
	And of course, that has never struck me as particularly believable, because there's a reason why you end up in a small apartment.
	And it may not be a bad thing, right?
	God knows I might end up in a small apartment as I pursue free domain radio.
	But people will just make up stuff to avoid dealing with the pain of what actually happened with their parents and what occurred within the confines of their family.
	So, if you are a happy person and somebody believes that happiness is impossible, and it's almost always because they had a sibling or a brother who is...
	Sorry, a sibling or a half-brother.
	A sibling or a parent who is depressed, right?
	And then you get drawn to all of this Schopenhauerian pessimism and so on.
	It's the deep wisdom of misery.
	The deep health of pain.
	The deep health of ill health.
	That's sort of what it translates to logically.
	Happiness is a state of mind wherein you are functioning with integrity relative to reality.
	And of course relative to a little something we call misery or unhappiness.
	Oh, the same way that your body is functioning well with relation to reality, right?
	So, how is your liver functioning well?
	It's doing what the liver is supposed to do.
	How is your brain functioning well?
	It's doing what brains are supposed to do.
	Interpreting reality.
	Accurately organized behavior with accordance to logical principles derived from the nature of reality.
	Boy, I think we've just come up with a slogan, haven't we?
	Put that on a bumper sticker.
	Actually, I think you could probably wrap that around a very large coffee cup.
	Ooh, very large coffee cup.
	I had a conversation last night with Christina about going full-time.
	Whenever I go through these kinds of changes, my sleep gets very light as I sort of reconfigure my brain for all of the good news stuff.
	All right, time to take a pause and to get my ickle coffee.
	It's not too bad, actually. It's becoming just a little bit more civilized out here in the Great Canuck.
	Or, as I like to think of it, the last place I live in before I moved to New Zealand, or some damn place that's civilized.
	So... Let me just turn my gloves on, and we should come in.
	When an inner state of ours conflicts with somebody else's opinion, it could either be because, just to recap very briefly, more for my benefit than yours, it could be because we are faking something in our own nature or faking something in our own personality and that is being picked up on by the other person as an act of dominance and thus they resent And resist it,
	it could be that the other person is fixed on a negative view of life and potential and joy, and they do that, of course, to protect the trauma that they experience at the hands of negative parents, to normalize negativity as human nature, right?
	It's this great fantasy zoo wherein we heard all of the unicorns of our imaginations.
	We can call human nature that pen of fantasy.
	It's dark and evil and sinful, says the Catholics.
	It's bright and happy and soundful, saith the, I don't know, the Wiccans, or something like that.
	So, there is of course a third possibility that none of you, or neither of you, I guess would be a better way of putting it, that neither of you are correct.
	And that is of course highly possible Either you're right, they're right, or neither of you is right.
	It's really the only possibilities that exist with any positive statement.
	But there are some ways to tell.
	There are some ways to tell, of course, and I'll go over a few of those that I've dug up over the years and you can see if they're of any use to you.
	First of all, one of the basic things that occurs when you share your emotional state With someone is that you're doing it for some reason.
	That you're doing it for some reason.
	Now, certainly, if you share your emotional state with somebody and that person is skeptical or negative and not helpful, it's okay to be skeptical of somebody's Emotional or mental state without being negative or hostile.
	I was asked by, I guess, who I assumed to be a recovering alcoholic who had done his time at AA and accepted a higher power.
	He was talking to me on Sunday on the call-on show, and there's no reason to be negative or hostile when somebody expresses an opinion that is accidentally perceived by them as something to do with truth.
	You can invite them in for a conversation or for something that can occur that's more positive.
	But what I would say is that if you are talking to somebody about your emotional state and things go awry in that the person becomes negative without being helpful.
	Negative is fine as long as you're positive about being negative, right?
	A negative diagnosis from a doctor is fine as long as there's something which can actually help you get better, right?
	So I don't think that we can avoid the negativity when it comes to being a philosopher, but we can be positive about it.
	We can be encouraging to the person with whom we are handing a diagnosis of a kind of Mental sickness calls illusion or vanity.
	So, the first question that I would ask if you're in this kind of situation is, why are you talking to this person to begin with?
	Why are you talking to this person to begin with?
	And that's a fairly essential question.
	Why, oh why, are you talking to this person to begin with?
	If they're negative towards you and it's not a pleasant thing, and if you are being fake, there's ways that they can help you to understand that without you feeling weird or rejected or negative or bad.
	Maybe you'll feel a little bad, but there's ways to turn this sort of thing around without it being a very difficult, dangerous and unpleasant exercise.
	So, there's something that is not correct.
	And I think Greg picked up on this, for which he was roundly Wow, wow, wow, wow, wowed down by Niels, which is fine, but this is sort of my thoughts, that there is something awry about that.
	Why are you talking to somebody about your precious inner states if the person is negative or difficult to deal with?
	So, something definitely is going along that's incorrect, and that I would say would be somewhat incompatible with maintaining happiness.
	Happiness is a real treasure.
	I mean, it's a hibiscus in the modern world, and To hang on to it requires some pretty strict discipline when it comes to who you hang with, what you talk about, and so on.
	And if you are revealing or sharing your innermost thoughts with people who are negative towards you, then I would say that just as the person who's negative towards you is playing out something from his childhood, you, my friend, are also playing out something from your childhood.
	At least that would be my first guess.
	And that would seem to me, based on what was posted, to fall into the category of my parents rejected my emotional state.
	My parents rejected my emotional state.
	Do you know, do you know, and I'm guessing that you do, do you know that There is little more hostility in the world.
	At least there was in my world growing up.
	Maybe it's different now. Parents are a little bit more different and I was raised by people scarred by the war and so on.
	But I will certainly tell you this, that the unabashed happiness of a child is the greatest irritant in the world to most people.
	The moment a child expresses Exuberance or joy, they must be restrained and controlled and brought back down to earth and have their legs cut out from under them and be deposited in a heap called maturity, which is also known as chronic dysthymia or underlying low-grade depression.
	The joy of children is like blood in the water for the false self-shocks that continually circle our souls.
	So, I certainly found that it was important to restrain enthusiasm, to restrain joy, when you are a child, because someone's always going to come along with some stupid, cutting comment.
	I remember being at summer camp when I was about eleven, and I had two broomsticks, and I was inviting people to play swords, and one guy, of course, looked me up and down coolly and said, aren't you a little old to be playing swords?
	There's always someone, always somebody who just wants to get in like a canker to your upper lip or like a worm in the apple to undermine and destroy one's capacity for joy.
	And it's a real strain, right?
	Whatever you love, people will denigrate.
	That's just inevitable. I feel.
	I mean, I won't sound too negative, but that's sort of been my experience.
	And the people who don't denigrate what you love, you hold them to you.
	You hold them to you.
	You hold them close.
	You wear them like an eighth layer of epidural skin.
	But I would suggest or I would say that you might, to the person who posted this, you might want to look into your own history and you might want to look at your own parents and whether or not you might not have had an authority figure,
	a slave owner, Who may have been depressed, or who may have been negative towards joy, and that you may be reproducing the pain of being rejected in terms of your joy by the person who was in your life when you were younger,
	who was negative towards joy, and that you will continue to do that until you go through, really experience and process the pain of having been rejected in this manner.
	That would be my strong suggestion, because when people do reject us, it's usually something that's pretty significant.
	I don't know, if you want to ask a girl out and she says no, well, it could be because she's just so superior to you, or it could be that she doesn't think you're cute and funny enough, and she's holding out in a shallow way for somebody with dimpled cheeks or something, or it could be that She senses your depth and veers away from you and also attempts to detonate that depth with rejection.
	There's lots of different things that can be occurring, but if you ask a good woman out and she doesn't want to go out with you, she'll say no in a way that is usually not so negative and not so destructive.
	But people who make you feel lesser, people who make you feel worse, people who make you feel diminished.
	Life is far too short to hang around such people.
	You can't save them.
	You can't elevate them.
	It's not something that I've ever seen that has been able to be turned around.
	You turn a cynic into an optimist or turn somebody who's negative into somebody who's merely happy.
	But you can beat your head against that cold glacial wall from here to eternity and not make a dent in anything other than, of course, your head.
	So, I think that there is something that's interesting to be learned about rejection, and it is usually that we have not processed the values and accepted the natures of, there I go using the word human nature, individual natures of the people around us, not human nature as a whole. We've not really processed the individual natures of those around us.
	And we are usually playing at something from quite early on in our lives that is almost always quite sad and a little broken.
	So I would strongly recommend that you look into your own history for what happened when you were a child and you showed the joy that I think is rather innate to unbroken souls.
	And hopefully that helps.
	In terms of the people that you're spending your time with now, and that you might be able to be a little bit more circumspect and then not have to worry about whether you're happy or not because someone says so.
	Because if you need somebody to confirm the state of yours, it's probably because they have too much power over them.

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