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March 5, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:27
668 How the Truth Looks to Others

Empathizing with the blind

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Time Text
Early in the morning, rising to the street Light me up that cigarette and I'll strap shoes on my feet Got to find a reason, the reason things went wrong Got to find a reason why my money's all gone Ha!
I got a Dalmatian, I can still get high I can play the guitar like a mother Hey, we don't have to swear first thing in the morning Just got three songs that I would recommend to you One is Sublime's What I Got, which is a really catchy and well-done melody, and sadly nihilistic.
Of course, I think the singer ended up overdosing, but a really good song.
And the other is The Eels, Goddamn right, it's a beautiful day, which is really also a very poppy and catchy song, and some very evocative lyrics.
And last but not least is a song that did not...
Really grabbed me the first time that I listened to it.
In fact, I thought she'd completely butchered it, but I have absolutely reversed my opinion on that.
And that is Mary J. Blige as the lead vocalist doing the cover of One by U2. And that is a really powerful song, and I think she just did a wonderful job.
I thought she gospeled it up too much.
I'm a huge Mary J. Blige fan, but I think she also underutilizes her talent in many ways.
But she is just a magnificent vocalist, and what a set of pipes, and what a set of...
I mean, the Molinas she pulls off, those sort of Ripley things in vocals, are just staggering.
And I think I've sort of turned my mind around, and I think that gospeling it up It's actually a pretty good thing, and I'm just enormously impressed, and I find it very moving.
I find the song very moving, and I always have, and I also find her rendition of it very powerful, and it's one of the things that...
It has helped me ditch the $160,000 a year that I'm currently making and looking to go to a significantly reduced income for the sake of following passion, for the sake of following dreams.
Why is it that some people get to sing beautiful gospel versions of great songs for a living and I have to essentially type about data?
It doesn't really seem very fair.
But of course the difference is that she did it and I didn't.
Oh, I shouldn't say I didn't.
I tried. But I didn't find the right milieu.
Thank heavens. I kept not finding the right milieu until I did.
And I'm very glad that I didn't succeed at all of those other things because to succeed at what I'm doing now is just a little bit more important.
Anyway, so I would recommend those three songs.
They just sort of popped into my mind this morning.
And give them a shot if you get a chance.
So, let's talk about a continuation of 665 and 666, the podcast of the beast, and continue on because I've had a couple of extra questions, mostly related to this idea of empathy, of empathizing with others who find our position to be startling, if not downright deranged, and...
I think that is a great, great challenge for us.
And it's one of the reasons, one of the traps, which is a central reason to me, at least, why philosophy has never made the kind of progress that it should have made as a discipline, as a science.
I mean, it's the most essential science, and without philosophy, the scientific method is largely just an abstract tool that, strangely enough, seems to work, but is isolated from all other fields of human endeavor, whereas...
My central question through the last 20 years is if logic and the scientific method and capitalism, and for me it's logic and capitalism are the two major ones.
The scientific method is derivation of logic.
But if logic, scientific method, and capitalism are the three greatest human achievements intellectually, philosophy, economics, and science, then why is it that only two of those have produced the kind of We're good to go.
Science has changed the world in staggering ways, but philosophy has never, and philosophy which gave birth to them has never caught up.
You know, the children have outgrown.
It's like this hunchback midget gives birth to these incredible strapping tall lads, and that just never has really made any sense to me.
And so one of the reasons that I started on this pursuit, and this I've talked a little bit about in The God of Atheists during the conversation that Gordon has with his students in the cafeteria next to the sandalistas and the shakewave era guys.
And it's a sort of central question, which is, why is philosophy still so primitive when the fruits of philosophy have become so powerful and recognized as, you know, there's very few people who say the scientific method is invalid, and there's very few people even on the extreme left who say that capitalism doesn't produce a whole lot of consumer goods that people like to consume.
Right, they just start clubbing you to death with the poor and so on, but it's always sort of been a central question for me, and this question has remained largely unanswered, and this is why...
Philosophy has always been associated with, and I take most of my cues for this kind of stuff from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.
Not the bogus journey, because I consider that to be sort of the Second Testament or the New Testament, full of a lot of inconsistencies and occasional mistranslations, although I do love the joke that when they go to hell it looks like, dude, this looks nothing like our album covers.
But in Bill and Ted's Excellent adventure, sort of the Old Testament of the verse of Bill and Ted.
They go to ancient Greece and they go to see Socrates.
And Socrates has this sort of thousand-yard cataract stare, very abstract, very spaced out, and very much old guy knocking his knees in robes in the middle of some, I don't know, some...
I'm trying to think of some good word for it, but it's totally escaping me at the moment.
And we shall not hunt it now.
Some arboretum?
Something like that. Some area within Athens.
And they come with the excellent lyric, Dust in the Wind.
Don't speak ancient Greek, but they explain it by blowing dust.
And this is important, right?
This is not merely accidental, this kind of portrayal of the philosopher as the staring-eyed, vaguely out of it, totally orbiting the moons of Jupiter as far as relevance goes.
And this, of course, is the otherworldly approach that occurs not only just in the Gospel of B&T, but also...
In things like the Dalai Lama, this presentation of the philosopher or the thinker as somebody who is far removed from everyday concerns and is largely involved in a mildly admirable form of mental masturbation is really, really common. And that always displeased me enormously because I would feel that philosophers should really be the first people that you go to when you have a problem or a question.
But you don't really see.
You see all these pundits on CNN. You never see.
Is a moral philosopher?
That's just unthinkable, right?
Because they're all arguing about whether nouns exist, right?
And whether the Cartesian demon has us in its 89th or 90th percentage grip.
They're not out there talking about the real world and giving people real choices to make that actually affect their lives.
And that always really displeased me.
They actually gave more respect in the Gospel of BNT. They gave more respect to Freud than they did to Socrates, which is telling.
And again, not accidental, right?
I mean, these things don't come from nowhere.
Freud is Freud!
Freud! Freud is portrayed in the movie, or at least he shows up at the end and does a fairly masterful job of explaining the psychology behind Ted's father, I think it is.
Dude, that's your mom! This is sort of how things go, right?
The depth is considered to be abstract concepts piled up to explain the unconscious with no verification that that's supposed to be useful and that's supposed to have some power in the real world, but actual philosophy I just wanted to mention that in perspective,
that... If it's true that we have cracked the final frontier, if it is true that we have got to the heart of things and the core of things, and if it's true that we have invigorated philosophy and given it some skeletal structure, some bones, some sinews, some muscles, some tendons, and some motion and some effect in the world, then it's never really been achieved before.
It's never really been achieved before.
The philosophy that I would say that we're the closest to would be enlightenment philosophy.
But enlightenment philosophy was really limited because it really only focused on some metaphysics, a little bit of epistemology, but socialized kind of ethics, heavy into politics, and anti-Christianity.
And that's really not a full package, in my view.
I mean, Lord knows I don't want to say that we're doing smarter things than the Enlightenment guys are doing.
I think we just have, you know, that old saying that if we have seen further, it's because we stood on the shoulders of giants.
But the Enlightenment philosophers just, they resisted the old world.
And through their resistance of the old world, a space opened up for some aspects of a better life in the new world.
But they did not have a positive program that was grounded and rooted all the way from metaphysics to the highest abstractions of aesthetics, which we have sort of tried to build here.
So that's the closest we got to, and of course, through the Enlightenment came the birth of things like republics, came the birth of democracy, which I would say is still in advance upon aristocracy, as even Marx himself admitted that capitalism was a step forward from feudalism.
He just didn't think it was...
And it's funny because Marx, of course, said that capitalism, as was practiced in the 19th century, was a step forward from feudalism.
But then after that came heavy statism, but after that came a stateless society.
And I wouldn't actually disagree with him.
Hopefully we don't go to the communist gulag thing, and hopefully we can put enough vibrant and vital ideas out there to sort of avoid that little step.
But I think that the movement is right.
Feudalism gives rise to state mercantilism, which is the capitalism that's often derided, and rightly so, by the leftists.
And then after that we get a period of heavy statism, which is, of course, the welfare-warfare state which we're currently groaning under.
And after that comes the stateless society.
This is why in the grand sweep of things, although the communists got just about everything wrong, in the grand sweep of things I wouldn't disagree with the general flow of where they thought society was coming from and going to.
And I also wouldn't disagree with their critiques of state capitalism, or I don't even know what a good word for it.
There's been a lot of dispute about this, but the sort of, quote, free market that is regulated and bribed and controlled and sold, like party favors to rich capitalists, the sort of quote free, mercantilism is the closest, the quote free market that leverages the power of the state mercantilism is the closest, the quote free market that leverages the power of the state to transfer money to rich people through the legal fiction of So that's an excellent critique, I would say, but I just think that they got everything else wrong.
And where they were going...
The prescription was worse than the illness.
We cured the headache, but the patient didn't make it.
It's a mixed blessing, so would say the Marxists.
But if we have cracked this nut, if we have brought philosophy to life in the way that it always should have been, but for a variety of reasons we'll talk a little bit about in this podcast, and some of which I will keep close to my chest until later, It's just never been achieved before in the way that we are achieving it here.
So this newness of what it is that we're doing, this planet really that we have discovered that people think that they're standing on firm earth when they're actually just standing on the dreams of a philosopher's fantasies from a couple of hundred years ago and have no contact with the real world conceptually but only sensually.
So they will write posts about how reality doesn't exist And they will use their fingers to strike the keys and click the send button because they operate within reality, but conceptually they operate completely outside of reality.
And it's that split, right, what's called the mind-body dichotomy by people who are not particularly sophisticated, which is otherwise known as the empiricism-fantasy dichotomy.
It's not like the body is real and true and the mind is false and abstract.
It's just that people operate on two levels, right?
They operate on drive the car and they operate on I want to respond to Steph's argument, so I'm going to go to his website, I'm going to click on this, I'm going to click on that, I'm going to type a syntactically correct sentence, I'm going to click send.
All of that stuff is operating within the realm of reality.
They don't just blow smoke rings in their basement and assume that they're responding to my argument because they know that I won't be able to see those and won't be able to respond in kind and won't understand the Morse code signals they've made up themselves.
So they recognize others in reality to the point where they will go to the site, they will click, they will correct, they will send me the angry emails, they will do all of this kind of stuff, right?
So they reason and they work empirically in that area.
It's just that... So the form, the form of their actions is perfectly empirical and sensible and rational and objective and everything that we would completely agree with.
But the content of their actions, the conceptual content of their actions is completely divorced.
Everyone takes the logical, empirical, objective, sensual-based steps in order to respond to an argument, and then they say that logic and empiricism and sensualism aren't valid.
It's just this massive scar tissue that prevents them from seeing the basic truth, because the basic truth is about a heck of a lot more than my arguments or what's been posted on the board.
The essential truth is that they are in agony and have been heavily corrupted and brutalized, and that is why they can't see reality in their minds, although they operate within it through their sensual apparatus.
So if we've achieved something here that is new and unique and powerful and true in a sort of much more fundamental way than I think has been achieved before, Then I think it's really important to understand two things.
If you're going to communicate about these ideas to people, understand two things.
One, it's very new.
It's very new. It's unprecedented in the kind of thought and the kind of...
And certainly, if we can unite the newness of this kind of thinking and the simplicity...
Fundamentally, everything I talk about is relatively simple, right?
Other than the psychology stuff.
The stuff around... Metaphysics and epistemology is just, you know, hey, you know what you're doing?
It's right. I mean, it's really not that complicated, which is why the epistemology one was metaphysics and epistemology were the shortest of the introductions to philosophy of podcasts and videocasts.
But not only is it new, but it is simple and it is easy, right?
I mean, there's nothing... Talk about in these sorts of realms that is particularly hard.
And so because it's new and it's easy and it's fundamentally obvious and simple, that's something that's really important to grasp.
And the other thing is that it's extraordinarily painful to see that.
it's extraordinarily painful to see that.
For others and for you, I mean, if you've really gotten it all the way down to your gut, then it's just very, very, very painful.
And the reason why, of course, is that it brings up all the motives.
It brings up a question related to all of the motives of those who told you that it was all too complicated, abstract, obtuse, and freaky.
for you to really understand.
Why would people not teach you the simple truths and beauty of philosophy?
Why? What's so complicated?
Other than the dream analysis, psychology, and the art stuff, it's all complicated.
I get that. But what's so complicated?
Reality exists, comes in through the senses.
We derive reason from the actions of matter.
Concepts work because matter is composed of atoms and atoms have common properties.
Therefore, concepts are accurate.
The greatest detail is the atom.
The greatest abstraction is the concepts.
They are intertwined.
The concepts are derived from the behavior of atoms and the nature of matter and the laws of reality.
And it's not so complicated, right?
So those things you think, yeah, they're right.
You look at a car, you know it's a car, you're right.
It's not that complicated. I mean, it's how we live anyway.
If we don't try and take our cars for a walk, we take our dock for a walk.
It's not that complicated. It's how we live.
The ethics? Not that complicated.
If you think I should do something, then you're telling me that there's some rule that's independent of your judgment that I should follow.
That's independent of your opinion.
People don't say, you shouldn't steal because I don't like stealing.
People say, you shouldn't steal because it's objectively morally wrong to steal.
So we're just taking people at their word.
They're saying, oh, okay, so there's a moral rule that I should follow.
So that means that that rule must exist independent of your consciousness, because otherwise you wouldn't say...
You should not steal. You just say, I don't want you to steal.
The same way as I don't like jazz.
Not like jazz is evil. I don't like it.
Okay, maybe jazz is evil.
But you know what I'm saying. So that's it.
I mean, that's all we're talking about as far as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics go.
That's it. Okay, so there's some rule.
Well, it's got to be objective. It's got to be independent.
Otherwise, it's just your opinion that you want me to do something, and it's just a power play, bullying, whatever, right?
But people are usually too cowardly to bully you with their own force, because you can fight back, and then they have to be openly violent.
What they want to do is subjugate you with rules that they're just making up that don't apply to them, right?
To trick you into obeying the rules rather than just obeying them, right?
That's why the priests invent God, right?
Otherwise they'd have to beat you up to take your stuff and they don't want to do that because priests usually are not the strongest people on the planet.
Not the best warriors around.
They're just more like termites than battering rams.
So it's really not that complicated and it's a validation of how everybody lives anyway.
All I'm doing is working empirically, right?
Hey, how do people live? Hey, what if they're right?
So when...
It's just so important to understand that when you talk to people about the truth, and the truth is simple and clear and validates how they already live, and they simply can't disagree with it fundamentally, what happens?
Well, you raise all their defenses, and that's specifically what this stuff is all designed to do.
This is exactly what the scar tissue, the brutality that is inflicted upon children in the realm of philosophy and concepts.
This is... Exactly what it's designed to do is to make people angry and frightened about the simple truths.
To make them hostile towards the basic truths.
Because the basic truths are there's no God, there's no legitimate government, there's no legitimate moral parenting.
Qua parenting. I mean, there are moral parents, but parenting does not make you moral.
Rutting, squatting, and dumping a baby on the grass does not make you a moral person.
It's just a little harder than that.
The same way the talent doesn't make you a moral person.
Morality is a sophisticated thing to achieve because we're all so lied to, right?
What is it Catherine Hepburn said about acting?
What's so hard? Shirley Temple could do it at the age of four.
I mean, it's really the easiest thing in the world.
And that's true, of course, for the talented it is.
And Shirley Temple at the age of four was not a sophisticated moral being, and talent can be exhibited at the age of four, and Tiger Woods was on the Johnny Carson show as a golfer at the age of two.
And so we're fairly sure that if a two-year-old can achieve something and a four-year-old can achieve something, it's really not that hard.
It's just hard for people who don't have the innate talent, right?
And so they look at it like, wow, that's, you know, go on, be a Tiger.
Be born Tiger Woods.
You know, it's not transferable.
It's innate, right? So...
So there's an extraordinary amount of humiliation.
And there is a grave awakening to the world's evil in accepting the basic truths of philosophy.
It's really agonizing.
It's totally, truly and completely agonizing.
And those who are going through it and those who've gone through it will tell you.
And if it doesn't hurt, you haven't got it.
I mean, I hate to put it that bluntly, but I really do believe that.
If you don't understand, you know, I've read some Ayn Rand, I'm totally dedicated to philosophy.
I don't know, it didn't hurt for me.
Well, it's because you haven't really bought it to life.
You haven't really bought philosophy into your life.
And even if everyone around you is great, which I highly doubt, but even if, you know, that would be like somebody, it would be like one of your aunts accidentally discovering independently and living the theory of relativity.
I mean, it's really hard to come up with consistent and rational theories of ethics and to really uncover philosophy.
It's so simple, it's impossible, and it's so emotionally brutal to go through it.
That people shy away from it as they're supposed to, as it's designed to do.
All of the stuff that we're taught when we're kids is designed to keep us away from philosophy.
It's designed to keep us frightened and angry about philosophy.
Because philosophy is the opposite of hegemony.
It's the opposite of power hierarchies.
It's the opposite of violence. It's the opposite of domination.
It's the opposite of manipulation. It's the opposite of propaganda.
It's the opposite of exploitation, both psychological, emotional, and economic.
It's the opposite of war.
It's the opposite of the redistribution of income at the point of a gun.
Philosophy is the opposite of all of these things and these things are enormously profitable.
Slavery doesn't work once the slaves figure out that slavery is a moral evil.
That's why you don't teach them to read.
That's why you make them Christians.
And make them read or read to them the parts of the Bible wherein slavery is justified.
Commanded, not just justified.
So, when you start to talk to people about the simple truths, the agony of everyone who's lied to them becomes clear.
And as I said, if everyone around you is great, that's wonderful.
Maybe everyone around you independently came up with a theory of relativity or Newton's Principia or whatever.
But even if they did, they themselves have to understand how everyone else around them is being lied to them, and everyone that's not in your immediate wonderful clan is lying to you.
And it's not that people lie to you that is the greatest and worst thing.
Some con man can come along to lie to you.
That doesn't destroy your sense of rationality.
That just makes you be more cautious about con men.
But it's when people lie to children wide-eyed and innocently they lie to children about ethics that they themselves never follow and they lie because they wish to avoid their own emotional traumas having been lied to themselves.
And they maintain the lies throughout the child's life and they exploit the child based on the lies they tell the child.
That's a different category from people who just were told bad things and I mean, there's a real intent here, right?
As you will find out if you have a family that doesn't independently invent all of the stuff that we've both invented and derived here, if they didn't happen to just have that ability, which, again, I sort of highly doubt.
And it's not because, oh, I think I'm so smart.
It's just because it's just so emotionally brutal.
It's just so emotionally brutal to go through it that I sort of guarantee that Not everyone in your family went through it, and anyone who did go through it and did reason it all out, if they had the ability and emotional strength and independence and money, right?
It costs money, too. I mean, 20 grand on therapy, you know?
What is it? I probably spent $300,000, $400,000 on my education, including opportunity costs, maybe $300,000.
That's all kind of brutal, right?
And... It's just really hard.
And then, of course, if they communicate, they have the abilities and skills to communicate it and are powerful and effective and positive.
All of these things would have to come together, and I just don't think they did in your family.
And if they did, it sure as heck didn't happen to more than one person in your family, and your family wouldn't keep them around.
I'm not anti-family.
I'm incredibly pro-family.
I'm incredibly pro-family.
I just wanted to stop being about lies and control and domination and subjugation and humiliation.
That's all I'm about.
I love parenting.
I love kids. I think the family is a wonderful and beautiful and benevolent thing.
It's just got to stop being about lies.
That's all that's important to me.
I mean, if the doctors are prescribing the wrong thing and I publish an article saying doctors are prescribing the wrong thing and then people say, well, you're just anti-doctor.
It's like, no, I'm not anti-doctor.
Why would I then say doctors are prescribing the wrong thing?
Because then obviously I'm saying that because I want doctors to prescribe the right thing and be better doctors.
But anyway, so the second part of what we're talking about here in terms of really understanding and empathizing with those that you're talking to It's heavily involved with and related to understanding the trauma that what you're saying is going to inflict on them if they really understand it, and that they totally get.
Everybody totally knows the truth.
Everybody absolutely, completely, and totally knows the truth already.
You're not telling anything to people that they don't already know.
This is not a truth that is handed over like a present.
This is a truth that is excavated from somebody's soul where it exists pristine and perfect already.
That's why push debating doesn't work.
You've got to both be archaeologists together, sifting and dusting and uncovering the truth as it remains like a buried city below the choking false dust of the false self.
The true self is a city underneath the desert straining and striving for sunlight and freedom and wind and populations.
But you've got to both dig.
You can't dig for him, right?
Because it's his soul. And he can't dig without your help.
Any more than I could dig without the help of Ayn Rand, eight million philosophers, and two years of three hours a week therapy.
The truth is social.
The truth is social.
The truth is conversation.
And that's why you can't be a push to beta, because they already know the truth.
They already know the truth.
And the funny thing is, like, three days of excavation and the city rises like Atlantis from underneath the sand.
It's all weightiness. The truth is waiting to be activated.
It doesn't have to be brought up bucket by bucket.
The city doesn't have to be dug out with a team of 5,000 laborers over 10 years.
You start digging for this city, this city rises from beneath the desert, towers above you, rains you with sand that blows away.
And it's pristine and it's golden.
And the plumbing works and the taps work and it's all perfectly preserved.
And everybody knows this.
Everybody knows this. It's just that the Bedouin dwellers flee.
The Bedouin dwellers who are the only family who say there is no city beneath the sand.
There is nothing but sand. They flee when the city rises.
And nobody wants to let those people go because they're the only social mechanisms that people have.
They're the... They're the virtue that people believe in that is simply just being lied to.
And the camels, no, I'm not going to stretch the metaphor that far.
I think you get where we're coming from.
So everybody already knows.
Now, I had this dream, which I've mentioned before, for many, many, many years.
It started emerging during the course of therapy, which was, gosh, I guess six to eight years ago for me.
Over the course of eight to six years.
And I had this dream which plagued me until relatively recently, until last year.
And it was a terrifying dream wherein I would be standing in a city by the sea and a meteor would strike the sea or something would occur far out at sea and a massive tsunami wave would come and smash the city.
Sometimes I'd be standing on the beach.
Sometimes I would be in the city.
Sometimes I would be underground.
One time I was in a hotel.
Many, many different opportunities for seeing this wave come in and absolutely smash the city by the sea.
Home by the sea.
And... This dream kept occurring, and I tried so many different ways to try and sort it out.
I tried renting Deep Impact.
I tried visualizing it during yoga.
I tried to write about it.
I tried just about everything, and I could not understand what the hell the dream was trying to tell me.
And this kept waking me up.
It was terrifying. At times, I would be smashed.
At times, I would almost survive my own death and see that in the dream.
One time, I was floating miles above the drowned city.
Oh, no, not miles, but...
Hundreds of yards, hundreds of meters above the drowned city.
I was floating on the surface of the water, and there was no land anymore.
And I had lost part of my leg, and I could see the city below and all the bodies.
It was just terrible, below the water, submerged.
And these dreams would occur with fair regularity.
And I finally figured it out.
I can't even remember what happened, but I did finally figure it out, what it was.
And the dream was trying to teach me empathy, and it was, okay, a little bit esoteric, and I, you know, could rather have, I would rather have had a slightly simpler message, but it certainly did drill it home for me.
Yeah, it was early last year, very shortly after I started podcasting.
And the answer to the dream was that this was the effect that I was having on others, and I didn't get it.
I didn't get it. That the truth, not me, but the truth that I was talking about was hitting people like a tsunami.
And it felt like destruction.
There was an impact far away.
And this was the view from the false self, right?
There was an impact far away, which was...
The truth hitting the senses, the spoken truth hitting the senses and entering the mind.
That created a massive wave that washed away the false self, and to the false self that felt like death.
And I couldn't understand at the beginning of the podcast.
I mean, I'm just talking about the state of the society, got all these angry emails and denunciatory things and, you know, hostility and condescension and, you know, faked pity for my intellectual ignorance and so on.
But what I sort of got through the processing of this dream was that I was coming across like a highly destructive tsunami.
And these dreams all started long before the Asian tsunami.
It wasn't that metaphor that occurred.
But once I kind of got the impact that the truth has on other people, and really that came about by finally recognizing the impact that the truth had on me.
The truth as actionable, the truth as this is virtue and those people who will neither conform to virtue, the virtue independent of your consciousness, those people who will neither conform to virtue nor refrain from attacking it nor will enter into a conversation about it must not be in your life.
That the first virtue, the first state of society is you, is your surroundings, is your environment, is your You don't have to have the city emerge from the sand in order to ditch the false Bedouin, right?
I mean, you can ditch the false Bedouin, and then you can start digging, because the false Bedouin will just keep kicking sand in your face and filling it in and tell you there's no city and mocking you, and that's just too frustrating, and you just won't get anywhere, right?
So, letting go of falsehood before achieving the truth is a bit of a...
That step is a doozy, as those who are going through it will tell you.
That's a bit of a step. That's a bit of a leap, right?
Leaping off the cliff on the assumption that you will fly is very, very tough.
Because you think you're leaping onto air.
Just mere ideas, but you're actually leaping into reality.
The cliff is the cloud, right?
The air is the earth.
And that doesn't look that way from the false self.
It looks like quite the reverse, but it's not so.
So, once you understand how the truth impacts other people, their exquisite sensitivity to it, Their extraordinary humiliation at it.
And this is, you know, if Jennyism Parts 1 and 2 ever made it this far, the laughter, I have believed as many absurd things as you believe.
And I have laughed at myself as hard at the things that I have believed.
And I have confessed to things like supporting the war in Iraq.
All of my mistakes. I've got a podcast subtitled The Morals of My Messes, and things that I've learned through my own susceptibility to corruption and to greed, and for me it's largely financial.
That's my great temptation.
So, if you did get this far, it was never meant to be humiliating.
It is funny, and the humor is not derisive.
The humor is that we have all been taught such nonsense, and we don't see it.
But it is fundamentally funny when you see how clearly It is revealed that we are all taught such nonsense.
But if Jenny didn't continue with the conversation and we haven't heard from her in a couple of weeks, if Jenny did not continue with the conversation, it's not because she felt that I humiliated her.
It really is because if she continues with the conversation, then she has to re-evaluate all the things that she's been taught through her education.
She would then have to say, hey, okay, so if my professors are all lying to me and destroying my mind in my degree, I wonder what their motive is.
And if nobody around me is correcting all the lies that I have been told, and if I am susceptible to those lies because of what my parents taught me and what my teachers taught me, And if I take vanity for the sake of my educational achievements, but those educational achievements are both to have my own mind destroyed,
but as a teacher or as somebody who wants to be a teacher, to become a virus that will infect the minds of children and destroy their capacity to reason in any coherent way, then really I am just part of the machinery of hegemonic subjugation, right?
I am just a propagandist that is raised to harm and brutalize and destroy the minds of children.
Huh. I wonder how I could have missed that.
And I wonder what my goals are going to be in a world where that's what I was being trained for.
That I was trained to be a terrorist against children.
I think that's a lot to swallow for somebody who's 18.
I really do. I highly doubt that I would have had the strength for that.
So, if she didn't continue with the conversation, it's because she gets that.
And that's okay. She doesn't have to get it now.
She's 18 for heaven's sakes. I'm not going to lecture anyone at not getting the truth at 18 when it took me until my Mid-30s.
And then late 30s for the real truth.
Stateless society plus the family stuff.
So, Jenny, if you made it this far, take your time.
But just recognize that now that you know, you won't get to be blind to the emotional consequences nearly as much.
now that you know the truth, you don't get to just get vaguely depressed and aggressive later in life.
You will feel much more exquisitely the pain of what it is that's going through, going on in your life, and the degree to which you're being lied to, and the fact that everyone told you all of these complicated and ridiculous, quote, truths.
And then, of course, you are going to wonder why.
And this wondering why, why, okay, if this guy who's telling me about anarcho-capitalism and freedom in radio philosophy, or philosophy in general, if this guy is right, and everyone lied to me, if this guy's right, and everyone's lying to me, and it's all this lying that's going on in society, then, and it's all this lying that's going on in society, then, then why, Why is it occurring? Why is everyone lying?
What's the motive? What's the motive?
And that's the true agony.
That's the true agony. You don't have to be sensitive.
You can go around bludgeoning people with all of this, but to get through defenses, you need a light touch.
Defenses are erected in the face of brutality.
And brutality will only reactivate those defenses.
And you can't fight defenses. You absolutely cannot fight defenses.
You can't fight defenses. The more you attack them, the stronger they get, because they're based on attack.
And this is why escalation always occurs.
And this is why when escalation is occurring, you know it's your defenses that are being activated as well.
And the reason that anarcho-capitalists or whoever, I will just call them ancaps, the reason that ancaps get so hostile...
It's because they have not processed that it's really hard to do it and they have not processed that it's really hard to do it because they have not processed the motives for the people who were lying to them.
Why? Why would everyone tell you all these false things?
Why would everyone tell you about the state and God and the virtue of parents and the divinity, the moral divinity of family?
And all of this other nonsense that reality is not real, that logic is only valid in certain circumstances, that stealing is bad, but taxes are good.
Like, why would everyone tell you all of this highly, highly complicated nonsense, this massively contradictory mess that people call modern thought?
Why? Why would people teach you that?
And once you get the answer to that, which we've talked about before, once you get it for exploitation, right?
The smarter you are, the more they'll try and train you that reality doesn't exist.
Because the smarter you are, the more verbal you are, the more you want to be a teacher.
And just look at teacher's college for all this nonsense.
Don't believe me. Just go look at the curriculum for a teacher's college.
The smarter you are, the more they're going to want to train you into being a virus of power.
The more they're going to want to corrupt your mind.
The greater your mind, the more they're going to want to corrupt it.
Now, they didn't with me, or at least they tried, but they didn't get very far.
But then they just ignored me, right?
Then they just rejected me.
Because they can't openly...
And I was pretty well prepared, and I have pretty good debating skills, so they couldn't just sort of crush me that way.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I was crushed in other ways, which I'm sort of recovering from, but that way was not so strong.
But the greater your mind...
And look at the minds on the board.
Look at the guy who did the podcast about it.
His grandfather died, ends up in an institution, reading Nietzsche at 13.
Of course they have to crush him.
Of course they have to crush him. The greater the mind, the greater the danger to the existing power structures, to the violence.
The people who can see and communicate clearly about the violence at the root of everything that we do as a society.
The bucket of blood that this statue of self-idealization rests in.
The fingernails and yay fingers that are embedded in the mortar of the wall of the church we worship.
The death of the workers who built the church.
The blood that is in the mortar that holds the church up.
The human bones that are the keystone and the arch that keeps the church aloft.
I mean, we can't see that.
We can only see the church.
church, we can't see the blood and the bones.
So, of course, the smarter you are, the more you're going to have to be crushed.
I mean, it's inevitable. So the people that you're talking to are obviously smart and verbal.
And they had a whole lot more attention focused on them, in terms of lying to them, than the, you know, the stereotype, you know, your average truck driver with an IQ of 90.
Not that all truck drivers have an IQ of 90, you know what I mean.
The same way that I will pour an enormous amount of effort into changing somebody who's, or...
Helping somebody wake up who's an 18-year-old intelligent, very intelligent, and verbally adept woman who wants to be a teacher, I will spend hours on podcasts to try and help that person wake up.
Whereas I will not argue religion with a hairdresser.
Because she's got scissors.
But... The more intelligent the person and the greater their language skills, the more they have been attacked, assaulted, undermined, controlled, brutalized, scarred, broken, lied to, deluded, distracted, and reshaped as an agent of power, right?
I mean, somebody who will now transfer the virus to children and harm children, break children, you know, for the sake of those in power, the same way that domesticated animals must be broken in.
So once you sort of understand the degree to which you are just bringing a tsunami of pain to people when you talk to them about the simple truths, that you're activating every single conceivable defense and that they have been taught that their humiliation is their pride.
that their subjugation is their vanity, that they have done well in school, and that they're smart, and that they're...
So, their entire false self self-esteem It's being challenged, and it feels like death.
It feels like humiliation.
When you have been told that advancing in the Nazi-like ranks of the child-destroying elite, if you've been told your whole life that getting a medal is the greatest thing ever, and you get a medal in war because you slaughter a bunch of people, and then somebody says to you, a badge of honor?
Badge of honor? You must be kidding me.
You think this medal is a badge of honor?
This is a recognition of mass slaughter.
It is pinned on your chest that you murdered for money.
And you believe this is something to do with honor?
The defenses that get activated in this situation are staggering, violent, unbelievable.
Trust me, I've been seeing them for, what, 15 months?
14 months? And before that for over 20 years, 25 years.
So I do know a little bit about this and I've also gone through it myself.
What did it cost me? What did it cost me to finally get the truth?
My relationship? My family?
My job? My friends?
Yeah, I get it.
It's tricky.
And having empathy for that is why you have to be so gentle.
It's why you have to be so gentle.
This is spinal surgery.
This is not carpet bombing.
This is not raised voices stuff.
The raised voices caused the lies and the defenses.
The bullying and the emotional manipulation and the frustration and the irritation and the negativity.
This is what caused all of this stuff.
You cannot solve the problem with the emotional aggression that caused the problem.
This is why it's so gentle.
It's such a delicate operation.
And that doesn't mean that you can't get angry.
That doesn't mean that you can't raise your voice or anything like that.
But you can't bully.
You can't bully. And if you decide that you are going to detonate someone, you only do that because they're beyond help.
And there are other people in the room who will benefit from that.
From seeing that.
So, I mean, some, I don't know, some marine calls into the show and I detonate him.
Because of my fabulous TCPIP-based coverage.
If some Marine calls into the show and I talk to him about the sort of mass murder and the murder for hire and so on, and he just gets more and more angry, I get that he's not going to see the truth.
I get it. So I'll detonate him, but not because I want to change him, but just because I want people to see that you can stand up to these people and also to see what happens when you call them on their stuff.
And that anger is not going to sway someone away from the truth.
So it's fine. You can do that.
I'm not saying be, you know, softy, softy guy, but just have a sense of care for what you're doing.
Thank you so much for listening. And thank you, thank you, thank you to the people who...
I went to skiing this weekend.
I'm teaching Christina how to downhill. And I just wanted to thank you.
I had a great trip, and I'm sorry that we didn't have a show this weekend, but...
But we didn't. And thank you so much to those who donated over the weekend and I came back with an absolutely renewed vigor for what it is that I'm doing and I hugely appreciate everybody's kindness that way and generosity, just as I'm sure you appreciate my generosity in these podcasts.
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