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March 9, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:28
676 Defoo Communique
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Good afternoon. Hope you're doing well, everybody.
I have a piece of paper, but don't worry.
I'm very stuck in slow traffic.
So, I'm going to read this, and then, since I have been so cavalier at exposing or at least discussing other people's personal lives, it seems only fair that I turn this laser-like focus on myself, and you can see how well I can peck at the mirror of self-knowledge rather than simply talk about other people.
So, this is a letter from my brother, an email, and I'll tell you the history.
Afterwards, might as well just get the whole reading thing in first.
Hi Steph, I had a long email, but I just junked it.
Here's what's so. I have been really angry with you my whole life.
It was perfect before you came along.
The whole world revolved around me before you were born, and you came along and spoiled it all.
So I got back at you by torturing you through your childhood, by ignoring you and killing you off.
When you got too big to tease, I switched to lying and selling out on you.
All in all, a pretty disgusting way to treat someone you love.
I see that all the breakthrough bullshit and promises of a happy ever after ending have been icing on top of shit.
You have been very wise to keep your distance!
The impact on you was a deeply painful childhood and constant disappointments growing up.
I burned up the enormous reserves of trust and love you consistently poured into me.
The further impact is that you have lost contact with his wife and his two daughters, who I know you love and miss.
The impact on me is that I've lost my brother quite deservedly, and I miss and love you so much.
I have also missed the gift of Christina, my wife, and all the wonderful things she brings to life.
So from the bottom of my heart, I truly apologize for the enormous amount of suffering my actions have caused.
I also want to thank you for the outstanding contribution you have been to my life, for all the laughter and fun you have generated for me over the years, as well as the sumptuous and enlightening conversations.
I have been deeply enriched by knowing you and being with you.
I am not committed to continuing being the righteous know-it-all asshole you have come to know over the past 42 years.
Oh, we have a pedestrian. Let us be careful.
That's not in the letter. I am committed to be a loving, vulnerable and intimate in our relationship going forward.
We have had great times in those moments when, by accident rather than design, I brought those elements to our relationship.
I am now saying that I see clearly what a jerk I've been and promise to manage myself accordingly.
I'm proposing we create an awesome partnership founded on love, respect, and admiration.
Do you accept this offer or have a counterproposal?
I'm also giving up another theme in my life, which is being controlling, so that I am wide open for anything you would like to create that works for you.
Crap, this ended up being a long email anyway, and he put a smiley face in.
So that's the email.
I might as well give you a little backstory, and it's not because you're so fascinated by the trials and tribulations of my family life.
It's just that I do counsel that morality and virtue and integrity is more important than family, and sometimes it's in direct opposition to these things, it would seem.
And so I recommend that you be as open and vulnerable and honest and courageous with your family as possible to find out if you can actually have a relationship with them.
There's nothing worse than hanging out with people you can't have a real relationship with.
It's destructive for everyone involved and it really messes you up and hampers and undermines your ability to love in other areas like in your marriage or with your own children.
I don't know if you can hear the reggae, but it's fairly funky.
It's not mine, because of the aforementioned fair funk.
Oh, can you hear that? No, probably not.
Wait. Oh, very nice.
All right, so there's a couple of copyright violations.
So, the backstory is that I have only one brother.
I grew up in a single-parent household.
My parents divorced when I was, I don't know, six months or a year old.
My father moved to Africa.
He's a geologist, and my mother did not.
She's insane. And I grew up with just a completely hellacious, violent, chaotic, destructive, abusive...
Family life. And this, of course, people say, well, this is why you're a philosopher.
And it's like, yeah, maybe. You can certainly accept that as a theory.
The problem is people say, well, that's why you're a philosopher, therefore your theories have less value.
And I don't know that that's the case, right?
If my mother died of cancer and I came up with a cure for cancer because I loved her and hated the way she died, I'm not sure you would say, well, your motive was because your mom died of cancer, therefore I'm not going to take your cure.
So, yeah, I grew up in this absolutely hellacious household.
And we moved around a lot.
I went to lots of different schools.
There was violence, chaos, sleeplessness, screaming, throwing things.
Just a completely chaotic mess.
But my mother was just mad.
Like, she's just mad and vain and weird.
And she also, to me at least, had the additional...
Not inconsiderable excuse of having grown up in Nazi Germany as a son of Jewish parents.
And she was born in Berlin in 1937.
Not a good place to have the Hallmark childhood.
So she was shipped to...
They were in hiding for periods of the war, and then she was shipped from orphanage to orphanage during the war, and of course, complete social breakdown and malignant evil throughout the land.
I can only imagine what happened to her in the wee hours with the caregivers who were around, so she was crazy mad and evil, but at least had some pretty sparky starting point to start from, so it is something that I don't forgive it, but I sort of understand it a little bit more.
My brother, on the other hand, has more of a sadistic streak than my mother.
He actively focuses on cruelty.
So my mother would just sort of get angry and hit and scream and throw things.
My brother would do this stuff like, you know, yes means no and no means yes.
Do you want me to hit you? And then, bam!
You'd get hit no matter what you did.
And there'd just be all these mind games and all this, I don't know, I'd hate to say standard elder sibling stuff because I think that my brother was a little bit more sadistic than most elder siblings, but it doesn't seem to be wildly uncommon for this kind of stuff to occur.
So then I didn't see him much during my 20s.
I was in theater school and I was doing an undergrad and graduate degree in history.
And then we ended up...
Let's not even get into why, but we ended up going into business together and worked together for a couple of years in business and built a successful company.
I might say that I did a little bit more than he did, but let's not get into all of that detail either.
But basically, there was lying and betrayals and so on, which ended up costing me some significant amount of money.
And eventually, after trying to talk about it with him a number of times, I just decided that it was too exhausting to stay in contact with this guy.
He was just too cruel.
He was too malignant.
And so I stopped seeing him.
I just, you know, sent him a letter and said, you know, that's it for me.
I just can't.
I guess I was about 34 or 35 or so.
And this was after, we don't even have to get into it, but he'd been pretty unpleasant for quite some time and had gone into business with a guy who cheated me out of some significant amounts of cash.
So, you know, obviously just not a whole lot of loyalty and that's some of the stuff that he's talking about in the email.
So really, I have barely seen him over the past six or seven years, and just for the video crowd, and I've mentioned this before on a podcast, but this is sort of my theory, and it seems to be like it sort of sits well with me, because I know everyone says, oh, he's your brother, you'll regret it, blah, blah, blah. Well, I don't think so.
But my theory is sort of like this, that I guess I start seeing my brother around the age of 35.
I'm 40 now.
And... So I had 35 years of unpleasant and difficult interactions.
And he's right, though. I mean, there was some fun.
He's got a great sense of humor and can be hilarious.
So there were some fun times as well.
I'm not going to be hand-wringing and all Greek and tragic and so on.
But the problem was that it's pretty much 35 years of mostly negative interactions.
Difficult, hostile, scary, brutal.
He could be violent at times.
I mean, just unpleasant interactions.
And... My sort of theory is, and it's not just my theory, at least I've put together most of it, but the component parts and certainly not all mine, you kind of need a 10 to 1 ratio, like 10 good things for one bad thing in a relationship.
And now that I'm married and realize just how blissful and wonderful a relationship can be like 100% of the time, I don't even have that as a standard, but let's just say that is a standard.
You know, like 10 times, you have to keep a relationship sustainable and positive, you have to have at least 10 times the number of good times as you do bad times.
So pretty much, let's say, 35 years of bad times.
I don't mind. If you want to knock off five years, we had some shits and giggles from time to time.
So let's just say 30 years of bad times with this guy, or some years I didn't really see him very much.
So, the problem is that if you sort of say 30 or 35 years of bad times, in order for the relationship to reach equilibrium where I'd be willing to move forward, there would have to be 300 to 350 years of good times in that sort of 10 to 1 ratio, like unbroken, unremitting good times.
And I don't really hold my breath for that.
I'm very happy if nanorobots can clean up my cells as they decay, but I'm not planning or aiming for a 350-year lifespan.
It may seem that I'm doing the podcast as somebody who lives even longer, but from a sort of mere physical standpoint, I'm not planning on living that long.
So there's no chance.
There's no chance.
Even if my brother would have...
Change around his personality completely and become exactly the opposite of who he was to change from a fairly sadistic and dangerous fellow to a positive and loving and wonderful and this and that.
There's just no way that I'm going to live long enough for him to reverse the harmful effects.
And this 10 to 1 ratio is more close to marriages, right?
Where you've both met each other as adults.
I think that the ratio is more like 100 to 1 when it comes to being a child.
Your first impressions of someone are much more important than the impressions you form later on when your personality is more or less mature and you've met each other as adults and so on.
So... Maybe I would have to live for 3,000 or 3,500 years in order to regain my trust, and that most of that 3,500 years would have to be perfect behavior on the part of my brother, and this is just simply impossible, right?
So there's just no conceivable way that there's any positive interaction that can come out of it.
And all of this, of course, is assuming that my brother has Really flipped on his personality and has magically reconstructed his brain from all of the savagery he displayed early for the first 15 years of my life until I became big enough to not be physically bullied.
There had always been a mental torture element, the creation of impossible situations and so on.
But this is assuming he could change his personality completely and almost 180.
Then... If we had a great relationship for 350 years, we would approach equilibrium.
And then we would be able to build after that.
But, of course, he's not going to change his personality.
He's not going to change his personality.
Personal growth is a...
I mean, it's a real challenge.
It's the ultimate extreme sport.
I mean, it is the greatest and most exciting journey in the world.
I kind of wish that we all didn't have to dig ourselves out of the holes of our histories.
But, that having been said, it is a wonderful and positive thing to go for.
But it doesn't generally seem to accrue to people who have...
performed sort of great evils against the helpless, right?
If you've abused a child and my brother was older and was abusive and I was younger and smaller and more dependent and so on, It seems like if you abuse a helpless child, the price you pay is that you spend the rest of your life in tortured self-justification and you will never achieve any peace of mind and you will never achieve any true joy because you're wracked with guilt.
And, you know, it's sort of important, if you don't mind me, I'll get to the letter in a sec.
I'm not sort of trying to dodge. I'm just sort of trying to put my responses in context.
You kind of want to do things in life that if you do something wrong, you can undo it.
If you yell at someone, you can grovel and apologize, and you can sort of reverse the harm that you've done, right?
But there are certain things that you can't undo, and once you're in a situation where you can't undo something, well then, my friend, you're in a situation where restitution is impossible and your conscience will simply devour you alive, and you will spend the rest of your life wriggling like a fish on a hook out of water, wriggling on the barbs of your own conscience and making up all these sort of mad justifications and so on.
And it seems, and this is not empirical, this is just sort of my theory, But it seems that there's almost no hostility that is greater than between the sadist and his victim.
When the victim escapes or evades the claws of the sadist, then it seems that there's almost no rage in the world that is greater.
Than the rage that the sadist feels towards his ex-victim, right?
I mean, that just seems to be sort of embedded, right?
And so if you go back into that kind of relationship, really that's what's waiting for you, right?
You're just going to get screwed again.
And the truly sophisticated sadist, of course, is the person who woos you back and then screws you again, right?
Woos you back and then this pattern has occurred again.
In my life with my brother enough times that I'd like to think that my learning curve can handle this stuff now.
So that's sort of the backstory and the history and the framework of this kind of stuff.
And my brother is on the Landmark Forum now, which grew out of Werner Erhardt's Est stuff from the 70s.
And I did, I think, two courses about...
Gosh, nine or ten years ago.
And I found them interesting. I found them stimulating.
I mean, it's intelligent stuff.
I did find that they were not very good at philosophy, but they had some interesting exercises and some fun stuff to do psychologically.
And so I didn't pursue it any further because I felt that intellectually it was a little weak.
Actually, it was quite a lot week.
But it certainly was an interesting experience to go through.
And, I mean, if you've got the time and the money and the inclination, I certainly wouldn't say that it's a bad thing to do.
You've just got to keep them off your time and your wallet afterwards, right?
They're a little bit invasive that way.
So now that he's on the forum and the forum is all about cleaning up your relationships and so on, then he's sort of been phoning.
He only has my wife's number.
And so he phones her like every couple of days.
It's been going on for weeks, basically, with the same kind of stuff that's in the letter here.
You know, I'm sorry.
I was wrong.
I want to change.
And so, if you go through this kind of process with a corrupt family member or your family as a whole, then you're going to get these kinds of apologies.
You're going to get these kinds of turnarounds.
And the important thing is to know what's going on.
Like, should you go...
Well, I will thaw my heart and I will turn around and let's have dinner and let's sort it all out and let's start again and start afresh and start anew.
Or am I going to be, you know, icy-hearted glacier fellow and not open my heart to this heartfelt and obviously sincere apology?
And am I just going to hold on to my resentment and nurse a grudge till it grows a beard?
And, you know, you're going to have those kinds of questions and doubts about it.
And that all makes perfect sense, and I'll sort of share with you my approach to it.
Somebody on the board asked, what, are you going to respond to this?
It's like, well, just in a podcast.
But no, no, I'm not going to respond to it in any way, shape, or form to him.
And of course, he's not going to see this.
I mean... If he got through 675 podcasts and got to this one, then he would not blame me for what it is that I'm doing, but he would never get that far anyway, right?
The depth that we talk about here is very shallow to people in the grip of the false self, so I am as safely protected as if I were on another planet.
So I don't...
Really believe that these kinds of situations can turn around.
And I'll sort of tell you why. Other than this sort of 350 years of perfect behavior fantasy that would be required from an emotional standpoint.
The reason that I don't think this stuff can turn around is that after a certain amount of rancid and negative behavior, you sort of are faced with the following conundrum if you have done this, right?
So... So let's just say you're my little brother and I've been an SOB to you for decades and frightened you and hit you and tortured you and all that kind of stuff, right?
And I did confront my brother about this when I was 19 and then when I was 24 and then when I was 29 and, you know, we'd just never really burst into tears or we'd get angry or whatever.
We'd never really make any progress.
He knows what to say, right?
I mean, lots of people, as you can tell from flipping on CNN and looking at politics, just about everybody knows the right mouthy words to speak when it comes to virtue.
Just, you know, putting it into practice is quite a different matter.
So, the reason that you get into this kind of conundrum, and I'll sort of try with me as the example, is I come up to you and say, listen, I'm so sorry that I was a bastard to you for 35 years, but now I've changed.
But now I've changed.
Well, your response to me, I think, if you're sort of in touch with your own emotion and true self, is you'd say to me, okay, so, why?
Like, what is it that made you change?
That's an essential question to ask people.
What was it that made you change?
If somebody says, I've stopped drinking, or I've decided to stop drinking, you say, what is it that made you change?
Well, I wrapped my car around a pole after mowing down two pedestrians, and I woke up coughing up my liver and bleeding in the gutter with syphilis.
And pretty much then I got that it was not going to be a productive lifestyle for me.
Well, there's at least some catalyst, some momentum for change.
But the challenge is that if you are an alcoholic or were an alcoholic and that was your impetus to change, then how are you going to explain that to your family?
You're going to sit down with your family and say, I have decided not to become an alcoholic because I got syphilis.
And I got beaten up or I broke my arm because I fell down a flight of stairs.
I was so drunk. Well, how's your wife gonna feel about that?
How are your kids gonna feel about that?
Well, they're not gonna feel very good, right?
They're not going to feel very good.
And why?
You didn't change for them. Their entreaties, their implorings, their begging for change, the damage that you caused them, the humiliation that you inflicted on your children by stumbling around drunk when their friends were over and all that kind of stuff.
All that kind of stuff.
Their emotional reality, their emotional needs was not enough of a motive for you to change.
So when your wife was weeping and begging you not to go to the bar, but you just pictured all the fun you were going to have throwing darts with strangers, and you went to the bar, and you did this for decades, and then you say, well, I'm no longer going to be an alcoholic.
The problem is that there's no way to justly explain to your wife that you have stopped being an alcoholic and it had nothing to do with her needs.
But only because it now became a problem for you.
When I broke mom and got syphilis and got a black eye and whatever, right?
Got a goat pregnant.
Then the negative effects of my alcoholism accrued to me, so I decided to change.
It's still fundamentally a selfish action.
In the worst sense of the word, like a narcissistic action, to say, I am changing now because I feel bad and the negative consequences are accruing to me for what it is that I'm doing.
Sorry, I'm not explaining it too well.
I hope that it's making some sense.
I'm not stopping drinking because I care about you.
I'm stopping drinking because I don't want to face the negative consequences of my drinking anymore.
It's a very important distinction.
It's still narcissistic if you only change when you hit rock bottom, or if you only change because you're bullied into a change, or if you only change because you're just sick and tired of the negative consequences of what you're doing.
It's still fundamentally narcissistic.
It's still all about you as the alcoholic.
So if I come up to you as your torturing, sadistic, horrible older brother and I say, I've now turned around and I'm going to be a great person and blah-de-blah-de-blah, and I haven't talked to you in years, then your question to me would logically be, well, what brought about this change?
Oh, I'm at the forum. I'm doing the landmark forum and they're bullying me and they're calling me on my relationships and they're telling me to give up my story and this and that and the other.
And so, basically, what has caused the change is not the fact that I... I'm sorry, I'm just going to flip back to this.
This didn't work at all. Sorry about that.
And I would edit it, but it's a video, and that's too weird.
All choppy. So my brother's changed because he's in the forum.
And so me confronting him a number of times, me expressing my needs, me crying as a child because I felt hurt or frightened or abused, none of that was any impetus for him to change.
None of that was any impetus for him to change.
In fact, you know, when I expressed pain as a child, I got more hurt.
And so I sort of dampened all that stuff down and then spent a good chunk of my 20s opening those valves back up again so I could enjoy...
A rich emotional life.
So my pain was actually a spur to his cruelty.
I mean, that's sort of pretty clear.
And that's the whole point of a sadist, right?
They like you to pain.
So my pain wasn't enough.
My anger wasn't enough.
My withdrawal wasn't enough.
Not seeing him for like half a decade wasn't enough to alter his behavior.
What was enough is now he's being bullied by the forum and so now he wants to alter his behavior.
Because there's no coward like a bully, right?
Especially a brave, noble child warrior who picks on a much smaller sibling.
I mean, there's just nobody as brave as the heroes who pick on children, right?
So, that problem is not just the multiple, the 10 to 1 multiple of good times to bad times.
The problem, and it's not an insignificant problem, is what is the motive for change?
If the motive for change is, if it occurs in a conversation, like if I was talking with my brother when I was 20 and confronted him, or 19 or whatever, when I confronted him on this...
And he just sort of burst into tears and this and that.
And if there had been, you know, I'm going to go to therapy and figure out what the hell was wrong with me, this, that and the other and so on, then that would have been a possibility.
Like, lo, those two decades ago for us to sort of turn this thing around.
But that wasn't enough. Me saying to him, look, you kind of ruined my childhood along with mom and, you know, to some smaller degree dad, only because he wasn't around.
You know, my childhood was like a real ruin and a mess and a horror to live through.
And, you know, it's a lot to do with you, largely to do with you.
If that had gotten through to him, then we might have had a chance 20 years ago.
But that didn't get through to him.
Confrontations later didn't get through to him talking to him about my feelings and my needs, about business betrayals and lying, and didn't get through to him tens of thousands of dollars of problems with money that never came back to me.
That didn't do it for him.
Nothing did it for him. Nothing connected.
Nothing made my emotions and my needs real within his personality.
That's the point of what a sadist fundamentally can't feel other people's feelings except in terms of enjoying their pain.
That's sort of the deal, right?
So now that he's changed, obviously the change has nothing to do with me.
I haven't seen the guy in five years.
I mean, once or twice.
He showed up at a company reunion, the company we founded.
I sat at the opposite end of the table and didn't look, right?
So, obviously this change has nothing to do with me.
this awakening as to what a nasty guy he was and so on has nothing to do with me.
So since it has nothing to do with me, it's not like there's any more empathy towards me in this email than there has been at any time over the past 40 years, off and on, that we've known each other.
There's not a single shred more empathy towards me because it's nothing to do with me that has caused this, quote, change.
He's just learned a new language because now he's being bullied by the forum and they're saying, you're not going to be a successful forumite if you don't clean up your history with your brother and get him to come down and take the forum and give us his money.
So he's just exploiting me again to keep the forum leaders off his back.
It's got nothing to do with me.
It's got nothing to do with me.
Because there's no explicable change that has occurred that has anything to do with me.
It's just uncomfortable for him now because he's in the forum to not have a relationship with me because they're pressuring him heavily.
And so that's why he's doing it.
It's got nothing to do with me.
He's just, again, reducing his discomfort by using me.
Or trying to. He's not going to succeed.
In the same way that when he was younger and he felt powerless in the chaos and madness of our household, he would exercise power by hurting me.
And that's how he would regain his strength, right?
He would tread my face into the mud and gain a few inches of height and feel like a He-Man.
And, yeah, yeah, I know.
Like, I mean, yeah, he had a tough childhood.
But, you know, guess what? So did I. He only had one bully.
I had two. And I didn't turn out to be an abuser.
And I've never hit anyone. And I barely rate my voice at anyone.
And I've never been cruel to people.
And so on. So I kicked a dog once and felt wretched about it for weeks.
It didn't hurt the dog.
I just... I was jogging and it kept running in my legs.
Anyway... So, yeah, it has nothing to do with me.
And that sort of essential question is important to understand.
And, yeah, you know, there's a part of you that's like, oh, it's all changed, it's all better, and things can go back, and things can be healthy.
But it's not true, because too much water under the bridge, too many failed attempts at trying to connect and communicate with this guy.
And, of course, nothing has changed now relative to what happened before, except there's some external pressure.
So basically, I begged him not to be an alcoholic for years, and he sort of spat in my face, and now he decides he doesn't want to be an alcoholic because he's going to go to jail otherwise, or whatever, right?
I mean, it's got nothing to do with me.
It's still just him looking out for number one and not having any empathy towards others, right?
So that doesn't really get us very far, looking at that.
Don't worry, traffic has slowed down again.
I don't want you to feel nervous. I'm an excellent driver.
Excellent driver. Now, here's some other clues.
Here's some other clues. When someone says to you, and it is, oh, such a convenient explanation.
When someone says to you, and it is always the elder siblings who do this, right?
When somebody says to you, well, you know, the problem was, you see, that you were born and you ruined my perfect life with mommy and daddy.
I mean, you hear this kind of stuff quite a bit, right?
And it's a pop nonsense bullshit psychology explanation for this kind of stuff.
Somebody says, some older siblings, always the elder sibling says, well, it's the curse of the birth order, and I had a perfectly wonderful time with mommy and daddy, and then you came along and ruined it all, and I hated you for that, and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And it's like, oh, what a load of bullshit.
Oh, my God, what a load of complete and utter nonsense.
First of all, I mean, this part you wouldn't know other than what I've sort of told you.
Merge. Merge.
But first of all, there was no idyllic life with my mother before.
I mean, my mother's crazy as a bat hound.
Was hospitalized for postpartum depression for two or three months after I was born.
Couldn't even get out of bed. I was given over to a nanny who was actually very affectionate.
Might have made quite a difference in my early life.
I'm sure she did. So, I mean, there was no, and my parents' marriage was dissolving during this time, so there was no idyllic life that my brother was experiencing.
My mom and dad were throwing things at each other and screaming, and I'm sure there was physical violence, because it wasn't like that ended when the marriage ended.
So there was no idyllic life.
There was no idyllic life that occurred for my brother before I was born.
What happened was that he was frightened and he was feeling a lot of chaos.
And then when he saw a helpless infant around, he sort of made that choice, right?
Rather than to say, well, bad things are occurring for me that make me feel upset, which is chaos, rage, torture, anger, and so on, violence.
I'm going to inflict that on this helpless infant and child so that I can feel some mastery over these feelings.
Of fear and so on that I'm experiencing.
I'm not going to solve fear through love.
I'm going to solve fear through violence and degradation and humiliation and bullying and torture and so on.
That's a choice. And yeah, you can make that choice at three and four and five and six years old, for sure.
For sure. And it's still...
A choice, right? There's a fork in the road.
Now, after a while, you don't get to go back.
It's like the road less traveled. You don't get to come back and take the choice again because your brain gets formed, right?
So then you just get hard-cased, and that's why these choices are so important.
And yeah, I do believe that somebody who's that young is still responsible for that choice because he doesn't like it when it's done to him, right?
It's this basic thing of empathy, right?
So, this idea that the problem, you see, was that I was born...
And I know he's not sort of blaming me for being born, but this is a story that gets him off the hook, right?
And more importantly, it's a story that gets mom off the hook and dad off the hook, right?
Because if he said, I enacted the abuse against you that was being enacted against me by mom...
Then he's obviously a step closer to understanding the truth of his own moral disasters and corruption.
But then he opens up a whole new kettle of worms, which is that for years he had my mom, and I vehemently argued against this, but he would have my mom, who's crazy and violent, babysit his children.
Babysit his children.
Until she left the door open and got the dog killed.
Because she was on the phone with some boy, some guy.
Right? I mean, if he gets how his corruption was enacted from my mom, or from our mom, then he's got a whole other mess.
Which is, why did he expose and continue, why does he continue to expose his children to this crazy, violent, evil woman?
Right? And then he's got more of a mess to clean up.
And then he's got to answer the question.
It's like, okay, well I raged against Steph and ordered him out of my life and then Steph took me up on it and I got upset and pretended I didn't and so on, right?
So I have put a line in the sand and said, Steph doesn't get to be in my life anymore and I agreed with all of that.
I wasn't like passive in that.
I didn't want to be in his life anymore and so I didn't call him for a while and then he just got really angry and so on.
So he's then going to have to sort of Answer the question, okay, so I got Steph out of my life.
I kept corrupt business people in my life.
I kept my mom in my life, who's crazy, evil, and violent.
I kept my dad in my life, who's like weird and crazy and probably violent too.
So the only person that I kicked out of my life was my brother, who is at least aiming at trying to be a virtuous human being, despite having, or perhaps because of having such a rough start in life.
So I got rid of the good...
The only person I got rid of in my life was a good person.
And I kept all the bad people in my life.
Then what does that say about him and his moral choices?
What does it say about his friends, his business associates, his marriage?
What does it say about his marriage?
And of course, he doesn't want to go there.
He doesn't want to say, well, the way that I'm going to understand my own history and why I did the terrible things that I did to a helpless child is I am going to examine the pressures that were being brought to bear on me and I'm going to start to experience the pain and horror and fear and loathing that I experienced that I smothered by exercising brutal control over my younger sibling.
Because once he gets that, then he's going to have to look at his last...
30 or 20 years, let's say, since he was in his early 20s and say, okay, well, my marriage, the way I raised my children, which I can't go back and undo, right, in this thing that we're talking about, can you undo it or not?
The whole life unravels.
Your whole life is going to unravel.
Everything you've done to your children, your whole marriage, your career, your friends, your extended family, your in-laws, everything is all embedded in the same area.
And of course, I was provoking change in all of that by, of course, I had to shed all of that stuff myself.
I shed my seven-year...
I shared most of my friends.
I shared my mom, my dad, my brother, my extended family.
Everybody had to go, right?
Because nobody was willing to talk in any kind of real manner about what happened in her family, this great smoking crater that we call the family center.
Nobody ever wanted to talk about it.
And they just basically told me to shut up and get back in line.
And I wasn't going to do that.
I mean, once you get down the road of truth a certain way, it just turns into less of a road, more of a luge chute that you just try and hang on as you go down.
And so I wasn't going to go down that.
And there's like 6 billion people in the world enslaved to their family.
One guy gets away. I don't think it's going to cause everything to unravel.
But with any luck, it will.
So... That's sort of another example that somebody is completely lying to themselves and attempting to evade responsibility in the present by saying, well, you see, the problem wasn't that the marriage of our parents was dissolving and there was fear and loathing and violence and chaos and madness and screaming and all of that around.
That wasn't the problem, Steph.
See, the problem was that you were born and I had this wonderful, beautiful and idyllic life that happened before.
And then when you were born, I hated you for smashing up this wonderful, beautiful, idyllic life that I had before.
But that's just a made-up story.
And it doesn't take more than a moment's thought to realize that before I was born, it wasn't like this marriage that our parents had was great.
I mean, it was just right at the end.
It was right at the end, and that's always the ugliest time in any situation.
So, this is just a story that's made up so that my brother can avoid taking responsibility for the choices that he's made and the cruelties that he's, I know for a fact, and I'm not going to get into any detail, but the cruelties that he's inflicted on his own children.
I mean, how was that going to change without rigorous honesty, without the Truth and Reconciliation Committee of the mind, without...
I mean, it took me years of therapy, and I wrote tons of books and kept a journal for many years, and my wife is a psychologist, and so I've worked very hard at trying to unclutter and clean up the past, which is hard enough if you're a victim.
I mean, if you're the victimizer, oh man, I can't even imagine what that would do to you.
I can't even imagine what that would do to you.
So that's sort of an example when somebody just makes up an explanation that just makes no sense whatsoever, then you know that they're in a dangerous self-justifying and unstable state, and you really are not going to profit at all from having anything to do with them.
Now, there's some other subtle language.
I'm not going to try and nitpick too much, but he says, I apologize for the enormous amount of suffering my actions have caused.
Now, this is a very subtle thing, but it's important, right, to sort of piece the puzzle together so that you don't get fooled and reeled back into another abusive situation.
The enormous amount of suffering my actions have caused, that's a pretty passive-tense way of putting it, right?
Another way of putting it is to say, I truly apologize for the enormous amount of agony I inflicted on you.
Not suffering my actions have cause.
Like, you're not dissociated from your actions.
They're not pets out there running around that you have no control over.
So little things like that are sort of important, right?
And then he's, you know, he tells me very clearly, I mean, probably unconsciously, but he tells me very clearly that, of course, this is about the 12 millionth time that he claims to have had some massive breakthrough that makes sense of his whole life, and now he's totally ready For a positive and benevolent relationship with me going forward.
He's eager and happy and everything's changed.
And he says, right? He says, add to all of that the breakthrough bullshit and promises of a happy ever after.
Which is icing on top of shit.
Which actually just gets you to eat the shit pie again, right?
People put all this, oh I'm sorry, they just want to drag you in to screw you over again.
Because they like to hurt you, right?
I mean, we have to assume that what people do repetitively they kind of like.
If you keep drinking, it's because you like to drink.
It's not that complicated.
So my brother has a long history of hurting me.
So obviously he prefers to hurt me.
He likes to hurt me. I mean...
Because he keeps doing it, right?
So the challenge is, when you are a victimizer, when you're a sadist, how do you get to keep the person coming back for more hurting, right?
Because if you just keep hurting them, then they'll just go away and won't come back as I did, right?
How do you get them to come back?
Well, you have to try and lure them back in.
And you have to try and lure them back in with the promises of better things, and this and that and the other.
I've changed, we'll have a great relationship now, and it's all too wonderful for words, and this and that and the other.
You've got to lure them back in.
And that's how you get to hurt them again.
You've got to fake trustworthiness in order to screw someone again.
How many times can you back to the same well?
Well, quite a few if you're me, if you're my brother with me, but at some point the well runs dry.
And so, yeah, he says icing on shit, right?
It's a very telling phrase that every time he claims to have had a breakthrough, which has been dozens of times, every time he claims to have had a breakthrough and now wishes to turn things around and have a great and wonderful relationship with me again, he says it's icing on shit.
And, of course, you put icing on shit So that somebody will eat the shit sandwich again, right?
No, it's icing. It's all icing all the way through.
This is the typical stuff, right?
And so he's telling me that his breakthroughs are bullshit.
And then he tells me that he's had a breakthrough and we should have a great relationship.
I mean, really, you can't get much more clear than that.
Like, if I went back and I would inevitably get screwed again in a horrible kind of way, I mean, it would be nobody's fault but my own at this point.
Nobody's fault but my own at this point.
If I keep trying to get the cheese and I keep getting nothing but the trap, at some point it's not the trap player's fault that I keep getting hurt.
At some point it's my responsibility.
So you couldn't get any more precise and any more clear.
And people are generally very clear in their communications.
We prefer not to hear them when they say stuff.
So he says, I hated you for being born.
My breakthroughs are all bullshit.
That they're icing on shit.
Which means he wants to eat shit again.
And you were right to stay away from me because all of my breakthroughs that have occurred were meaningless and were mere allures to get you in to get hurt again.
But now you should...
But now you should come back and we should have this great and wonderful relationship.
I mean, you really... We couldn't get any more predictable, right?
I mean, you couldn't get any more clear if you tried.
You couldn't get any more clear if you tried.
So, you know, there's no temptation whatsoever.
I mean, it's a clear warning shot.
I mean, he doesn't want me back in his life anyway.
I mean, he doesn't want... I absolutely guarantee you.
And this will be true of defooing for you if this is what is required for you to be a happy and virtuous person.
There's just no way in hell that my brother wants me back in his life.
I mean, I absolutely, completely and totally guarantee you that.
Because I've gone through a pretty rigorous process of trying to establish, achieve, maintain, and grow the truth and integrity within my life.
And so, I mean, how long would it be before there'd be some massive, horrible collision of values, or rather values and anti-values, and so on?
He says, I propose we create an awesome partnership founded on love, respect, and admiration.
Love, respect, and admiration.
Well, you know, without wanting to sound vain, I can see how he might have that feeling towards me.
Even at some, I don't know, tortured corner of his soul where some original shreds of true feeling may still reside.
But on what grounds could I conceivably love, admire, and respect him?
For being cruel to me, for being cruel to his children, for lying, for cheating people, for being dishonest in various situations in his life, all these kinds of things.
On what conceivable grounds would I love, respect, and admire him?
So how could that conceivably be mutual when he's just confessed to spending 35 years feeding me shit sandwiches?
And he says, now, if you could respect and admire me, that would be great.
It's like, yeah, I get that that would be great for you, because it would give you some real relief from looking in the mirror and thinking, gee, I'm not a nice guy.
Which is, you know, I mean, if you've never had to do that, I mean, it's really agonizing.
We all love to believe that we're the good guys.
So, I totally get that he wants love, honor, respect, right?
But he says, I hated you for being born.
I treated you like shit. I fed you shit sandwiches.
I tortured you. I lied to you.
I cheated you. I betrayed you for, you know, 35 odd years.
And then you stopped seeing me.
Because, you know, my learning curve is not the sharpest sometimes.
And then he says, but I want your love, your respect, and your admiration.
I have tortured you.
For decades, and I want you to admire me.
What kind of strange Stockholm Syndrome universe does he think that I'm still living in, that this would be at all remotely tempting, or anything that I would be even capable of providing?
Even if I wanted to, even if somebody paid me a bajillion dollars to admire, love, and respect my brother, the sadist, how could this be?
It just couldn't conceivably be.
It's like asking a woman to love her rapist.
I mean, it's just... I guarantee you it's not going to happen.
It's not going to happen.
So this mad fantasy wish fulfillment is just deranged, right?
I mean, he just...
He wants the heroin.
I mean, he must be running out of people to hurt, right, in his life.
I mean, he must be, right? So he's running out of that...
That juice, that hit, that positive feeling.
He's just not able to hang on to it, right?
He needs another hit. And that is something that is clearly not going to be able to be achieved for him unless he sort of lures me back in for another sort of hit and strike.
I just think that was about it, that I wanted just trying to measure my time to go home and so on.
And... Yeah.
So, I mean, there's really nothing else to talk about.
It's just that when you look at this kind of stuff and really do try to remember this, like 10 times, 10 to 1 positive to negative ratio, plus the question of why have you changed and does that have anything to do with me and my needs, and really read between the lines.
People are very clear in what it is that they're communicating.
What he's telling me is that I want you to come in and love and admire me because I'm feeling bad, and then I want to hurt you again and make you go away because otherwise your integrity will make me feel even worse if you stick around.
So, I hope that this helps.
Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you soon.
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