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March 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:18
684 The Etymology of Lying
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Ah! Ah! Live in Ancapistan!
Wow! Ba-dang-dang-dang-dang!
Live in Ancapistan!
Wow! I feel good!
Actually, I just mostly feel kind of white.
But I'm in a James Brown kind of mood, so I will be...
Ah! Oh, let's not do that too many times.
It's not soul. I'm just getting strangled by my left hand.
Down, boy! Down, wantums!
So I hope you're doing well. I thought that I would try and clarify something, which, you know, maybe I should have gotten into just a little bit before, but never did quite get round to.
So... Ow! It's not Sol.
What's happening is my seat warmer is...
It's short-circuiting. Ow!
And that sort of basic brain function with relation to reality, which I'm not really having much luck mastering at the beginning of this podcast, but hopefully will continue as we go forward.
Ow. So, I guess the basic question is...
Why would lying be bad?
Why would it make you feel bad?
What's the criteria for good mental health?
How is it that the mind works in relation with reality?
And what are the consequences of failing to work it with relation to reality?
And so on. So I thought I'd just do a quick meander through this topic and see what we could come up with that might be of some sticky use.
So, the first and foremost thing, of course, is that the mind is sensitive to reality.
But the human mind is different from reality, obviously, insofar, though it is completely contained within reality, in that the human mind can create error, right?
It can process either through a mistaken perception of the senses or a mistaken interpretation of base sensual data or through emotional defensiveness or through some other mechanism, the human mind can contain error, as we talked about way back in the Introduction to Philosophy podcast, series 6 million.
And the human mind can create error, can create a mirror of reality that distorts reality.
And that's sort of the downside.
The other, of course, is that the human mind can create a mirror of reality that deepens, enriches, and extends reality, insofar as the physical laws don't exist in the real world, but they've been discovered, at least some, by human beings, which is an enrichment of what goes on in reality.
The human mind is an enrichment of what is actually just sort of blindly happening in reality.
So the human mind can enhance or degrade reality depending on its adherence to principles derived from said reality.
Ow! So...
What I mean by that, naturally, is that logic, the scientific method, and so on, are a series of principles that are derived from the nature of reality, and the human mind enhances reality to the degree with which it enslaves itself to those principles and tries as little as possible to veer from the course of rationality and empiricism and so on, the scientific method. And in the realm of economics, this translates into the free market because there has to be a recognition that there's no objective...
A thing called value in the world.
So how is value determined? Well, it can only be determined through the unfettered actions of human beings choosing value and putting something, not just saying I choose value in the way that people, everyone says I'm honest and courageous and noble and good, but that they actually put some skin in the game and cough up some resources of their own in exchange for other resources.
The only way in which value can actually be determined are price, but price is just a reflection of value.
It's the numerical form of value.
So, if you lie, for instance, right, there's lots of sort of things that go on in terms of morality and so on.
And if you lie, and we're not talking the little white lies, like, you know, if you're late for a meeting that's really important, you say, oh, traffic was really tough.
Whatever, right? Rather than, I was, you know, my cat looked particularly good this morning.
So, I mean, whatever it is that you don't want to say, you can sort of put in a little.
I don't think that stuff's particularly harmful.
Candy bar once a week isn't going to kill you, and a couple of white lies a week isn't going to kill you.
There is also the exaggeration, which I at times can be prone to.
I exaggerate too little in this context, but when you build upon a story until it becomes something larger than it was, that is also a form of fakery, but it can be entertaining.
I mean, fiction is a form of lying, but it's entertaining and sometimes creates, if it's well done, contains greater truths than most things that you experience in regular old life.
But we're sort of talking chronic lying, where you just sort of lie about stuff a lot, and it becomes sort of a habit.
Well, I mean, there are some specific reasons that you do that, and the most fundamental reason that you do that is low self-esteem.
You lie because you don't think that you're good enough without the lies.
It's a sort of makeup, to put it kindly.
So if I introduce myself to some woman and don't say, hey, I'm a software guy who yells at people in my car when I'm alone, but say I am a fighter pilot who also inspired Chippendales to do their thing, then obviously it's because a ranting solo software Volvo guy doesn't strike me as appealing enough to the fine young lady that I'm attempting to enchant with my charming wares.
So I'm going to make up something else, right?
And naturally and immediately I've set myself up for a situation of danger, right?
Of danger and conflict and problems.
If I manage to lie to this woman successfully and she's like, oh, Chippendales fighter pilot, dude, let me offer up my breasts to you like two pomegranates on a shelf.
Wow, bad metaphor. It's like the one in, what do they feel like, Bags of Sand?
That one from 40-Year-Old Virgin.
I didn't make it through that whole film, but I watched about the first 20 minutes before Christina and I walked out.
I do remember that line.
That was just a bit too gross for me.
So, if I say this to a woman, then, you know, an intelligent woman...
Is going to be kind of skeptical about that.
Like it just seems like a bit of an outlandish claim.
And she's probably going to ask me some sort of pointed questions about this, that or the other and very quickly reveal that I'm not telling the truth.
And that's going to be very humiliating.
I'm now working on...
I've got the sort-ofs under control.
Now I'm working on that little...
I'm trying to replace it with the James Brown howl, but again, Whitey Von Tidy Whitey is not letting me do it because I'm too white.
So if I do manage to get the woman to go to bed with me because I've lied to her about who I am and I've sort of tried to impress her or whatever, then she's going to experience the humiliation when she finds out that she's been lied to and she believed it.
So one of us is going to get humiliated, for sure.
And if she doesn't find out, or whatever, I continue to keep the lie up, then where does this lead, right?
I mean, I know this is a bit of an extreme example, but I think it's useful to look at.
Where does it lead, right?
Where does it lead? So I bet it said lovely, if somewhat air-headed, stewardess and, sorry, sky waiter, galley hag, sky fossil, something like that.
And where does it go if she's believed me, right?
So she wakes up the next morning and we exchange numbers or whatever.
Then what happens? Well, I'm either going to have to keep up the pretense, tell her the truth, or break it off without telling her anything.
So again, here we have real humiliation, right?
So if I attempt to keep up the pretense and I end up like every bad sitcom in the history of the universe, I end up having to keep all this nonsense going.
That's humiliating to me.
I have to keep making stuff up and keep faking stuff.
And I've got this sort of false self persona going that's kind of wretched and it's just bad all around, right?
And of course at some point it's going to come crashing down.
At some point I'm going to not know the name of something in the movie Top Gun and that's going to be bad for me and it's going to come out.
The longer I keep it up, the more humiliating it is for me when it comes out and the more humiliating it is for the girl that I'm with.
Now, if I say, well, sweetheart, I am called to the Eastern Front, and I must go as a fighter pilot, much though I love thee, darling.
I'm afraid I can't stay.
I must go and fight the good cause, the righteous cause, and I must go off in my skyjet.
Well, then she's going to want to write to me, and I'm going to have to give her my address, and she's going to...
Oh, all this kind of stuff, right?
And if I don't see her anymore, like I could just break it off...
And then never see her again, never call her again.
But that's very humiliating for her.
And the more that she believed me, the more humiliating it is for her, right?
So the more she thought I was a great guy because I lied to her, then when I break up with her, she's going to feel even worse because a great guy doesn't want to have anything to do with her and isn't even returning her phone calls, and that's really humiliating and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, I mean, there's a sort of a clear example where reality is very likely to reassert itself unless I am willing to go and...
I don't know, work out at the gym for a year, join Chippendale's, oh, and become a fighter pilot, at which point I'm still going to have to explain to her why it took a little while.
Reality is going to reassert itself at some point, and the result is going to be humiliation.
And, of course, really that's the fundamental point of lying, is humiliation of self or other.
Humiliation is going to occur.
And the lying occurs because there's low self-esteem, but more importantly, there has been a significant violation of trust in the past.
Like, I think back to the times in my life where I lied more.
I don't really lie that much now, I don't think, but where I lied more, there's just a significant violation.
Humiliation, and a significant trust destruction that has occurred in the past.
People have lied to you, like they make commitments to you, and then when you expect those commitments to get fulfilled, they get angry at you, and then when you call them on it, they say, well, no one's perfect, but then if you ever miss a commitment, they attack you.
Like all of that kind of shifting, viper-sand, death-lock-destruction interaction that occurs is what happens, which results in people just lying.
You also have a tendency to lie if you get attacked for telling the truth.
That's just natural.
As I've said before, when I was a kid, I'd usually have two or three or four things that I could get nailed for at any given time and would get attacked for in a very hostile and ugly and destructive manner.
You know, things like I used the flashlight last and I couldn't remember where it was and I didn't want to look for it because then it would be harder to fake that I didn't know where it was if I genuinely didn't know where it was or I thought I'd put it back or whatever.
Then that is what occurs...
Sorry, that was what was occurring for me.
There'd always be something, some couple of things that I could get nailed for.
So I lived in a perpetual state of sort of disease and anxiety, sort of low-grade anxiety.
Not so much for that for a lot of other things.
That was a symptom. And so when somebody would demand to know something, and this is true for me even to this day, and I swear to God it's going to be true until the day I die.
You just can't undo this early wiring.
You can just learn to work around it and soothe it where possible.
So right now, even now, when people sort of get really angry or confrontational and demand this, that, or the other, like, I genuinely don't remember at this point.
Like, at this point in my life, the defenses are so embedded, and I don't think that they're bad.
I just have to avoid people who are like that, right?
It's not like they're bad because they're instructing me on how it is that I'm being treated.
But somebody comes along and says, you said X three weeks ago.
Where is it? I genuinely can't remember.
I can remember things I said in Podcast 3 down to a fairly fine detail, even though I've never listened to it more than once.
But when somebody comes at me full guns blazing, I literally don't remember.
I literally become a deer in the headlights because that was the defense that I used early on.
I very quickly and early learned that that was better than confessing to something.
There was no nobility in confession.
There was no nobility in honesty.
When you were in my household growing up, there was no, you know, well, you know, I can admire you for telling the truth, son, so I'm going to, you know, whatever, not punish you as much.
But there was none of that. If you admitted to something, when I was a kid, and maybe it was different, I'm sure it was different, I hope it was different for you, but when you admitted to something, not only did you get punished, But then it became a standing issue within the family, right? And this is how these sorts of pathologies develop, right?
So if I were to say I took the flashlight and I have no idea where it is, well, I'd get punished and screamed at and dragged around the kitchen and don't you know how much these things cost and money doesn't grow on trees and just all the humiliation that you could imagine in the world.
And then what would happen is anytime that anything went missing...
I would never be able to deny it.
Like never. Anytime my brother would lose something, then he would, like the moment I would admit to having lost something, anytime my brother would lose something, he would just blame me and say, oh, this is like the flashlight incident, the famous flashlight incident.
Especially if you've denied it and then you admit, then you can never, ever change your story.
This is how defenses start.
So if my mom sort of snarls at me, where's the flashlight?
And I say, I lost it.
Well, that's bad enough.
But then anytime everything goes missing, people would just say, well, Steph, you must have lost it.
And that's really annoying. It's really frustrating.
So I didn't want to go down that road.
And the other thing that might occur is that I might deny it and then admit it later, right?
If the promises of absolution raise their ugly head, right?
It's like, I won't get mad at you.
Just tell me if you lost it. I won't get mad at you.
It's like, I'm sure I fell for that before I can remember.
I'm sure I fell for that once or twice.
But then it just got even worse because then any time I would deny things in the future, it'd be like, oh, this is like the famous big denial of the flashlight incident.
For sure you did it. You have no credibility with me.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? So, I mean, what sane human being is going to want to get involved in that, right?
So you're just going to lie. And you're going to lie.
And in order to make your lies as believable as possible, when you're in a situation of extreme emotional and sometimes physical danger, you're going to purposefully disassociate.
Or you could say unconsciously or whatever.
But you're going to dissociate from the surroundings and you're going to fog your memory.
You're going to fog reality.
You're going to fog reality because when you genuinely don't know, then it's a lot safer for you.
Because you can genuinely say, I don't know, I can't remember, I don't know what happened to it.
Whereas if you look for it and you get all the answers and you figure it out, when there's no value in truth and there's an intense amount of value in terms of diminished punishment and no longer being the family idiot pin-up boy for everything that goes wrong in the future...
When there's every negative to really learning the truth and becoming conscious of the truth, and there's every positive to remaining foggy about it, then this is, of course, what happens.
People just get foggy.
And this is something, I swear, this is a trait that is embedded within my soul, right deep down in my spinal column, when people come at me guns blazing, and they do, right?
I mean, this job a little bit, actually more than a little bit, I just, I fog out.
And this is why I'm leaving. I mean, I'm leaving because I can't do a good job here, because I don't, I'm not committed to the success of the people around me, and they're certainly not committed to my success.
So I'm old enough now to know that if I don't like and really respect and are committed to the success of the people that I'm interacting with, said success is never going to occur.
It's never going to occur. There's just going to be a grim, dismal, forever and ever amen spiral of some kind or another that's just going to be highly negative.
So once you get into that situation, if you're ever around people and you don't wake up wanting their success, like I yearn for the success of the people on the board.
And I don't mean this as someone who's eternally and perpetually successful myself.
I mean, I yearn for my own success, too.
I yearn for my wife's success.
Anything that I can do to make my wife more successful and thus be more of a sponge off her in the Freedom Aid radio parasitical mode, I can do, I will do.
And I yearn for the success.
I feel overjoyed when people on the board report success in various areas of their life.
And if you're not hardwired to enjoy the success of those around you, you can't succeed, right?
This is a very aggressive company.
It's got a very aggressive board and lots of yelling and so on.
It's just not an environment that works for me.
There may be other people who are more dissociated that it works for, but it certainly doesn't work for me.
And this has sort of reminded me of this, right?
So lying is...
It's low self-esteem stuff.
Obviously, I was not raised to have any sense of my own self-worth, but rather to just be a hiding, curled-up armadillo slash mouse slash small mammal at the feet of big and brutal dinosaurs.
So I was not taught to have any indirect sense of my own self-worth.
I was not taught to negotiate.
I was not taught to think for myself.
In fact, thinking was the enemy, right?
And I think this is much more common than would be evident just from looking at the pathologies within my family of origin.
Thinking is the enemy, right?
And when you're attacked for telling the truth or for honest mistakes or whatever, then you very quickly realize, and it doesn't take more than one or two times of this, you very quickly realize that the truth is your enemy.
Reality is your enemy. Because reality gets you punished.
If something happens, you just get punished.
And because you're in a situation of perpetual violence or bullying or disapproval or whatever, they all sort of roll together for a child.
If you're in that kind of situation, very quickly you learn that if you tell the truth, you get punished.
Therefore, the truth is bad.
But you can't consciously say to yourself, when I tell the truth, I get punished.
You might say it to yourself like, oh man, they suck every time I tell her.
But you can't sort of fundamentally process what an incredible evil it is to do that to a child.
Because you get, or if you're anything like me, you'll get sort of sucky and pouty and cranky pants at your family, grumbling to yourself, treat me fairly, grumble, grumble, grumble.
But you can't really stare into the bottomless evil that is doing this sort of thing to a child, right?
To punish a child for processing reality correctly, to punish a child for honest questions and honest mistakes, to punish a child for the correct processing of reality, to hold physical or emotional abuse over the head of a child so that the child will choose to dissociate and fog out and not be, to not exist, which dissociation is willing yourself out of existence.
To do that to a child is really the foundation of such an enormous amount of evil and corruption in the world that we could spend a long time talking about it, but we won't.
And if I had really processed that, I would have been too depressed to get out of bed.
Like, I would have realized the degree to which I was embedded in a black obsidian, entombed within a black obsidian rock of evil, shiny, volcanic evil.
And that would have been just beyond processing.
You can't work that out when you're six and go, great, another 12 years in the tomb of evil.
That's not going to work out for you as a child.
Nobody's going to survive that psychologically.
And so you just get grumbly and petty and you feel hard done by, but you don't really process it at any sort of fundamental level.
You develop these sort of camouflage strategies with the truth and so on.
So as an adult then, you know, this is an important thing to process.
If you're like me, there are other reasons why people lie, I'm sure.
This is sort of the one that I think is worth talking about.
You know, because it's me, so it's worth talking about.
But this is an important thing.
When you feel the urge to lie...
Then you have to be very careful around people like that because it means that you're in the face of somebody who's aggressive, who's going to punish you for telling the truth, who's going to get upset, who's going to get angry, who's going to be negative, who's going to be hostile, who's going to be whatever.
These people are poison.
These people are poison because you really should allow no personality to stand between you and the truth.
And if you're in a situation where you find yourself falling back into earlier habits of self-obscuring, Well, that's an environment to get the hell out of, right?
I mean, if you just don't feel like you can talk and play and be curious and make mistakes and have other people make mistakes, you know, this perfectionism is the slaughterhouse of virtue, right?
Perfection is the enemy of the good.
And this approach to perfectionism is absolutely...
And, well, we'll talk about that.
I don't think I've done a podcast on perfectionism, but, boy, do I have some things to say about it.
We will get to that another time.
But... This standard that people hold that error is to be punished is very common.
Since consciousness is innately erroneous, it has the innate capacity for error.
We can misinterpret everything we look at.
The world is flat. And, you know, the moon and the sun are the same size and all that kind of stuff that I've talked about before.
I promise I'm going to get some new.
When I go full-time, I promise you, my darlings, that we are going to get some better science metaphors.
Oh, I can just feel the three that I'm using.
And thank you for the gases expanding.
Maybe you've heard the podcast where I've had the beans.
Anyway. I promise I will get some better science metaphors when we go full-time, and they will involve some really mind-bending stuff that has something to do with quantum physics and LSD. Oh wait, that's redundant.
I think they're the same thing. So you may have had this particular approach to being punished, or you may have experienced this approach to being punished for making mistakes.
But consciousness is naturally erroneous.
Naturally erroneous.
And especially that is the case when we've all been raised so badly, right?
Then, of course, consciousness is going to err far more than it non-errs, so to speak.
And if you've had this experience where you're punished for making mistakes or speaking back or having questions or having an identity or having a being or taking a breath, it's all sort of the same thing.
Then you are obviously, when there's a standard of perfection, there's obviously going to be a standard that you feel you fall short of and so on.
And all of that's fine. I'd love to meet this person who invented these standards of perfection.
I really would love to meet this person who invented these standards of perfection and has been able to achieve them in the realm of wisdom and virtue before inflicting them on others in the realm of petty and nonsensical other things.
But I doubt I shall ever meet that person because it doesn't exist.
People use standards to bully other people, not because they have such high and wonderful standards.
People will yell at you for having a typo or whatever, just using a past example.
They'll get mad. I wouldn't yell at you.
They'll get mad at you and sort of put you down for there being a typo in something you're doing without realizing that in the big scheme of things, a typo is far less important than, say, letting yourself become negative and abusive towards other people.
But this is just the criteria.
This sort of criteria is never allowed to exist.
So the mind then befogs itself to save the integrity of the body, right?
And to do the basic pain avoidance that the mind is good at.
I mean, the mind wants to connect with reality because reality is where sustenance is.
But the mind recoils from pain, from fear, from physical injury.
Of course, right? And in any decision between giving up on reality and retaining the physical health of the body...
The mind will give up on reality.
You can always try and reconnect with reality later, but you can't undo a broken bone.
So if somebody's going to hit you with a bat, if you tell the truth, you're going to lie.
You're going to lie. I mean, this is natural.
There would be no sane or healthy mind that would choose getting beaten up in some god-awful manner to lying.
And this, of course, since religion is a lie, we can tie all of this into how much bullying goes on towards children when it comes to religion.
We can sort of talk about that.
Well, we've talked about that before, but just everything I'm talking about here is not necessarily to do with flashlights and typos.
So, this aspect of things is sort of important to understand.
I think that lying is a symptom of abuse.
It's a symptom of prior abuse.
Human beings don't naturally want to set themselves up for humiliation.
And lying, if you continue to do it as an adult in any sort of chronic or significant manner, It's to protect your parents, right?
It's to reproduce the humiliation in others that you can't handle in yourself and that you can't blame your parents for in any kind of accurate manner.
So, hey, Vaguely Wondery cast, but we sort of got the central topic done, which is not too bad, and it's been a quick drive, so I think I'll wrap up a little early and give you all the time to go out and play.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you feel like donating, I would certainly appreciate it.
It's been a dry couple of days after a massively generous Sunday recent.
So if you feel like donating, I would certainly appreciate it.
We will have to buy a server at some point.
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