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April 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:25
720 The Hell of Attempting Connection
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is the 18th, 19th of April 2007.
Oh, spring has come to this benighted and frosty, hoary land, and so I'm going to go for a short walk at lunch, and while I was going, I thought I would answer the wise question from a long-time listener who was, let us say, mildly perturbed by...
It's more than a comment that I made in a recent podcast.
So let's get into having a little chat about that, and then we will see if we can't make some sense of some kind of theoretical answer.
So the issue that this gentleman came up with with regards to the podcast was this.
He said, At 17 minutes and 33 seconds.
Apparently, I haven't checked, but I believe him.
Why not? I said, if you have been fundamentally rejected by your parents, then any kind of emotional contact is going to highlight the early rejection.
And then the problem becomes, since we have normalized that lack of connection, when we then achieve some connection after an early life of fundamental rejection from our parents, the closer we become to others, The more pain we feel.
Getting closer to people equals an increase in agony.
So I have a few questions.
Okay, I know I'm probably being lazy here.
No doubt this is in one of the bazillion previous podcasts, but maybe I can get a special exemption for being a little dense?
This is the gentleman who occasionally puts himself down, but I can't find any evidence of it here.
One, I think I understand the link you're making here, but I'm not sure how the one, early rejection, leads to the other, inability to make adult connections.
Why, once you're an adult, would you not just immediately reject the rejection and move on?
Why would you instead choose to repeat on yourself what had occurred in your childhood?
Could you explain that a bit more?
Ha! No, no, I can't explain it a bit more.
I can't explain anything a bit, for God's sake, man!
Two, was this your experience as well?
And if so, how did you escape the paradox?
Or is this something one is doomed to have to keep revisiting and revisiting every time one wishes to make a new connection?
If that is the case, what are the coping mechanisms?
How did you tame this thing To a degree that connections were at all possible.
How do you keep it from flaring up now?
So, excellent questions.
And I mean, really, this comes down to the heart of the matter.
Straight to the heart of the matter.
And this paradox that we face, and this is part of the torture that continues from our early lives.
And this is how...
Evil and alienation and loneliness and corruption and horror and angst and all these sorts of things reproduce themselves.
So I'll at least put forward what I think and you can tell me what makes sense to you, if anything.
Now, first and foremost, it's hard to understand adult psychology without understanding that a child is immature.
And a child is entirely dependent.
A child isn't...
If you imagine you have been in some terrible accident and you...
Oh man, is it beautiful out here.
Oh, sweet mother of all that's happened.
You've been in some horrible accident and you're in one of those hoisted up kind of body casts and you're alone with someone and you have an itch and then you're thirsty and then you need to pee and Whatever, let's just assume that none of this is automated for you.
And so you're entirely dependent upon someone.
You're completely helpless and completely dependent.
This dependency, in the absence of morality, creates abuses of power.
It's inevitable. For many people, when somebody walks up to them and starts putting themselves down, like if I walk up to you and I start putting myself down and Looking down and shuffling from foot to foot and I appear very insecure and so on.
For most people in the world, this arouses aggression for reasons which we don't have to get into right now, but we've talked about before.
And this imbalance of power, this dependence, creates aggression.
And So when you are helpless in the hospital bed with your whole body in a cast, and you need things, and the person who's supposed to be taking care of you, who's, let's say, paid to take care of you, they're there voluntarily, continues to get more and more angry at your constant and legitimate requirements.
You've got to eat, you've got to scratch and itch, you've got to pee, you've got to take a dump, you've got to do all of these biological things.
You've no control over those, right?
I guess other than soiling yourself and starving to death.
But what happens is you face this problem that you want something from someone.
It's legitimate. You can't prevent that want.
You can't prevent that need.
You can't eliminate it because you're a biological creature.
And yet, every time you ask this person to fulfill that need, which they have voluntarily chosen to take on themselves as a task, You're paying them good money to do it, they get increasingly angry.
And let's just say there's no free market, you know, just try and reproduce the parental situation as close as possible.
Well, you have one of two choices, right?
You can either get angry at the person who you depend upon to scratch you and give you a catheter or whatever.
You can either get angry at that person Or you can get angry at yourself.
You can either say, this other person is being a jerk, and I'm going to assert myself, and I'm going to be assertive, and if need be aggressive, to get my needs met.
Or, you say, I'm an irritating person, my needs are unjust, and I have to tread carefully because this person is justly upset with me having my endless and continual whining complaints and requirements for X, Y, and Z. So, if you're irritating someone and you're dependent upon them, either they're a jerk for being irritable or you are an irritable person.
You irritate people.
Those are the only two possibilities for processing.
You can't ignore it because you're dependent.
You can't walk away because you're in a body curse.
So it's got to be one or the other.
It's got to be one or the other.
Now, this is the basic calculation that children go through When they're faced with this situation, as all of us were.
Well, if you confront an irrationally aggressive person with the irrationality of that aggression, what's going to happen?
What? Oh, what? Oh, what?
Let us put on Our magical mystery thinking caps and see if we can't parse out what might, might, might conceivably happen when you confront an irrationally unjust person with the irrationality of his or her injustice.
So if you're in a body cast and someone gets irritable because you need three glasses of water a day in order to survive, what's going to happen When you confront them on the irrationality, hostility, humiliation, degrading aggressiveness of their irritation and their communication of that irritation, what's going to happen? Are they going to say, huh, that's really interesting.
Of course, I've never really put it that way before to myself.
I can totally see that I have been treating you unjustly and badly.
It all makes sense to me now.
I'm going to light a campfire in your belly, we're going to roast some marshmallows, and kumbaya will float by for sure.
See how I tied the thread together from this morning?
morning, it's all too beautiful, isn't it?
Or is it more likely that they're going to escalate their hostility towards you and instead of just being irritable, they're going to become enraged?
What are the odds?
What are the odds that somebody who is expressing irritability frustration, short-temperedness, passive-aggressive, hamina hamina, to legitimate demands from someone who's dependent on them?
What are the odds that someone like that, if confronted with the hostility and irrationality and injustice and corruption of their approach to the relationship, is going to say, well, that's great.
You've really opened my eyes. How wonderful.
I'm going to go into therapy and get this all sorted out.
If somebody had the capacity to do that, they would not be...
Irritable at legitimate demands to begin with.
So the child says, I have, and this is like, I say the child is immature.
This doesn't mean that the child is not brilliant.
And I think that we all are in how we navigate these landmines, or these minefields.
So, that's the one option that the child has.
Now that option...
is going to increase the hostility of the parent, the option one, which is to confront the parent on the irrationality, or confront the nurse, or whatever, on the irrationality of the irritability of responding to just demands.
You confront, they escalate.
And then you know that you are hated.
As a child, you know that you're hated.
Now, you can handle being hated as an adult, because you're not dependent on your parents anymore or your nurse or whatever but you really can't handle and it would be biologically suicidal to do so or at least highly detrimental you can't handle this kind of hostility this kind of enraged feeling when you're a child completely dependent on your parents not going anywhere for 10 or 12 or 15 years what are you going to do?
If you're in prison and a guard is treating you badly, what's going to happen if you sit down and try and confront this guard with the inequity of his behavior?
What's going to happen? Well, I'll tell you what's going to happen.
Your treatment is going to get a whole lot worse.
And this is what slaves and prisoners and children have known since the dawn of time.
that when somebody fires shots across your bow, if you point out the irrationality and hostility of firing shots across your bow, they will just torpedo you and sink you.
If you're carrying a heavy load in a prison and a guard tips it, trips you and you fall and the guard says, well, that was rather careless now, wasn't it?
And you say, well no, you tripped me.
What's going to happen? Is the guard going to say, you know, you're right, I did trip you and that was pretty rude for me to intimate that it was your fault.
I'm so sorry. Let me help you pick these things up.
And I'm going to report myself to the warden.
No, of course not. If somebody had the capacity to do that, they would never be tripping other people to begin with.
See, I told you couldn't explain anything in a short way.
Now, the second option that you have is to say, I am irritating.
Not, my caregiver is irritable and irrational and unjust and cruel and cold and unsympathetic and whatever, volatile, immature, petty, dictatorial, whatever you want to say.
That's the one choice.
I'm not irritating.
My caregiver is irrationally irritable.
Now, the second, and that leads to escalation.
It could lead to physical abuse.
It could lead to abandonment. Basically, it's not a productive option.
Approach to take when you're dependent.
The second approach is to say, oh gee, I keep irritating my caregiver.
Therefore, I must be an irritating person.
My caregiver is just.
My caregiver is fair.
Therefore, I must be an irritating person.
I am the cause of their irritation.
Their irrational immaturity and weirdness and I am the cause of their irritation.
They are just and fair and I'm constantly irritating them.
And that's what every child and every slave and every prisoner and everyone else does.
We don't say, taxation is unjust, therefore I'm going to refuse to pay taxes.
That just escalates things.
You don't explain to the IRS guy, well, look, it's unjust what you're asking for.
You're using violence. He's not going to say, oh, gee, you're right, I think I'm going to quit my job and Let you go.
So we pay our taxes.
I mean, we just pay our taxes.
You don't confront aggressive and irrational and irritable authority.
It just escalates when you're dependent, when you're under their control.
So everyone takes behind what is door number B. It takes what's behind door number B. Or door number two, which is that my caregiver is not irritable, I am irritating.
And this is self-rejection, right?
So the rejection occurs.
The parent is completely unconscious of the rejection because they're immature assholes and they feel that they are being completely fair and all that with their child.
It's just that the child is irritating.
That, of course, is the projection of the parent onto the child.
So, you have to reject yourself and say, well, I'm irritating.
When you're rejected by your parents, you don't question the ethics of your parents, you just reject yourself.
It's inevitable. Everybody does it.
There's no shame in it.
It is the most sensible, most rational, and most scientific survival strategy.
And way back in the depths of toddlerhood, we tried things different, and they went very badly.
I guarantee you, though I cannot remember it, That when my mother, when I was first conscious of this bad behavior towards me, that I complained, and things escalated, and I got beaten.
I absolutely guarantee it.
So, we all tried something different, and found that we couldn't do anything, right?
If you're stuck in this body cast, and you say to your nurse, who's the only nurse who will ever come into the room, you say to her that you don't appreciate her snapping at you, and then with punishment she decides not to change her catheter, For a day and a half.
By the end of that, who's going to win?
You're helpless, you're dependent.
You're going to be like, I'm so sorry.
Whatever I've got to do to get you to change this catheter so I don't die and back myself up with urine, whatever you need, I'll say.
Whatever you want, I'm not going to give you any more trouble, miss.
And that's, of course, what parents can do.
So, what happens is you then reject yourself And when you reject yourself, and you say, I'm irritating, and I'm fundamentally unworthy, and I'm bad, and this and that, all the stuff that we do in order to survive, in order to have manageable rejection,
and a rejection which doesn't generally escalate to the point of suicidality, although of course it can, and it can, self-mutilation and so on, but in order to have a more manageable rejection on our hands, we reject ourselves, in order to have a non-violent, non-escalatory kind of Rejection on our hands, we reject ourselves.
Perfectly sensible, perfectly rational, exactly what I would do all over again where I put in that situation, without guilt.
So when you reject yourself, when you say, I am irritating, I am negative, and my parents are good and just, and they have legitimate, fair, rational, and moral complaints against me because I'm a bad person, and they're really good.
That's how you keep it from escalating.
That's what you do to protect yourself.
From rejection and violence.
And also to keep resources coming your way.
Parents can withhold dinner from you.
They can withhold TV from you.
They can beat you. They can dress you up in bad clothing.
They can make fun of you in public.
They can, quote, accidentally step on your toys.
I mean, you're completely helpless in this environment.
Completely helpless. It's worse than jail.
So you reject yourself, and what does that mean?
That means that good people reject me because I am bad.
That's the survival strategy that our parents inflict upon us through their evil.
Good people reject me because I am bad.
But of course the reality is quite the opposite.
Bad people are rejecting you because you are good.
So you completely have to lie to yourself.
You have to completely invert Everything that is, in fact, actually happening in order to survive.
And I don't just mean, like, not get beaten up, but I mean you can get the food you need and so on, right?
Especially when you remember that there were more kids than there was food throughout most of human history.
Kids who caused a lot of trouble, anyway.
Get into that. So, you say, I am bad.
My parents are good.
I am irritating. They reject me legitimately.
Which is the exact opposite of the truth.
So what happens then when your hormones hit and you sally forth in the world to find love?
What happens? What are you programmed to do?
If you don't deal with this, if you don't defoo, if you don't recognize the corruption of your family and how much damage they've done to you and this and that and the other, what do you do?
What happens? What happens?
Well, let's have a look at what should happen and then we can see what does happen.
What should happen is the moment that you get to be 16 or 17...
You leave home. You get your own job.
You don't look back. You take night courses if you want to go to school.
You get therapy. That's what you do.
That's what you do. And what does that mean?
That means that you say, well, my parents were bad.
I was good. I had this survival strategy called, I'm bad and my parents are good.
But now that I'm free of that, I am not going to continue to do it, right?
Like any more... Then once I'm out of prison, I'll continue to wear those orange fatigues, those orange overalls.
I'm out of prison, I can dress how I want, so I'm not going to do that anymore.
I'm out of the family, so I can now reverse the behavior that I did under compulsion, under threat of force, withdrawal of affection, resources.
And this, of course, is going to be very painful, because all of the years of suppressed pain and self-incrimination are going to pop up.
And it's going to be really painful to deal with this.
And that's why you need professional help.
Or at least expert help, let's say.
Because it's like getting the bends.
It's like being dragged up from the depths and placed on the land.
Your joints are going to hurt.
All the nitrogen bubbles are going to form in your veins and it's going to be painful.
Because you're changing environments and reversing all of your prior suppositions.
It's really painful. It's like if you were told your whole life that you had to walk on your hands and knit with your feet and then you can do everything upside down and then you realize that it was in fact upside down.
You had to reverse it. You'd have a lot of retraining and physiotherapy to go through.
It'd be very painful. You'd spend the rest of your life upside down if you want, but not very productive.
Just familiar. So you would go through a period of readjustment of mental physio, so to speak.
And you would recognize that your parents were bad and that you were good, which means that you would then be hypersensitive to, in a productive way, bad people in your life.
Bad people in your life would represent a familiar threat, which you would then avoid, and you would seek out good people in your life.
So the moment that someone treated you irritably, or somebody was irritable around you and didn't have, like, really good reason, and wouldn't talk about it, then you just say, bye.
I've seen this before. I know what it is.
It doesn't work for me.
You're a piece of crap.
Get out of my life. So you'd find good people and you wouldn't be sucked into horrible relationships.
There'd be no universal values, right?
So you'd be fine. But, you know, what is it that actually happens to people?
Well, like all of us, the pain avoidance, which allows us to invert the values of our parents' irritability and our virtue, the pain avoidance still continues to chug along.
And so people don't confront this issue that their parents were bad and they were good.
Anybody who harms or rejects a child is...
It's just evil. Because it's out of that that all evil comes.
So, you don't...
Most people, they don't avoid.
Sorry, they just avoid these things.
They just don't deal with these things at all.
They just avoid them. And so what happens?
Well, down in the base of the brain, the inversal of values remains intact.
It remains intact. Nothing happens to break apart...
This irrational ecosystem, this crazy structure.
Adaptable and rational, but crazy when you're free.
So, what happens then?
Well, you think that you're bad and that people who reject you are good.
I guess I could have started with that.
It would have been a little simpler. But hey, without the theory, I really feel that I get donations by the syllables.
So you sail forth into the world thinking, I am bad and those who reject me are good.
Now, nobody can consciously say, I want a bad partner.
I want somebody I will never love who will never love me.
I want to be rejected all the time, blah, blah, blah.
Nobody says that. Nobody aims it.
I mean, and it's not possible because that would be someone that you wouldn't be attracted to, right?
So you try to enter into relationships saying, good people reject me because I am bad.
I'm irritating. I am unlovable.
So you sail forward into relationships.
And one of two things happens. Either you meet a bad person who rejects you, in which case they're good and you bond with them.
This is back to the dream we did two podcasts ago.
So, if you sail out into the world with people who reject me are good and I'm bad, what happens is anybody who rejects you becomes good and you glom onto them.
Or, you meet somebody who doesn't reject you.
In which case, you switch positions.
You meet someone who accepts you, suddenly they become a loser, and you become your parents and reject them, so that you can be good.
Because whoever rejects someone who's dependent is good, right?
That's the axiom that survives from the childhood.
So then when you go out in the world, either somebody rejects you, in which case you attach to them, as a sickly familiar person, But consciously virtuous relationship or reality.
Or, if somebody doesn't reject you but rather wants you, in which case you flip into the other side of the equation, you become your parents and reject and score on them as losers.
Go to any nightclub and you will see this being played out over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.
Perpetually.
And this is the torture.
This is how I say people just cannot meet In this sort of situation.
They just can't connect.
They just can't meet. Because if you want the other person, it's because they're going to reject you.
That's good, right? It's good to reject you.
So the more you want someone, the more they're going to reject you.
The more that someone wants you, the more you're going to think they're a loser and reject them.
Because you're bad and irritable.
So why would anyone who was decent want you?
And that's why I...
And that's why I talk about this torture of people...
The more they want relationships, the more those relationships self-destruct.
The closer they want to get to someone, the worse the relationship gets.
It's like those two magnets of the opposite poles that you try to push together.
Now, of course, the reason you don't immediately reject the rejection is this is years of habit.
And, of course, there's not really anything, at least that I've found, to be coherent or decisive in the social atmosphere that helped people to see this more clearly, right?
Everybody will talk about, the psychologists talk about this sort of stuff in the abstract, but they don't say, and the way to deal with it is to get rid of your parents, anybody who's hurt you.
Now, how did I escape it?
Well, as I said, you retch up the contradiction.
You stick your finger down your throat, you retch up the contradiction.
You just take a stand. I mean, and...
It's a willed stand. It's a willed stand, and it's only possible to those who swallowed the abuse without re-abusing others, right?
So if you've abused others, well, you haven't come this far on the podcast, for sure, right?
I mean, fundamentally. So, what you do is you say, okay, well, I look at the facts.
Were my parents really good people who had a great relationship and were totally virtuous and taught me everything about virtue in a rational, concise, and understandable manner, but I just decided to become mysteriously evil?
Just look at the facts. Look at your parents' history.
Look at their relationships. I mean, if I look at my own parents, I won't go into this more than very briefly.
My dad has attempted suicide a number of times.
He's been institutionalized.
He's had electroshock therapy.
Suffered from lifelong and intermittent bouts of depression.
Had a marriage to my mom, the crazy evil bitch.
Had another loveless marriage.
And turned to the pathetic solace of superstition and religion later on in his life.
So, if my father rejected me, how could that be?
It must mean that I'm good, right?
To be rejected by bad people makes you a good person, right?
Because it means that you don't have power over them, which means you're not abusive, so they won't reject you.
Or so they will reject you, right?
They feel safe in doing so. You're not a threat to them, so they can reject you.
You're helpless and dependent as a child.
And my mom, well, we know all about my mom, I don't have to say anything.
My brother, well, these are not good people.
You just have to go, this is why the scientific method is so important, so powerful.
It's by logic and philosophy and rationality.
Empiricism is all powerful.
Just to keep questioning the axioms.
Okay, so if I was constantly rejected by my family, then my family must be, and if my family is good and I'm irritating, then my family must have evidence of being shining moral specimens of near-angelic perfection when it comes to ethics.
But then, of course, the question would then arise, even if you think that they were, why would parents of Angelic virtue, harshly and continually and humiliatingly reject a child.
Surely that would not be virtuous, right?
See, there's just no way that this doesn't all come together logically.
So you focus on that.
You just keep combing over. Look for the facts.
Look for the evidence. Forget your opinions.
Forget your history. Who cares about that?
If all we stuck with with opinions and history would still be amoebas and thinking that the world is flat.
Forget what it looks like.
Forget what it feels like.
Forget what you think it is.
Forget what habits you've accumulated.
Forget all of that stuff.
That's not scientific. That's just the bigotry of history.
So forget all that stuff.
You just look at the facts. What was the moral nature of the people who rejected a child?
Who rejected, scorn, humiliated child?
What is their moral nature? Are they good or bad people?
Are they good or bad people? If they're bad people, then tell them to take a flying fuck off a mountain, long walk off a short pier, and get the hell out of your life.
They're not reformable, and even if they were reformable, you would never be able to reform them.
You would only self-destruct doing so.
Somebody may be able to help the rapist, but sure as hell isn't the rape victim.
So get them out of your life.
Because it's only in action that philosophy comes alive.
We can think like Hamlet forever.
We can think about climbing the mountain forever, but it doesn't move us out of our chair.
At some point, if we want to climb the mountain, we've just got to go and climb the damn mountain.
And so if you believe that virtue is important and that you deserve love, then get the people who undermined and destroyed you as best they could out of your life.
You can't say, I'm worth something, I am a good person, and then allow yourself to continue to be abused by bad people.
It all just works, right?
It just tortures you. So the way out...
It's through a rational evaluation of your history.
Forgetting your opinions, forgetting the habits, forgetting everything that was drummed into you over and over and over again over those years.
Forget all of that stuff. That doesn't matter at all.
That's just a bunch of bullshit that people told you.
It's just a bunch of opinions that mean nothing.
Well, usually they're specifically designed to undermine and humiliate you.
So, forget all of that.
Forget all of that. Just look at the facts.
Look at the moral nature of your parents and your siblings and your friends and your lovers.
Past and current. And you know, it's not hard, right?
I mean, we avoid all this stuff all the time, of course.
I know I did for many years. But it's really not that hard.
Good people are bad people.
And we know. I mean, we know.
We know the truth. There's no mystery here.
There's no mystery. We know the truth.
It's all very simple. We know the truth.
And so all we have to do is, you know, like when you're picking through grapes, you throw up the rotten ones and you eat the good ones.
But you have to really work on your definition of rotten and health.
Thank you so much for listening. I really, really appreciate it.
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