All Episodes
Previous Next
April 23, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:04:47
726 The Inversion of Values Part 1

How bad philosophy shows up in everyday life...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph, 22nd, 23rd, or something like that.
It's Monday, that much I can tell you.
Oh, and listen to the Canadian rain lashing down upon me.
Sadly, not like sugar bombs or...
Some sort of syrup. But we'll have a little bit of time for today's chat.
And I believe that, my friends, it is not such a bad thing that we will have a short amount of time for today's chat.
For I did not podcast this morning, which will give me just a little bit more elbow room for this evening's conversation, which I would say is fairly important.
So let's have a chittle-chattle, and you can let me know what you think.
So, a while back, I talked about how I did not believe that Christina should feel that she is obligated to talk in my shows.
And then, in 7-24, Christina talked about how...
She did want to talk on my shows, but she didn't.
She hated the idea, but she didn't want to save the world because she couldn't decide if she loved or hated it.
And Lord knows, haven't we all been there at one time or another?
And sometimes we can spend, well, quite a long time there as well.
So, the question has naturally arisen from the brilliant and intuitive listeners...
Which is this. Dude, Steph, oh Rama, what is your BCF doing to my brain?
Because first of all, you're saying that you should not feel obligated to save the world.
And then you say, oh my god, you have to save the world.
Like, where are you coming from?
What are you talking about?
And this is probably a good time to introduce a fairly big concept, at least in my way of thinking, just try this on as a hat and see if it fits your brain.
This is a Steph thought.
I'm not going to claim that it is empirically proven.
It's just something that's sort of a theory that I have developed low over the years.
And you can find out, look within your own heart and within your own Head, and you can let me know if it makes any sense.
The world that is, is so false.
The world that is, the world that we believe in, I mean the social world, there's no falsehood in the real world.
It's not like that rock's the wrong rock.
But the world that is defined for us, the philosophical world that we live in, the world of society and indoctrination and propaganda and religion and statism and patriotism and war worship and so on, the virtue of the soldiers and the benevolence of politicians and the moral nature of democracy and all of this sort of stuff, all of the stuff that we are...
Which is all just the purest nonsense, which you...
I mean, just one example popped into my head while I was on Mark Stevens' show on the weekend, which is that we say that...
The government, the people who are into gun control say that the government should prevent stores from selling weapons to those who will do harm to others or who have some reasonable indicators of the possibility that they may want to do harm to others.
So, of course, if you have a criminal record...
You've been a murderer, then you can't.
The government should stop people from buying weapons in a store.
Which, of course, is a very interesting idea, and I would certainly not disagree with that.
If I were running a store, a gun store, I wouldn't want to be arming criminals.
But, of course, people separate the government into these myriad little shards that don't ever fit together.
And the reason they don't ever fit together is then that they would actually have to Think in a consistent and coherent manner and actually get something done rather than just manipulate words.
They would have to confront reality and confront people in reality who are immoral.
So people just love to play around with words.
So of course it is the same government that would be enforcing gun control that currently sells billions and billions of dollars of arms to third world countries.
And this is true not just of the U.S. but of all countries pretty much in the world that the buying and selling of weapons to dictatorships is a central component and aspect Of the military industrial complex and particularly of funding, of profiteering within the government.
The government is like a gun shop that only sells to genocidal murderers.
It won't sell to people who aren't that way.
They should not think of the government as some agency that is going to control weapons, especially for those who are dangerous, or the sale of those weapons to those who are dangerous, because the government's making enormous profit from selling weapons to known genocidal dictators throughout the world.
So, I mean, $200 billion of arms aid to Saudi Arabia, hundreds of billions of dollars of, well, maybe not hundreds, but certainly tens of billions of dollars of arms sales to the dictators throughout Africa, South Africa, North Africa. but certainly tens of billions of dollars of arms sales And it's just examples go on and on, right?
So, the idea that the government, the same government which sells arms to dictators is going to be effective at regulating arms internally is laughable.
It's completely laughable.
It is completely unhappable.
It's like going to Jack the Ripper and saying, I would like you to take out my appendix.
This is the logic.
And it's logic that people have a great deal of trouble seeing, of course, because it is just so obvious.
But it requires that we work from principles, and that's what we're never really encouraged or allowed to do.
So I'm going to give this just sort of one example, but I'll give you a sort of topography.
Wherein you can help differentiate between these two sorts of things.
And I'm going to start with a general theory of emotional motivation, and hopefully it will make some sense.
If it does make sense, then the second half of the podcast will make even more sense, and I hope that...
Let's hope, babies!
Let's ride the wild wind and see where we land.
Coffee time! So...
First and foremost, when philosophy is inverted, when what is true is proposed as false or is condemned as false, and what is false is praised as what is true, there is an enormous impact, a sudden subterranean big bang tectonic impact In the spiritual or soulful life of mankind, of the species, and of you.
I'm going to just talk about you in particular as well.
It's like a huge seismic eruption or collapse somewhere out in the ocean which produces a massive wave when it hits the shore.
When values are inverted, emotions become inverted.
When values are inverted, emotions become inverted.
That is a very, very important thing to understand when you are looking at your own emotional reactions to things prior to the achievement of a fairly decent degree of wisdom, which of course I'm still working at.
But when you look at your emotions, they appear causeless and to some degree senseless, incomprehensible, and fearful, right?
The fearmongers within you because you don't know where they're leading you and they seem to be leading you to bad places and so on.
And The exact opposite is occurring in the realm of emotions, for most of us, as is occurring in the realm of thought and the realm of ideas.
So people praise the government as that agency which brings peace, but the government is that agency which brings war.
People praise that agency of religion as something which brings peace of mind when it provokes endless conflict, war, and the destruction of children.
People praise families as the most moral institutions around and the most important social connections you can have when they are, in fact, by and large, the most dangerous and destructive social relationships that you have.
People praise soldiers as the highest moral ideal when soldiers are, in fact, the greatest murderers in mankind's history.
So when you have an inversal of values, which results all the way from metaphysics, epistemology...
All the way through ethics and politics and so on.
When you have the exact opposite of the truth at the core of a social philosophy, the philosophy of the society you live in, then your emotions are going to be the exact inverse of what they should be.
And if you really get that, then you really can turn things around.
I'll give you sort of a metaphorical example.
Let me know what you think. If you want to go someplace sunny, and your travel agent hands you a bunch of photographs, and in one of them, it's like a dark gray sky, and it looks really sort of unpleasant and dark and so on.
And you're like, well, that looks like Siberia in February.
I don't think I want to go there.
And then she shows there's some other place that is bright and so on.
And you say, well, that seems good.
It's all kind of monochromatic, but that seems a lot brighter than the other place, so I want to go there.
And you get there, and you find out that this place is, in fact, the place that you thought was really bright is Siberia in February, where it's really, really dark.
You call your travel agent.
You say, well, that's not where I wanted to come.
I wanted to come someplace bright and sunny.
You sent me someplace dark and dingy.
But this is the one you chose.
And I said, but it was bright in the picture.
It's like, yes, that's true, but those are all negatives.
Those are all negatives.
And if you sort of really get that in your bones, then the metaphor, I think, is fairly helpful in that you want to get somewhere, but you're looking at the exact opposite.
It's the George Costanza thing, you know?
If everything I do is a mistake, then if I do the opposite, I should be a success.
And there's some truth in that, and that's a particularly brilliant Seinfeld along with the chicken supernova one.
How do we know what is immoral?
It is what people condemn.
How we know what is immoral is exactly what people praise How we know the moral in society is exactly what people condemn as the greatest immorality.
How we know what is immoral is exactly what people praise as the greatest moral.
It's the highest values.
And we are inevitably We're drawn like water going downhill.
We are inevitably drawn towards that which we see, to have an emotional reaction or response that is positive to that which we consider the highest value.
That's what emotions do.
They're like a compass pointing us at our values, and they will respond to the values we program in them, but there's a layer below them, which I would call the true self or the authentic self, Which will not let false values produce happiness.
So, if you are really insecure, if you're an insecure human being, and you have a lot of illusions that you don't want to confront, then you are not going to choose a forthright and decisive person to be your lover.
You will not choose a forthright and decisive person to be your lover.
Because a forthright and decisive person will not accept the neuroses and inconsistency and insecurities of your false self.
They will confront you on that.
If you lie a lot, then you don't want perceptive people around you.
People who aren't afraid of you.
People who aren't going to just shut up and nod and smile when you lie.
If you're a consistent liar, are you going to want an intelligent and perceptive human being and courageous and to some degree confrontational, or at least not afraid of confrontation, human being around you?
Of course not. Of course not.
The commitment to lying, the giving yourself the latitude to lie, means that you have to keep weak-willed, pathetic people in your life.
So that you don't end up being confronted and humiliated and torn down.
You're a false self torn down.
Since it's the only self you think there is, it would be the equivalent of murder for you, so you're not going to do that.
So when you look at a liar and you say, who is good in the world?
Well, who is good in the world is whoever the liar rails the most against.
Who has the most integrity?
Well, the person who the liar dislikes the most.
Who has the most value?
the person who the person who hates values hates the most.
It is a very, very fundamental thing to understand, this inversion of emotions, this inversion of values that occurs. - Yes.
So for myself, when I was younger, I mean much younger, and I resented people who were good and strong and noble and however I perceived it, and there was a good deal of skepticism in what I perceived as in all those terms.
But it was very easy, because I had very low self-esteem, it was very easy for me to figure out who I was attracted to.
All I had to do was figure out who I was the most afraid of.
When you have low self-esteem, you hinge your self-value or your self-worth on the acceptance of others, other people approving you or digging you, baby.
And so for me, desire, which should be a positive pleasure, was perceptible to me only through fear.
How did I know what I wanted?
It's what I was afraid of.
It's what I was afraid of.
It's what I reacted to.
to.
It's what I could not cease criticizing.
It's what rankled me.
It's what rubbed me the wrong way.
Okay.
And this is foundational.
This is foundational to the understanding of yourself in relation to society.
And I'm telling you, my brothers and sisters, this takes balls.
This part that I'm going to talk about a little bit later, and it's not about now, but this really takes some balls.
When I was, I've mentioned this before, when I was trying to be a writer, when I was trying to publish my novels, everybody loved bits of my writing and then they disliked the whole book.
Everybody would just go gaga over, oh wow, you're fantastic at dialogue, your metaphors are just incredible, blah blah blah blah blah.
I dropped off through a mutual contact a copy of one of my novels with one of the most famous Canadian publishers and one of the most famous editors at one of the most famous Canadian publishers.
And she said to me, your metaphors are some of the best I've read in all of literature.
I'm like, wow, that's fantastic.
So what's the next step?
Oh, I don't think your book is right for us.
And I went through this so many times I can't even begin to tell you In one form or another.
And it's very hard to figure this stuff out.
I mean, I knew that what I was writing was good.
And other people admitted that it was good, but nobody ever wanted to publish it.
But of course, it takes a long time to figure...
At least it did for me. Maybe it's easier for you.
It took a long time to figure this out for me.
Because all I would do is I would say, well, what's the kind of writer that you publish that you're most proud of?
And they'd say, well, it's Person X. So I'd go to the bookstore and I'd pick up a copy of a book by Person X... And I would read it and I would die of boredom or find myself repulsed or find myself just turned off or alienated because it would just be a very strange tale about very dysfunctional people who were lost to the world and, you know, drunken ex-boxers.
Or it would be one of those Carol Shields kinds of novels where there's this woman who's got a slightly distant relationship to a bumbling intellectual guy and all of her cutesy little thoughts will roll around.
And I would look at that and I would say, well, yeah, okay, I can sort of see that after many years of continuing to try and not really wanting to change my basic approach to art, but continuing to try to get something published.
I sort of finally came to the conclusion that, you know, once I sort of understood things philosophically, well, it sort of makes sense.
Like, if you like that stuff, you're not going to like my stuff.
If you like stuff about dysfunctional people where everybody loses, or the only gain that you get is a sad sort of little conformity, then yeah, you're not going to like my books about the struggle to reclaim humanity and the...
Thank you.
And I went through this.
It's the Britney Spears phenomenon, right?
It's the Britney Spears phenomenon, right?
Britney Spears obviously is a woman with no self-esteem, is no self, right?
She's just a flash of legs and hair and singing, right?
So she has no real identity, has not lived a very virtuous life, clearly.
And she could date lots of guys, right?
Lots of people think she's pretty, and I think she's pretty.
So she could get lots of dates and she could get a decent guy, right?
But the iron law of self-esteem can never be escaped.
The iron law of integrity and virtue can never be escaped.
So this woman, who could get probably about a third of the planet to go on the date with her, billions of men, chooses this guy with, like, three-dimensional loser written and scribed in hieroglyphics all over his forehead.
A guy who's had kids with some other woman and is addicted to pot and is going to be a rapper.
Oh man, just sad, sad, sad stuff, right?
And she glommed onto him.
Just loved him for the moment she saw him because he was the price that she had to pay for a lack of virtue and wisdom.
This is inevitable.
And so... Who Britney Spears chose as her husband is the exact description of who Britney Spears is deep down.
A shallow, vain, insecure, neurotic, empty self entertainer.
There's a lot of entertainers like this.
Now, assuming that Britney Spears doesn't go into significant therapy and counseling, which I would consider highly, highly unlikely, Then whoever Britney Spears chooses next, let's say you phone up Britney Spears and she won't go out with you.
She calls you a loser. Well, that's going to sting, right?
as long as you don't remember that to be called bad by a bad person is a mark of honor.
This inversal of values that is really the secret right at the core of modern society and how it operates and how it works is something that is so important to get into your skin because we are at war with the ethics and the falsehoods of the modern world right?
right? We philosophers are bringing the light of science and reason to bear on the black and evil superstitions of social conformity and the abuse of children's minds.
And so we will be roundly condemned and we will be roundly attacked and people will dismiss us and people will scorn us and people will put us down and people will laugh at us and people will try just about every trick in the book to get us to feel bad, to get us to feel down.
And it's so important to just understand this with relationship to society but also with relationship to ourselves as well.
What People attack, and who people attack, tells you everything that you need to know about them and their core values.
Unchangeable values, right?
So if you show something precious to someone, something that you love to someone, and they roll their eyes and say, oh yeah, only losers are interested in that.
Oh yeah, that's interesting.
Hey, what's on TV tonight?
That's all you need to know about the person.
Whoever is attacked is probably the best.
Whoever is praised is probably the worst.
And I'm just saying probably because maybe there's examples that I can't think of.
And I don't mean in terms of, well, are you saying that people are for the Virginia shooter and therefore he's a bad guy and people don't like the Virginia shooter and therefore he is a good guy?
No, of course not. But you don't need philosophy for that.
You don't need philosophy for that.
And where somebody outwardly does evil, and looking at that in hindsight, you don't need to be a philosopher to understand that.
Like if you see a guy lying on the street with his head six feet away and flies all over him, you don't need to be a doctor to say, Jim, he's dead!
Right? You don't need to be an expert when things are totally obvious.
You don't need to be a nutritionist to know that a steady diet of ball bearings and Quaker oil is not going to give you a whole lot of robust health.
It's in the subtleties and the delicacies that you need the expertise.
Knowing that the Virginia shooter is a bad guy does not require a philosopher.
In fact, it barely requires an IQ of 70.
So that's not philosophy, right?
That's just saying, the beheaded man, Jim, he's dead.
But in terms of philosophy, in terms of the abstracts, in terms of the non-concrete, the non-obvious, what people praise and what they condemn is the exact opposite of what is good what people praise and what they condemn is the exact opposite of what is good and what is corrupt, of what is
And because we are sort of naturally social beings who desire approval and so on, one of the toughest things about being a philosopher is to make that leap for yourself.
To say, well, if I am not condemned, I am not right.
Or I'm probably not right.
And not by good people, not by the good people listening to this, or the good people on the board, or whoever is a virtuous person.
You desperately want the approval of virtuous people.
Because they can be really helpful in watching your back, just as you guys are helpful in helping me watch my back and stay on the good course.
But this inversal of values is something that's so important to understand.
If the opposite beliefs and the opposite values are accepted at your core, your emotions will be the exact negative of what you want, the exact opposite of what you want.
And you will never ever be able to be neutral about X topic, whatever X topic is.
So, with that framework in place, we'll talk a little bit about Christina, and then we'll talk a little more about you.
You sitting right there, or standing, or walking, or jumping, or flipping, or swimming.
Now, when I would say to Christina, I would like you to do something on the show because of X, Y, and Z, she would get tense, and frankly, she would get a little hostile, right?
Which is very much not in her nature.
And that is a very instructive and important thing to understand.
The causes of, right?
So that you can be sensitive to other people and to yourself and really help them, right?
And the way that a dentist helps you doesn't always feel good in the moment, but it's definitely better than the alternative.
So Christina would get tense and she would get upset and originally it was more direct and then it would become more oblique and I had to spend a good deal of time sort of chasing down the symptoms and communicating the issue.
Now, if I said to Christina, Christina, would you like to drive to Anchorage, Alaska in February?
She wouldn't say no and get really tense.
And she wouldn't say, no, stop pushing me.
No, she's not like that. But she wouldn't get tense about it.
She'd say, no, thank you very much.
That's not something I want to do.
If I say, Christina, would you like to do the second flush of a double flush dump by your lovely husband?
She'd say, not particularly.
If I said, would you like to take this fork and jam it in the hind leg of that bull mastiff?
She'd say, no, not really.
But it wouldn't be tense.
She wouldn't be tense about it.
I mean, she might be a little baffled.
She might be a little tense that I'm asking you to do some stupid things.
But she wouldn't be tense about it.
If I say to you, would you like to date a transvestite?
And if that's not, say, to be somewhat metaphorically appropriate, your bag, then you'd say, no.
No, not really. But you wouldn't be tense about it.
You wouldn't be hostile about it.
You wouldn't get screwed up about it.
So, if I had said to Christina, I'd like you to do a show, and she'd said, you know, it's not for me, really.
It's not for me. Then I would have let it go, obviously, because it's not for her.
If I say, hey, let's go skydiving.
I'd like to go skydiving again.
And she said, you know, I really don't.
I've got to tell you, I don't want to go skydiving.
Or if I said, I'd really like to climb Mount Everest, what do you think?
And she'd be like, that's never really been an ambition of mine.
I mean, if you want to do it, but that's not for me, for sure.
Well, she wouldn't get tense about it.
But if I say, would you like to talk about psychology with very smart people with whom the talking makes a big difference?
Well, she gets tense about it.
She freezes, her color goes different, she gets...
Tense. She feels like, oh my god, I need weeks of preparation.
I've got to do this. I've got to do that.
What if my college finds out and people attack me?
All the stuff that she talked about in 724.
She feels that bad things are going to happen, right?
Whatever. It's just unnerving.
Now, in the realm of values, the value that Christina was given over and over again, as most of us were, was shut up and obey and make me look good.
Don't think. Don't talk back.
Just make me look good. Just be easy for me.
Do my chores. Make people laugh if that brings me some sort of social cachet, but just shut up and make me look good.
Don't think for yourself and don't speak out any opinions.
That's what parenting is for the most part, even from decently positive, in their own minds, parents.
So Christina was told not to have any opinions and not to speak out and not to take risks and not to stick her neck out.
Easy live and quiet die.
That's the motto. And so when I said, I'd like you to have a voice.
I'd like you to take the microphone and speak.
I'd like you to have a voice.
Well, why would she get tense about it?
Why would she get tense about it?
If I say, I'll give you a million dollars to fly to the moon, you don't feel tense about it, like, okay, well if I really jump and strain, I can get there, right?
That's not stressful for you like, oh my God, that million dollars is almost within my grasp, but whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
So there's no fear where there's no desire.
And I'll give you another example.
if there's some, I don't know, swastika, four-headed, shaven-headed, 300-pound bouncer oaf standing there snotting glue, and I say to you, I'll give you a quarter to go over and grab that guy's packet.
Or you'd be like, no, thanks, really, I don't think I want to do that so much, right?
You wouldn't feel tense about it, it'd just be like, no.
And if I said, okay, well, I'll give you $10 to do it, you'd be like, no, no, no, I'm not going to, this guy's going to beat the crap out of me, right?
And let's just say I started escalating the money.
And then I said, well, I'll give you $10,000 to go over and do this, or $20,000, or $40,000, whatever it is.
At some point, right before you decide to do it, and it's going to escalate, you're going to start to feel like tense.
Because there's conflict, there's ambivalence.
For $10,000? Tax-free?
Cash? I could goose that guy and run.
I mean, he's high on PCP and glue, so maybe he couldn't catch me.
But if he did catch me, oh my god, he just beat the living tar out of me.
$10,000. Like, you'd start to feel stressful because you would have a desire to want to do something at the same time as you would have an inhibitor to do it.
You would have a desire to get the $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 or whatever would push that fulcrum for you.
If it's Bill Gates, maybe it's, I don't know.
I'll fix a tenth of the bugs in Windows or something like that for free.
Whatever it is that is going to be enough of a motivation for you, that is going to cause in you desire and inhibition.
I want to and I'm scared to.
There's a really great candy bar right by that sleeping dog.
You're going to feel the desire and you're going to feel the fear and desire.
If you understand that, then you can understand that There is a very powerful thing that occurs when you offer something to someone without a positive incentive on your part.
And they have the same reaction as if you were offering a positive incentive to them, then the positive incentive is coming from them.
Then the positive incentive is coming from them.
So, if I say to Christina, let's drive to Anchorage, and she says, I don't want to do that.
And I say, well, I've got a guy who'll pay me $20,000 to drive to Anchorage.
If you and I both go together.
Because he wants a really long Oscar therapist.
Well, suddenly she's going to be more conflicted.
There's no conflict if it's just like, of all the things we could do for no reward, would you like to drive to Anchorage?
There's no conflict, you just don't want to do it.
But... If I say, well, somebody's going to pay us $20,000 for a week, if we spend a couple of days driving to Anchorage and back, she'd be like, well, that's pretty good, right?
So suddenly there'd be tension, right?
Like she'd want to do it. And it's around where the balance is, right?
So if somebody said a million bucks to drive to Anchorage, you'd go do it, right?
And if somebody said a thousand bucks or, I don't know, it depends, 10,000 bucks, there's some level at which you'd be like, oh, I don't know.
And of course, that's the fundamental about it.
We want the money, but we want the good, and the price is the equilibrium, just a bit beyond what we'll do to keep the money and not take the good.
Now, if I said to Christina, somebody wants us to drive to Anchorage and pay us $20,000, she'd be like, yeah, okay, okay, okay, okay.
I mean, I don't want to do it, but I want the money, whatever, right?
So let's get it done.
Now, if I said to Christina, I'd like us to drive to Anchorage, and there was no money, nobody was paying us at all, and she had that same reaction like, oh, I don't know, right?
Then clearly she wants to go to Anchorage.
Because otherwise she'd say no, right?
So anyway, I think you get the idea.
So this is the essence of the reaction formation.
This is the essence of what's called the reaction formation.
It's called the reaction formation because it's a structure.
It's a personal structure. A personality structure of emotions and desires and so on.
Which form in reaction to something that you want but you don't believe you can get.
So if you... If you really want a woman to go out with you, but you don't think that she will, then it's possible that you will have a reaction formation and you will say, well, she's kind of stuck up, or she's kind of snobby, or, you know, man, she's got high maintenance written all over her, blah, blah, blah.
And it's well known that men who complain about a woman, this is a staple of romantic comedy, and somebody who complains about somebody else actually quite likes them, or actually quite likes them.
In the realm of what we do here, we anarcho-capitalists, we scientific rationalists, we deep-skull philosophers, well, society has an enormous reaction formation to us, right?
And there's that old quasi-joke which says that if you want to aggress against domestic citizens, then you are a Democrat.
And if you want to aggress against foreign citizens, then you are a Republican.
If you don't want to aggress against anyone, my God, you're a radical!
You're an extremist!
And if you understand that because what people think is so corrupt, so corrupted by bad philosophers and corrupt teachers and so on, because people's values are so inverted, they attack what, in a healthy situation, they would love.
That's why I use the metaphor of cancer.
Cancer attacks healthy cells and cannot be attacked by antibodies, or can't be effectively attacked by antibodies.
So, cancer is the inversal of health, right?
It's healthy for the cancer, it's just not healthy for a life, for a human life.
So, the world and maybe you love what you should hate and hate what you should love.
You fear what you want And you are indifferent to what you need.
Although indifference is rare.
You react to what you need in some manner.
And that fundamental understanding of the inversal, not just of values but of emotions, is essential to understanding the badge of honor that comes with condemnation.
Thank you.
Thank you.
The badge of honor that comes with rejection.
My process, the reason that I had to work so hard for this theory, my process was, well, I love my books.
You don't like my books, so I'm going to look at the books that you love so that I can understand why you don't like my books.
And that's why I say, and I really mean it when I say, it takes a huge set of balls to pull this off.
Or a deep set of ovaries, something like that.
Because what you're doing is you are saying delusions of grandeur are bad because then you believe that you're good when there's no evidence.
So somebody who says, I'm Jesus, has delusions of grandeur, because obviously if he's not currently walking on water or coming back from the dead, not a whole lot of evidence, right?
So when you are a philosopher in the modern world, and I think throughout most times in history, you have a problem, and the problem is this.
That the greater you are, the more you will be ignored.
The greater you are, the more you will be rejected.
The greater you are, the more the people will roll their eyes.
The deeper you are, the more the people will condemn you.
And they won't typically condemn you openly.
They'll condemn you in a tiny, little, inconsequential, shallow way.
Oh, that Steph, he's just a randroid.
He's just, I don't know what it is, just completely obsessed with rationality.
I mean, I guess he's got a really, I don't know, he's threatened by the irrationality and mysticism of his mom, so he's just got this reaction formation to his childhood abuse called rationality, and then he's just hanging on to it like grim death, and he won't let it go because he won't let go of the past, and he won't forgive people, and... So he's got to be right.
So he makes up all these rules that say that he's right.
I've heard it all my life, right?
So this is nothing particularly shocking.
And we all have. This is nothing particular to me.
And it gets ridiculously complicated insofar as Calling my philosophy as a reaction formation, defining my philosophy as a reaction formation is itself a reaction formation to the threat of philosophical standards.
You have to psychologize them and you have to put them into bizarre motivations so that you don't actually end up feeling like you have to make any changes or do anything.
So you can see this more clearly when you get older.
It's one of the great benefits of aging.
It's one of the beautiful things about aging is you get to see the bill for what people do.
You get to see the bill for what people do.
Everybody looks rich when they're at the restaurant until the bill comes, right?
And then the bill comes and you find out if they actually have any money to pay for it.
So this is a time capsule down the years to the youth who are listening to this, that I'm telling you that there's not one exception to this rule, this Inversal of Emotions rule, this negative worldview.
The world has a negative, a photographic negative, not just the whole thing's negative.
Which is that those who sort of condemned and criticized me have not done well.
It's not like they haven't done well because they unfortunately couldn't master the whole voodoo thing.
But they haven't done well.
I mean, you look at the people who scorn and mock values and those who strive to achieve them, and they don't do very well.
They don't do well at all. It's a pretty gruesome thing to see, actually, how miserable people get and how they just never turn back.
They go down that road and...
You just don't come back to that fork in the road and you can never come back and change it, it seems.
I mean, maybe there's some fulcrum that I'm not aware of, but it would seem that you just can't change this kind of stuff and it's pretty gruesome to watch.
So when people scorn you and come down on you and belittle you and roll their eyes and are skeptical, endlessly skeptical and so on, right?
Or as when I was chatting with the two friends of mine, one of them said, you know, I just can't buy religion.
I just don't buy it. I just don't buy it fundamentally.
It's like, well, it doesn't matter whether you buy it or not.
Is it true or not?
It's not something that people should be trying to sell to you.
It's, is it true or not? But those people don't end up having any good things in their life.
They end up with absolutely wretched existences.
And it really is very powerful to see the effects of values over the course of people's lives and just how inexorable those who violate values, how inexorably bad it turns out to be.
It turns out to be much...
Like some people can smoke and not die until they're like 95 of getting hit by a bus.
But violations of values are far worse than violations of generally accepted health rules and so on.
So the reason that I'm talking about that is that when you see people who have attacked you...
Then you say, okay, well, I was somebody that they attacked.
I talk personally. So, Bab, some friend of mine, was constantly rolling his eyes and scorning about my beliefs and viewed them to be some sort of, as mentioned, some sort of fetish that was scar tissue from my past and evidence of immaturity and rigidity and self-righteousness and all this shit that gets thrown at anybody who tries to be a sensible moralist.
Well, you sort of look at what happens to these people as they get older and you realize that they did not, like, this guy did not reject me because he had a far better and wiser way of living.
That's very important to understand and you don't see that as clearly when you're young because you just, you know, you don't have the evidence.
But I'll tell you, from this vantage point, from the ripe old age of 40 in my life, I mean, it is absolutely clear to me that the people who attacked me, first of all, it had nothing to do with me, right?
It had nothing to do with me, but let's just, just for the sake of linguistic convenience, those who attacked me did so because they hated values.
They hated anyone believing in anything.
They hated the responsibility And the integrity that would be required.
And they hated what they perceived as a limitation on their 360 gravityless free flow of behavior.
And they viewed any standards or any inhibitions on what it is they just felt like doing.
As enraging, as narcissistic, right?
Anything that limits my behavior is going to cause me rage.
Somebody saying, don't put your fork into that wall socket is a bully, and I'm going to damn well put my fork into the wall socket, right?
I'm not going to be bullied!
And that's because they are, of course, bullies, right?
So they can't interpret the world any other way.
But the people who attack you, it's important to track them in your life.
So for most of us, like our parents...
Attacked us. Physically or emotionally or verbally or whatever.
Our parents attacked us and condemned us and criticized us.
And I got a lot of this from my parents, of course.
Mostly my mom because my dad wasn't around.
Lots of attack around this kind of stuff.
The stuff that I believed in.
And you can just sort of track and see.
Did they reject you because they were really great people?
And I talked about this a long time ago in the podcast.
I'll just mention it briefly, that there was this yoga teacher that I was interested in, and she would chat with me very pleasantly but wouldn't go out with me.
And was it because she was waiting for a real hero?
No. She ended up going out with some doofus, empty-head pretty boy who bragged about basically having sex with her in the locker room.
And it's like, oh, so that's who you were waiting for.
I got it. Well, if you were waiting for that dipshit, then I can sure as hell see why you wouldn't go out with me.
We all have this, like the pretty girls who like the bad boys or whatever.
And it's really frustrating.
But of course, if the pretty girl or whoever, if the girl likes the bad boy and she won't go out with you, guess what?
That's a good thing.
It may be frustrating, right?
Because maybe you'd like her to not be a bad girl or whatever, not like bad boys, but you kind of don't want her to go out with you.
Because that's not really a badge of honor.
That's not a very good thing.
If one of these... I mean, this is something I played out and sort of to try and wriggle my way through this, I don't know, the hot birth canal of coming to life when I was in the realm of art, right?
So I thought, geez, you know, so let's say this woman had decided she really loved my work and wanted to publish it.
And she said, you know, I really loved your work because it so much reminded me of this guy's writing and I love his writing and he's the guy I'm most proud of, right?
I love this guy's writing.
And so I would go and read this guy's writing, and it would be shit, as modern novels almost invariably are.
They're either formulaic and empty, like the Crichton stuff or whatever, or they're just shit, right?
I mean, they're well-written, but scabrous and horrifying.
And so how would I feel about that when she said, let's say that this publisher had published me, and And she'd said, oh, I love this book.
It reminds me so much of this guy's book, who is like a great writer, and I love him.
And then I'd go and read this guy, and it's about some other horrible life of emptiness and alienation and self-destruction and nothing but abusive men, and there's always abusive men, endlessly, endlessly, endlessly.
And Anne-Marie MacDonald, you just remind me, so go and read that stuff.
And it's like, oh, really?
Really? Then I'll have to pull my book because I don't want to add to this stuff.
I will not let my book get published if it's like this writer's book or these writer's books which are adding to the horror of the world.
So it's inevitable.
I can't get published if the publisher likes bad books or corrupt books or negative books or books which add to the horror of the world.
Because if they like my work, I can't let it be published because I'm not going to add to that.
I'm not going to add to that.
Or they don't like my work because they like this other stuff, in which case then I'm not going to get published.
The moment that I find that somebody's like, oh yeah, a great writer is person X who I think is just diseased, like Douglas Coupland or whatever, right?
Then I'm doomed.
Either I'm not going to want to let them publish me because the book is...
Anyway, you get the idea.
But this is the inversal of values.
This is the inversal of values.
You've got to look at what people praise, and you've got to look at what people condemn, and that tells you everything that you need to know about those people.
It tells you everything that you will ever need to know about these people.
I've never seen a case where you can successfully reverse your values.
I mean, I guess I wrestled through it when I was a teenager, but...
I've never seen it, and certainly later in life, where people just say, oh yeah, you know, I guess I have been a cancer for the last 35 years, but I'm going to change now.
People will change if they've held themselves in stasis and they haven't made many mistakes and they've been sort of waiting to erupt into life.
But not if they've made a real commitment to putting other—certainly not if they've bullied other people or put them down or scorned decent people.
I mean, it's simply impossible. I mean, you cannot—you're expecting a rock that's thrown off a cliff to change its course magically and float up and turn into a boomerang and fly back.
That's never going to happen. Never going to happen.
And you can do this with yourself.
You can do this with yourself.
There's lots of questions around, what is it that I most want to do?
Well, the question is, what do you fear?
What do you hate? What do you love?
This may be a good place to start because it could be a reaction formation.
I mean, if you say, oh, I hate pedophiles, right?
I'm not saying that because it's rational, right?
Well, it's rational. But when you say, I hate Steph for becoming a full-time philosopher, or whatever, or I really resent that, or damn it.
I mean, I'm not a good target for that kind of resentment, but let's just say there's something that you resent.
Oh, those damn actors are so shallow.
Well, maybe you want to be an actor.
You can look at your reaction formations to find your true self.
You can map the world by the negatives.
You know that there are a bazillion ribbons on people's cars to support the troops in the United States, and there is not one ribbon to support anarcho-capitalists.
In fact, there is nothing but condemnation and eye-rolling with regard to anarcho-capitalists.
And there's some, though less, eye-rolling with minarchists and libertarians.
And so this is what you need to know.
That soldiers are bad, and libertarians are a whole lot better, and the best of all are the anarcho-capitalists.
And this is what I've been meaning When I say, this is sort of the content of when I say, when people sort of attack me, and like I've got just about a bazillion responses on my YouTube video about the will kill, people just going nuts about it, attacking, attacking, attacking, right?
It's like, okay, well, they don't see, right?
So they say, well... I'm going to attack this because I could just go in the middle of nowhere and just go and kill someone and no one would ever know and there'd be no retribution and blah, blah, blah.
It's like, well, yeah, you could do that now.
Are you doing it now? Like, is this something that you're like, oh, I'm going to go find a hobo who's alone and just kill him, right?
I mean, it's just people just making stuff up to attack it, right?
Just making stuff up to attack the idea.
Because I think there's some valuable truth in the idea around, you know, the more you condemn the will-kill scenario, then the more you condemn government.
The less you condemn it, then the less you need government.
So either way, you should end up with less government, right?
That's why I always try and name these things.
No matter which way you go, you end up with less government.
But this is what people are spending their time attacking, right?
The will-kill metaphor.
And why is that?
Because there's truth in it.
Because there's value in it.
And of all the other things that people could be attacking, of all the other criticisms that people could be making, this is what they're spending time attacking.
Why? Because they need it.
Because they want it. Because they want it to be true.
A guy who posted about universally preferable behavior says, well, if correct grammar is universally preferable behavior, and I don't use correct grammar, and I just speak to people in a language that I've made up, or gobbledygook, is that immoral?
It's like, no, it's just meaningless.
And you'll notice that you didn't...
Didn't apply this question to me in a made-up language, so you're already using universally preferable behavior.
Blah, blah, blah. But why do people attack this?
Because they need... Or ignore it.
Or ignore it. It's a pretty important formulation, I think, and can do a huge amount to move the debate forward in a very essential way about what morality is and how we can define it and prove it without God and without the objective fantasy of the ultimate value of the preference for life and so on, which is just not true at all.
Well, people attack it because they need it and they want it.
People attack ethics because they need and want ethics, but they don't know that.
They don't know that about themselves.
To them, it feels like they feel contempt towards these things, but they need it desperately.
And so the people who attack you are people who really need what you've got.
They've identified it, and they feel their true self reaching for it.
They feel their true self reaching for it and begging for it.
Reaching for it. And they are begging for the truth.
That's why they attack you.
That's why they get tense and hostile.
Because they need it so desperately.
We can map what is valuable by what is attacked.
Irrationally attacked. Is it really such a bad thing to say that violence is bad?
Of all the people in the world...
Who put forward ideas.
Is it really the person who says, I think that violence is bad in a universal way?
Is that the person that you're going to spend all of your time and energy attacking?
Well, of course, in any rational universe, no.
But the reason that people do, the reason that people do ignore you, the reason that people roll their eyes, the reason that people criticize you, the reason that people scorn you or ignore you is because they need it so desperately.
And they recognize the truth of it.
And they recognize the truth, right?
That's why people are responsible.
They recognize the truth. And so within your own life, your greatest desires may be shrouded by your greatest hostilities.
Your greatest desires may be shrouded by your greatest hostilities.
We're in the negative world.
We're in the negative world.
What is attacked? The free market.
What is praised? Government.
That's the exact opposite.
We live in the opposite world because the values and the philosophies are so opposite that inevitably the emotions and the motivations and the passions and the expostulations are all going to be the opposite of the truth.
Everything we hear, pretty much, and everything that we see, pretty much, is the exact opposite of the truth.
It's the exact opposite of the truth.
And once you get that when you look at the world as people think, as people talk, you look at the world of ideas, you look at the world of art and philosophy, whether it's conscious or unconscious, when you look at the social world, you're looking at a negative.
If you want to know where the light is, look for the darkest patches.
If you want to know where the virtue is, look for the areas of greatest condemnation.
If you want to know where the evil is, look for the area of greatest praise.
go watch a war movie about the noble heroes of war.
If you want to know whose parents are doing the greatest harm, look at whose parents are the most self-righteous and consider themselves the most moral.
Okay.
If you want to look for the greatest evil, look at the most self-conscious morality, which is religion and family and the state.
When you look at the world, you are looking at a negative.
And once you get that, you can reorient yourself.
You can reorient yourself.
It's not easy. Because we are social beings, and at least if you're anything like me, you have a preference for being approved over being attacked.
But once you get that, then you can orient yourself in a much more productive and fruitful way, and happier way.
Because if you don't know that you're holding the compass upside down, how the hell are you ever going to get where you want to go?
You can't. You can't get to the people you want to get to.
You can't get to the marriage you want to get to.
You can't be the father you want to be.
You can't get the career that you really want.
If you're looking at the map upside down in a bag underwater with the compass that's completely pointed in the wrong direction, how on earth are you ever going to get where you want to go?
How are you going to choose to move towards the sun if you're looking at a negative and you say, well, moving towards the sun looks really black, so that can't be the way that the sun is.
I've got to go the other way. The values that everybody has around you are the exact opposite of the truth.
The motivations, the passions, the expostulations, the arguments, the eye-rolling, the scorn, the whatever.
Whatever people are doing around you are the exact opposite of the truth.
The exact opposite of the truth.
I had to face this most fundamentally with my beauty addiction, with my addiction to physical beauty in women.
It's the exact opposite of what is virtuous.
Because beauty is power, and power in the absence of philosophy corrupts and we have no philosophy.
So beautiful women are shallow and vain and destructive, in my opinion.
And this could be tons of different examples just in my...
I had to switch that compass around.
I had to switch that compass around, and there's a good deal of this in The God of Atheists.
Rudy attempting to shed this curse, this plague.
And I did it taking this last job.
Just didn't read the compass the right way, you know, and...
And forgot that I'm looking at the opposite.
I'm in the opposite world. And we live in this opposite world.
Up is down. Black is white.
Truth is lies.
Virtue is attack. And if we really do begin to process that and reorient ourselves and realize that We've got the bends down here in the depths, and we are swimming to the bottom, trying to get to the top.
Or swimming to the top, trying to get to the bottom, but we're going the opposite directions.
Because if we take anything from the social cues around us, we will go in the wrong direction without this processing.
I mean, how would it have been if I thought that everybody who wouldn't publish my books was a great and noble and wise and virtuous and benevolent publisher?
Well, of course not. Where would I be?
I would have stopped writing. Where would I be as a philosopher if I thought, well, everyone who scorned and rolled their eyes at everything that I said my whole life was right?
Well, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
The inversal of values, the inversal of effect...
The inversal of life in society is so fundamental to get a hold of that you really can't see much in society unless you get it and really commit yourself to this idea.
And this is called being a philosopher.
This is called being a philosopher that values matter, that premises matter, that axioms matter, that what you believe really, really, really matters.
That what you believe and what other people believe really, really, really matters.
There was a guy posted on the board today about it.
He says, my wife's become a Christian again.
We were married for a while. She was raised a Mormon, I think it was, and became a Christian again.
Now she's bringing my kids to church.
Well, if she was refusing to give your children protein, what would you do?
If she was physically abusing your children, what would you do?
It really does matter what you teach children.
It really does matter what you inculcate within them.
It really does matter what they end up with in their heads.
In every level.
To hurt a child's mind through bad ideas, presenting bad ideas as true, presenting vengeful, horrible fantasies as noble and virtuous truth.
It's destroying your children.
And it really does matter what people believe.
And it really does matter that modern philosophy is so completely and totally fucked up.
It really does matter.
It does matter if you hold the map the wrong way up.
It does matter if your compass is reversed.
It does matter where you're going to end up.
And if you don't get... That the fact that everything is inverted in the modern world, if you take any of your cues from what people say or do around you, who aren't philosophers, then you will always end up going in the wrong direction.
You will always end up smashing from bad relationship to bad relationship to bad relationship to bad relationships.
Bewildered and frustrated, despite the fact that you call yourself a thinker who has values, but you don't want to live by them, or imagine that the fact that somebody holds opposite values to you, you don't really want to believe that that is actually going to produce opposite behavior, and I say this as somebody who went through this for years.
I have a good deal of experience with this kind of self-abuse.
But it really does matter, you know?
It really does matter. We wouldn't bother being philosophers if it didn't matter what people believed.
But it really does matter what people believe.
It really does and totally does.
It dictates what you believe now is who you will be in five or ten years as you work towards closing the gap between fantasy and scar tissue and ideal and truth.
So, when you look within yourself, when you look within society, this idea of reaction formation, the upside-down, black-as-white world, is absolutely essential to understand.
That you have to process these cues before acting on them.
That when people put you down who are unenlightened in the modern world, it's because you, my friend, know the truth.
▲
Export Selection