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April 24, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:21
727 The Inversion of Values Part 2

How to know when to use reason, and when to use instinct...

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's the 24th of April, 2007, 8.22am.
As I head off in my last week of work, minus one day, I'll be back on the Monday, I think, which is the end of the month.
Pinch punch. And I'm going to talk to you about an interesting and important secret.
Ah, it is my The Secret.
I watched a little bit of that.
Christina was given the video by one of her patients about The Secret.
And it's truly horrible because it contains just enough truth to really mess you up, but fundamentally it's deranged.
And they have guys on there.
Like, slight upgrades from cheesy second-hand used car salesmen.
And one of them is called...
I am a metaphysician, right?
That's his job.
I'm a metaphysician. And, of course, this is entirely designed to appeal to the uneducated who don't know what metaphysics is.
So I'm going to call myself an epistemideologist.
Just so it sounds vaguely medical and like I have a degree in something that's really deep.
But anyway, we'll deal with the secret another time.
I wanted to have round two of this issue that we were talking about yesterday.
Which was this instincts versus reason.
It's really what it came down to.
And I'd sort of like to give you my approach to how I try and work these things out in my life.
Which I found to be pretty successful.
And you can let me know what you think, of course.
The... Main issue for me, and I'm going to quote two examples, both of which involve Christina, and I'm sure she'd love to speak if she were here, but she'll have to make do with me.
So, the first is that a couple of months ago she was at a conference, and a psychology lecturer, professor, or whoever he was, I was talking some real nonsense.
More on the philosophical than the psychological side, but the psychological side was also nonsensical as well.
But, as is the case with many of the conversations here, that we have here, it was nonsensical in a manner that was not mainstream, right?
So the mainstream wisdom is X, but it's completely nonsensical.
And that just doesn't make any sense, right?
Like, you know how we have these issues with gun control where people say, well, we should have fewer restrictions on guns because they prevent crime and because people have a right to this, that, and the other.
And other people say, well, we should have more restrictions on guns because...
It causes crime and this and that and the other.
And everybody, of course, is asking the perfectly wrong question, which is wonderful, because then who really cares about the answer?
And as opposed to working it from the ground up, from sort of principles up, to discuss what is it that human beings have a right to and how is it that you would put this magical slicer and dicer between the people in the government and the people who are not in the government and accord them completely opposite rights.
And by the way, the government is the one that sells the arms of the third world and If you define a crime as the initiation of the use of force, then taking away someone's gun who's not committing a crime is the initiation of the use of force.
All these sorts of things. If you bring that to the table, people get annoyed.
They're going through a ritual called having thought.
They're going through a magical ritual called thinking.
It's not thinking. It's not even close to thinking.
In fact, it's quite the opposite of thinking.
But people are going through this magical ritual that they call thinking, and they are as irritated when you actually bring thinking, real thinking, philosophy to the table as the king is when the kid in the crowd cries, the emperor has no clothes!
So, which, you know, if the emperor is Naomi Campbell, it's not necessarily a bad thing.
But for the king, who's not Naomi Campbell, and maybe even for Naomi Campbell, if she's got her phone handy, it's not a good thing.
So, you know, I just know that 200 years from now, there's going to be some footnotes.
Hello, footnotes! Naomi Campbell, supermodel of the early 21st century, through phone and assistant, and picked up garbage as a recompense.
So, I'd like to think that by throwing the pop references in, that I'm actually making the eventual historical transcripts and MP3s of these even longer, which, you know, is productivity to me.
Come on, give me a break.
But the secret that I'd like to talk about relative to these two situations, one is Christina was in this And the guy was talking some nonsense.
And she felt an urge and a fear about talking and pointing out that what he was saying was not true.
That what he was saying was not true in front of everyone and so on.
And I said, no, you don't have to do that.
You don't have to do that at all. You're perfectly free to not speak up about freedom.
It wouldn't make much sense to be lashed to the master of freedom and go down with the ship because you're free.
I mean, that wouldn't mean much to me.
But on the second side of things was her involvement with my show, where I was saying that I really did fairly grim battle with her false self on occasion over the months, because she had a great deal of reticence, hesitation, fear, tension, frustration, and some anger about participating in this show.
So... The question is, well, how do you know the difference?
And I think I have some ways of working it out.
It's actually quite simple. If it's something that I want you to do, then resistance is a reaction formation.
If it's something that I'm indifferent to, then you can do whatever you want.
So, I guess that's it.
Thanks so much for listening. Look forward to your donations.
Donate to the narcissist.
The megalomania is digging over.
But the principles that I work with in terms of this, and you can let me know what you think, are these.
In the one situation, Christina did not have knowledge, did not have direct knowledge based on evidence or rationality.
And when I say evidence, I mean like it's happened before and blah, blah, blah.
Christina, when she would confront the lecturer on his bad thinking, she did not have any knowledge that was empirical and conscious, which would give her a knowledge of what was going to happen when she did that.
No knowledge, no conscious knowledge, let's say, of what would happen when she would confront this professor.
Now, there are some teachers who take great delight in being confronted.
I think that I'm one of them.
I do enjoy very much when people correct.
And there will be a Will Kill Part 2 until I can absorb some of the enormous amounts of criticisms that have flowed in on the Will Kill side, which is fine.
And I appreciate it. I want to put out an unformed idea.
And I knew this one was right on the edge, so I'm glad to get the feedback.
So, if somebody corrected...
Me, during a lecture, I would truly appreciate it.
I really would. I mean, to me, it's not humiliating because I don't have a standard where I've got to be right all the time or I'm being aggressed against, right?
That would be pretty pathetic.
So, Christina had no conscious knowledge of what would happen if she confronted this person with his lack of knowledge.
Now, If she did have historical knowledge of the fact that this guy spoke out of his armpit on occasion, or I guess more than on occasion, then she would never be in that situation to begin with, right?
So she goes, she's never seen this guy lecture before.
She doesn't know what the hell he's going to talk about, what he's going to be like.
She knows the topic, but she doesn't know the guy.
So she goes, so she has no knowledge of what this guy's like.
Now, if she had known that he was going to be talking a bunch of nonsense, then she wouldn't have gone, right?
So, clearly, she's in an unknown situation.
An unknown situation.
And unknowable, right?
She didn't know this, because you could go on the web and try and find reviews about his lecturing style and this and that and the other, but that all seems like, you know, quite a lot of work and not something that I would do, particularly.
I guess I would do it, what I would do before I went to an economics lecture was to make sure that, well, you know what, I would go either way because either I get, you know, some expansion of the truth or I get some nonsense which I can talk about here.
So for me, having a, I don't know, hypocritical podcast is a good thing.
It's beautiful. It gives me a reason to listen to fools.
So she didn't know what was going to happen consciously, consciously.
Now, I would submit to you that it is certainly possible that if Christina had been, if she'd been in a different kind of environment and if the professor had been a different kind of person, then she would have felt, I'm not saying perfectly comfortable, but she would have felt much more comfortable correcting him on point of theory.
She would have felt much more comfortable about that.
And that's one of the reasons why, I mean, it's not a conscious plan, but I think it helps, and I'll do a podcast on this another time.
It's scheduled for 282 days from now, if I remember rightly.
But it's sort of, I've got a theory that the reason that truth-tellers get aggressed against in a sort of very fundamental way is that they don't love the planet enough.
They don't love people enough.
And that lack of love comes through, and that's why people are hostile towards them.
Because they are instructing humanity without enough love.
Or where there's this sort of dewy-eyed love, then there's just not enough rigor.
But I thought, what if I could put rigor and joy together?
Then would I be aggressed against in a sort of fundamental way?
And I think that so far, the joy and the humor such as it is, is enough to shield me from all of that.
And I think that's It's always sort of been annoying to me that people aggress against philosophers.
And I sort of put the blame on philosophers, as I did with the Battling Socrates podcast.
I sort of put the blame on philosophers that trying to take on the craziness of the world...
It's no small task and you can't do it because you don't like or you're angry at craziness and you can't do it because you want to feel superior and you can't.
I mean, you can do it for all these reasons, but the problem is that that's going to communicate itself unconsciously and you're going to be reviled as the biggest hypocrite of all.
Oh, I'm draining off the future podcast because you're using virtue for self-aggrandizement, which is the exact opposite of virtue, but you call yourself a philosopher.
So anyway, we could talk about that more Another time.
But if Christina had, say, been talking to somebody like me, if we didn't know each other, where I put things forward as conditional, where I didn't have the absolute facts, and even if I did think I had the absolute facts.
Like when I was on Mark Stevens' show on Saturday, I used the billeting as one of the reasons why the U.S. launched the War of Independence against the U.K. And I emailed him afterwards and said, I think I need to be corrected on that because the billeting, if I sort of think about it now, the billeting was more of an issue after the war began when the British sent all their soldiers over.
And he said, no, it was before and after, though it was more after, right?
So I'm always eager to correct myself if I am making a point of theory error or fact error.
The only thing that I will never correct myself on is this is what I feel at the time.
I mean, because nobody can tell me what I feel.
At the time. I mean, they may say it's a defense, whatever, but they can't say that it wasn't real.
I mean, they can, but they're wrong.
So, there is a fair amount of arrogance in thinkers and a fair amount of haughty superiority, which I think is a real shame, right?
I mean, all that means is that only really insecure people or only other haughty people like that are going to engage, and that's not...
That's not very, very helpful, right?
It's like you sell your medicine only to those who don't need it.
That's not the problem that we're dealing with.
So if she'd been talking to somebody like me, then she would have raised her hand.
If I'd have said, is there any questions, she would have raised her hand and said, I don't understand what you meant about this, this, and this.
And I'd have said, well, blah, blah, blah.
And she just said, well, you know, and we would have come to some sort of resolution.
But she would have felt in a sort of positive and supportive environment for the exploration of truth, which is surely what you want when you're trying to talk to people about what is true.
Because I'm not right and you're not right, but together and with reality as our guide and reason as our compass, we can get to the truth, right?
I mean, I put ideas out there and people have a go at them and we get an ecosystem wherein, hopefully, we can get to the bones, we can get to the skeleton and away from all the rotted flesh.
I don't know. That metaphor didn't work out too well.
Oh, it's sticking up the car.
Let me open a window. So...
She was in a situation, she had no knowledge about what was going to happen, no conscious knowledge of what was going to happen, but she felt an enormous amount of hesitation about what would happen.
She felt an enormous amount of hesitation, and she felt that she wanted to say something to correct him, but she felt a good deal of, frankly, fear about correcting him.
And so, as we talked about yesterday, she had a desire and she had an inhibition.
Now the question is, where did the inhibition come from if it was an unknown situation?
Where did the inhibition come from if it was an unknown situation?
So I would submit that the inhibition came from the fact that it was not an unknown situation.
It was merely unknown consciously.
So I'll give you an example.
At the same conference, I attended a couple of lectures.
No, I think just one lecture I could go to.
I attended a lecture, and it was about weight control and diabetes and the population and health and so on.
And the lecturer had one of these, you know, big stellar introductions about all this, that, and the other, and he got up there, and he was a guy who obviously took an enormous amount of pride in blow-drying his hair.
He was really skinny, and he was...
He took great pains.
Like, literally, he said four or five times over the course of a 45-minute lecture how he was a runner.
He'd been a runner for years, and he went for, like, a 15K run the night before, and this and that, right?
And, of course, he's talking to people who have all these weight control issues.
To me, that's kind of insensitive.
That's like, look, look, I'm thin, I'm fit, right?
And all these people who've got diabetes and weight control issues, it's just kind of jerky, right?
And whenever he would be asked a question, he would sort of pause thoughtfully and so on.
And it was all, you know, they weren't tough questions, right?
I don't pause thoughtfully when somebody says to me, how do you determine truth from falsehood?
Well, I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's my way of doing it, right?
Reality and scientific method, logic.
And this guy also, Christina pointed this out, this guy...
He was like a walking icon of 1980s videos, right?
Like he had the pipe-stem pants, he had the...
The little belt, the little, I don't know, it's like some sort of burlap belt.
He had the flared shirt with the multi-layered zippered pockets.
And she said, you know, this guy ceased developing in the 80s, right?
Late 80s or whatever. And he was in his, I guess, late 30s.
So he'd sort of stopped his development in around, probably around the age of 20 or 18 or 20, probably when he went to university or something like that.
And so what did he substitute personal growth for?
He substituted vanity for personal growth.
So he was thin and he ran and he talked to people about weight control issues.
And so this kind of guy is not the kind of guy you're going to have a productive discussion with.
And how long does it take for you to know that when he walks into the room?
I suspect that it takes about a second.
It's the way he walks, it's the way he carries himself, it's the way he looks at you.
There are a number of people in the world, oh god, they are just teeth grating, who have developed the art of the Gandhi gaze, right?
The Gandhi gaze. And the Gandhi gaze is when you come up to talk to them, they smile, their eyes flash warmth.
And they are very superior and very knowing and very spiritual and very deep.
And they really want to listen to you.
And that's terrible.
And they may even clasp your hands between theirs.
But it's all an act.
It's all a complete show. And it's kind of creepy crawly if you've ever been in the presence of one of these sorts of people.
It's sort of a...
You know, you see this with politicians when they're walking through a room and they're They're pointing at people and it's like, hey, you know, they're shaking people's hands.
I said a few words to him, you know, and thank you so much for everything you've been doing for us, you know, and all they, they really, they lock on and it's like, it's like, ew, gross, get out of my pants, you creepy girlies.
So... I didn't see the lecturer that Christina was, in a sense, confronted by, but I absolutely guarantee you that she had...
I shouldn't say absolutely guarantee you.
What a statement of errant nonsense.
It is my personal theory that this guy was someone who was going to be aggressive or humiliating in a very sort of...
Psychologists can be humiliating in a very, very passive-aggressive and sideways manner.
And so she felt an inhibition.
Where did the inhibition come from? The inhibition came from the fact that she'd read the room perfectly correctly and that it was a bad place to bring up new ideas.
It was a bad place to bring up the truth.
And why is it a bad place to bring up the truth?
Well, The reason that it's a bad place to bring up the truth, the reason that, I mean, let's say that in some parallel universe, Steph667 gets an invitation to speak at some Republican event.
I wouldn't take it. I would never take it.
Because I don't want a collective experience.
I don't want for people to have a collective experience of the truth.
I want you and I to have an experience of the truth.
I want us to have an experience of the truth in isolation from social situations.
Because if I'm at a hall of 2,000 Republicans and I'm talking about anarchistic free market philosophy, there's going to be a collective jackal pack animal routing with jeers and catcalls, and everyone then is going to have thrown in their lot with falsehood.
They will have attacked a philosopher for speaking the truth, which means that they will then be almost completely unreceptive To the truth, right?
So if you're in an audience and someone is speaking the truth to a hostile audience and you're like, duh, I don't know what to do with this.
This is like bizarre.
This guy's saying stuff that's just weird.
And then everyone starts jeering and catcalling or rolling their eyes or however it is that they're going to do it.
Then to most people, like you'll have made up your mind.
Well, I can't figure out everything.
Excuse me, I can't figure out everything in this world and everybody seems to think this is nonsense, so it probably is.
And that's going to be it for you.
That's going to be at that end of the road, right?
You're done. That's going to be it for you.
And I don't want that.
What I do want is for Freedomain Radio to be your complete and total guilty secret.
For the first, I don't know, 50 or 100 podcasts.
I want us to be having an illicit affair.
Think of me in the fishnets in a sleazy motel in the French Quarter of New Orleans pre-flood.
With Rouge and, you know, depending on your tastes, a tasteful wig.
I want to be your complete and total guilty secret so that you and I can have this conversation without the constant catcalling and haranguing of the social anti-brain phenomenon occurring, right?
That's why I think these podcasts are a great way to do it.
You know, you could even tap your feet, right?
We're talking philosophy, man.
Just keep tapping your feet so everyone thinks you're listening to music, and you are.
It's just the music of the soul, not the music of the ears.
Just be the guilty secret.
I mean, I want to be like Freedom Aid Radio.
Never heard of it. Interesting.
Huh, right? Podcast 89, but I'm not telling anyone.
It has to be a guilty secret so that we can pursue this conversation undisturbed from the cat calls and the hostilities of everyone else.
So the reason that I'm talking about this is because the traffic is unbelievably slow and, my God, do I need filler.
Okay, well, yes, but I think it's good filler, right?
It's additional details.
I'm fleshing out the portrait, so to speak.
So the reason that you don't bring up the truth in a hostile environment is that it will turn people off the truth.
Because it's very hard for people to say, I was ignorant of the basics of the obvious realities, I was ignorant of the truth, lo these many years, but I am now going to pursue it.
That's a very hard thing to do.
That takes a very strong self.
However, it takes a self that, I don't know, is unbelievably strong to say, I have not had the truth, lo these many years, and when the truth was first expressed to me, I attacked it.
I mean, that's pretty bad.
I mean, people aren't going to be able to look at themselves that way.
People can look in the mirror and say, I'm ignorant.
I didn't know something.
I mean, we all... Because we're all ignorant, right?
We all don't know just about everything, right?
So, I mean, that's not a stretch.
But it's a whole different ballgame to look and say, yeah, I was pretty corrupt when I heard the truth and I joined in the general howling, pitchfork, torch-bearing horde to nail this beautiful Frankenstein to the wall.
So... To not bring up the truth in a hostile situation is a very, very, very good idea.
Is a very, very, very good idea.
So, like, if you're the doctor, there's the cure for the illness, but everybody...
The illness is that everyone thinks there's no illness when there is.
And you're the doctor who has the cure for it.
You don't go in front of a bunch of skeptics and say, I have this pill that will cure the illness because people are like, ah, he's a quack.
Yeah, he's a cultist.
He just wants your money.
And then nobody takes the pill.
And then if you approach them individually, they'll say, come on, get away from me, loser.
Like, we already went through this. But if I can talk to you individually and step you through the arguments and give you this, that, and the other, then you can have a much greater chance of actually thinking for yourself, realizing that you're sick, and taking the pill.
It's one of the few medicines that has to be inserted auditorily.
It's the ear canal that we insert the cure in.
So the inhibition was an enormous degree of knowledge and processing that had occurred within Christina unconsciously.
And I think it occurs within all of us.
It occurs within all of us.
So, Christina knew, based on the body language, based on also the reactions of the people around her.
Hey.
Everybody wants to invent a hero, right?
The whole world, this is another, it's a coming soon, soon to be released, the podcast on the hero as false savior.
Everybody wants a hero.
Everybody wants to imagine that there's some hero out there, whether it's, for you, Einstein or Gandhi or George Bush or, I don't know, Arnold Schwarzenegger or, I don't know, candy samples, Annie Sprinkle.
I don't know. Whoever it is who's a hero to you...
You want to invent, everybody wants to invent that hero, and why?
So that they can just do what that hero says, rather than having to think for themselves.
That's why Jesus, and that's why all of these people, and people do it with Socrates, and people do it with Ayn Rand, for sure, right?
Why do they want a hero who's flawless?
Well, so they can just go look up the answer, rather than have to think for themselves, right?
Thinking for yourself. Impacts your personal relationships following Ayn Rand and keeping it to yourself to, for the most part, becoming haughtily distant doesn't force you to confront your own history and personal relationships.
So, if the listeners to the lecture had been sort of...
I mean, I wish I could do this on video, but I'm going to sort of hyper-characterize this a little bit, but...
If they had been, uh, ooh, Professor, you're so wise.
Ooh, do tell us more.
Ooh, you have all the answers.
Ooh, you are the best and greatest person and lecturer ever.
I bet you can levitate.
Ooh, ooh, touch me.
Touch me right there. Right there.
Oh, yeah. Oh, my God.
I'm never going to watch that spot. Ever.
I'm not sure I ever did before.
If there's this sort of rapt positivity that goes into worshipping the teacher, then you know that you're in the presence of an enormous number of false self people.
False self people, right?
Empty, empty, dead, dead souls.
And when you are in a situation like that, and Christina would have picked up the body language, as we all do, from everyone in the room within about a second, maybe a second and a half, if she hasn't had her coffee.
So she knew that this was a pompous windbag who was insecure and couldn't take criticism.
She knew that they were a bunch of rapt, slavish, empty-soul listeners.
And so they're going through a ritual called the transferring of knowledge.
They're going through a ritual called thought and education.
And they don't want to know that it's a ritual.
In fact, they'll attack anyone who points out that it's a ritual.
I went through the same thing with the forum, the landmark forum, and tried to argue with them.
About philosophy, and they couldn't answer the questions, of course, right?
I mean, even back then, this was about ten years ago, eight years ago, something like that.
But they did say that I was running a racket called, I'm smarter than you.
I was like, oh, so if I agree with you, then you're right.
And if I disagree with you, then I'm being defensive.
Especially if I successfully disagree with you.
So, basically, there's just no way you can be wrong.
And that, of course, is a cult.
So... So she knew that if she questioned the professor, especially on a point of fact, if she was wrong, she would have done that.
She wouldn't have felt so alarmed.
To question this professor on point of fact would have been to threaten unconsciously.
All of this stuff occurs unconsciously, but instantaneously.
We think of the unconscious as something that's murkier and below our conscious mind.
Nuh-uh. Nuh-uh.
The unconscious is the weather we live in and it's instantaneous.
The unconscious is above us.
The unconscious dictates and dominates and controls our emotions.
It generates our emotions and it is above us and it is faster, far faster than we are.
Far faster than we are.
That's why if you don't harness it, You're really slogging your way uphill in the rain when you could just take a plane.
You're climbing the mountain rather than just flying over it.
So, she would have, by questioning this guy on point of fact, she would have been implicitly condemning all the false self nonsense that was going on around her.
Because everybody else would have said, huh, well if the professor admits that he's right, then I'm just kind of sitting here slavishly listening to everything he says and not thinking for myself.
And they'd get irritated. At who?
At who? Yes, at Christina, of course, because otherwise they wouldn't have felt that, and so they'd be annoyed at her.
So if the professor admits error, then the whole ritual of the grand hero of knowledge who's transmitting whatever-whatever gets disrupted and destroyed, and the people who think that they're there learning realize that they're not thinking, they're just absorbing like a sponge uncritically, which is not at all thinking, and certainly not education.
And if she's wrong, which she wasn't, right?
I mean, of course if she was wrong, then she wouldn't have had the tension either to mention it or to mention her disagreement or to not.
So, the reason that she had the inhibition was because she knew the situation down to the last detail.
She knew that she would personally be humiliated, which would cause her to lose respect for her profession.
And, of course, I don't know.
I mean, this is a tough question, right?
I mean, of course you want to know the truth, but you don't necessarily want to go and rub your face in lepers sores.
They are real, but it's not really what you want to focus on.
So, it's not always wise, in my view, to keep provoking bad people to do bad things to you because, you know, it wears you down a little.
At least it does to me. It wouldn't have been productive.
The guy would have not been productive.
He would have just weaseled his way out.
And then it would have escalated.
So if she says, and he's like, heels away in some manner, then she's stuck.
Because then she's like, okay, so I just got a non-answer.
Now what do I do? Do I say, I'm sorry, I don't think that answered my question.
Perhaps I can try again. And then you get into this weird, bitter, subterranean, teeth-grittingly, smiley, hateful conversation and confrontation with someone where they're trying to wriggle away from admitting they don't know something or made a mistake, especially if it's fundamental to their belief system.
You know, I just wrote a book on this, and you've just disproven the whole thesis.
Huh. That's fucking great.
Thank you, oh, philosopher, philosophatrix.
So, she recognized that she was going to do harm to the people who, sitting in the back, may have had scraps of enough of a true self to hear the truth, if alone, and it's a guilty secret, and I'm in fishnet stockings, I believe it was. Then...
Those people might have a chance.
But if she calls this guy out in front of everyone, everyone's basically going to jeer and catcall, and they're going to immediately jump to the professor's side, right?
And, of course, this happens all the time.
I know this, well, from university, right?
Before I learned all this stuff.
When I still had hope, yes, yes, the young days of hope.
How touching they were. My salad days.
But... Everybody's going to jump to the side of the professor, and they're going to turn in wide eyes, and they say, I think what he's trying to say is this, this, this, and this, and this.
Does that help? Does that help you understand, you poor, deluded soul?
And so she didn't...
The inhibitor was that she knew how it was going to play out, and she knew that it was going to be humiliating for her, which is not the end of the world if there's some productive stuff that occurs.
If I'm speaking to a group of half-libertarians and half...
Marxists, then for sure I'll take on the Marxist guy.
For sure I'll debate the Marxist guy, yay, unto the death.
I'd do it with a half-Republican, half-Democrat, and a sliver of Libertarians, because I'd want to talk to the Libertarians.
But even then, the catcall would be too much.
The catcall part would be too much.
I mean, you want to convert people, right?
Which means don't get them involved in the ritual stoning of the person who thinks.
And they can't turn back, then they can't be saved.
So that's the situation with Christina, and that's why I said, no, you shouldn't do it.
I mean, if you'd feel like, if you're in a situation where you have no evidence that's conscious, and you have no knowledge that's conscious, and your unconscious is saying, don't do it, right?
Your integrity is saying, speak the truth.
Your unconscious is saying, it would be a bad thing to speak the truth right now, then you listen to your unconscious, right?
You don't You don't argue with the processor, right?
Any more than you argue with your liver, right?
You don't argue with your heart and say, I don't know, beat differently.
Or if you could stop beating for a while because I'm trying to think, that would be excellent.
You don't argue with your pancreas.
You don't argue with your leg.
You just, you know, do what you do, right?
And thank you, by the way, to my liver and all the other organs who keep me going.
I really, really appreciate it.
You don't argue with your unconscious.
I mean, you can do it, but it's sort of...
It's just exactly like arguing with your liver.
I mean, the liver's not going to change.
You're just going to waste time, probably.
By thinking that you can argue with your liver, you're going to drink more, right?
So if you're getting cirrhosis of the liver or scarring of the liver from drinking, then if you sort of argue with your liver, what happens is you think you can drink more.
And when you argue with your unconscious, you think that you can maintain your conflicts.
And that's just not a good idea.
It really... It never works.
It never works. You might as well argue with gravity.
You know, jump out of a plane and say...
I disagree with gravity!
That's one flat philosopher.
So, that's sort of the one situation, and believe it or not, the traffic has cleared up so we can deal with the second situation with just a little more brevity.
Oh god, it's hard to even say the word brevity.
So, in the second situation though, She was knowledgeable of the variables, and she was in control of the situation.
So in the first instance confronting the professor, she's not in control of the situation.
It's up to the professor and the students how it plays out.
But in the second situation, where I say to Christina, I'd like you to do like 20 minutes on relationships, because there's a number of people who've emailed me, and there's a number of ask a therapist questions, and there's postings on the board around relationships, so it might be a good thing to go over them.
I also knew that there were some women listening in about relationships and call me an estrogenical treachery merchant, but I do believe that it can be a little bit nicer to hear a woman talk about relationships, especially when she's, say, trained and accredited.
That can be a plus.
Although Socrates didn't have a doctorate.
Other than passive-aggressive sarcasm.
Masked as convivial knowledge exploration.
But when I say to Christina, can you do 20 minutes or whatever on relationships for the show, just an intro, she, you know, had a professional freak out.
And the question is, well, how is that different?
Well, it's very different. First of all, she's in a safe and secure environment.
Nobody will ever attack my wife without me totaling them, right?
I mean, I don't care how they do it, and I don't care if she's wrong.
Nobody will ever attack my wife on air, in email, or in any way, shape, or form without me having something to say about it, just as the reverse would be true for her.
So she's in my show, and we're talking to my beautiful, beautiful audience.
And so that's not a situation that is fraught with tension, right?
She's seen the quality of the conversations that we have, the quality of the listeners, and of course I would be there.
And so there would be no reason for fearing that it would turn into a Humiliate Christina attack fest.
So there's knowledge that it's a very different situation from that standpoint.
Now, the basic principle then, so that, I mean, we could go into other reasons as to why that she's the lecturer in this situation, so people are more likely to listen, and of course they'll question her, but she doesn't have a false self, she's just not making stuff up, so people would question her.
But she would be graceful about it and she would probably be right.
And if she was wrong, then she would say she was wrong.
Whatever. So it's a very different situation.
She's in the position of the lecturer.
And it's not because she can't do it, right?
I mean, if I said to her, I need you to start teaching Mandarin to advanced Mandarin speakers next week, then of course she would...
Well, she wouldn't...
She would be like, no, I can't do that because I don't speak Mandarin.
I speak Cantonese. So...
I wasn't asking her to do anything that she hadn't already been studying for 15 years, right?
And practicing for 12, right?
So, actually, that's not quite right.
Studying for... Anyway, she spent a lot of time in school and then she practiced for a while.
More than a decade, for sure.
Oh, he just lost the newlywed game.
So... This is a very different situation when I'm saying if you could just speak for 20 minutes to people in a totally controlled environment about something that you're a complete expert at, then she is the best therapist in the world.
I mean, no question. And...
So if she feels tension about that, then we have the same thing, right?
We must have desire and inhibitors.
We must have desire and inhibitors in the same way that we had desire and inhibitors in the previous situation.
I wanna and I don't wanna.
So in the previous situation, there's the want to correct the guy, don't want to correct the guy.
I have no knowledge about how it's actually going to go down, so I'm going to have to trust my instincts.
That's the principle. This is the secret.
In the absence of knowledge, you trust your instincts.
Because your instincts have knowledge.
Your instincts have knowledge.
Your instincts have the accumulated knowledge, not in any kind of past lives nonsensical way.
Your... Instincts, your gut, your unconscious has all of the accumulated knowledge of every organic creature that led to your evolution over the past couple of billion years.
And that's kind of a treasure trove.
That's kind of a treasure trove, right?
To pass by, right?
I mean, to pass by. It's like being a researcher these days and not using the internet.
I mean, I can be kind of retarded, right?
Our unconscious, like, you didn't decide puberty, right?
I mean, your pituitary gland decided puberty.
And you didn't decide to have your liver.
For most of mankind's history, you didn't even know they had a liver or what the hell it did.
But it works away. And you want to tap into that knowledge, right?
All of our feelings and instincts and reading the room and figuring out the body language, it's all part of the skill set we inherit, like eyeballs and the ability to hear.
I mean, why would you not want to use those?
So... So where we don't have conscious knowledge, we rely on our instincts.
And I bet you they're going to be correct.
Where we do have conscious knowledge, we can question our instincts.
And we can further analyze the situation and a more appropriate response to that situation.
So where Christina has no conscious knowledge about how something's going to go down if she confronts a professor...
How's she going to judge that? How's she going to judge that?
Well, there's no rationality that she can bring to bear on it.
She can impose some fairly arbitrary absolutes like, I must always speak the truth.
Which, of course, is not philosophically true.
And so it's not...
I'm speaking the story. Always having to speak the truth is exactly the same as saying I should never use violence.
Well, no. In self-defense, I can use violence.
And when attacked and somebody says, where's your wife?
I want to kill her. I can lie.
In fact, I bloody well should. So there's no absolute.
I must speak the truth.
I am the truth and teller.
And if I am silent, I am condemned.
What's that from... From Les Mis.
If I speak, I am condemned.
If I stay silent, I am damned.
It's a great song. So, in the absence of empirical knowledge, conscious knowledge, and the ability to apply rationality, she has never met this guy before.
She's got to go on instinct. However, where there is evidence, right, the evidence being that this is a friendly and positive show, we have a great time chatting with the listeners, and very occasionally she'll get a hostile response to an Oscar therapist, but that's fairly manageable, and of course it's so completely obviously defensive that we don't really need to trouble our pretty little heads too much about it, so...
And that's the way in which I confronted her fear.
So clearly, it's perfectly rational to ask someone to do something.
When you're asking a surgeon, would you mind doing a tracheotomy on this guy that you've done for the last 20 years, and he freaks out, it's not because he can't do it.
And he's not drunk and all this sort of stuff.
It's got to be some other conflict. So...
When there's no logical reason for the inhibitor, and there's no evidence, and you're not in an unknown situation, the inhibitor must be fear.
And the fear, then, is the demarcation of the desire.
You are afraid to do something that's rational for you to do, because you want to do it.
And the fear rises proportional to your desire, as we talked about in yesterday's podcast, 726, 726, 726.
So that's the difference to me.
When you're in an unknown situation, consciously unknown, you trust your gut.
You trust your gut in general, but I can't tell you how many times, and Christina probably could, because she's heard a whole lot of this, right?
Is that, I mean, we're doing something, I think, pretty new here.
I mean, I think we're doing something very new here.
Dare I say, dare I call it unprecedented.
I think I dare. I may be wrong, but I think I dare.
And I can't tell you the number of times I sat down with Christina and said, ooh, my gut says this, and I don't know, and do the listeners want this, or do they want that, or should I take the show in this direction, or here's the map of podcasts, should I go this way or this way, I can't tell, should I be drawn off, is this a tangent, or is this part of the core thing, listeners are asking about this, should I put it off to later, or should I do it now, or people seem to be not posting on the board, do you think it's something I did, I haven't had a donation in a week, or is it something I said, all this kind of stuff.
So doing this show has really helped clarify this for me.
For me, at least, this is a totally unknown situation.
It's a totally unknown situation. So what have I got to do?
I got to just follow my gut.
I got to just follow my gut because there's no proof here.
There's no proof here.
There's instinct. And I have to believe, and I think there's good evidence to believe, that...
The instincts that I have with regards to this are accurate, because there's no book to look up to say, here's how to run a successful and interactive philosophy podcast.
Let alone how to turn it into an income.
So it is just a follow my gut.
This is part of what I've learned.
This is part of the gift that this show has given me.
And part of the amazing, amazing eye-opening, eye-opening like you rip your eyelids open, that this show has given me.
And that you, as the listeners, both by listening and interacting with me, Have given me as a human being.
And I thank you so much for it.
I know that you're getting a great deal out of this, but I've just got to tell you, I am too.
But I still like and want and need, frankly, donations.
But I just want to thank you for listening, of course, and for the feedback that the most amazing people in the world have given me.
I mean, we will be known in the future as a fairly blinding crew.
Blinding with light. Bright?
Let's just say blindingly bright.
Not blinding. We're seeking to undo the blinding.
So I hope that that helps at least for you to differentiate these two situations.
Thank you so much for the listeners who have posted these questions both to my email and on the board where we are rapidly approaching a sort of event horizon wherein the number of people who have joined the boards is almost equal to the number of podcasts.
I think it was 719 and this is 727.
So I must podcast, podcast, that will be 12 a day!
Actually there have been about 7 people a day joining so I can't do 7 podcasts a day.
It would be mad. So it would be interesting to see that.
So yes, thank you so much everyone for asking these questions, which helped me to explain my thinking or my reasoning so much more clearly.
I really, really do appreciate that.
And if there are other situations that fall into this category, be sure to let me know.
And of course, if any of this is unclear, Or wrong, right?
Be sure to let me know. And let me know your own experiences with this as you start to bring it to the fore in your life.
Thank you so much for listening.
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