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May 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:58:31

747 Call In Show May 6 2007

Ron Paul, crushing fantasies, religious mothers, helping others become philosophical, and the pause that refreshes!

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	Well, I'm going to start just with a short rant, shockingly enough, and then we will get to the meat of the matter, which is the questions from the listeners.
	We've had some excellent suggestions on the board and I hope that everybody is appreciating the snapping performance of the new server, which is doing a mighty fine job of serving up data most rapidly.
	So that's great.
	It's a dual-core P4 with 2 gigs of RAM and 120 gig RAID hard drive, which is sexy for geeks and incomprehensible to others.
	But it's a significant upgrade.
	Before, we had a quarter of a processor because it was a shared hosting server.
	We had 384 megs of RAM, and we only had a 10 gig hard drive.
	So now, 12 times the storage, more than 4 times the processing, and more than 6 or 7 times storage.
	The memory we should be set for another month or two.
	Now that we have moved everything over to the new server...
	There will be, hopefully, bandwidth will be served that much faster.
	It will be a heck of a lot easier for me to compile the stats, which I do from an obsessive self-back-padding, in a self-back-padding way at the end of the month.
	Right now we're spread across three different servers.
	So that is not the easiest thing in the world to compile.
	So we will hopefully have a better situation in the future to get all this stuff done.
	So thank you so much for your donations which make this all possible.
	I did use quite a bit of...
	I spent quite a bit of money, I think 400 bucks or so, last month advertising upon StumbleUpon, which actually got a large number of people, about 11,000, to come to Free Domain Radio.
	So, welcome to the new listeners, if you have come by from that.
	And... We'll see.
	I mean, I don't know what the conversion rate is as yet.
	We'll see from StumbleUpon whether people actually end up listening.
	But I'm going to spend, as you know, I have one more day of work on Monday.
	And then I move on to Free Domain Radio full-time.
	And the list of things to be done is growing.
	And actually, the fabulous, I guess, pretty close to web admin now for Free Domain Radio.
	Mr. Will, Mr. Bill, has set up a site where we can put our to-dos in and come up with suggestions and track progress of the things that we are going to do or the things that I'm going to do over the next couple of weeks to make this all run a little bit more toastily.
	Once I figured out whether StumbleUpon is actually giving us new listeners, then I'll sort of start advertising there again.
	I just didn't want to advertise too much on StumbleUpon because people were having problems getting the podcast because...
	Some minor stats.
	I found out there were 11,500 distinct hits on one of our servers last month, which means, I guess, that was the podcast server.
	So it's at least 11,500 people listening.
	I think that the server load is pretty much evenly balanced between the new stuff and the old stuff.
	I would guess that we're over 20,000, probably closer to 25,000, and there would probably be about another 1,000 or so hitting Christina's site, which was the original host for the podcast.
	So that's good!
	To me, that's very exciting that there are 26,000 people, 25,000 people out there who are very interested in philosophy, I think.
	And that's one month, right?
	That's one month. So I think that is very, very good and very exciting.
	And Christina did a funny, what do we have here?
	I'm under Steph again today.
	Well, because it's Sunday, so it's that time of the week.
	Anyway, the video's not running, is it?
	Should I put pants on? No? Okay.
	So I wanted to start there with an interesting question.
	This question has come up before, and I've done a podcast on it, but I'm going to just mention it briefly, just to sort of go over it again, because there's quite a lot of excitement in libertarian circles about Senor Ron Paul.
	And Senor Ron Paul did a very exciting job at the debates.
	For the presidential nominees and people are very excited and somebody said, well, he's committed to cutting government by 90% and so we should put our time and energies into helping Ron Paul to get the message out.
	And I think that it's an important thing to ask or to try and figure out what is the message that Ron Paul is trying to get out.
	And the message, of course, that Ron Paul is trying to get out is that government is too big, that there's too much violence, that we as slaves are being beaten too often, and that the amount of beatings that we are receiving as slaves should be cut back.
	And I really don't think that that's a message that's going to work.
	In fact, I view, I mentioned this on the board, I view libertarianism as a detour away from the truth in the way that agnosticism is a detour away from atheism, which is the sort of logically correct position.
	And the true position, right?
	So people want the state to become smaller, and so they head down the road towards libertarianism.
	And to me, there's nothing wrong with that.
	I mean, it's a starting point. I certainly went down that road for many years and found it to be very productive and enjoyable, and it taught me a lot about economics, and it taught me a lot about The state and it allowed me to become skeptical of authority and it allowed me to begin to plumb some of the myths that run society, the stories that we are all embedded in oh so violently and I found it to be a very productive and positive journey for me.
	I would certainly recommend that you don't spend as long a time as I did in it from the destination that I arrived at a couple of years ago before I started this show.
	I wish that I hadn't spent as much time there, but because of my lack of exposure to positive anarchistic thinking, I'd never read any Rothbard, I'd never read any of the other sort of Proudhon, all of the other people who were, I wouldn't say Proudhon's that positive, but I hadn't really been exposed to any of it, so I had the normal clichéd views of anarchism and violent and Marxist and bomb-throwing and leftist and all, there was lots of communes and nudity and all that.
	So, of course, I was drawn to the communes and nudity, but not so much the Molotov cocktails.
	So, cocktails, yes. Molotov, not so much.
	So, I would suggest that people who are going down the road towards libertarianism We're doing it because we think that the state should be smaller or the state should be more minimal or more controlled or the people should have more control over the state and I think that's an illusion.
	The thing that I think is the worst thing in the world is something which gives you the illusion of progress.
	Something which gives you the illusion of progress will waste your time and turn your life into ashes and futility.
	It is much better to know you're not making progress It's better to know that you're lost than to never check the map.
	If you never check the map, you never get anywhere, you never know that you're lost, and you wonder why you never reach your chosen destination.
	So I would say that it is important not to linger too long in the land of libertarianism, and for people who think that Ron Paul has even the tiniest shred of hope of cutting the federal government, all we need to do is look at his own record.
	And I've posted this question repeatedly in email responses to people who are fans of Ron Paul, who email me and say, oh no, Ron Paul is doing great, right?
	He's going to cut the size of government and this and that, right?
	Well, he's, what, the 17th district of Texas?
	So I said, well, that's very interesting.
	Perhaps you can tell me whether he's managed to cut his local government by 90%.
	And nobody has...
	Well, some guy said, well, they keep changing the size of his district.
	Well, so what?
	He should still be able to cut it by some significant portion.
	And of course he hasn't been able to.
	So this is an example of, I think, don't waste your time.
	This is a don't waste your time scenario.
	If you do think that somebody like Ron Paul is going to go and cut the size of government for you, you're completely and totally mistaken.
	And I don't like to put it that bluntly too often, but I just see a lot of people rushing out there, getting on this bandwagon and having hope.
	Because there's somebody who talks freedom in Washington and somebody who talks about abolishing the IRS in Washington.
	And it is really not a good idea to follow that particular road.
	Saying that slavery is a moral evil that should be abolished will win.
	It will win.
	It will not win quickly.
	It will not win quickly, but it will win.
	The truth, the truth has a power That nothing else can equal.
	The truth has a power that nothing, nothing, nothing else can equal.
	No campaign ads, no slogans, no ads.
	And everybody wants to bypass the truth so that they can have an effect in the world.
	Everybody wants to not state the truth and to live the truth in their own life.
	And they want to go campaigning for Ron Paul because they feel, that's how I'm going to have an effect.
	And that's where we lose many of our best and brightest in this movement.
	They can't answer the question or people feel uncomfortable with the question when we talk philosophy.
	They feel uncomfortable with the question, well, how is this going to change the world?
	You're just talking. It's all talk.
	Blah, blah, blah. What are you actually doing to change the world?
	Well, of course, the answer to that is I'm freeing myself.
	I'm freeing myself.
	I am living freedom and I'm passing on freedom to as many people as I can in the most positive way that I can.
	And that's the only way that it's going to work.
	That's the only way that it's going to work.
	There is just no other conceivable possible way that we are going to get rid of things like the government and things like religion.
	You can't do it through politics.
	You can't do it through going door to door.
	You can't do it by designing nice graphics for leaflets that go out in the mail.
	You can only do it by speaking the truth with courage and with dignity and with strength and with anger where appropriate.
	You can only fix the world by speaking the truth.
	There is no other way that it can ever conceivably occur.
	The world can only be healed by simple and repetitive and passionate honesty and integrity.
	The truth is such a silent and powerful weapon that it completely shapes the future.
	And yes, it feels like we're making no progress at times.
	And yes, it feels like we're going the wrong direction.
	And society is going the wrong direction.
	But that's why we need to stay on the path of just speaking the truth and of living the truth, which means getting bad people out of your life and confronting the people who speak falsely and continuing to fight for and speak for the truth.
	There's just no other way to do it.
	I mean, the truth is the only thing that will set the species in the world free.
	There is no politician who's going to do it.
	There's no priest. There's no one else but us, we philosophers, who speak the truth.
	So I would say that the false hope of people like Ron Paul and like the Libertarian Party and so on and the Objectivist Association just doesn't work.
	It's a huge distraction.
	I mean, if I were the government and the Libertarian Party did not exist, I would invent it.
	I would invent the Libertarian Party to draw off people who were getting close to the truth and get them lost in the low, mucky tidewaters of political action.
	And somebody else, just the last thing I'll mention before I go to questions, somebody else had pointed out that they can't believe that we're not banned in China yet.
	China was the second largest consumer of free-domain radio podcasts last month.
	So people were sort of acting surprised.
	Well, not acting surprised, but they were surprised.
	They got some emails and so on.
	People say, well, I'm surprised that they haven't banned you yet.
	But the great thing about speaking the truth, the great thing about speaking the truth, is that the people who are currently in power aren't frightened of it because they know that it's not going to kick them off.
	The people who are currently in power, they know that we're not going to kick them out.
	George Bush is not frightened of Free Domain Radio because we're not going to have the effect within his sphere of power.
	The only time that Free Domain Radio is going to face any political opposition is when the Bush twins listen to it in DFU. Then we might get some attention from the powers that be.
	Or if some communist leader's kid defoos because his parents are evil.
	And that's when, my friends, we shall have some political attention paid to us, but I don't consider that too likely just yet.
	So, anyway...
	Thanks so much for letting me get that off my chest.
	I hope that was helpful. And if you'd like, I would be more than happy.
	Christina is manning or personning the booth, and she is going to be able to get people on who have questions.
	Feel free to have them brought in.
	And the last thing I'd say is that thank you.
	We had the largest single donation for Freedom Aid Radio.
	This last weekend, and Greg's asked me not to use his name, so we'll just say it's a friend of Greg's.
	And thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you so much.
	The MP3 gigs is so far, we have 8 gigs of MP3s, most of them encoded at 56k, but some of the earlier ones are at 40k, and I haven't gotten around to recompiling them.
	I'm not so much worried about bandwidth these days, although one of the things that I am planning on doing, of course, is selling the DVD sets or whatever.
	Yeah, I know that there's already some torrents out there of the first couple of hundred ones, but I'd like to do the DVD set, which is...
	All of the videos at uncompressed resolution, all of the audio at high-quality resolution, just so it's, you know, maybe even selected ones in format so you can pop them in a CD or whatever.
	So, yeah, it's lots of sort of these kinds of things doing that I'd like to sort of get moving along.
	So, yeah, high-resolution BCF. It's important to see every single freckle.
	I think that without that, you're just not getting the biodome of thought that it's free-domain radio, so...
	I can Easter egg the Queen socks.
	Kind of a rotten egg, but yes, I certainly do appreciate the thought.
	It's great. All right.
	So if we have any questions, if you are, welcome back to some people I can see here who have not been around for a while.
	Thank you so much for rejoining this conversation.
	I'm sure you have been listening as we go forward.
	But if you have questions or comments...
	Feel free to voice them now, or I can go to the questions that were posted on the board and read those off.
	So I'll just give people a moment to gather their thoughts and click on the Ask for Mike button, request microphone, or whatever the hell it's called in the various versions of Skype.
	There's a band out there whose lead singer is channeling Freddie Mercury.
	You tell me, brother, I would love to listen to a singer as good as Freddie Mercury.
	Mika. Very interesting.
	I miss old Freddie. There's just nobody who can sing quite like him.
	I don't know that there will be again for quite some time.
	All right. Well, I will go to the questions that came up for the Sunday Call-In Show that were posted on the board.
	One gentleman wanted to talk about sex, and that's totally fine with me.
	I'm more than happy to talk about sex.
	And of course, I think an FDR MySpace is a great idea.
	So, whoever wants to get involved with the Freedom Aid Radio MySpace would be fantastic.
	And let me just double check here, if anybody else has any questions.
	All right, so we have another question which came up on the boards.
	I'll read this from a gentleman who posted it.
	Steph, I'd like to hear your thoughts on procrastination and the romanticizing of ideas to put them in the realm of fantasy unattainable to justify not doing them subconsciously, of course.
	I'm sure this ties into the false self.
	This may not be the same thing, but it seems a common habit for people to be very involved in the setup.
	Of a pursuit, like buying a bunch of ridiculous running gear and then never going running, or using the excuse of not having a bunch of running gear to not go running.
	When said person expresses the desire to do something, why is it so easy to get caught up in the excuses and the setup?
	Is the desire false, or simply a motivation problem?
	If I romanticize writing a book, am I basically dooming myself into never finishing, or doing it because of my false self perspective?
	Well, I think that is a wonderful, wonderful question.
	And I do believe that there is a very common phenomenon that occurs with people in terms of getting things done.
	And procrastination, of course, is a huge problem for everyone.
	Everybody procrastinates.
	And my initial clever self-manipulation in this realm was to say, well, okay, I'm bad at getting things done.
	I'm going to procrastinate.
	If I could just find a way To put off my procrastination till later, I would actually get things done now.
	But that didn't work too well.
	So the question of getting things done and the size of the goal, and if I understand the listener's question in detail, then it's that I set up these enormous goals that I know I'm never going to get done, and I neither let go of the ideals nor do I actually achieve them.
	Well, I take a sort of simple approach to this kind of stuff, and it may be too simple, so you can certainly let me know what you think.
	I just say, give it up.
	I just say, give up. I'm very much one for, like, just give up.
	If you've had a goal, say, you know, for...
	I dated a girl once who wanted to be an actress.
	She wanted to be an actress to the point where she got...
	I mean, she had perfectly healthy teeth, but there was a slight crook or gap or something like that.
	And she met a woman on a plane who was an agent.
	She was a stewardess. And she met a woman on a plane who was an agent.
	And she chatted with this woman.
	And the woman said, oh, well, you know, you're a pretty girl.
	You've got a good look. Certainly, if you're interested, you've got some of the raw materials that would be required for, you know, to ensure you'd be photogenic and so on.
	And so this woman ended up going to get her braces, like painful braces, for like a year to straighten up her teeth.
	And that was her sort of sole movement in the direction of becoming an actress.
	Now, I thought she would actually have been a good actress.
	She was very funny, very quick-witted, and very intelligent, and very verbally skilled, and quite emotional.
	A lot of these things were not bad in the realm of acting.
	But having had some experience within the acting community, having taken two years of theatre school training and acted in various plays and directed and so on, I couldn't help but say to her at one point, well, it might actually help if you took some acting classes or got involved in amateur theatre or did some community stuff or anything like that.
	But she had this goal.
	That she put ahead of herself.
	She's like, okay, well, my teeth are fixed in a year.
	I'm going to call this woman, and I'm going to go and meet with her, and then I'm going to start to be an actress.
	And this, of course, just had Doom written all over it.
	And I've known a number of women, and men, too.
	I just, you know, I've dated more women.
	I've known a number of women who have these big goals.
	Like, I want to be a filmmaker. I want to write a book.
	I want to do stand-up comedy.
	And they have these big goals, and there's no particular methodology for achieving them.
	Now, this is a weird combination of stuff.
	I'll sort of give you my thoughts on it, and then you can certainly share what you like.
	And just to finish up the story with the stewardess I dated, so the year was up, and she got her braces taken off, and her teeth looked fine.
	And lo and behold, she went to go and talk to this woman, who she still had the number, And the woman said, well, your teeth are great, sure.
	Have you done any acting?
	And so the woman said, no, I haven't done any acting, but do you want to see my teeth from a different angle?
	And it's like, well, it's not a freaking tooth commercial, right?
	I mean, you're supposed to bare your soul, not your ivories, when you are an actor.
	So... The question comes up, what did she have this for?
	And the question also comes up, who could she have been if she didn't spend a year of her life waiting to be an actor?
	And those things are very, very important.
	And you can't easily talk people out of what they conceive to be their dreams.
	And I very much enjoy being a dream crusher, but it's a delicate operation for sure because you can easily provoke people's rage and aggression when you try to crush their fantasies.
	But I think it's very important to have your fantasies crushed.
	I don't know. If I said, well, yeah, I'm going to work as a software executive for a while, but I really want to get the lead in the Nutcracker.
	And I don't know. I posted some videos of me dancing.
	Well, okay. I mean, I can do a lot of ballet stuff.
	No, I'm just kidding. I took some dance in theater.
	That's about it. But...
	It would just be ridiculous.
	And the waste of people's time and energy and resources is just insane.
	It's just insane. And it goes all the way through levels of society.
	People have fantasies that the government can solve the problem of poverty or the problem of ignorance or the problem of war.
	Right? So they wait for the government to achieve these things.
	They wait and they beg and they cajole and they write letters and they want the government to achieve X, Y, and Z. Which is exactly the same at a much more despicable level of this woman who just thought, well, if I get my teeth fixed, I'll be an actress.
	And she's waiting, and she's waiting, and she's waiting.
	And of course, part of this waiting comes from waiting for your parents to love you, waiting for those around you to take an interest in you, waiting for those around you to treat you well.
	Waiting, waiting, waiting, right?
	So procrastination is just a form of waiting.
	And there's lots of ways that we get habituated into waiting when we're young.
	Of course, we have to wait all the time when we're kids for anything interesting to happen in school.
	We have to wait for affection.
	We have to wait to treat well.
	And we wait. We do wait.
	There's a part of us that just waits for all of this kind of stuff.
	And I just think that it's a really, really terrible idea.
	People like to say...
	Well, I'm really interested in being an actor.
	Maybe it makes him sound interesting or, you know, gee, I've always wanted to write a book and so on.
	And I can't remember who said this, but it's something that always stuck with me because I guess I wrote my first book when I was 23.
	Actually, no, that's not true at all.
	I wrote my first science fiction novel when I was...
	Oh lord, 14? 13 or 14.
	And then I wrote another book when I was...
	Well, I wrote a whole bunch of plays throughout my teenage years and poetry and so on.
	And I wrote another book when I was 18?
	17. I wrote a book when I was 16, a book when I was 17, a book when I was 21.
	Then I finally wrote Revolutions when I was 24, which I thought was good.
	And I worked to move that one out.
	So... Somebody said, some writer said, and I think it's a good way of putting it, he said, you know, people are always coming up to me and saying, oh yeah, I've always really wanted to write a book.
	And he said, that's just a load of nonsense.
	If you want to write a book, it'll never happen.
	If you have to write a book, or you can't sleep, if you have to write a book, or you can't live with yourself, if you have to write a book, or it feels like someone's pushing you off a cliff, then maybe you will get to write a book.
	But you don't get to do it by just wanting it.
	To do it. And so my concern is that when people have these ideas, I want to write a book, I want to do this, I want to do that, they're totally missing out on what they could be doing if their false self was not giving them these goals that stymied them and stultified them.
	Letting go of dreams and dream crushing is something that I've had to do with my own life totally repetitively.
	So I was going to be an actor and I had to crush that dream, strangle it like a boa constrictor.
	Then I was going to be a director, and I had to crush that dream.
	And then I was going to be an academic, and I had to crush that dream.
	Most recently, I was going to be a business executive.
	Well, I actually was a business executive.
	And I had to crush that dream so that I can release what is, in fact, a better...
	Life for me and a more important life for me.
	If I was still hanging around, let's not even get started on the singing thing.
	If I was still hanging around trying to achieve all these other things, I wouldn't be doing this.
	I would not be doing this.
	So the important thing, I think there's a couple of ways that you can help determine a fantasy from...
	From imagination. Imagination is good.
	Fantasy is bad. Imagination is extended and rooted in the richness of reality.
	Fantasy is some alternate universe where up is down and black is white and there's no air but you don't die.
	It's a horrible universe.
	First of all, where does the impulse come from for the dream that you have?
	Where does the impulse come from?
	Is it because you love to do it?
	I thought I would love acting, and I wasn't bad at it, but I just didn't like acting, and I sure as hell didn't like the people in the theater world.
	They were just all mad as hatters, and shallow and backstabby, and ugh, just nasty, nasty people.
	I thought I would like academics and I really did enjoy the research and I really did enjoy putting together logical arguments and so on.
	But I found that professors and the people in the academics world, nasty, backstabby, just not pleasant people.
	And then I turned to writing, but I found that agents weren't productive for me to be working with, let's say.
	Lots of promises and no action.
	And then I thought, well, you know, business executive, I really like the business world and so on.
	But, you know, the people are no saner in the business world.
	There's no sane people except for, I think, the work that we're trying to do here.
	So... I think that...
	I think it's important to say, well, where does the impulse come from?
	I mean, I have no doubt whatsoever that if I can make this full-time free domain radio thing work, that it'll be the permanent gig for the rest of my life.
	And Christina will need like four crowbars, sturdy crew, and a candle prod to get me out of my couch when I'm, quote, thinking about free domain radio.
	And... Why is that?
	Well, because I love to do it. I love to do it.
	I love to do it. I get such a high and such a thrill out of getting this stuff done.
	And when I'm doing it, I'm not doing it in order to do something else.
	When I'm doing Freedom Radio, it is complete in itself.
	There's nothing else that I would rather be doing that I can do on camera other than what it is that I'm doing in the moment.
	So if you talk about your goals, like, yeah, I really want to write a book or whatever, then that's not a self-generated motivation.
	That's, you know, it would be cool to write a book that would help the world.
	Well, sure, absolutely, but that's like me saying it would be great to invent a cure for cancer.
	Sure, but so what?
	I mean, unless I'm actually going to school to learn something about biochemistry or whatever it is that would be involved in a cure for cancer, then it's just idle talk, right?
	It's idle talk. It's like, my parents are good.
	It's obey my dream turtle, right?
	So I would say that if it's something that is generated from within you, that when you're doing it, you're doing it because there's nothing else that you'd rather be doing in that moment.
	So if you say, well, I'd like to write a book, or I'd like to do this, I'd like to do that, you just have to work empirically.
	And I very clearly remember the conversation that I had with a friend of mine when I finally realized that I didn't want to be an actor, when I preferred to write and to think.
	Because I said, you know, I'm just sort of thinking back over the last year.
	I had left theater school because I didn't really like the people and I really didn't feel comfortable there.
	It was a very emotionally volatile and difficult place, way too much like my family.
	So I'd left theater school, but I was still heavily involved in acting.
	I was playing Macbeth at McGill and so on.
	So I was still heavily involved in acting.
	And I took the role of the doctor in the Elephant Man, Anthony Hopkins' role in the movie.
	And, oh man, I sucked.
	I actually didn't really like the play, but I took the role because it was a lead and I was vain.
	And I remember I was talking to the director and I said, you know, I've just sort of been thinking about this and I'll finish the play, right?
	I mean, I'll do the play and I'll continue to try and do not a job that sucks as bad as I've been doing it.
	And I ended up doing okay in the end.
	But I said, you know, when I get home...
	Or when I get back at the end of classes, at the end of rehearsal, I don't sit there and work on accents, I don't sit there and work on monologues when I get back to what it is that I have.
	When I have free time, what do I do?
	Well, I read about philosophy, I read about economics, I think and I write.
	So you can work really empirically from your life to find out what's important to you.
	You don't have to just figure it out all within your own head.
	What is it you actually do when you don't have to do anything?
	What is it you actually do when you don't have to do anything?
	That is the physics of your future.
	That is where you should be moving towards.
	Another way to tell it is, are you taking tangible steps to achieve it other than just getting teeth straightening or whatever?
	Are you taking tangible steps to achieve it?
	So I was interested in being an actor and so I applied for and got into the National Theatre School of Canada, which is not easy.
	They take like 1% of people who apply.
	So I was taking steps towards it, and thank heavens I did.
	Because if you're not taking steps towards it, then it's not something that you're actually doing.
	People have every right to impose the same empirical scientific standards on your dreams that we do on the government, that we do on God, that we do on the family virtue, that we do on everything.
	What is it you're actually doing?
	Not what do you say you want to do, but what is it you're actually doing?
	Procrastination can swallow decades of your life.
	A dream that you could do X, Y, and Z, which remains untested by application, can not only swallow up decades of your life, But also, it can prevent you from doing what you really want to do.
	And this is the false self thing. The false self thing will be, I want to do that which is going to make me rich, that which is going to make me famous, that which is going to make people envy me, that which is going to make, when I walk into the party, everyone's going to go, ooh, that's such and such.
	He does X, Y, and Z. That's the false self.
	We'll look for external validation for what it is we should be doing with our time and energies.
	And the true self doesn't.
	So you end up with this ambivalence.
	The false self says, here's your goal.
	You're going to go do X, Y, and Z. But the true self says, eh, not so much.
	So procrastination is just ambivalence about what it is that you want to do, which is really that you have a good motive for not doing it and a bad motive for doing it.
	And the good motive won't win and the bad motive won't let go.
	And so you end up stuck.
	That's my particular take on it.
	Were there any other questions that came up?
	I didn't randomly answer.
	Are they starting to talk about something else?
	No. Okay, good.
	Ooh, look, the history of Spain.
	Was there another question that came up?
	I wonder if Stefan wears a dark hooded robe when he crushes dreams executioner style.
	Yeah, I should say probably the Fantasy Crusher as well.
	I mean, that's perhaps the better World Wrestling Federation tag for me.
	The fantasy crusher crusher crusher.
	Hello.
	You are on.
	Oh, hello. Hey, how's it going?
	Not too bad, son.
	I didn't really get my thoughts together yet, but in the realm of Romanticizing ideas, like you said, if you want to write a book, it might not be what you're doing, and so it's probably like a false self kind of thing.
	Now, you're saying something about other people around you, getting validation from other people around you, like that's a good idea.
	No, no, I didn't say that, but that's a good idea, but go on with the question.
	Okay, well, is that not what you meant?
	Because that's where I was going. I wonder, The people who go around saying the things that they want to do, and it's mostly just summed up to talking to other people about it and getting feedback.
	That's basically where it ends.
	Yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with sharing your ideas with people and so on, but if the idea of what it is that you want to do If you're sort of doing it because you think it's cool, or it gets you attention, or you think it would be a good thing to do, or you'd feel proud of having done it, or all of those things which are all effects of having done something, if you're really interested in the effects of having done something, then you're putting the course before the effect, or you want the unearned.
	And that means you're going to get stuck trying to do something which is never going to work out.
	So if you say, well, you know, if I did write a book that changed the world, man, I could get late, or something like that.
	I could really, all the groupies, of course, that's how close I am to the Rockville.
	That's what I think of, not necessarily writing a hit song.
	But if you say, I want the effects of this particular achievement, and everybody has those dreams, you know, like I'm going to go and sing in front of 10,000 people, whatever it is that's your particular kick, right?
	But what you want is the cheering, and what you want is this, and all the fame, and the significance, and so on.
	Then you want the effects.
	You don't want the thing itself.
	And that's going to force your true self to say, Yeah, it's kind of hard to hear your stuff when you're breaking off pretty badly.
	Alright. Let me close down this other computer, although it's not actually using the internet at all.
	Is that any better?
	Yeah, I can hear you good now.
	Alright. Also, I think...
	The others might find this interesting.
	I was reading a blog by this guy named Disky.
	He's kind of a relativist, but he had, on the topic, it was about giving up, how life is about giving up, where he had been at a Christmas party and someone who was pursuing a professional career playing guitar had become a business guy and wondering why he didn't keep pursuing that.
	And the guy had said, That basically, you know, life was about giving up things.
	And I'll give the link for everyone else, but it's a pretty neat perspective on it.
	It kind of goes with what you're saying.
	So even though, how you said crush dreams, but let's say you're doing something that, let's say you're into, let's say you are writing short stories.
	Now, In the act of giving it up, let's say...
	Sorry, Stefan, drawing a blank.
	Take your time. Silence is uncomfortable.
	No problem. I must say that I really enjoyed your description of the blog writer.
	He's sort of a relativist. He's a perfect description.
	He's sort of a relativist.
	I wanted to tell you how much I enjoyed that particular description.
	You're welcome. Now, the guy who's saying about his guitar playing that life is about giving things up, well, the question is, what is he giving up?
	Because everything in life is sacrifice, and everything in life is compromise, and everything in life is just a basis of economics.
	Everything that you're doing excludes everything else that you could be doing, right?
	I mean, you could be, I don't know, trying to burrow through somebody's backyard right now, but instead...
	You're talking to me, right?
	So everything that you do excludes everything else that you do.
	And the question is always, is it worth it for you?
	Is it really worth it to you?
	And as I've mentioned on the show once before, or maybe twice, I'll just mention it very briefly here in case you haven't heard that one.
	When I was about 24 or so, I was out of theater school still thinking about acting And still doing some plays and so on.
	And I went for dinner with my brother and he had some business people in from town and I was sitting there with this guy.
	And he was saying, oh, what is it that you do?
	And I said, well, I act and I do this and that.
	And he's like, oh, it's interesting. My brother's an actor.
	And I said, oh, it's okay.
	What's the story? What's the story?
	He said, oh, you know, it's a...
	I mean, he's had a cool life, but it's tough, right?
	He said, the guy's 35. He's been living in New York for the last 10 years, and he's been getting some roles, like some off-Broadway stuff, and he's got some commercials, and he's kind of got enough to get by, but...
	He said, now he's met this woman, and he wants to settle down, and he...
	He doesn't have any savings.
	He doesn't have any job skills.
	He doesn't have a career.
	He doesn't have a profession. He doesn't really have any education other than theater.
	And he's got another 30 years to go in his working life.
	That, to me, just was too scary for words.
	And I really think that given my level of innate talent, that would have been where I ended up.
	That was sort of my guess, right?
	That's sort of what my true self sent up this flare of terror about the future, which I wisely, I think, chose to heed.
	And, of course, if I had pursued acting, then I wouldn't be doing this, right?
	I'd be, I don't know, doing meth or something.
	So I think that it's a question of the risks that you're willing to take to pursue your profession.
	So this guy, I mean, very few people are going to pay you to play guitar, right?
	I mean, I know someone in the music biz, and he says the same thing all the time.
	He says, it's all about the song.
	Good singers, great singers are a dime a dozen.
	Great guitar players, they're like falling out of the rafters.
	But the one thing that is really rare is to write a great song, a song that makes people hum and sing and get into it and energy and whatever, whether it's dark energy or light energy or whatever.
	To write a really great song is really, really difficult and that's the rare skill.
	So what is he giving up?
	I mean obviously there's a million people on YouTube who you can watch them play great guitar for free.
	Sound isn't great, but very few people are going to just come and watch you play guitar.
	So what is he giving up? Is he giving up the dream that people will come and watch him play guitar?
	Or is he giving up the dream that He's ever going to write a hit song?
	I mean, how many songs has he written?
	How much has he tried to, you know, has he done the whole cafe circuit?
	And did he spend years and years of his life touring, right?
	I mean, that's how it usually starts out, at least until the manufactured biosphere boy bands from the big bats in South America came along.
	You know, Freddie Mercury lived in like a room with mold hanging off the walls for a couple of years.
	They released like three albums before they hit big, right?
	So it was like five or seven years where these highly educated guys, right?
	A guitarist was doing his PhD in astrophysics and Freddie was getting a doctorate in gay.
	And so these guys were really, really focusing on this band thing.
	And if it worked out, that's great.
	And if it didn't work out... It costs them like a million bucks apiece in lost earnings and having to catch up.
	The world is full of people who started out as band members and ended up as roadies.
	It's a risky, risky thing to do.
	And so what is this guy giving up?
	He's giving up maybe the dream of being a guitarist, but he's also giving up a life of uncertainty, of...
	Of being around people who do a lot of drugs, frankly, of not having very intelligent conversations, of traveling all the time.
	I mean, I was interested in stand-up, but I just did not want a life where I was going to be on the road for 11 months a year.
	That just seemed like a complete nightmare to me.
	So you give up, but you gain.
	Yeah, somebody said Freddie Mercury's got the PHK.
	Very true. I like to think that I've at least got a GED in that.
	I don't know how I got it, but just something to do with the accent and boarding school, I think.
	Yeah, you're British. Everybody who's British, I mean, we get an elementary education in this anyway.
	I don't know how. All right.
	Did you have any other questions? Was there anything else you wanted to mention?
	No, that sums it up pretty good.
	Thanks, Steph. I appreciate it.
	No problem. Great to chat with you.
	I think you're a first-time caller, right?
	No, I called a few weeks ago.
	I think it was about the relationship issue.
	Right, right, right. How's that going?
	Oh, it's going very nice.
	Good, good. Very good. Keep us posted.
	Keep us posted. Will do.
	Thanks, Josh. Thanks. If anyone else has any other questions or issues or problems for either Christina or myself, I need to take another bite of pizza, so feel free to have a lengthy speech.
	Well, now my dreams are crushed.
	Oh, listen, if your dreams are crushed, could you hold them up to your speakers?
	Oh, I love that smell.
	Oh, oh yeah, it smells like freedom He just posted an icon of his heart breaking Oh, that's tasty.
	It's like burgers. Now, what is also interesting that happens for me, at least in terms of personal motivation, are the things that are very, very interesting to me at some points in my life, that sometimes then I just lose the motivation for them, and that really is quite an interesting transition.
	And that, I think, has a lot to do with this whole question of the false self or the true self.
	Because The false self will give up on two things.
	Two things will cause the false self to give up on a particular goal.
	The first is that the false self may at some point realize that instead of getting praise, you're getting marked, or you're getting indifference, and the false self lives for social approval.
	That's the scar tissue, that we have to live on the physics of other people's emotions and whims rather than reality itself.
	As I sort of posted on the board, I was having a chat with Christina this morning, and I was saying that conformity to reality is sanity, conformity to the opinions of others is slavery, and that's the true self-false-self distinction, at least for me.
	But when the false self no longer believes that it will get praised for something, then the motivation to do it just goes poof, like vanishes completely.
	But the other thing that occurs is if the false self is putting forward a particular goal for you that is based on bad motivations or silly criteria, vanity or whatever, how good it would look to receive the Oscar rather than I love the process of acting, then what else will cause the false self to spitefully give up on the dream is if you confront the person on it.
	And I've had more conversations than I would care to mention in this realm where I finally do sort of confront people I've always been sort of pragmatic around this.
	I tend to rush full tilt at everything, which usually I'll either break through or there'll be a horrible bald splat as I hit the wall.
	But at least then I won't keep running at it.
	I tend to, as you can probably tell from the volume of the podcast, when I think that something is good for me, I will go full tilt boogie at it.
	Because I want to find out if it's the right thing for me to do or not.
	And so I tend to go full tilt boogie at it.
	And that tends to either get me in or get me out.
	But I guess relatively quickly.
	Relatively quickly, so...
	All right there. David has a question that he would like to ask, so I'm going to give him the mic.
	Okay, David, I think you're on.
	All right, Mr.
	D. Hello?
	Hello. Can you hear me?
	I sure can. Excellent.
	I was in a therapy session with my therapist.
	Last week, and I talked about the letter that I wrote to my father.
	If you remember that?
	Yes, okay. Well, in the end, when I started talking about how I wanted to, I was thinking that maybe this is something I shouldn't send, and this is something that I really shouldn't really have to I should feel free to leave my father if that's what I felt was right.
	And what the therapist said was she brought up something interesting that I had never heard of that is apparently becoming popular.
	And the idea, I mentioned the rape analogy that you made, that you don't show the rapist your soft underbelly, you don't tell the rapist what makes you happy because then they're going to use it against you.
	And she said, well, actually, one of the interesting things that's coming about recently is that therapists are actually telling their patients who have been rape victims to go and confront their rapists and say, what you did hurt me, and hopefully get them to change.
	Can I comment on that?
	It's actually quite interesting.
	I've heard quite the opposite, being in the profession, that the trend is not to go and confront it because it's sort of a re-abusing, sort of a re-victimization, and as a therapist, not to get the client to...
	To go there sort of psychologically and mentally even in the session because it is recreating the trauma.
	I don't think I necessarily agree with that completely and holdheartedly.
	I think there is some value in re-experiencing some of it for very different reasons than I think has traditionally been the case.
	But it's very interesting.
	I'm interested to hear more about this.
	I've never...
	Did your therapist give you any references or suggest the theory behind this?
	Not really, and I didn't dig too far into it.
	It seemed a little absurd to me, and I didn't confront her on it.
	It was towards the end of the session anyway.
	But it did strike me as a little effed up, to use the technical term.
	You can say fudged. It's okay.
	We're on the internet. Oh, thank God.
	Oh, not him. No, you can't say God.
	You can say fudged.
	So yeah, it didn't strike me as something that was terribly healthy to do.
	I don't know if this is something that she regularly recommends, but I think this is a sign that I should not be seeing her for too much longer.
	I would think that having, you know, to recommend to someone that you should go and confront your rapist, I mean, that is absolutely the worst possible thing that you could do to someone.
	I mean, this person is dangerous.
	This person can be violent.
	This person has, you know, I mean, it would just make no sense to me at all whatsoever.
	Well, sorry to interrupt, but what if the rapist says, yeah, she's cuter than I remember.
	Well, I think the idea would be to have it in a safe environment, sort of like a rapist and the victim and the therapist would get together and have this.
	Oh, my God, no.
	Absolutely not.
	I would never, ever, ever condone that.
	I would never allow a rapist in my office to atone for abusing someone.
	Absolutely not. The rapist needs to be in jail, not in the therapist's office.
	I'm sorry, I'm trying to read between the lines.
	Are you for it or against it?
	No, and the other thing...
	It's not so much that the therapist would send off the woman who'd been raped to some rapist dungeon or whatever, but...
	The rapist may know where she lives.
	The rapist may know her name.
	The rapist probably does know her name.
	So if the rapist could re-engage with this woman.
	Because the rapist now knows that he has power over this woman.
	And how does he know that he has power over this woman?
	Because she's coming to confront him.
	So she needs something from him.
	I don't know if this is some imaginary thing whereby You become empowered by going to confront someone, but when you go to confront someone, you are not coming from a position of strength.
	That's sort of what I was trying to get at in that podcast, probably fairly obliquely.
	You're not coming from a position of strength when you go to confront someone.
	You're coming from a position of weakness.
	I need to confront you.
	My salvation, my mental health, relies on me confronting you and Your response in some manner, right?
	So the woman goes to the rapist.
	If the point is that she confronts him directly, then she must need something from him that he can bring to the interaction, right?
	Otherwise, she'd do it to a chair, pretending that it was the rapist, or she'd write a letter in the way that you did.
	So it would make no sense to have a live interaction with the rapist unless the woman needed something from the rapist, something that he would provide or not provide, and would prefer that he provide it and feel very unhappy if he didn't provide it, which is exactly the definition of giving someone power over you.
	Yeah, that's what I thought, and certainly her opinion on that was not something I was going to take too seriously.
	So it's not a common practice at all, is it?
	I certainly never heard of it.
	Christina hasn't either, but to return to your situation, why do you think she brought this up?
	I'm not sure.
	It kind of reminded me of what the letter about being, my letter being, and your response being sort of The woman was talking about family therapy methodology, the idea that temporary breaks are okay with your family, but not a long-term eternal break.
	And I think that she was worried that I would be leaving my parents for real.
	And I don't know if that spooked her or if that wasn't something that she was Well, I think you're exactly right.
	I mean, I think that it's pretty clear that there's a great deal of anxiety that defooing provokes in other people, right?
	If you say, I do not want to spend time with people who abuse me, whether I dropped out of the hole of my mom From the sperm of my dad 30 years ago doesn't mean anything to me because there's no moral quality in having sex and having babies.
	It's a biological phenomenon.
	There's no moral nature in it whatsoever.
	In fact, the power that it gives people over children usually corrupts whatever is left of their decency and turns it into a hellish manifestation.
	So... When you say, I am not going to see my parents, and people get shocked at that, or they feel like that's something that should be opposed, or that's something where, oh, you're just saying that, or, oh, you're just upset, or, well, okay, maybe they're bad, and maybe they broke your leg, and maybe while your leg is broken, and they keep swinging their baseball bats, while your leg is actually broken, you can take some time out, get a cast on, and heal your leg, but then you've got to go right back in there.
	Which of course makes no sense at all, right?
	I mean, if somebody's breaking your leg repeatedly, the important thing is to not just take a break so your leg can heal and then go back and get your leg broken.
	It doesn't make any sense, right?
	And I bet you that people would not say this about women who were being physically abused.
	I wouldn't ask your therapist this, but it would be interesting to ask yourself about this with regards to your therapist because you don't want to give your therapist free therapy on your dime.
	The question is, would you give this advice if I were a woman who was being beaten by my husband regularly?
	Would you say, you can't leave him, you maybe can have a short separation while your wounds heal, but then you have to go right back in?
	And if not, why not?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, she's a counselor through the university, so I don't pay for her, but it's certainly my time that she's taking up.
	Well, and has she been helpful in other areas?
	I mean, therapists don't always have to be perfect in every area to help you in other areas.
	Oh, yeah. I never would have gotten to the point where I was ready to write that letter if I hadn't been talking to her.
	I thought that my problem was on the maternal side and not That was my father.
	So she's been really helpful in a lot of things.
	She dropped the ball on this one, I think.
	Yeah, for sure. And because it is such a powerful cultural phenomenon, the worship of ancestors, right?
	We laugh about this in the Shinto religion or the Japanese culture, that they worship their ancestors.
	We do that. We just don't wait until they're dead, right?
	So there is this fetishistic worship concept Of the parents, right?
	Which is the scar tissue of having been brutalized and frightened.
	So it's a very, very common thing in our culture to just worship parents.
	And parents are the templates for governments and gods, as we've always talked about.
	So it is hard for people to give up on that in the same way that it's hard for people to finally give up on God, right?
	So people want to do agnosticism.
	They want to do deism. They want to not talk about it.
	They just... They won't crush that fantasy, right?
	There's always some fantasy that's tough to crush in people.
	And the parental virtue one is really, really fundamental.
	And I do sort of generally believe as a whole that it's, I mean, obviously it's a Christian hangover in terms of the sacrifice to the authority figures, both the priests and God and so on.
	But more fundamentally, I think it comes out of religion insofar as what I really get At the age of 40, what I really get is that I'm not going to live forever.
	What I really get is that since I don't believe that there's any conceivable form of consciousness after death, the voices in my head go out just as much as when the battery runs out on your radio.
	It's not like they've gone elsewhere.
	There's just no energy or electricity left to run them.
	And I really get that every day that I spend with difficult, negative, or abusive people is not a day that I'm going to get tacked onto some paradise later on.
	There's no reward for suffering.
	There's no reward for suffering, except when you go to the dentist, right?
	Given that I don't believe in an afterlife, for me, it is just a net negative sacrifice to spend time with difficult or abusive people.
	And I really think that people say, well, you should suffer through it.
	In some ways, whether they're religious or not, I think unconsciously because...
	They vaguely believe that there's some reward out there or that it's going to be made up for you in some karmic manner or something like that.
	But if they really do get that the number of days that we have on this planet are fixed, and we don't even know how many there are, but the number of days we have on this planet are fixed, And every day that we spend being abused is just a net negative and we don't get anything back later.
	We don't get any reward. We don't get any payback.
	There's no justice after death.
	And I think if you get that, then you get, well, why would I spend one more day than I would have to given that my days are finite and there's no reward for this suffering?
	Yeah, exactly, exactly.
	And I think it's so funny that she let me get to this point where I'm like, okay, well, maybe my father's not the best person.
	Maybe he was actually kind of a bad person.
	And then said, well, you can't really leave him.
	Right. And that's projection, right?
	What she's saying is, I can't leave mine.
	Right. A lot of people in the healing profession need healing themselves.
	A lot of people who are in the healing professions are there because they need to be healed themselves.
	This is true of nurses.
	This is true of psychologists, of social workers, very damaged people.
	But rather than confront their own damage, they become sort of, quote, healers towards other people.
	And I'm not saying anything about your therapist because I don't know her, but certainly in this particular instance, her own scar tissue overwhelmed what should have been a much better interaction.
	Because she should not impose her values on you.
	Fundamentally, therapy is about you learning about yourself.
	She should not be telling you what to do.
	That's my job. She should not be telling you what to do.
	She should just be saying choices, consequences, and she should be exploring your feelings about not seeing your father.
	She should not be telling you about rape victims and going to confront rapists.
	This is not her job.
	This is a complete professional break.
	This is not what she should be doing.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I agree.
	It sounds like you're happy.
	That was all.
	What?
	Thanks. I appreciate that.
	Do keep us posted. And, you know, really, thank you, thank you, thank you again so much for posting that letter.
	I've had a number of communications about how helpful it was for people, so thank you.
	I'm really glad I could help other people because I did help so much through this stuff.
	Good stuff. Well, listen, I really appreciate it.
	It's this kind of, you know, real honesty, dare I say, bold openness that really is going to make you good.
	All right. Thank you very much.
	I'll go back to listening. Okay.
	Thank you again. We'll look for the next person in the queue if you have any other sort of questions, issues, or comments.
	Move to listening. That's right.
	Is there anyone else who wants to talk to me?
	You, maybe?
	Honey?
	Ron Paul, 08.
	Thank you.
	Don't mime. I don't have the video camera.
	No sign language. Oh, sorry.
	I had the mute on.
	You mean point? No mime.
	Earlier, when we were talking about dreams and stuff, before David came on, Greg was saying something in the chat window about what if we don't have dreams and stuff.
	And I noticed that when I started rooting out my false self, a lot of my previous motivations for things went with it.
	And it kind of left a vacuum of ambition, so to speak.
	So it was a little bit disorienting to have the things that previously motivated me sort of disappear suddenly like that.
	And I was just wondering if you would like to address that a little bit.
	Yeah, no, I mean, I think that's an excellent, excellent point.
	And I certainly have experienced that vertigo that comes from when your momentum seems to just escape you completely.
	And it's not exactly like you fall.
	It's like you're free-floating.
	Or it's like, now what?
	And of course, the problem is that when most people's false selves collapse in a particular area of motivation that is not based on sort of healthy or organic or self-generated motives...
	They feel this vertigo, and they feel uneasy.
	They feel uneasy. What am I supposed to do now?
	Right? And they then will rush into something else, right?
	I'm going to join a volleyball league, or I'm going to, I don't know, join the Foreign Legion, or I'm going to take up a new hobby, or I'm going to go date someone, or I'm going to, you know, there's this...
	There's this feeling of disconnectedness or dissociation or alienation from the life that you've had, and it's very disorienting because you think that you have a personality that wants certain things and dislikes certain things, and then that changes really, really rapidly when you have a breakthrough, a personal breakthrough.
	And then there's this feeling of like, you know, floating in space, you know, like up there like Stephen Hawking upside down.
	And most people will then rush towards something else to fill that void.
	But that void is essential, right?
	That void is essential. That's like you've just moved this huge dead tree out of the way.
	And now the light is striking, you know, the little shoots or the tiny buds of the true self.
	And to not act in those moments, to not rush to fill with something new, I think is particularly essential.
	And that was certainly my experience of it.
	And it's a hard thing to do. Sometimes you can feel like days are going by, weeks are going by, and I don't know what it is I'm supposed to do.
	But out of that can come some real fertility, but I think the waiting for that is very important.
	What was your experience of it?
	Well, I think it was similar to that.
	Actually, I kind of went into a self-imposed hermit life here for a little while, and it was just...
	I would still do a lot of things that I enjoyed doing, you know, hanging out with some of my friends and stuff, coming on the FDR boards and hooking around and things like that.
	But the old, you know, I want to make this much money so I can do this and that and all that other stuff just sort of dried up and went away.
	And by allowing myself to, like you said, not grab immediately for something else, I think that's what allowed the restlessness in my career that I've been talking about over the last few weeks to sort of show itself.
	It allowed me to explore that discomfort and finally break through to this development into wanting to pursue this contractor type career.
	What was really cool about that is once the Once I realized that, and since I'd been kind of, I guess you could say, building up my emotional capital for that, I was able to, you know, really hit it hard, and then the success felt fantastic, because there hadn't been all this other noise, I guess, around it.
	You know what I'm saying? I think I'm being a little choppy on this, but...
	No, I think...
	Yeah, so the victory was really, really sweet when it When it happened.
	It was something that I knew was motivated from deep inside me in a true self way.
	It was definitely just a healthy, internally motivated thing versus looking out into the world and seeing other people that seemed happy and saying, ooh, they're happy, I want what they have.
	Right, right. Right, it's to be a commercial.
	Everyone out there is having fun, and they're playing Twister, and they just seem to be having the best time ever, and I'm sitting here stewing in my own philosophical juices, not getting anywhere in life, and I'm doomed.
	Then you just have to go out and buy a Twister game, which of course doesn't work.
	I just thought that was an important thing to mention, that if there's no dreams, then don't worry too much about it just yet, because Just give yourself a chance to...
	I mean, the dream is there.
	You just have to realize or you have to give yourself a chance to recognize it, I think.
	There's a gap between the I'm thinking of the book The Hobbit, right?
	There's this Smorg.
	Smorg, the dragon, Smurf the dragon, was not quite as frightening.
	Smorg, the dragon, is like flying over this town.
	And of course, this is the false self, right?
	It's flying around. It's supposedly patrolling you from the enemies of the outside world, but it's actually becoming sort of a tyrant, which is sort of what the government is supposed to be there to defend you, but it's actually attacking you.
	That's why, and so is God, right?
	It's supposed to love you, but he actually curses and punishes you for disobedience, right?
	So that which we create to protect us ends up attacking us, right?
	So when you've had smog, the dragon, flying over your village for 20 years or 30 years, when smog goes down, it takes a little while for the villagers to come out from their cellars, right?
	Because they've been down there hiding for decades, right?
	So that space, that space of great silence and stillness.
	That occurs after the false self goes down but before the true self comes up is a great test of people's patience and self-confidence to know, just to know, to know, to have reliance on yourself and to know that you're going to do the right thing at the right time.
	Absolutely. Yeah, I think that's what I just wanted to kind of put out there because I think there is an open question about that on the board.
	Cool, I'm done. It's open no more.
	Open normal. Well, thanks.
	That's excellent. Did you have anything else you wanted to ask or mention?
	I don't think...
	Oh, yeah. There was something that came up on the boards just over the last couple of days, and I believe that the guy that we were talking with is in on the chat window right now, so that might mean that he's listening in, but he's coming up against a The big question of, you know, do I face down this thing with my parents or don't I? I think you know which one I'm talking about.
	And I said, you know, there's a lot of freedom on the other side of that question.
	And he, you know, of course, which was a very wise thing to do, he said, well, I hear what you're saying, but it sounds like you're preaching to me like a pastor or a minister that just says, trust me, it's there, you know, but I have no proof.
	And I'm really wondering, like, How is it that, because I kind of face this same question comes up for me all the time when I'm talking to my friends about things like this, is how do I convince people, aside from my obvious enthusiasm for this stuff, that there is such freedom in this?
	Because I can tell, I mean, some of these people are like literally just tripping over the edge, and it's like they want that push, but I can't really quite figure out how to help them with that, you know?
	Right, right. That's an excellent, excellent question.
	Do you have access to any medium to hardcore drugs?
	Because if you can slip something into their drink and then put them in some foreign country in a jungle where they have no contact with their parents, it's the third party defu.
	By the time they get back to civilization, they'll be so mad at you and they'll have forgotten about their parents.
	So there's lots of different ways.
	If that's not an available option for you, then there's another way of approaching it.
	If it's the same guy I think that you're talking about on the boards, I asked him, because it's about asking, it's not about telling.
	When somebody's that close to the edge, if you tell them, then what happens is you push them back to their relationship with their parents.
	Right, right. So if you tell them, well, you have to separate with your parents because it's the right thing to do, then you're lecturing them.
	And again, that's my job.
	So don't cut into my territory.
	So... Christina's laughing but also wiping away a tear.
	So you can't tell them.
	You can't tell someone to be free because we're not free because we got told all this nonsense all the time.
	The way that I will try to approach it, and I've sort of done this on the board, I haven't had a chance to check his response yet, Well, first of all, it's not about me.
	If it's you, I'll just sort of pretend it's you.
	It's not about me. But what I would say is that what are the values that you have that are directly opposed to the values that your parents have?
	And I think that's a very, very important question to ask people who are just on the edge of leaping and flying, right?
	Because it's just important to clarify.
	What values do you have that are the opposite, right?
	So this guy's an atheist, if I remember rightly, and his parents are religious.
	And so he started off this post, and again, correct me on anything I misremember.
	He started off in his post by saying, you know, I dislike women.
	And I don't understand why, because my mom is great, and my grandmom is great, and my parents are still together after 40 years, and they love each other, and they worship each other, and blah, blah, blah.
	And then, you know, not literally two days later, you find out...
	And, you know, enormous kudos to this gentleman for taking this leap, because it's very, very hard to make this leap.
	When you're arguing with somebody...
	When people argue with me about, you know, environmentalism or the state, and I just know it's about their family...
	And then I say to them, well, tell me a little bit about your family history, then they think I'm pulling some horrible trick on them, right?
	And it's not easy.
	This guy did it beautifully, so massive kudos to him.
	You find out that he's an atheist, that his mother thinks he's a narcissist, And that she's religious and inflicted religious education, well, religious miseducation, anti-education on him, right?
	So what I hear from that is she's a dangerous cultist who abused her child, who calls him narcissistic because he disagrees with her.
	And to me, it's no longer a mystery why he doesn't like women, right?
	I mean, especially if there's a grandmom thrown into the mix.
	So this is a peculiar kind of horror, well, it's not that peculiar, that is passed down through the maternal line.
	So I think that the way to give him the strength to do this, or to release his strength to do this, is to appeal to his pride.
	And the way to appeal to his pride, I hope I'm not giving the whole game away if this guy listens to it, but it's not really a game.
	It's pretty obvious. He's listening right now, actually.
	Oh, is he great? Did I get anything completely wrong?
	There is a grandma. Okay.
	There is a grandmom. Yeah, I thought so.
	So what you do is you say, well, what are your values compared to your mom's values?
	And we're not going to talk about the dad just now because his issues are more with women than with men at the moment.
	And so you say, well, what are your values?
	He says, well, my values are, you know, truth, integrity, rationality, justice, honor, dignity, whatever it is, right?
	And what are the values that your mom has that opposes that?
	Well, she's superstitious, she's domineering, she's bullying, she's critical, whatever it is, right?
	So you say, okay, you have these values, which are good and positive, you know, you haven't inflicted religious education on a child and called that child narcissistic for whatever X, Y, and Z. So you have these values, which I think by any reasonable standard would be considered good values, rational integrity and so on, or philosophy.
	And your mother has the complete opposite values.
	Now, do you think that it's possible to be in a relationship with someone, to be close to someone, to trust someone, to give them your heart and soul?
	Because we have no choice about that with our parents and our siblings.
	We give them our heart and soul just by stepping in the room.
	There's too much unchosen history there.
	You can't protect yourself from your family.
	That's why I say de-foo, not de-friend.
	Because friends are more recent and they haven't...
	I mean, unless it's the same sort of abuse.
	But... So, you see, once he clarifies the values that he has that are in opposition to his parents' values, so he has values, and they're not subjective, right?
	Superstition and rationality are not, you know, hey, flip a coin, which do you want?
	So you have values and you have anti-values, and then you say, well, do you think that it's possible to have a loving, safe, nurturing, productive, happy, joyful, secure relationship with someone who violently opposes the values that you hold that are good values?
	And if you ask that question, it tends to bring things pretty close to the surface.
	So once you get the opposite values thing, once you get that you have these values, which are good, not I like Rocky Road and you like some other ice cream, but good and bad values, right and wrong values, values and anti-values, Once you get that you have these values and your parents have the complete opposite values, and they will attack you every time you manifest what's important to you, it becomes pretty clear you can never have a relationship with these people.
	Unless one or two things occur.
	Either A, you change your values to the exact opposite, Of what you believe.
	So you become superstitious.
	You sink into the quagmire of general insanity called religion.
	You become conformist. You become whatever.
	You completely dismantle and submerge your personality into the collective weirdness that is the modern society, right?
	Into your parents' wishes.
	In which case, you're not going to have a relationship with them because you don't exist and they don't exist in any fundamental way, but at least you won't be fighting all the time.
	So you'll sort of dissolve into this collective soup and there won't be any conflict.
	Or, if your parents reverse all of their values and stop being superstitious and creepy and overbearing, and I'm just making this stuff up.
	I don't know much about his parents, but just religious and narcissist tells me quite a bit.
	If your parents are willing to ditch their anti-horrible, nasty values and become positive and decent people in terms of good values, then it's possible, it's possible, I don't think it's probable, but it's possible that you can have some kind of relationship with them.
	But the problem is, if it's easy for them to do that, then the question is why did they never do it before, and you get into all of this, once the tracks have been laid, you can't change the train's path in history, right?
	That all becomes stuff to do with the past.
	I think that this clarification of values is really important because people, when they're confronted with that question, I believe in honesty and you believe in lying, that you can't have, once you get that clarity, you cannot have a relationship with somebody when you have opposing values in very fundamental areas.
	Actually, that just made me think of something else.
	When you talked about if they're able to suppress their own values or to give up their values, I was thinking that if we're always being asked to sacrifice those values that we hold most dear,
	rationality, virtue, universality, if we're asked to sacrifice all of that in order to have a quote-unquote normal relationship with our families, Then why shouldn't we be able to also ask them to sacrifice what they call values for a relationship with us?
	Well, sure. That's a perfectly reasonable question, and you know the answer to that, right?
	Right. Obviously, but that's just the question that...
	One of the questions that I had to ask myself, I think, and, you know, when it came to my own defooing, it was ridiculously hard to...
	Face right up until the moment that I did it.
	As I was doing it, as I was having that conversation, that vulnerable open conversation with my mom, it became suddenly very easy because I realized how intransigent she was clinging to these values so tenaciously that She was using them to justify her actions.
	She was using them as, you know, as her excuses, as her cover.
	And I thought, well, there's no way I can get through to this.
	There's no way that I can share anything with this woman because our standards of truth are literally polar opposites.
	And I mean, there was no hope for deep connection there because I mean, we were standing on different islands, so we couldn't reach out and touch each other.
	Right, right. And I think the other reason why I really recommend that people have that conversation, if it's physically safe to do so, is that doesn't it give you an enormous amount of sympathy for yourself when you were a child?
	Absolutely. If you can't do it as an adult with all the knowledge and freedom, if you can't make a connection with your parents, When you're an adult, with all the knowledge and freedom and psychological insights and sophistication and independence, if you can't make that connection as an adult, there was no chance that you could have done it when you were a child.
	Right, right. Yeah, in the chat window, Daniel asked...
	Oops. Anyway, someone asked, how can we tell what a good relationship is?
	And my answer was, you don't fear openness.
	And that was the biggest indicator for me that I had...
	Sorry. Anyway, that was the biggest indicator for me that I didn't have a true relationship with my family is because the stuff that I value the most, the stuff that I can easily talk about with my friends, I was terrified of talking about this stuff with my family.
	And every time I tried to bring it up, each one of them would use their own special kung fu for covering it up.
	My brother would...
	My mom would tell me that I think too deeply about stuff.
	I should just go with the flow and stop worrying so much about everything.
	My mom would say I don't understand and then try to change the subject.
	I'm not sure with my dad so much.
	He just likes talking about boring stuff.
	I knew deep down that was the fear that I had of going to them with this stuff, is that I knew that it was just going to be annihilated.
	As soon as my mouth was open and the words came out, they were going to take a tennis racket to them and pound them into the floor.
	It was pointless.
	And the most powerful, for me at least, the most powerful question that a child can ask his parents is this.
	I don't feel that you listen to me.
	That to me is one of the most powerful questions that a child can ask a parent.
	I don't feel that you listen to me, and that's a very precise question.
	Because it's not saying, you don't listen to me.
	Because that's a statement of fact and not of experience.
	Statements of experience can never be contradicted.
	Statements of experience can never be contradicted.
	I feel scared can never be contradicted by anyone.
	You know, what's someone going to say?
	You don't feel scared? I mean, I'm telling you, I feel scared.
	Right? That's why the I feel, I think, statements are so powerful in relationships.
	And that's why the you are and you never and you always.
	I mean, that stuff is escalatory because then you're making statements of fact which are subject to attack.
	You know, in the sort of screenplay versus documentary metaphor, I feel scared is a screenplay statement.
	It's like the lead character of my movie's name is Bob.
	Nobody can conceivably disagree with you.
	Unless they, I don't know, you're an incredible liar and they've got an MRI machine hooked up to you and they can see your fear center, whatever, right?
	But I mean, in any genuine human relationship, when you say to your parents, I feel that you don't listen to me, how they respond tells you everything that you need to know about that relationship.
	Because if they say, no, we do listen to you, you're wrong.
	Then clearly they've just confirmed the diagnosis, right?
	I feel like you keep hitting me.
	Punch! No, I don't, right?
	I mean, that's clearly an insane non-relationship, right?
	Now, if they say, well, I'm sorry to hear that, tell me more, then maybe you've made a mistake or maybe they've learned something or whatever, right?
	But if they basically tell you that you're wrong, when you have an I feel statement, then they're just not interested in you as a human being.
	And they're just going to try and shut you up.
	And that's not, of course, any relationship any of us wants to waste time in.
	Absolutely. So yeah, what I learned out of this conversation with this guy on the board, and by the way, I also agree that the thread that He started with the full disclosure that he started with about his attitude toward women and stuff like that.
	That took some stones.
	That's guts that I just absolutely admire.
	To put himself up there in front of us all to see what was going on under the hood was just great.
	It is amazing that when we are the most vulnerable, we are the most admired.
	That's something that's the complete opposite of what we think is going to happen.
	Right, right. And so, I mean, what was really great about this conversation for me was that it helped me to ask this question right now, is how do I help the people that I know can take it, that I know want the help, but I just, I'm trying to figure out what's the correct next move, and it's the ask the questions, don't lecture.
	And I have a real hard time with that sometimes because I tend to be sort of luxury.
	I think that's part of my My own false self upbringing.
	I was the smart kid that always wanted to tell everyone else what to do.
	Oh yeah, no, that's terrible.
	I've never had any experience with that.
	Never, never. Why are you looking at me that way?
	Why? Stop staring!
	Oh wait, sorry, that's my conscience. It's a bit blurry sometimes.
	The big eye. The big eye? The vagina eye, yeah.
	But yeah, no, I mean, it's around asking questions, and you've got to trust them, right?
	You know, it's sometimes getting the true self to come out.
	It's like getting one of those really, you know, it's like trying to get a ferret on a double espresso to sit on your hand peacefully, right?
	I mean, it's no sudden movement.
	They want to know that the dragon is out of the sky, so to speak, but...
	It really is. You've got to trust that people will absolutely make the connection.
	They will absolutely do the right thing.
	But they have to go through that value clarification themselves so that they can see clearly because they know this deep down.
	The true self records everything.
	It is the ultimate transcriber.
	And they know deep down the values that their parents have.
	And they probably knew this at about the age of 18 months.
	They knew their parents inside and out like an x-ray.
	And once you get them to the opposing values, Then it's clear, like, you can't have a good relationship unless you give up your identity or your parents give up their corruption.
	There's just no possibility any other way, and that is what, it's the illusion, right?
	It's like the illusion of progress.
	Well, if I go over and I try this approach or that approach, or if I try to open the lock with this particular combination and so on, but, you know, people are not trying to pick a lock, there's just a blank wall, right?
	And once you get, once people get that Ron Paul isn't going to save them from the government, and once they get that Agnosticism isn't going to save them from religion, and once people get that, conformity is not going to save their relationship with their parents, then we can all just stop wasting time and get into something more productive and joyful.
	Testify. Alright.
	Yeah, brother! I think I'm done with what I needed, so...
	Thank you again.
	Doody from Doodyville that we're randomly picking apart here in the chat window.
	He doesn't want to come on, is that right?
	Or he doesn't have a mic? I don't know.
	Alright. Okay. Well, if he does, then let me know.
	Oh, he said he can. Oh, yeah.
	Well, if he'd like to, let me know.
	Somebody had a question. The movie that I wrote, it's called After.
	I've just realized, of course, I don't have a copy, so I'm going to get in touch with my ex-girlfriend and get a copy.
	I don't know how I'm going to distribute it, but there it is.
	If you want to know how to get a copy of After, donate, if you would be so very kind.
	For 50 bucks, you get the PDF of The God of Atheists.
	For 100 bucks, you get the PDF and the audio book.
	Or if you want for 100 bucks, you can get Almost, which is almost an entire forest worth So that's why it's almost consumed all of the damn paper in the world to print, because it's about a thousand pages.
	But I think a damn fine book, if I may say so myself.
	So that's the answer to that question.
	And did we have this?
	He's on? Daniel, you're in the lion's den.
	Testing, can you hear me?
	Sure can. Oh, cool.
	All right. I'm a little bit nervous, so please forgive my wavering voice.
	Well, don't worry about that, and I should be a little bit apologetic, because here we are talking about you in the third person, and you're listening away, so I hope that it wasn't too harsh or unfeeling or anything like that.
	Well, I just stopped crying.
	So he's not too nervous to make a joke.
	That's good. I think you're relaxing already.
	Well, my hands are still a little bit shaky, but that's all right.
	I'll just ease into this.
	Don't think of all the generations in the future who are going to be following every single comma that you'll be talking about, because that freaks me out when I think about that, so don't think about that, whatever you do.
	Okay, I'll work on that.
	All right, let's see. Well, yeah, I'm not really sure what else to talk about with this.
	It was all pretty well dissected earlier and on the board.
	You know, it's really a scary thing.
	Well, do you mind if I ask you those questions that I was talking about with the last caller?
	I mean this thing around value clarification because the impression that I got from the first post or two that you did about your parents was that they were sort of a long-term, loving, devoted to each other kind of couple and that didn't make much sense to me in terms of your feelings towards women and so I suspected some poisonous center to the matriarchy and then when you began to talk about your mother's religious I think I remember on the board.
	And then, in particular, when she used the phrase narcissist to describe you, which is a very harsh and terrible term to use, of course, on your own child, this began to sort of clear things up a little bit for me.
	But can you tell me a little bit more about the values that you hold that are the opposite of the values that your mom holds?
	Well, when I was talking about how they had a long-term loving relationship and so forth, they'd been married for 20 some odd years and my mom would always come to me and she would talk about how she would worship my dad.
	She would just tell me about how such a wonderful person he was, how he worked so hard and he supported everybody and how he always thought of her and all this kind of stuff.
	And my dad would do the same thing.
	He wouldn't talk so much as he would just do stuff.
	He would do stuff that he knew that my mom liked and take care of her and that kind of stuff.
	When I said that, I think we were still talking about women at that point and my innate misogany.
	On the surface, this is the only thing that she and I differ on, really, On the surface is the religious aspect.
	Of course, you know, when you go deeper in it, it's more of the whole rationality and she's, you know, big on faith, but she won't talk to me about it.
	And that's kind of what frustrates me, you know?
	Right. And so give me a sense of the kind of, you'll say, or the topic will come up and something to do with God or religion or faith will come up.
	You'll make a comment or an invitationary kind of statement.
	Like when Christina says, I just went shopping, right?
	That's an invitation to freak out.
	No. Panic!
	Panic! I've got to go back to work!
	I can't do free domain radio! You've been to them all!
	But what is your mom's response when this sort of topic comes up?
	Well, at first, it was just kind of avoidance.
	Because, you know, I didn't come right out and tell them I was an atheist at first.
	I kind of tiptoed around the subject as sort of waters a little bit.
	And then When I did, it was kind of all of a sudden, because I think we were like talking about politics or something, and of course it veered into that.
	And what I did is I would talk about things that I didn't agree with, like that HPV vaccine scandal, which really was the final straw for me.
	Oh, where they said, we don't want women to get immunized because the threat of cancer will make women not have sex.
	Exactly, the disinhibition.
	And I thought that was just exactly the opposite of love and compassion and all that kind of stuff.
	And so I would bring that kind of stuff up and she agreed with me on that.
	But later on it finally came out and she and I were talking on the back porch and it was a nice day and everything and it finally came out.
	I don't really remember the conversation that well but what I do remember was my dad was inside and he He could, you know, obviously hear us talking, and he got kind of upset and charged out and started, you know, giving me the standard, you know, theist response to rationality, like, well, you can't see infrared waves.
	And I came right back with him. I said, but I can measure them.
	And that really, that kind of stunned him, and we got into a debate on that.
	But normally when I talk about this stuff with my mom, she withdraws.
	And what she'll do is, if I do get her into this, you know, this, I hate to say back her into a corner, I talk, you know, it's like, well, how do you know?
	How do you know? How do you answer these contradictions in the Bible?
	How do you answer these logical contradictions about God?
	And that kind of stuff. She gives me what I think of as kind of an honest answer.
	She'll say, I don't know. And other than that, she just kind of avoids.
	And then she'll send me devotionals, prayer devotionals over the email.
	And she forces me, if you can say that, to say grace.
	When I eat dinner at their house and that kind of stuff.
	But after she told me that she was attacked by her co-workers verbally for being a Christian and they're all a bunch of atheists.
	And you know how most atheists can be very haughty and very elitist and that kind of stuff.
	And she was verbally attacked by them.
	I just stopped bringing it all together because it's like I don't want to add to that.
	And plus I was still kind of confused.
	I wouldn't say agnostic.
	The latency of religion is very hard to get over and I've only been an atheist now for Actually, I think about 13 months.
	So, you know, I'm getting around to it.
	But at first, at this point in time...
	No, it's tough. I mean, it's embedded, right?
	I mean, it's emotionally rooted within you.
	This is why they get kids, right?
	Because they can't sell this stuff to adults very easily.
	But kids who are credible and dependent and helpless in the face of intellectual insistence on the part of their elders...
	I mean, I totally sympathize.
	It absolutely embeds itself right into the root of your soul...
	And it's very hard to uproot that stuff.
	So, I mean, don't be in any rush.
	I mean, it takes time, and it takes, you know, consistently combing over.
	Sorry, go ahead. Well, I'm just going to, you know, say it's like, you know, growing up in, you know, 30 years, and you're told that the Earth is flat, the Earth is flat, the Earth is flat, and then, you know, some dude with a ship comes to you and says, yeah, no, the Earth is round, let's go sailing around it.
	And you're thinking, eh, I think they'll fall off.
	What, over the edge? Are you crazy?
	Yeah. Well, Richard Dawkins has this thing where I think he's quite right when he talks about this, and he says that, and I mentioned this in a podcast recently, but it's worth repeating here.
	He says that to call a child a Christian is child abuse.
	To say this is a Christian child.
	This child believes in God.
	And it makes no more sense to say a Christian child than it does to say Marxist child or Keynesian child or libertarian child because the concepts can't be processed by children.
	And it's not that children don't have the intelligence.
	In my view, children are about the most intelligent people on the planet because they're closer to the true self than will be for quite some time.
	But they don't have the independence to make any sort of decisions on their own.
	And if parents force stuff down the children's throat intellectually, the child has no choice but to open up and say, hey, that was tasty, give me some more.
	There's just no possibility that children have any other way of dealing with this kind of stuff.
	So the question then sort of arises for me, and you can mull it over or tell me that I'm full of nonsense, which is totally fine, but the question sort of arises to me, If your mom knows how you feel or what you think, why is she sending you the devotionals?
	Well, I can tell you what I would think in her position.
	I can't tell you what she's thinking, obviously.
	Well, my grandfather was not a Christian, I think.
	We think. We're not sure. And so when he was dying, everybody was very freaked out because of this very issue.
	And so I kind of think it's the same thing going on here.
	It's just that she's freaked out because in her mind, at least consciously on the surface, I'm on the fast track to hell and she wants to save me from that.
	But she can't talk to me about it because, for whatever reason, And so she just kind of sends me these devotionals.
	Maybe she doesn't think I'm serious about it.
	It was just a phase I went through or something.
	I don't know. Well, I think that it's clear to me at least that your mom is making truth statements, which is there is a God and he is described in the Bible and Jesus was his son who died on the cross for your sins.
	I think most particularly your sins.
	The sin of disobedience to your mom.
	But just kidding. I think that your mom is making truth statements that are very fundamental about reality and morality.
	That she has no basis for, right?
	She has no rational basis for making any of these statements.
	They are merely convincing opinions, as I've sort of talked about recently.
	It's a story that she's asking you is true, to believe is true.
	And it's a story that doesn't even have the consistency of something like Star Trek or Lord of the Rings, which Lord knows aren't perfectly consistent, but it's a very contradictory and silly story with talking snakes and walking on water and coming back from the dead.
	I mean, it's all very, very silly, right?
	I mean, that's not how we experience it when we're children.
	Then it's like a noble and holy truth.
	But when you grow up and you say, well, you know, these screenwriters should have been shot, right?
	Because it just makes no sense at all.
	And it's completely contradictory.
	And we're supposed to worship this wonderful being who kills everyone in the whole world because they disobey him, right?
	I mean, this is homicidal, right?
	We're supposed to dislike Hitler and love God.
	I mean, it makes no sense at all, right?
	Fundamentally.
	But she's making very solid truth statements that she has no reason to believe, so...
	So this is, I'm guessing, and you can let me know what you think.
	Your mom is saying, this is true.
	Right? And you say, well, if it's true, how do you know?
	Right? If you're saying this is true, like God exists, it's different from I like ice cream.
	If you're saying it's true objectively and independently, how do you know that it's true?
	And she says, well, because the Bible says this.
	You say, yeah, but the Bible says the opposite and so on.
	So She's got a certainty, which is that God exists and Christ died for your sins and you're going to hell if you don't believe whatever, whatever.
	She's got this certainty, and she says, I have certainty for reasons A, reasons B, and reasons C. I'm just, I don't know how many, she's probably got an infinite number of them, like all religious people do, but she says, I have certainty about the existence of God and Jesus and hell and so on, based on A, B, and C, and then you disprove A, B, and C. Does that dislodge the certainty?
	Not at all. Right?
	Not at all. Not even a tiny bit.
	In fact, she views it as something which is a, it would be a sin to express any doubt and so on.
	So basically, what your mom is doing is she's saying, I have rational reasons for believing in God.
	I have reasons for believing in God that God is not just my opinion.
	The existence of God is objective and true and factual and so on.
	Because of A, B, and C. You disprove A, B, and C and she doesn't change her position.
	Well, then she switches over to the, well, I have faith argument and faith is virtuous.
	And so you ask, why faith is virtuous?
	And that makes perfect sense.
	But then what she says is, I believe that there is a God.
	That's a whole different planet from saying there is a God.
	I mean, there's lots of crazy people who believe that they're Napoleon.
	That doesn't mean that they're about to lead the charge on Wellington, right?
	So saying, I believe that there is a God, which is a true statement of faith.
	A true statement of faith is, I believe that there is a God.
	A true statement of fact, though, There is a God, and that's why I believe in God.
	I don't mean to be overly subtle in this distinction, but this is a world apart.
	This is the difference between a documentary and a work of fiction.
	If somebody has an opinion that there's a God, well, it's true that they have an opinion that there's a God.
	And is that opinion based on any evidence?
	No. Well, then it's just a prejudice.
	Then it's just bigotry, right?
	Like, if I believe that blacks are inferior, and somebody says, why?
	And I said, well, reasons A, B, and C, and those A, B, and C reasons turn out to be false, and I still think that blacks are inferior, then I'm just a bigot, right?
	I'm just making up reasons, but fundamentally, I just believe that blacks...
	Like, there's no evidence. It's just an opinion, but I'm trying to pass it off as a fact.
	So, in this case, it is possible to have a wrong opinion, so to speak.
	Tell me more what you mean? Well, you know, an opinion, you know, like my dad would always say, or, you know, he would say, it's my opinion, I would say, your opinion is wrong, just kind of teasing him, and he would say, well, it can't be wrong, it's opinion.
	You know, you can't say that I don't like the color blue, because, you know, it's an opinion, but you say that faith is just an opinion, or, you know, bigotry, you're using those terms anonymously, So in this case, though, the opinion could be wrong.
	Well, their opinion is wrong, for sure, because even by their own definitions, it's wrong, right?
	Because they give all these reasons why they have this opinion, right?
	So people say, I have objectively interpreted the evidence, and this is why I believe what I believe.
	That's what you do when you make a truth statement.
	But they have not objectively interpreted the evidence.
	They believe basically because they were forced to believe and they've got a lot of scar tissue about being bullied to believe the superstitious nonsense.
	And they don't want to evaluate their own histories.
	They don't want to evaluate what was done to them as children.
	They don't want to evaluate who they are as human beings and what their histories have been like and what their parents were like.
	And so they just continue to photocopy this infliction of superstitious harm on their own children.
	But if it's an opinion, like if I say, I like ice cream, does that mean you have to like ice cream?
	No. Right.
	So if I say, I believe in God and it's just my opinion, that doesn't mean anything in terms of what you need to believe, right?
	Right. If I say, I like this song, does that mean you have to like it?
	Well, in that case, yes.
	Well, if it's one of my songs, yes.
	But, I mean, if I just have an opinion about something, that is not in any way, shape, or form binding upon you, right?
	Well, you know, in the case of, you know, being a...
	Well, if it's just an opinion, yes.
	But I guess where you're going is, like, if you're, you know...
	The boss of a black person and you don't like black people or whatever, and you start discriminating, that becomes an issue.
	Well, sure, but that's a difference.
	So I can inflict my opinion on other people, but that in no way, shape, or form means that they have to agree with me.
	So if I'm some racist bigot and I fire some black guy, then I'm saying basically I'm firing you because I don't like blacks.
	But that doesn't mean that it's incumbent upon him to start disliking blacks.
	He's just going to say, what an asshole, right?
	What a racist jerk.
	I'm glad to be out of his employ.
	But that doesn't mean that he now has to believe that blacks are inferior just because I'm bigoted.
	Sure. So in the same way, your parents can inflict their religious fantasies and their superstition on you But that doesn't mean that you must believe it because it's true.
	You just say, well, this is bigotry, that they believe stuff without any reason whatsoever.
	They claim these rational justifications.
	When questioned on them, they change the subject.
	They send me all these passive-aggressive devotionals.
	They won't talk about it. They come up with arguments to say, this is why, well, you can't see infrared.
	It's like, well, of course I can see infrared.
	That's how we know there's such a thing called infrared rather than kryptonite, right, which we can't see.
	Actually, I think kryptonite is a material now.
	But anyway, I mean, they come up with all these reasons, and then when you point out that those reasons are false, they don't change their opinion.
	Well, that's the very definition of bigotry.
	It is belief despite evidence, not without evidence.
	Right, you were just saying that in the earlier podcast.
	You were just saying that in the earlier podcast.
	Was it today or yesterday or something?
	Oh my god, did I repeat myself?
	No! It can't be!
	Let us mark down the time.
	What is it? 5 to 5, Sunday the...
	Oh, my God. I can't believe I went this long without repeating myself.
	Once! Even once.
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, I had nothing else.
	How does all of this, though, relate back to the bigger picture of whatever it was we were talking about?
	Well, the bigger picture which started the conversation, as far as I'm concerned, is not your past with your mother, but your future with women.
	Okay. That's a good way to go.
	Honey, did you want to say anything about that?
	No, you haven't read the post, right? So the only thing that I would say about that, and you've got lots of stuff to chew on, right?
	So, I mean, take your time or whatever, and then let me know if I've made any total ridiculous mistakes and whatever, right?
	But the way that I see this sort of working within your own mind, and you can let me know or take time to think about it.
	And again, this is just my opinion.
	There's nothing incumbent upon you to believe anything or not.
	This is just maybe helpful, right?
	The way I view your mother, this is just my opinion, is a hypocritical, manipulative witch.
	And I apologize for putting it this bluntly, and Lord knows I have not been without my own mommy issues, so I hope that I'm not projecting.
	But the way that I see your mom is a hypocritical, manipulative, conformist witch who put you through a, quote, education that was the opposite of knowledge, that was the opposite, that did enormous harm to your capacity to think, and has given you a very deep pit from which you need to crawl out using your fingernails and teeth.
	To recover from the damage that was inflicted upon your mind through the infliction of this superstitious nonsense when you were growing up.
	So I view this as extraordinarily destructive.
	And your mom knew better.
	Your mom is fully responsible for that.
	Your mom knew better because she knows exactly what to avoid.
	Your mom knows exactly which topics to avoid.
	And this is the essence of parental responsibility in the realm of child abuse.
	If your mom Was innocent of doing anything wrong with you when you were a child, then when you brought up the logical contradictions within the belief system that she has, this bigoted fantasy superstition that she believes in, when you brought up these contradictions, she would sit there and go, oh my goodness, I had never thought of it that way before.
	That is incredible.
	I mean, to think that I could have taught you or believed in all of this stuff and that it could even, maybe you're totally wrong, That it could be wrong is horrifying to me, exactly as if I had taught you that you should avoid vegetables and you should only eat chocolate.
	Right? And then you get diabetes or you get sick, right?
	If I had given you advice on what to eat that was the complete opposite of what would be healthy, as a parent, I'm just appalled that I might have done that.
	And I'm appalled that my parents did that to me.
	And I'm appalled that all my friends are doing it to their children.
	And I'm appalled that the priest did it to them.
	And I'm appalled that everything that we're teaching children could be the exact opposite of truth.
	It's incredibly destructive towards them.
	And then she would explore this with you.
	If she was innocent... Of doing anything wrong to you.
	If she simply had never encountered any non-theistic rational philosophy ever, then she would be forgivable, right?
	Because then it would be like you'd go on this journey together to learn the truth and you'd argue and you'd debate and it would be thrilling and terrifying and exciting, but that would be a companion worth having.
	I don't really know how to express it, but that's a very, you know, kind of a profound way to put it.
	It illustrates it for me, I guess.
	Puts it in context.
	As I posted in my most recent post on the board in this thread, compared to 99.9% of the people on this planet, my childhood was utopian.
	It was perfect. This is just one little kink.
	If it wasn't for this religious thing, man.
	And so, you know, I don't know, it's like going, getting a gift car that, you know, has shattered windshield and, you know, flat tires, and it's like, how can I overlook that?
	And I see it, and you just, you know, told me what a good car looks like, and it's like, oh, okay, now I see it.
	It makes sense now. Right, right.
	Everyone else is dragging themselves around by their teeth and fingernails, and you have a car that's a junker, and you're like, hey, I'm great, right?
	Right. And I totally understand that.
	Of course, part of the cult of Christianity, part of the dictatorship of Christianity for children is that you have to smile and believe that everything is perfect, right?
	Because to be unhappy is to be sinful.
	I mean, this is mentally, like, not even philosophically, emotionally and mentally, it's a complete straight jacket.
	I'm sorry, can you say that?
	Oh, I was just saying that...
	No problem. For Christians, to be unhappy is to be sinful, right?
	Christians always emphasize on putting on the good front, Sunday best, we're happy, everybody smiles like it's a perpetual photograph, because God is always watching an unhappiness, his lack of faith in God's hands raised to the sky, yes.
	Yeah, yeah, you've got to be joyful, make a joyful noise, and all this be happy, and to be unhappy is to, I don't know, kick sand in Jesus' face on the beach, or something like that, right?
	It's incredibly unhealthy.
	It's incredibly unhealthy.
	You are not allowed to have the deep and rich feelings, and there's a reason for that, right?
	That the deep and rich feelings lead you more towards reality than to God.
	So I'll just say two more things, and I don't want to drag you through the muck and mire too much, but I'll just say two more things if you don't mind.
	So just to finish up this thing with your mom, the important thing is to denormalize what your mom did, and I know it's what everyone around you probably did and I know that it's it's hard to denormalize this kind of stuff but if you get a chance listen to this thing again after I post it this part of it is important for you because you need to get a sense of what your mom's doing right your mom has been caught in in passing off bigotry and falsehood and mental torture in a way right God's watching you Christ died for your sins you're going to hell She has been caught by you,
	thinking, poisoning the mind of her child, right?
	And what is she doing?
	She's attempting to say that you're wrong and to cover up her crime.
	That is how you know that she's manipulative and abusive, right?
	Because she's not sitting there going, oh my god, I can't believe what I might have done to you.
	Let's explore this further.
	Tell me the books you're reading. I'm going to read through them.
	I'm going to struggle and strive to understand.
	No. She's like, hey, I know exactly what not to talk about.
	I know exactly what to cover up.
	I know exactly which topics to reject.
	I know exactly how to deal with my son so that he'll stop asking me these questions that make me feel bad.
	And I don't like to feel bad.
	And he's addressing against me.
	And he's a bad kid. But I love him.
	I'm going to send him the devotionals.
	I want him to get better. I don't want him to go to hell.
	But he really pisses me off when he talks about it.
	Like it's really bad. Like it's really bad emotionally to interact with this kind of toxicity.
	Right? With this kind of abuse. Okay.
	That makes sense. Now I don't think that that's clear for you yet.
	And there's no reason why it would be.
	Right? I mean it's hard to look at your parents objectively.
	And I'm not saying I am. Right?
	I'm just saying this is a possible perspective that might be helpful.
	But fundamentally, if it's true what I'm saying about your mom, but you don't see it, but you still feel it, where do those emotions go?
	If you believe what I'm saying at some level, and maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong, if you believe what I'm saying at some level, but consciously you don't accept that this has anything to do with your mom, then where do those feelings of betrayal and being manipulated and being controlled and being bullied, where do those feelings go?
	Oh, I see. You're bringing this back to the original post.
	It is all one big circle, my friend.
	And so you're saying that...
	It's a possibility.
	This is just a theory, right?
	So it's a possibility. These unprocessed emotions are being...
	I'm projecting them onto every long-haired person I see, huh?
	Yeah. I mean, assuming that you're not some sort of hippie concert...
	Exactly. Yeah, I mean, that it's...
	And so this is the danger, right?
	And the other question is...
	Why is it that if it's true that your mom is sort of a manipulative and destructive witch, which is again, just a theory, right?
	I mean, just a theory, just something all over.
	If it's true, and if it's also true that you don't see that, those feelings are going to attach themselves to something else.
	And this is how bigotry and prejudice reproduce themselves, my friend, because you can't look at the truth with your mom.
	And again, no shame in that.
	It's really, really hard to look at the truth with your family.
	But if it's true that you're making women in general pay for the sins of your mother, then in a sense you're almost being as unjust as your mom is in a way, right?
	Because she's got this bigotry about religion, and then you have this bigotry about women.
	And it's not that the bigotry...
	Sorry, go ahead. I was going to say, almost as just, I'd say it's even more unjust.
	But go on. Well, you have to be careful with the self-flagellation.
	As a Christian, this is your crack, right?
	As an ex-Christian, you have to be careful about judging yourself too harshly.
	Look, how old are you roughly?
	Twenty-four-ish.
	Twenty-four. Okay. So be very, very careful about judging yourself too harshly.
	Christians have a very, very tough time evaluating flaws in an objective manner, right?
	So first of all, you are doing an incredible thing overall for the planet.
	I mean, I know it seems like maybe not that way for you at the moment, but...
	You are doing an absolutely incredible, noble, heroic, incredible, wonderful, beautiful thing for the planet as a whole.
	So to question the ethics of your family, to look at values from a logical, scientific, and philosophical standpoint, to help drag mankind out of the medieval muck that we've been wallowing in for 100,000 odd years, doing your part for that and what that is going to do in terms of you being a father, of you being a husband, of you being a friend, of you being A high-quality human being, I'm telling you, it is staggering, right?
	I mean, I didn't start until after I was 24, and sometimes I don't think it was probably many years until after I was 24, so I'm just blowing a huge amount of sunshine up your ass here because it's absolutely true that what you're doing here is an amazing, wonderful, and beautiful thing.
	I would just say be very, very careful about jumping down on yourself.
	You were taught an enormous amount of false things by people who had total control over you, and you should cut yourself a lot of slack for that, I would say.
	If you've ended up with this opinion of women, it's because your mom kind of messed you up and then didn't own up to anything.
	Give yourself some gentleness and some kindness here to explore this without necessarily jumping to a big negative conclusion about yourself, if that makes sense.
	Well, I'm always tender with myself in private.
	Yes, I think I hear the fur glove moving as we speak.
	That kind of brings up a question about the difference between self-deprecation and humility.
	We don't have to go into that right now if you don't want to, but it's certainly something I would like to explore later on at least.
	Yeah, well that might be a good podcast topic.
	If you could post that on the board as a question, I will try and get to that this week.
	Sure thing. Well, listen, I really, really do hugely appreciate your openness with this.
	And again, be kind to yourself during this process.
	Be forgiving, right?
	I mean, you're trying to crawl out of a hole, and you're not going to get as far as you can, as quickly as you can, if you were at all sort of, oh my God, I'm such a terrible guy because of X, Y, and Z. You were very honest about the feelings that you had, and you can see the power of that honesty, right? So you posted on the board these feelings that you had towards women.
	And look, we've all been there.
	I mean, I was raised by a real witch.
	And again, I'm trying not to project into where you are.
	So your decisions are obviously completely and totally final in this area.
	But we've all been there.
	Women are sort of cold, manipulative, horrible people and so on.
	So there's nothing to feel bad about.
	It's the honesty that you brought to the conversation, the honesty and rigor that you bring into this aspect of the conversation.
	It's totally heroic and it probably doesn't feel like that at the moment, but it absolutely will be something that pays off in a beautiful way.
	Okay, well, that's something to certainly look forward to.
	But thanks for your help.
	I really appreciate this.
	Oh, anytime, brother. I really appreciate your honesty.
	Alright, well, thank you.
	And if we have time for one more question, if anybody has.
	One more question.
	Going once. Going twice.
	We have a two-hour show today, I think.
	That's not the end of the world. All right.
	Well, thanks everyone very much for dropping by today.
	I really appreciate it. And thank you again for the soul-bearing superheroes of Free Domain Radio and the boards and the emails.
	I really do think that it is fantastic to have this level of honesty.
	This is, you know, do this.
	Don't go campaigning for Ron Paul.
	This is the way to do it. Thank you so much, everyone.

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