May 8, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:15
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| Alright, let's have one just little, very, very short, teeny tiny, barely visible podcast as I head home after my errands and the gym. | |
| An excellent and very intelligent new listener, who is a new board member, has written the following. | |
| Steph, you mentioned 18 months with some inability to sleep in a recent podcast while studying philosophy and how it kicked your ass for a while. | |
| Are there earlier podcasts where you relate this experience in more detail? | |
| I'm curious. I had a close friend suffer a psychotic break, or was it just a total meltdown of some other sort? | |
| I never found out. Studying philosophy, and 10 years later, he's finally going back for his PhD. | |
| But I'm really more curious about your own experience than about what kinds of thinking were so dangerous. | |
| I recognize the terrible power of philosophy, but only in a dim and distant way so far. | |
| I'd like to know more about the pitfalls. | |
| Help a brother out? And I wrote back that it wasn't that I was studying philosophy. | |
| It was that I was studying philosophy and not living philosophy that caused my insomnia. | |
| And it was more than some inability to sleep. | |
| It would be days without sleeping or maybe an hour or two. | |
| That actually made me feel worse. | |
| It was just terrible. | |
| So he said, Curious, and I hope not crying too badly. | |
| And I replied, no, if it had been that conscious, I would have been okay. | |
| It was more that my philosophy was completely separated from and often opposed to my life and daily choices. | |
| I valued rationality and virtue but spent time with my hateful family. | |
| I valued integrity but was involved with corrupt business partners. | |
| I valued self-esteem but was in a destructive relationship. | |
| I valued courage but never thought to really live my values. | |
| I was cornered into change by insomnia after spending years avoiding it unconsciously. | |
| Philosophy does have a terrible power. | |
| It is a wonderful servant and a terrifying master. | |
| And that is something that is... | |
| I have tried after going through... | |
| I mean, just the most appalling suffering, insomnia is... | |
| I mean, there's a reason they use sleep deprivation to break the hardened criminals or whoever they've got in their hands, because it is the worst thing. | |
| I mean, in many ways. It's worse than physical pain. | |
| You can dissociate from physical pain. | |
| You can't dissociate from insomnia. | |
| So, I did. | |
| I went through an absolute... This was the genesis of my philosophy, and this was me becoming me, right? | |
| Out of Ayn Rand's tutelage, and out of Aristotle's tutelage, and out of John Locke's tutelage, and out of all the other philosophers, and Nietzsche's, and all the people who made... | |
| who had value to me. | |
| Breaking out from their tutelage was, oh God, I mean, for me, extraordinarily dangerous. | |
| I do have this. | |
| Actually, it's all written up, believe it or not. | |
| And I did at one point try to publish it. | |
| I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it now. | |
| I actually have... | |
| A book on everything. | |
| All of my notes and journals and dreams and experiences through therapy. | |
| It's quite considerable and quite dramatic. | |
| I think it would make an excellent cartoon. | |
| At some point in the future, it is full of really lively characters. | |
| And what happened for me was I went through quite a number of conversations with different characters in my unconscious during this process. | |
| Which is why I became not just a philosopher, but a psychologist at this time as well. | |
| The book's called Crazy Talk, and I don't know what I'll do with it at some point. | |
| It may be worthwhile to publish it. | |
| There's nothing terribly bad in it. | |
| I mean, I wasn't a terribly bad person or anything like that, but as far as the lack of integrity went, it really was quite appalling. | |
| I mean, looking back on it. I was betraying the truth in an absolutely appalling manner. | |
| And this is not, you know, I don't feel guilty or bad about it. | |
| It's just where I was. | |
| But in hindsight, I mean, it's absolutely the case that, you know, the final revolt of my true self, which shut off the spigot of sleep for damn near 18 months, which forced me into therapy, which forced me into finally coming alive and finally becoming whole and finally acting on my values... | |
| This was a lifesaver. | |
| I mean, this sort of suffering can be a lifesaver. | |
| And I don't see why anyone else should have to go through what I went through. | |
| I mean, with this technology for communicating about the truth and about philosophy and about psychology, oh man, I would give an enormous amount to have nobody else ever have to go through what I went through during that time. | |
| Because I really, for myself, I really just felt like I was heading out into interstellar space without any map or guide or... | |
| Anything like that. I really felt like nobody had come here before. | |
| This was the undiscovered country of the future or of the depth of humanity or something. | |
| It was just an unbelievably dangerous and trying experience. | |
| And that's one of the things that I sort of resolved within myself, right, in this idea that you can turn hell into heaven if you prevent other people from going down. | |
| Then I wanted to communicate about it, and that's why I haven't just talked about dry philosophy, but personal relationships, right? | |
| Because there's just... | |
| I mean, if the sum total of my entire effort here was that one person didn't have to go through what I went through, I mean, it would be worth it. | |
| I really mean that. So it's not philosophy's fault at all that I had this unbelievably difficult psychological passage. | |
| It was not the fault of psychology at all. | |
| I mean, it definitely was the fault of culture. | |
| There's a reason that the first four letters in culture are cult. | |
| So the culture had given me no tools to deal with the truth and to act in a truthful manner. | |
| That it put forward blind, empty, vacuous, hysterical conformity as virtue. | |
| So... There was no cultural references. | |
| I found the philosophical references that I had were not helpful at all. | |
| And I don't know philosophers who've dealt with the family. | |
| I know psychologists who've dealt with the family. | |
| I know philosophers who've dealt with truth. | |
| I wish there'd been more philosophers who dealt with economics and art and the whole package, but I don't know philosophers who dealt with family. | |
| they tend not to talk about it very much, which is probably one of the reasons why they're philosophers and why they don't achieve what they want to achieve in terms of making the world a virtuous or more virtuous place. | |
| So I'd love to blame some external agency, and there is some truth that there was no cultural references, no academic, no psychological, no philosophical references to where I was and where I needed to get to. | |
| I did have an excellent therapist, but I was half the time ahead of her as she was half the time ahead of me. | |
| So it was a real one step forward, one step forward, and occasionally 12 steps back situation. | |
| And so it's not the fault of philosophy. | |
| It's not the fault of the truth that I had been lied to. | |
| It's not the fault of the truth that I had been lied to. | |
| And it's not the fault of philosophy that... | |
| I had never had any cultural references or impetus or praise or value in connecting thought with action. | |
| I mean, what do you always hear? | |
| And we still see this posted on the board and probably will long after we're dead. | |
| Well, you know, when it comes to Ron Paul, you know, like a theory. | |
| Theory is one thing, but there's practical things. | |
| Practical life is different from theory. | |
| This airy fairy castle in the sky stuff that you're building is all well and good, but sometimes you just got to get things done. | |
| Everything in the cultural references that we have, even in things like libertarianism and so on, screams out that abstracts are mental masturbation, waste of time, distraction, probably psychologically motivated from a desire not to confront anyone with anything. | |
| So, the murder of principles is, you know, a daily ritualistic, orgiastic sacrifice within our culture. | |
| And anybody who tries to act on principle is automatically attacked. | |
| I mean, that's just, I mean, rational principle. | |
| I mean, that's as natural as breathing for the cultures, all cultures in the world. | |
| And it didn't used to be quite as much the case for the West, but it certainly is becoming more, as more and more of the East seeps into the West, it is becoming more and more the case. | |
| So, now, I don't know. | |
| If your friend was... I was not studying philosophy, and I've only taken one course in philosophy in my whole life. | |
| I have never studied philosophy in a formal setting. | |
| It just wasn't really my thing. | |
| You know, maybe Mozart shouldn't have taken piano lessons either. | |
| I don't know, to praise myself, perhaps beyond all rationality. | |
| But... No, I've not studied philosophy, but the reason that I stopped studying philosophy was that it made me feel insane. | |
| It made me feel completely mental to study philosophy because it was madness. | |
| It was madness made visible. | |
| It was madness codified in language. | |
| And I would expect that the rational faculty of your friend was seriously attacked and assaulted by the philosophy that he was studying, which was probably graduate-level studying philosophy. | |
| And I imagine that his mind was blown by the sheer mad irrationality of the philosophy that he was studying, which again... | |
| It's not the fault of truth that people lie. | |
| It's not the fault of philosophy that people ate philosophy with madness. | |
| In fact, it's to the honor of philosophy, right? | |
| It is to the honor of a good currency, or at least a stable currency, or at least a currency that is accepted, that counterfeiters attempt to imitate that currency, right? | |
| So, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and those who wish to imitate virtue and philosophy do so because they recognize the power and grace and beauty of the truth and of philosophy, and they ape that in a terrible, horrifying manner. | |
| Which is a desperate shame, but it's certainly not the fault of philosophy. | |
| I will say, though, that once you know... | |
| Now, the reason that I can forgive myself for my many betrayals of the truth is because I just genuinely didn't know. | |
| And when I sort of look back from here, from where I am now, from where we all are, my happy, happy tribe, when I look back on the journey that got me here, I mean, the amount of stuff that had to be invented... | |
| It was madness for me. | |
| It's like saying to a caveman, how come you don't have a space shuttle yet? | |
| It's like, oog, bang, rock! | |
| It's not the blueprint you're looking for. | |
| The amount of stuff that had to be invented for me to get to any kind of real integrity was just so enormous that not knowing it was, I think, entirely appropriate. | |
| It was entirely appropriate. | |
| You can't know before you know. | |
| I mean, all that we can do is continue to push forward to the knowledge. | |
| And I just didn't know. | |
| Now, why I talk about the danger of philosophy more for you people is that you're completely fucked. | |
| I mean, you all are totally screwed. | |
| I'm fine. Because I sort of had one knowledge and I ground my way through it and did it all for myself and blah, blah, blah. | |
| So I sort of got it and each... | |
| Each inch up this thorny, icy tree left my skin blue and gashed, but I sort of won my way up there, and it was gradual. | |
| You people are hosed, I mean, frankly. | |
| And I've told you this from the beginning. | |
| This is no particular surprise, and I'm only sort of half-tongue-in-cheek here, but you now have the full package, right? | |
| You have a good deal of the truth. | |
| And I think I've done a fairly good job of trying to get it across. | |
| Certainly nobody can fault me for lack of trying, right? | |
| But now you have all the knowledge that took me, I don't know, gosh, 25 years to accumulate. | |
| And it's been relatively rapid. | |
| It's been relatively rapid. | |
| And once you have the knowledge, that's really only the betrayal only occurs. | |
| If you don't have the knowledge, it's like, if you've ever seen the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding... | |
| The guy gets the non-Greek guy to swear in Greek by saying, you know, I'd like a glass of water, turns out, to be nice tits or something like that. | |
| So... If you don't know, you're just swearing in a foreign language. | |
| It's not your responsibility for swearing, right? | |
| But once you know that foreign language, if you swear, then you're responsible, right? | |
| Now I've taught you Greek. You are responsible for knowing Greek. | |
| And that's why you're screwed, right? | |
| I mean, that's why you're messed. | |
| And that's why when I say that, all I mean is you really don't have as much luxury to make endless mistakes as I did. | |
| Because the knowledge is a little bit more formed now through this conversation than it was when I first started out. | |
| So... You can get lost and it's acceptable to get lost when there's no map, right? | |
| But now, there's a map, there's a destination, there's even here are the gas tanks and here's the accelerator. | |
| And now, of course, if you don't get there, you won't get off as easy as I did when I didn't get there. | |
| So I hope that helps. Thank you so much for listening. |
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