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May 18, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:28
762 A live conversation with a listener...

A critical letter from a listener

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Yeah, so just as an introduction to the people who may or may not hear this as a podcast, I'll sort of edit it, or not edit it, but compile it and send it to you guys, let me know what you think.
This is, I think, a very honest and brave and noble complaint that a listener had against me with regards to my encouragement of a particular thread.
With regards to the public space aspect of the free domain radio boards along with the question of the potential imbalance of authority that occurs between a board admin and listeners who are being, let's just say, a tad rambunctious.
I encourage this gentleman to pursue this line of reasoning and then got sort of less pleased with that line of reasoning in a podcast without a lot of, I don't think with any intervening comments, and so he quite rightly felt,
well, what's the point of encouraging me to pursue a line of inquiry and then getting upset in a podcast about it, which is a perfectly reasonable thing to be upset about, and so we're going to just sort of go through the steps and This gentleman is going to read the letter that he sent me, so go ahead. And lest we forget, good afternoon everybody, it's Alex.
And it's Friday, May the 18th?
Something like that. Oh wait, oh wait, oh no.
Satire doesn't work.
Okay, well here's, we have a listener letter, and hey, it's me, the listener.
My name is Alex, and here's my letter.
Dear Steph, I thought I'd communicate my somewhat unparsed feelings about Podcast 759 in the hope I can work them out by writing to you, and also in the hope that they might be useful to you.
If they are not, I'm sorry to have wasted your valuable time.
I, too, am looking forward to upcoming podcasts on beauty and aesthetics and all the good things I'm sure we'll talk about.
I feel two sort of conflicting things, at least two.
I feel like I owe you a huge apology for continuing to explore the issues around the Board Attacks podcasts and the Board Attacks themselves.
Why?
Because it seems clear to me that you've found my posts destructive rather than constructive.
If that is the case, please accept my sincere apology.
Even if my posts are actually constructive to myself or others, if you feel they're destructive, my apology is no less.
Because if you find them destructive and wearying, then I have distracted you rather than helped you, at best.
And that's no good.
I place your efficacy at truth-seeking above all others but my own, if I have to rank them.
On the other hand, I feel this terrible sadness mixed with anger.
I wonder, why did Steph encourage me in my threads to keep after the truth, if what he really wanted was for me to shut up?
I wonder, why is Steph still posting more Board Attacks podcasts, if the issue is one that is wearying rather than productive or important?
I feel put down and humiliated, and consequently angry in a dim sort of way about the whole thing.
If I was so way off target in my analysis, why didn't anyone take me aside and say, Hey, you're being foolish, at least.
People tried to refute a few things I was saying, and we got somewhere with that.
At least I made some progress in my own reasoning, as far as I can only speak for myself.
At the time, I felt I had something to contribute, some analysis of the situation that might yield further insights.
Of course I wanted to share this.
It is difficult when nobody agrees with you, and you're certain enough to keep going, not because of the aloneness, but because if progress isn't made in the argument, something odd must be happening.
I'm proud of the fact that my aloneness did not deter me.
On the other hand, if I was wrong and nobody could point out why I was wrong, the whole thing would go on and on, which it did.
If I was right and still nobody agreed with me, what did that say about the other debaters?
So I have this worry that if there is some truth to what I'm saying, nobody wants to see it.
But it's a motivating feeling, isn't it?
It's like, wow, now I really have to work out this argument.
And on the other hand, a dim sort of gnawing feeling that I may be going insane and nobody is telling me.
But I feel yet another thing, too.
And maybe you can help me with this.
But maybe you're the last person who can.
I don't know. I feel a sort of projection regret, like I was unknowingly identifying with Niels and projecting a parent onto you.
So there's this horrible, yucky feeling of embarrassment and shame and doubt there.
If I was doing that, how do I recover?
Am I slated to be this irrational nutjob who forever gets cross-eyed when faced with the truth?
Will I just rack every thread I post in?
Will any conflict involving me turn into a malicious and subtle unconscious troll of the worst kind?
Worse, because I'm smart enough to drag along a group of would-be philosophers on a meaningless quest to battle an evil that is only inside me.
I want to doubt in the most useful way.
Three last little thank yous.
Your podcasts on this and my stick-with-it-ness have paid off for me with many insights.
I learned a whole bunch about the nature of subtle abuse that has opened my eyes yet further to the Ivy League torture my parents continue to try to use on me and my two brothers.
One brother is in thrall, but my little brother is full of the red-hot fire of his second master's in a psychology-related field.
Now he knows, too.
I learned, but have not yet written about, a lot about how bullies operate and what motivates them, the excuses they make for violence, etc.
Three, I learned a lot about why people turn to violence as the first resort.
I have not yet written about that either, but it was the Board Attacks podcast and Intense Reflection that opened new insights here as well.
Actually, there's quite a few more.
The point is, thanks.
With the light of reason to guide us, let no shadows stand unexplored.
Alex And I just wanted to compliment you on the, I mean, the language of the letter is beautiful, the expression is clear, and the language is something that I envy, which is concise.
And so it's, you know, it's a really wonderful letter, and I certainly do appreciate you sending it to me.
Now, was there anything that you wanted to add sort of since you sent it or since we talked yesterday?
Well, of course, with time, you process things more and more.
And actually, my feelings, the sort of yucky, weird, mucky feelings about the whole situation have sort of passed.
And I think some of my initial...
I guess angst is maybe the best way to say about like, ah, what is, you know, what's going on with the boards and, you know, what is Steph's relationship to the rest of the listeners and, you know, the people posting the boards.
The original sort of angst about that is also sort of past, but now it's like I want the knowledge of what's going on.
So... Yeah, I couldn't really add anything directly to that letter.
I feel like what I had to say there was definitely how I felt at the time.
But how I've sort of moved past that, I'm not really sure exactly.
Maybe it was just a little talking with you and a little talking with Scott here, who's also joined us today.
You know, it just helped me sort of process it a bit more.
Now, Scott, was there something that you wanted to add to this?
Because you guys have chatted about this quite a bit, right?
The only thing that I would add at this point is that I was feeling some of the same things that Alex was because I was also kind of like, well, I'm not too sure about this, but is this my problem?
So I just kind of backed off from posting.
I've just been doing a lot of thinking about it.
But the whole thing about leading everybody down the wrong path and About Podcast 759 or just in general?
Yeah, about 759.
Okay. Well, I mean, that's all fantastic.
And again, thank you so much for bringing this up.
I can sort of explain to you my experience of my side of the conversation, and then you can sort of let me know what you think.
And then I'll tell you about my evil manipulative side and what I was trying to do.
Sure, sure. Just to bring back that queasy feeling, which I know we all know when it's not.
Actually, I do want to get that back, but in the rest of my life, not just hearing it.
So understanding is important.
Right. So first and foremost, the pursuit of the thread was, to me at least, fundamentally about the imbalance of power.
And the focus was, you know, and please expand on this if I'm missing something.
The focus was on sort of two major areas.
One is that, I guess three major areas.
The first is that the board is kind of like a public space.
Right. The second issue was that that creates an imbalance of power that may subtly distort the conversation.
And if that distortion is not available to people, then it's going to not be productive for them to not see it.
I'm always talking about the gun in the room.
And if the recognition of the board of men's power is not there...
then it's you know we're kind of not practicing what we preach if i understood that right right correctly and the third is that if uh you know since since we're all going down this road towards at least an approach to anarchism or spontaneous self-organization within society if the board requires a quote government right
somebody who has the power to unilaterally arbitrate disputes through banning and so on then is there not a mismatch between the uh principles that are espoused in terms of spontaneous self-organization and anti-statism and then in the environment where these discussions about no central authority is occurring, there is in fact a central authority who has final power.
And that there was a disconnect, is that a fair summation?
Right. Yeah, of that aspect of it all, for sure.
You know, and I think that's what a lot of people on the board were interested in talking about as well.
You know, and I think... So, you know, we have first, you know, we have the incident of the board attacks themselves, and then, you know, I was looking into a lot of, like, why did people do what they did and what causes them to do that sort of, you know, Greg and Niels themselves, like, you know, what was their behavior in looking at that.
But, yeah, you're right. Once we get beyond that and then...
We, you know, there was some analysis going on in, you know, I think prompted by some posts I made about, you know, Steph is the gun in the room, you know, and that kind of thing.
Then, yeah, we end up with this, looking at the whole...
The whole forms as a sort of microcosm, or is it or is it not, or how does the free market operate, and how does free association operate, et cetera, et cetera.
So, yeah, this is one huge aspect.
The reason why I think that's important, of course, I mean, what I think isn't that important, the fact is that you thought it was important, but the reason that I thought it was important is that, of course, as I've mentioned in podcasts before, if intellectuals get the organization of society wrong...
Right. Like, tens of millions of people tend to get killed.
So it's pretty important, right?
Yeah. I've got a great idea.
Let's have communism. Right, right.
Communism or fascism or, you know, even democracy, right?
I mean, and militarism and all of the cover stories that are always going around, imperialism and so on.
So, yeah, when people get social organization wrong, it's pretty disastrous.
Like, I mean, it's the worst plague or pestilence in the world, so...
I think that it certainly is important to say, well, if we expect spontaneous self-organization within society, but we require a central authority figure to moderate a discussion around spontaneous self-organization, then there may be something either wrong with the theory or wrong with the practice.
And that's an important question, without a doubt, and that's certainly what I was encouraging in terms of the examination or exploration of it.
Now, what happened then for me was that there was, so when you said, Steph is the gun in the room, right?
And I bristled a little bit at that, right?
I mean, try not to be, you know, but, you know, to me that's approach which is saying, and this is the sort of issue that I had with it, Was saying, well, there is an abusive behavior that's going on, right?
And we were all aware, I think, that it was not a mutually escalating situation.
It was not, you know, two dogs fighting, right?
I mean, there was an attack.
And I thought a fairly measured response followed by an escalation followed by a fairly measured response.
Like, there was an aggressor and there was a defender in this instance.
And what I felt was that The only time that you applied a fairly, I shouldn't say exactly pejorative, but a fairly heightened statement of a disparity of power or Yeah, a disparity of power. And the potential for abuse was towards me, right?
Right, right. So why are we not looking at the first issue, right?
We've got this issue, blah, blah, blah, and now we're looking at the whole power structure.
But wait, what about the first issue?
Right, and so the fact that you kind of went past that, right?
Because my sort of perspective was that if you're into the abuse of power and the ability to ban people, which is basically the ability to reject people or cause them to not be on the board anymore...
then certainly people who are verbally abusive have far more power than I do, right?
Because I can ban people's IPs, but they could just come in using proxies or bypasses or go to a public library or whatever they want.
I can ban people's usernames.
You can play whack-a-mole, and you know because you can abort admin too, right?
So I don't really have that much power to ban people.
However, somebody who is verbally abusive to a particular individual and continues that abuse, so every time Greg would have logged on, Niels would have posed something abusive about him, then Greg has far more power, in a sense, to ban people.
Sorry, Niels has far more power to ban Greg from the board than I do to ban Niels from the board, right?
Because creating a hostile environment for someone, unless they're totally masochistic, is going to mean that that person is not going to want to be on the board, and it's more effective than banning someone.
Okay. So if the criteria was getting someone off the board and also the abuse of power, then it would seem to me...
It seemed to me kind of odd that you sort of walked around, Niels, and came to me with the sort of gun-in-the-room comment and other sorts of questions about disparity of power.
And that's where I began to feel a little not so sure about where this was heading.
Okay. I understand.
Um... Getting a little distracted by the sounds in the mic here.
Do you have a monkey? Anyway, go on.
Throw people off.
It's an elemental lawyer trick.
But anyway, go on. What?
I'm distracted. I must be wrong.
Sorry again. Damn it.
That's what we were talking about yesterday.
Yeah, and you and I had a little talk about this yesterday that...
That, you know, there's an issue of, and I thought it was quite interesting and something worth exploring further that, you know, there's this idea that, you know, if one of the posters pursues the other around the boards and posts everywhere they post in this sort of abusive way, then they're really the one with the power to do damage and get rid of somebody through damage.
And they're generating the abuse, right?
Not responding to abuse.
Right. They're pulling the gun out first, right?
And then after that, it sort of becomes a matter of self-defense.
But if you only focus on what you're trying to defend, there's something to me not quite...
And look, I have no doubt that you're easily intelligent enough a fellow to get that on principle, which means that, for me at least, and I don't mean to jump the gun, but I mean, to me, it would indicate that it would have cost you something emotionally or in your life or with relation to your family or something.
It would have cost you something To focus on the instigator of the abuse rather than the person who was trying to manage the abuse.
Okay. I do understand and respect that idea, but I did spend some time exploring, and I'm not sure I can sort of link it or whatever here, but with the idea that...
So we had this idea that Niels might be chasing Greg around the boards.
You know, damaging him, you know, and trying to get rid of him through this abusive behavior.
But then you have to also, I think, ask the question, well, is Greg doing that to Niels?
Because certainly, if we look at Niels' behavior, it seems like he feels cornered.
And I think he was sort of posting to that effect, like, ah, I feel cornered.
This is also where we get into the excuses bullies make, right?
Let's say a man beats his wife or something like that, and then you say, well, why are you beating your wife?
And it's like, she made me do it.
She's been aggressing against me with her screechy language or whatever.
So then I have to defend myself by punching her in the face or something like that, right?
And so I think that question really needs to be asked here, and I think, you know, you've basically, you sort of asked and answered it.
You know, you said, well, you know, Greg was being reasonable.
He was talking about the facts. Well, where did he, where was he being abusive?
I don't see it. You know, so you were kind of resolved with that, whereas I wanted to spend some time looking into more sort of what sort of generates this sort of violent behavior if...
If Niels' behavior was violent or abusive, which I think we can agree that it was.
It's, you know, far too aggressive in posturing and not referring to the facts, but more to a feeling of being attacked, right?
I feel I'm being attacked.
Well, where is the attack, you know?
Right, using things like negative and so on.
And again, I don't mind particularly that there was a flare-up, right?
I mean, there was a minor flare-up on the board this morning where somebody sort of made an analogy to somebody abusing their own child, right?
And I thought that was a bit over the top, to say the least.
And I said, you know, I think that's a bit harsh.
And the guy apologized, and it's like, great.
Even the swearing and so on, I mean, if you sort of catch yourself and go, holy, that was definitely uncalled for.
I've got to sort of figure out... I mean, there really is nothing you can do with that conversation.
You can't control other people's reactions.
No, you can't. The argument is based on not so much in reality.
You're not doing something I like.
What is it?
Sorry to interrupt, but there certainly was a history that is relevant to this conversation.
I didn't know anything about this history until this came about.
The fact is that Greg initially was much more self-critical than he is now.
He's been in this conversation from quite early on and made some pretty significant changes.
Right. Neil's was definitely the dominant one there.
And one thing that happens, as you probably know, with this idea of leveling, right?
that when you take a dominant position with somebody else and you gain ego gratification from being superior to them, when they begin to question you, when they begin to grow as human beings, when they begin to make reference not to your opinions but to objective facts, for a lot of people who have a streak of bullying within them, that's the time of greatest for a lot of people who have a streak of bullying I mean, to take an extreme example, it's when the woman tries to leave the abusive husband that she generally gets killed.
Because when somebody's a bully and you're in that relationship, and there's reasons why Greg was in that relationship that obviously he has to continue to work on, when you stand up to that person, and of course when you stand up to a bully you've been associated with for a while, it's never a perfect interaction because there's a lot of ambivalence about the interaction.
But then when you stand up to that bully, the bully will attack you in ways that have only been latent previously.
And so definitely there's a history there, and Greg has an involvement in fostering that in an equal relationship, and then breaking out of it is definitely going to cause Niels to become aggressive.
And it's a history that renders some complexity to it.
The imbalance comes to the surface, yeah.
Yeah, and the ego gratification, the person feeling superior is threatened, and thus when you get stronger, when you're associated with a bully, when you get stronger, that bully perceives that as a personal attack and attacks back in kind to either drive you down or if you're going to leave their orbit to feel so that they can feel self-justified and sort of ignore their own motives in being associated with you.
Right. So we also, I mean, this is also the opening to a whole other thing, and I'm not sure that, I'm not sure whether you've podcasted or not about this, but, well, it's two things.
One, I know you've podcasted about, you know, what are the attitudes you can take in a debate.
I think you talked about that in one of your most recent podcasts, actually.
You know, in the questioning and, you know, looking at your own actions and stuff.
And the other aspect is, like, when you get these feelings within yourself, like, let's say you are the bully, And you don't realize it.
And then these feelings of anger or whatever rise up in yourself.
Like how to recognize that and break out of it yourself.
So, you know, to look at the facts on the ground and, you know, what it's saying.
Focus more on the... The facts of the situation and your own actions and this, that, and the other thing.
And I think that aspect of it is not...
So we have the aspect of getting the abusing poster out of the forums if you can't adhere to a request to calm down and apologize or whatever.
But then we also have the aspect of what do we do ourselves in either situation?
If somebody's attacking us, And they're being unreasonable.
How do we get them out of our lives?
If we find ourselves, you know, at least our feelings are telling us, you know, this person is being a jerk and I feel like, you know, I want to hit them or I want to lash out, you know, how to deal with that?
So I wanted to look into that more as well.
And then we finally have this issue which you outlined with a few points just earlier in this conversation about the nature of You know, the forums themselves, and you're the owner, and, you know, is there a government, and, you know, how is our microcosm reflecting on that?
So it's quite large, and it's quite hard to sort of isolate, well, which one is the most important to talk about?
And I do agree with you that, you know, if there's violence in your life, the first issue is, you know, to stop the violence in your life.
And then move on to understanding, you know, the bigger picture.
Alex, can I just jump in?
Go ahead. Okay, question.
So are you, in your first aspect that you mentioned, are you referring to how to deal with someone who is being verbally abusive in the sense of using curiosity to perhaps diffuse their abusive behavior?
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot to that.
Actually, my little brother and I, the one with the second master's in psychology, had a discussion about that this morning.
But yeah, that's one aspect of it, for sure.
And is another aspect, an aspect of self-awareness that if I or anyone else who is listening to this is posting and finds...
Himself going into a spiral of escalating abusive behavior or wanting to go that way than a method that one could use to sort of de-escalate oneself?
Right, right. And, you know, if you're trying to actually get to the facts and make a change or, you know, trying to do anything actually productive in reality, then, yeah, you do need to have a process to get yourself out of an escalating situation.
So there's a lot to be learned by the board attacks themselves, I guess is my point there.
Right. Now, the sort of – I'll just give my sort of very quick answers to the three questions, and then you can let me know if that sort of makes sense.
The first is that you don't engage at the level of the, quote, facts, right?
I mean, that was – you simply just say, that's abusive.
I don't appreciate it. You don't have the right to talk to me that way.
And you don't engage in the realm of, well, you said this and I said that.
You simply focus on the abuse, right?
So when I first came into that thread, I said, don't be abusive.
Because that was the issue.
It wasn't whether or not this website was true or false.
I mean, nobody knows. But the issue is the abuse, right?
So you've got to focus in on the abuse and to give a clear no to the abuse, right?
Now, then you can't control how that other person acts.
I don't think that it's valid to be curious about the motives of an abuser.
I don't. I could be totally wrong about that.
But I have never found, and I've tried six million different ways on Sunday in these various interactions in my life, I've never found somebody pull up from that level of hostility.
Like I've never found somebody who escalates or who is that aggressive.
I've never seen anybody ever pull out, where the pulling out is not just a maneuver to gain the mealy-mouthed apology, like, I'm sorry I let you provoke me so much with your evil.
When somebody has that capacity to lash out, that's why I said that they have a lot of bodies in their wake.
It's not the first time they've done it, especially if they've had kids and they've done it to their own kids.
There's a huge amount of backlog there.
Sure, sure. They can pile up icebergs against their ability to change, for sure, if they've really been terrible.
But it does seem incredibly failistic, Steph, to say that if you've received somebody as You know, having acted abusively in this situation, that they do that in all aspects of their lives for all future and all past.
For instance, like, I can remember, you know, I have a little brother.
I can remember being pretty much of a jerk to him on occasion.
And now we get along pretty well, and I think he's, you know, quite able to point out when I'm sort of slipping into being a jerk, if that ever happens.
So, you know, I feel like change is possible, right?
You know, if we make the argument too strongly that...
That any sort of lashing out or whatever indicates the person can never recover.
I mean, that just sort of says, well, if I've ever lashed out, why am I listening to podcasts?
I just sort of should go find a cliff quickly and do humanity a favor.
Well, that's certainly true.
I mean, I don't believe...
Oh, no. Okay, bye. Sorry, what I mean is true is to say it is an extreme statement, I agree, to say that somebody who verbally abuses somebody can never be saved.
But, and that, you know, that may be, I've certainly found it empirically true, and again, I don't know the level of what happened with your brother and yourself, but I would certainly say that if that person can be saved, it is not up to the victim to do so.
Oh, absolutely, yeah.
It's not up to the victim to save the abuser, right?
Absolutely, I 100% agree with you.
Can I understand my tormentor and help change them to save myself?
No, no, no. That's not a good idea.
The guy may be cured of rape somehow, but it's not the rape victim who's going to do it, right?
Right, right, right. Steph, on one of the threads, I don't remember exactly which one, you posted a definition of what abuse was, at least in the context of the board.
Could you restate that definition?
Sure. Do you want me to look it up or do you want me to just sort of try and re-piece it together?
I'll try and re-piece it together. Yeah, whichever.
A theme of abuse is to put forward a universal condemnation, like a condemnation of someone based on universal values that you are violating by putting forward that condemnation, right?
So if I say to you, you're so fucking hostile...
Then, obviously, I'm saying hostility is bad, but because I'm swearing at you, I'm violating the same universal premise that I'm using to condemn you.
It's a violation of universally preferable behavior, right?
That, to me, is abusive.
Like, if I just say, you stink, right?
I mean, that's abusive.
That's just kind of stupid, right?
But when I manipulate you with an appeal to universal values, which I am violating through, like, say, you're negative and that's bad, especially if I'm a determinist, is to both establish a principle and violate it simultaneously, Which is an attack more on one's capacity to reason and to understand than it is on anything else, right? That's what's so abusive about it.
So it's abusive because you're attacking someone's ability to think logically by doing that.
Well, you're destroying your own, basically.
I think like when Steph was saying on a podcast recently, maybe yesterday, like you're spitting on yourself or something.
Yeah, I mean, what's fundamentally heartbreaking about this is that, and people, they don't believe me on this, and maybe you will, I don't know, right?
But what's fundamentally heartbreaking about this is I know for a really deep fact that the choices that people have made recently on the boards orient their future, right?
It orients their life. You so desperately want for somebody to say, to shake their heads and go, man, I was in the grip of some historical demon.
I've really got to deal with this, right?
You want that.
At least I do. I want for people to go, wow, that was out of line.
I wonder what's going on with me.
I'm so sorry. You really, really want that because you know that is going to change someone's life.
That simple statement of the third eye, the observing ego, looking at your own behavior and saying, That is out of whack with the very values that I claim to espouse.
And for somebody to take that pause, to observe their own actions, to recognize the disparity between what they're doing and what they believe, I mean, that is a life-changing moment.
I mean, it's so heartbreaking to see people take that wrong turn, right?
And this is now the next 10 years or 20 years or for the rest of their life.
This is the direction that they're going in.
This is the fork in the road that they're taking.
And every step they take down that is like 50 steps they have to take back.
And it's really, really painful to see that.
I mean, fundamentally, what bothers me the most about it is the waste, right?
The waste of happiness, the waste of potential, the waste of the capacity to do some real good in the world, right?
And I really do see that these are not isolated things, that they do guide someone's next decision and next decision and next decision, right?
I mean, we are creatures of habit, and the worse we do, the worse we're going to do, in a sense.
So I do see that as particularly kind of heartbreaking, but again, you can't make those choices for people.
Right. No. Nope.
Yeah. So now let's talk about you and your brother, unless you had something else you wanted to bring up.
Oh, no, that was pretty much it.
I think we covered a lot of ground pretty quickly there.
And I think I would just say about my letter, like when I made one paragraph of that statement, I want to doubt in the best way, I think this kind of relates here to self-reflection and say, well, was I being a jerk?
Just look and see.
That's what I'm asking Steph here.
Was I being a jerk by looking at the board set up and stuff like that?
And now I can see.
You know, from Steph's perspective, the original point was the abuse itself, and now here I am talking about other stuff that's not really that.
But with the same principles, right?
About the abusive power and so on, right?
Yeah, the abusive power, right? So I can certainly see that.
So I've learned something just from talking with you here about that.
Yeah. I mean, the phrase jerk wouldn't really occur to me.
I mean, you're a great guy in a lot of ways, and I really do appreciate your presence and thoughtfulness and excellent writing skills on the board.
Like, don't get me wrong about that.
Yeah, I'd assume so.
The only thing I sort of had a concern about, and this is my evil manipulative side, so just...
Okay, bring it on, bring it on. You have an evil manipulative side?
That's interesting. Well, no, I'll just sit up with me tongue-in-cheek.
This is what I thought when you began doing what I would, you know, perhaps unjustly characterized as being a professional Hamlet, which is, you know, to be racked with indecision about, to me, a fairly obvious priority of values, right?
Which is that if you're concerned about abuse of power, then you start with the person who initiates the abuse of power.
And you don't start with the sheriff who's struggling to sort of rein in the abuse of power, right?
So the fact that you missed that, what I sort of felt was that there was an emotion within you that was going to be problematic for you.
If you focused on the abuse of power in what I would consider to be a more objective hierarchy or priority, so if you say the abuse of power, like Steph's struggling, and maybe he's doing the right thing and maybe he's doing the wrong thing, but it certainly is a challenging thing to deal with.
I mean, these are all very verbally intelligent people and technically skilled, and I had like six or seven different wars on at the same time.
I mean, it was quite the ninja juggle, right?
I'll certainly say that.
And, of course, this is on my first week on the job, and, you know, it certainly had an effect on donations and all that, right?
So, I mean, there was definitely a sabotage-y kind of element, from my standpoint, right, sort of going on.
So, there's kind of like a beleaguered thing, right?
I sort of felt a little bit beleaguered, and there were some people who were helpful, and I don't want to characterize everyone that way.
But what I sort of thought was that if you had focused on the real abuse of power, whether my response was just or unjust, it certainly is a response and not an initiation.
So if you're shooting back at someone who's shooting at you and you miss or you hit an innocent bystander, it's definitely a bad thing.
Let's say that I did something that bad.
But still it is a response that would not be occurring without the initial provocation.
So if the abuse of power was key, To focus on me just seemed wrong.
And so what I sort of felt was that there was an emotion that would have caused you upset or some negative feeling if you had focused on the initiator of the abuse, right?
And yet you couldn't ignore that feeling because something was coming up for you, like at a very deep emotional level, I think.
Something was coming up for you in this debate wherein if you had cited With the principle that you're concerned about the abuse of power and so on, not sided with me, but sided with the principle that you wanted to explore, that would have cost you something emotionally.
And I'm not sure exactly what that is.
I may have a guess or two. And so I felt that it was kind of like you avoiding your own emotional...
I say problems is way too strong a word, but you avoiding a negative emotion by plunging into an obfuscation of the issues at hand.
Yeah, I can see that. And then, but yet on the other hand, it's like I'm still sort of unresolved about like, you know, I don't know, just the entire thing in general.
Like, is it not, is the nature of this sort of episode not characterized and brought about by the structure in which it occurs?
You know, the boards and the forms and stuff like that and the power structure there.
So it's sort of like, I intellectually still can't quite parse it all out, so I'll have to think about it some more, but I would certainly be interested to hear what you had to say about where I'm avoiding and what it is you think I might be avoiding.
Just speculate or whatever, because I love my own growth.
Sorry, first of all, let me just ask you if I understood that last thing that you said correctly, that it may be something to do with the structure of the board society or whatever that caused this flare-up of abuse.
Well, yeah, they're all related or something.
It's not just the abuse occurring, it's like the context.
I don't want to be too post-modernist.
Everything is in the context.
It's all relative or something like that.
Well, sure, but the interesting thing is that after listening to a number of podcasts about it, and we talked a little bit last night, we've been talking for almost 38 minutes now, Yeah.
You still haven't said that Niels was abusive, right?
And so now the abuse...
I think I did earlier, but...
Well, maybe, but now what you're saying is that the abuse may come from the structure of the board or something like that.
Do you see that whenever... And again, I'm not saying this is right or wrong.
I'm just saying this is sort of what I observe from the outside.
It's like looking at you trying to connect with the instigator of abusive behavior is like trying to push two heavily opposed magnets together.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They get together, and maybe they'll touch, then they'll jump apart again.
And I think with your own mind, you're constantly seeking to find some explanation for someone's behavior that is external to themselves, right?
So it's either some history with Greg or it's something to do with my power or it's something to do with the board structure.
Like you're not willing, and again, maybe you're right about this, I'm just sort of saying how it looks, that you're not willing to say Niels chose to be abusive and that's Niels' responsibility.
And you'll sort of mention it and then you'll go back to some other excuse for that behavior.
Now, of course, you don't know Niels and you probably don't even care that much about Niels and probably don't even care that much about me, right?
Because the major issue is that there's some connect, I would say, just from the outside, my hypothetical, whatever.
You have not come to a resolution about your own history of perhaps being hostile or negative towards your brother.
Right? So you can't own that behavior within yourself, so there's a part of you that will constantly seek to excuse it or obfuscate it in others.
Yeah, well, I think that's interesting.
I don't tend to agree.
I mean, I tend to, like...
But, man, what can I say?
I guess it's something that I'll think more about.
Let me ask you a couple of questions, if it's okay, and you certainly don't have to answer a damn thing, but we don't have to publish this at all.
It's totally up to you, but...
Tell me some of the stuff that occurred between yourself and your brother that you regret or that you think was problematic.
Well, that I regret...
I regret him shooting me with a BB gun when we were kids after I sort of taunted him about something.
I can't remember. I regret arguing in a doorway and him flying through it and it was like glass and he cut his arm and had to go to the hospital.
Can I just interrupt you for two seconds?
Now, you've just given me two explanations and in neither of those were you the instigator.
Because what you said was, he shot you with a BB gun.
That's what you said first, right?
And I'm just being annoyingly nitpicky here.
Sure, sure. This is great.
I mean, if I'm obfuscating, that's exactly what we need to do, right?
Right. So the first thing that you said to me was, he shot me with a BB gun.
And that's a pretty shocking thing, right?
He shot me, right? And then you say, after I did X, Y, or Z, right?
So the first thing that you say is his response.
And then you say, we were fighting.
Again, that's a mutual thing.
And then flew through.
Was it a glass door or something?
Yeah, it's a glass door. Right, so he flew through a glass door.
So you're both fighting, and then he flew through like some third-party poltergeist pushed him or something, right?
So there's not, to me, a direct ownership of your actions to say, I shot him with a BB gun, and I shot him through a glass door.
Yeah, a glass door is a little...
That's what I mean by I say that there's a disconnect in terms of your ownership of these actions.
Okay. Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying, and it's certainly possible.
It's something I should really reflect on and maybe gain some great insights on.
So give me some more. Sure. I think the last part was not such a...
Oh, go ahead, Scott. Yeah, I was just going to jump in.
Do you remember when we were walking up the path in Oregon Ridge, you were talking about how you used to wrestle with your brother or something, and you kind of, I don't know, pinned him down or twirled him around or something, and it was...
And then he went away, and then he came back, and he was kind of big and strong, and you kind of looked at him, and you realized, wow, I can't do this with him anymore.
Yeah, it was very funny.
Yeah, and was that in reference to a specific incident?
Yeah. Well, see, this is not really about abuse.
It was like our way of greeting each other as, like, college-age kids.
We would, like, sort of play karate.
And then one year he went away and became a lumberjack, and he's 6'7", and weighs, like, 260 pounds.
So he came back, and he was just so huge, he just picked me up by the groin and the neck and just held me straight out.
And I said, oh, I guess, well, the karate fights are over, you know?
Oh, okay.
That was just sort of an animal play greeting or something.
Nobody ever actually...
That was about us enjoying our brotherliness.
Oh, okay.
Were you stronger than him for most of your time?
I'm not sure what the age difference is here.
Oh, it's three years, two and a half years, three years.
Yeah, so I was definitely stronger than him for most of our childhood, for sure.
Right, so would you say that when he came back as a lumberjack, that he had an equivalent expansion of strength when you were a kid, right?
It was absolutely, it was just about exactly, like, proportionally.
And you didn't want to play anymore, right?
Well, yeah, I was scared.
At first, yeah, I definitely felt scared.
Like, oh my god, he can just pick me up.
You know, I'm a big guy myself.
So like, yeah, I was scared.
But we still wrestle and stuff like that.
But it was just like, yeah, it was a definite realization for me, for sure.
Like, if there is power going to be exerted, it isn't going to be mine.
Right. So basically, you didn't want to play when the roles were reversed.
Well, I did. I mean, we still did play.
But I mean, this is an important story for you.
And again, I'm just totally...
You can stop me whenever you want.
I'm genuinely trying to help, right?
So if I'm being totally annoying, just let me know.
But I think that's important.
And again, not knowing anything about your history with the guy, but...
And again, this is the...
I'm the younger brother-sibling view, right?
My brother was half years older than I am.
And it's not that much fun to wrestle with someone.
It's actually kind of frustrating when they're a lot stronger than you, right?
Because it's not... Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, and I certainly did that.
That gave me a flashback, actually, of holding him at arm's length.
My arms were longer than him, and he was trying to swing at me.
It's the same thing with running, right?
My brother was a faster runner than I was because his leg was longer, so I could never catch him, but he could always catch me.
So there's a fundamental disparity of power that occurs here, right?
And if you use your physical strength and abilities, which are not anything other than the random accident of birth, as a sort of physical domination of the other person, then it's really quite humiliating to the younger brother.
Yeah, sure. And I do feel regret about that.
And where did you learn that from?
Like, where did you learn that that was how you...
Well, see, this is how my family, you know, sort of operates.
It's sort of like, I mean, with the humiliation and taunting kind of thing, like, put somebody in a double bind, and then they act crazy about it, and then you laugh at them for being frustrated, right?
Right, so it's like, no means yes, and yes means no.
Do you want me to hit you? I don't know, right?
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to explode, and then, you know, so with me and my little brother, it would be like, you know, I'd have a friend over, and I'd be like, no, you can't play with my friend, too.
You know, I want to. Well, no, sorry, and, you know, just, you know, making sure that he felt excluded and these other things.
And then later on, he throws a hissy fit and starts attacking me physically, and I'm like, ha, ha, ha, you can't get me, you know?
Right. So you would get involved in stuff which you could exclude him because of his size and make him feel sort of like left out.
It's amazing. All the brothers all go to the same school.
It's amazing. Yeah, we all do.
This kind of humiliation that, as you say, occurred within your family, and was it mostly verbal and sort of mind game torture?
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like in my letter, I say, Ivy League trained.
I mean, that literally tormentors.
Yeah, it was mental.
I mean, but then once in a while, like when the stuff came to the line, it got physical.
And so that was for sure.
We knew what was up.
The more important the need, the more explosive the situation.
So then, why was it that you began to humiliate your brother?
What need did that sort of serve in you?
Well, passing along the chain of humiliation, right?
I mean, That's kind of abstract.
Can you sort of give me more of a level?
I mean, I appreciate it. It's like a baton.
That I have some control over my universe?
Go on. And the only kind of control that I know is to take control of others?
I don't know. Because I'm not in control of mine.
What was my instinct when I did that?
It was just like, my brother's annoying.
He's asking all these questions.
He won't respect my privacy.
He wants to come in my room.
Annoying asking all these questions like on a thread.
No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
Yeah, like on a thread, exactly.
Yeah, but that's actually really quite complicated because part of it is him trying to understand my family.
So I did a little parenting for him too.
So our relationship is, you know, I mean, older brothers and younger brothers do that as well.
When you have parents that are acting irrationally, it's like, why, why, why, why, why?
So I don't want to complicate it too much.
But yeah, my instinct was sort of like, why did I put him through these situations?
It was more like, It was sort of like because I could or something.
I have a friend and you can't have him.
I don't know. I don't know.
Right, and I mean, I'm not expecting you to come up with that with the top of your head, right?
I mean, that's a pretty complicated thing, and it really is right at the core of the power structure within your family, right?
But I think that, you know, when I sort of had a hypothesis that you hadn't connected with and owned your own relationship with your brother and whoever else this may have occurred with, Again, it's complicated, but if you don't know why you did it, then you haven't owned what happened.
That's just sort of a basis.
If you don't know why, you can't know what.
You can't know how. You don't even have a diagnosis, let alone a cure.
And again, there's no reason why you would.
This is complicated stuff, and it's messy, and avoidance is a natural tendency of everyone, myself included.
Yeah. So I think that it probably would be fair to say that if you don't know how this infection of the desire to humiliate and to a small degree tyrannize, and I don't want to sort of make it too dramatic, if you don't know what motivated you to act that way, Then I can't think that you can really own that behavior and have sort of come to peace with it and move past it and so on.
And I think that given that that's a pretty key thing, right?
The desire to humiliate a dependent and helpless younger brother, right?
Given that that's a pretty ugly aspect of your family and I don't think you're a bad guy or anything like that.
The picture of me that's being painted is like this jerk who goes around humiliating people.
Well, no. I mean, look, you're in this conversation, which is, I think, entirely to your credit, right?
I mean, that is an amazing thing.
And, you know, I was never able to have this conversation with my brother in any kind of way, so I certainly appreciate it, right?
I mean, I'm certainly aware that I may be more invested in this than in most conversations, so just let me know if you feel that I'm over the top.
But this is a family cancer, right?
This humiliation. Oh, yeah. This is a family cancer.
Yeah. There are certain things that you were not as responsible for when you were a kid, right?
But now that you're an adult, I think that there are things that you're responsible for.
I think it's, you know, very, very key.
You don't have kids yet, if I remember rightly, right?
Right, I do not. That you know of, I think you said.
I've got some kids out there somewhere.
Hey, hey, I didn't say that.
I'm just kidding. I didn't find another way to paint you in a negative light.
It's, you know...
But there's a cancer in the heart of your family that I think psychologically you still step around to some degree.
Yeah, I still can't quite see it.
Right, and the reason you can't see it is that it's very hard to look at things that are bad and feel that we've got a reflection in the mirror looking back.
Right. Because it's very hard to say, damn it, I'm so angry at that abuse, when you feel, at whatever level, that you may have participated in it.
It's pretty hard to say, I hated this concentration camp, if you're helping to process the body, so to speak.
And again, what a ridiculous metaphor, but I'm just sort of trying to point out that it's very hard to get angry at your family when you feel that you may have participated, because it's hard to understand how that could have happened, right?
Obviously, you look in the mirror and you say, I'm a good guy, right?
I mean, there's no question of that, and I think in very many ways, you are.
And there is a family cancer here that you avoid, right, which is verbal humiliation.
Right. Not so much anymore, but yeah, I'm making progress there.
But yeah, but the picture is still not clear.
Let's just leave it. You know, let's just put it at that, for sure.
Right. I avoided it, and I have trouble seeing it still.
I haven't, like, totally owned it and said, you know, especially, I agree with you, if, like, I participated, you know, in this horrible, you know, humiliation and keeping people down and putting people down and destroying their self-esteem and all this, you know, just in a worse kind of way, then... How can I see that and accept that I'm an okay person?
It becomes very hard to do that.
No, I totally understand.
That is the hardest thing in the world to do and my own particular, just because there's no point in me picking apart your scabs without showing you some of my own because that's just a beautiful thing.
Let's compare scars. My own particular history with this was I got involved in very corrupt financial dealings that I ended up with a lot of people basically being ripped off a lot of money in the stock market.
I got involved in a business, I was chief technical officer and there was indication that the senior, that the company who bought it, the company that I co-founded, that they were corrupt but I was still profiting from the sale of the stock even though it was a total pump and dump and in hindsight there was evidence and it was that process Of being involved in that kind of corrupt activity that really brought me up short,
right? That was just like, oh my god, I can't think of myself as just a merely good person by saying it when I'm capable of doing something like this, where millions of dollars are in an illicit kind of way.
And that was one of the real sort of, oh my god, you know, horrible moments of looking in the mirror and saying, if I want to keep a strong sense of myself as a positive human being that's based on reality and not just saying I'm a good guy, then I really have to confront my dark side, which was my own capacity.
Because I felt that I was so heavily stolen from as a child, my own capacity was to be okay with stealing back.
It's like, fuck you, Will.
You screwed me, and I'm going to have a cold, calculating relationship with you.
Since nobody ever tried to help me as a kid, I'm going to have no allegiance to anything, whatever I can get away with.
I'm going to get away with.
And there's a certain kind of scar tissue that's involved in that that's very healthy to survive this kind of environment when you're a kid.
But the confrontation of the dark side of our own, which we all have.
We all have the capacity to do some really bad things.
We're all raised really badly, right?
I mean, relatively. But I would say that that exploration of your dark side is where, in a sense, your future, your humanity, the richness of relationships, your career and all that, is probably on the other side of that passage.
Right, and hey, that's why I'm in therapy right now, looking at that dark side.
Right, right. And so the last thing that I'll say, sorry, you go ahead.
I was just going to say, yeah, it is very, very difficult to look into the nebulous sort of evil within or, you know, and try to pull it apart and find out what is it, what is so horrible in there or whatever.
Right, and having some sympathy for the survival mechanisms that you had to invoke, right?
I mean, you're sort of bored of a bad guy, and you're not a bad guy now, but during this incredibly difficult family environment of verbal abuse, which, as I said, is the worst of all, you had some survival strategies and survival mechanisms that were essential.
And I think that the warning is really to do with the fact that those survival strategies were essential, and not to own them so much, because it was just an environment that you were in that you had to do what you could to survive.
Right. To own the things that you can, you know, change now.
And so the last thing that I'll sort of say is that sort of when I... This is the evil manipulative side of Steph, right?
So when you began to...
When you avoided the verbal abuse of Niels, I knew for sure that you'd been a verbal abuser, right?
I mean, there's no question. Again, this is not a sole definition of you.
This is just one particular aspect of a brutal childhood that you got through, right?
But I knew for sure, and that's why I sort of was like, you know, keep going on this thread.
But I knew very quickly that the reason that you couldn't see Niels was that you were avoiding yourself.
Huh. Whereas, well, I still feel like I see it in Niels, but I also want to see everything else that's going on.
So, I mean, maybe that's obfuscation.
I'll definitely think more about it, but it's like I want to see the whole picture as well, which I think is a good instinct.
So, you know, partly I want to kind of go forward with it, but partly I totally understand what you're saying.
Like, you know, even if I am, like, saying Niels was wrong and he was abusive, I'm also trying to sort of Justify it in that I'm trying to explain and explore everything around it.
Right. And in order to do that, you need to do what Niels doesn't do, which is you need to confront your dark side.
And of course, you can work on that with your therapist, but another great way to do it is to listen to your brother, right?
Right.
Which is what we're trying to do.
So if I can just jump in and maybe reiterate.
So maybe, Steph, what you're suggesting is that Alex, in looking at his dark side, should look for some corruption, some moral corruption, in terms of how he's treated his brother. in terms of how he's treated his brother.
Yeah, I mean, I don't think he needs to look for it.
I mean, he's certainly aware of it, right?
I mean, I think there's avoidance, and what knows who they would be for anyone, right?
I mean, this is not any weakness.
This is like, why would we want to stick our fingers into an electrical socket, right?
I mean, avoidance is natural.
But I don't think that he needs to look very far, right?
He came from a verbally abusive household.
He had several pretty violent episodes with his brother.
And his brother was clearly, like when the tables were turned, he didn't want to play anymore, which is his brother's experience involuntarily throughout their childhood with this kind of roughhousing.
And as he talks about his incredibly, was it Harvard-educated verbal abusers?
I can't remember the face. Yeah, yeah.
Ivy Leaguers. Right.
And the awful thing, of course, is that your own extraordinarily good language skills come from that same dark pit as your parents' verbal abuse capacities, right?
So, I mean, gold in the shit as well, right?
So, it's all very common. But I don't think he has...
Just don't use the gold to make more shit.
That's what I worry about.
It's like, you know, I've got these language skills and now I can really be an evil troll, you know?
Right, so I don't think he needs to look very far.
The challenge in our histories is not to find out what went wrong, but to find out what was ours, to make restitution where we can, to listen to those that we've harmed, and to really sort of make a commitment to something better.
That's the hard part. Usually it's not that hard to figure out what we've done that's wrong.
It's just hard to accept that based on our desire to see ourselves as great people.
but we can't be great until we take the whole personality and the whole history and put it together.
Okay.
Well, on that, lol, I think it's probably about a little after two, so I'm going to hang up.
Well, thanks so much. I appreciate it.
I appreciate the email.
I appreciate the courage of this conversation.
I know it sucks. And I know it's really annoying and so on, right?
That was Scott saying he was going to hang up.
I'm still here. Oh, okay.
Are we in? Yeah, I think so.
I mean, I think that's it. Okay, yeah.
What I'll do is I'll put this together.
But before I do hang up, I'll just say that, you know, Alex and I talk about this stuff a lot.
You know, we're hanging out and we do kind of talk about these things and...
It's really, I guess it's a unique pleasure, and I guess maybe any advice that you could offer, Steph?
Well, there are some podcasts on So You Think Your Family Was Nice, and I don't know that that would be as essential because I think that you're kind of getting some of that, but I think it could be helpful in differentiating your victimhood as a child versus your power as an adult.
There's also a podcast on...
Confronting your dark side and the power that's sort of involved in that.
And there's lots of Jungian stuff about that, although he's a mystic.
He's good, I think, with the dark side stuff.
But you might want to have a listen to that.
And if you have come up with more questions, I certainly would be happy to share at least my experiences with this stuff.
But yeah, I'd have a listen to a couple of the podcasts.
And it really is just a recognition that we can get angry at having been abused Even though we may have participated, we can get angry at having been put in that situation where that seemed like the best thing we could do.
I mean, that's the horror of it.
Yeah. Cool.
Alright, well, I guess, Alex, I'll see you tomorrow and stuff.
Have a good day. Thanks a mil, guys.
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