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June 4, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:26
782 Eavesdropping on the Dead - A Dream Analysis

A powerful dream analysis about heroism

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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
I think it's something around the 3rd or 4th.
It would be the 4th of June 2007.
And we're going to do a dream analysis, which we haven't done in a while, but I got a strangely beautiful dream sent in by Greg.
And I'd like to have a stab at it and see if we can't make some sense out of it.
And, of course, other people have made some good sense of it already, so I'll just add to that.
But first, let me start with a minor complaint.
You people. For those of you who haven't donated, now would be a good time.
It's been, I don't know, four or five days since the last decent-sized donation, and I would prefer it if you could throw a few shekels my way.
If you're up in the 700s, the people who've donated generously already, this is not intended for you who have been absolutely wonderful, but I think that it may be a reasonable thing to do to throw some shackles my way.
Full-time occupation, server costs, blah, blah, blah.
If you could see your way clear to it, I would hugely appreciate it.
Let's go on with the dream, which was posted by Greg.
Greg's unconscious has been rather quiet for a while, and he's enjoyed enormous peace of mind, of course, because of the aforementioned donations.
Anyway, he says, here is a very brief dream I had late last night.
The first really comprehensible thing to come out of my subconscious since April the 12th.
Well, I think that's better than I've been doing.
The White House is no longer used as an official government building and has been converted into a museum.
I am a custodian working there and my key duty is sweeping out the Oval Office and adjacent rooms.
One day, as I'm sweeping, Reagan's ghost comes in, sits in one of the armchairs next to the desk and stares out the window.
A bit later, Isaac Asimov's ghost, the younger Asimov, not the older, walks in, and the two ghosts play out an original meeting from decades earlier.
This apparently did not happen in real life.
I'm not frightened or shocked by the apparition, because having worked there for years, I know this happens every day, and I know when to expect it.
Indeed, it is why I'm in the office at this time, ready to see it when it happens.
I cannot hear them say anything, so I play a recording of their meeting from a tape player on the Oval Office desk just so I can have some audio to go with the visual spectacle.
As I'm watching the exchange, two security guards are chatting in the hallway, and I overhear one of them call me Backfire as a derogatory nickname because I apparently fart a lot in the dream.
I wake. I have no memory of the words spoken on the tape recorder as I listened in the dream.
Some background. I was a huge fan of both Reagan and Asimov as a teen.
I used to subscribe to Asimov magazine and would frequently try to emulate the stories I read in it, sometimes rewriting endings to suit my tastes.
My mother was a dyed-in-the-wool Chicago Democrat, so bringing Reagan up was a great way to tweak her.
My take. The White House is a clear symbol of authority.
Museums are places where items of reference or rarity are preserved for posterity and education.
Asimov, despite being a sci-fi writer, was ever the rationalist, always a hard-nosed scientist, and his writings were often very anti-authoritarian.
Reagan, of course, is the perfect symbol of the idealized father, an avowed religious mystic and a shining example of arbitrary authority.
Both were powerfully influential intellectual symbols from my adolescence, but why Reagan and Asimov are ghosts and not living people is really puzzling me.
I mean, this is a dream, so they could just as easily have been alive, couldn't they?
During the ghostly meeting, the two are not arguing or debating, but simply discussing something in what seems to be a relatively pleasant way.
I do not know what they are saying at all.
Why is the conversation blocked or hidden from my conscious mind?
In the dream, why am I playing the conversation back from a recording rather than hearing the ghostly voices?
The fact that the White House has been converted into a museum seems to indicate to me that I might be harboring some sort of reverence for something out of my adolescence, but I'm not sure that something is an authority figure.
That I am an employee there, not just a tourist, seems significant as well, but I can't put my finger on why.
The fact that I'm returning to the Oval Office day in and day out to see and hear the same meeting over and over suggests an unresolved conflict, perhaps.
The security guards making snarky comments about my flatulence, clearly a metaphor for being denigrated by an authority figure, but again, I'm not sure how to tie it to the rest of the scene.
again.
So I asked Greg, what were your associations with Asimov?
I understood the Reagan ones, I think, anyway.
And he said he was sort of an idol for me when I was a preteen and early teen.
I kind of imagined Asimov in the way that everyone thinks of Einstein, an inexplicably mountainous genius.
but then I also used to think of Reagan as a moral hero, too.
I read Everything I Could Get My Hands On by Asimov, which, unfortunately, the time wasn't much.
I wrote art at least twice in dozens of other short stories of his and tried to emulate them myself.
I didn't have the patience for more than 500 words at a time back then, though.
I was given a subscription to Asimov's monthly sci-fi digest as a birthday gift and would read a lot of the stories over and over.
Asimov is also an atheist, as you must know.
Has anyone ever read his essay Armies of the Night, a sweeping literary condemnation of creationism?
But I pretended not to realize it then.
It was our little secret.
My dad, interestingly enough, also claimed to be an Asimov fan, though I never once saw him read anything by Asimov.
Mostly he would just talk about Asimov, but would regularly read these serial science fiction books by John Norman about a planet named Gore.
I think I read one of those too. I tried reading this installment, there's a link there, but I hated it.
Lots of laser guns, lusty, half-naked romance, and two-bit philosophizing about alien insect society, but that's about it.
A few additional notations about the dream.
I remember being dressed in a full-length, plain-tan overall suit, like any workman would have on.
No patches, no insignias, and no name tag.
This seems kind of odd, if I was also an employee.
Now, I did a little bit of research to confirm a theory, or to test a theory that I had about the dream, and found out that Isaac Hasimov In 1975, wrote in Isaac's Universe volume on the Diplomacy Guild, he wrote that nations must join together and cooperate to survive.
I don't have the actual article, but this was the summary of it.
And in 1987, he put out in Isaac Asimov's science fiction magazine a strong argument for a unified world government.
And I think that this is something that we all know sort of unconsciously deep down.
So there's this question about...
Is he anti-authoritarian or not?
And, of course, somebody who's atheist but for a unified world government is a communist, right?
I mean, that's a communist desire or perspective, right?
So, here we have...
Two authority figures, one of whom is capitalist but religious, and the other of whom is atheist but communist.
And again, I don't know much about Isaac Asimov's politics, but he sure did have some funny sideburns, and that usually means communism to me.
Well, I don't know. Maybe somebody could correct it some more.
But I do have a theory about the dream, and the theory for me is very different from your take on it, which...
It doesn't mean that it's right.
This is just where I think the dream is.
And I say this sort of having known you for certainly more than a year now and being fascinated, impressed, and awed at times by your progress, right?
I mean, the leaps and bounds that you take are immense and powerful.
And so I'm going to put forward something here which is going to seem...
Startling. It's going to seem startling.
And if there are two words that are going to characterize this podcast, again, another very, very, I think, important podcast.
If there are two words that are going to characterize this podcast, my friend, the words are these.
So what?
And that so what is not aimed at you, but at these two gentlemen, Reagan.
And Asimov. So what?
and I'll tell you what I mean by that, but first of all, let me run through the imagery that I see working in the dream, and you can let me know what you think.
All right, so let's run through the dream as we want to do in general as a whole.
The White House is no longer used as an official government building and has been converted into a museum.
Well, clearly, this is a post-authoritarian environment, if that makes sense.
Post-authoritarian environment.
See, it's really good that the White House is no longer used for official government businesses and been turned into a museum.
That indicates a post-authoritarian, a post-hegemonic environment.
You don't seem to indicate, and neither does the dream, that the seat of government has been moved somewhere else, but there is no government.
There is no government.
At least in this, this is what the dream seems to indicate.
So that's one of the things that I find eerily beautiful about this dream.
My God, wouldn't we love to live in a world where the White House was no longer used as a seat of government and been turned into a museum.
Oh my God!
It would be beautiful.
Sort of a white-collar Auschwitz memorial of where wars and death and murder and destruction were launched from.
Where 1-2% of the population was imprisoned from.
Where the seat of predatory taxation was managed from.
The white-collar gulag would be a wonderful museum to see.
Custodian working there, my key duty is sweeping out the Oval Office and adjacent rooms.
One day, as I'm sweeping, Reagan's ghost comes in, sits in one of the armchairs next to the desk, and stares out the window.
A little later, Isaac Asimov's ghost, the younger one, not the older, walks in.
Two ghosts play out an original meeting from decades earlier.
This apparently did not happen in real life.
There's something strangely beautiful and strangely sad.
This could be me and maybe you feel the same way.
I always, when I think about pleasant...
Ghosts having innocuous conversations.
There's something very beautiful and very sad about that.
Because they're not scary ghosts.
They're not rattling chains. They're not tortured ghosts crying out for blood and vengeance beyond the grave of a hidden murder or something.
They're just ambling ghosts.
They're just chatty, empty ghosts.
They're just ritualistic, nonsense ghosts, right?
There's no hell here. There's no heaven.
There's just a vague habituation.
Like two old ghosts playing chess.
There's something just strange and beautiful and mournful about that image.
That the afterlife is just...
It's not hell.
It's not heaven. It's not nothing.
It's not Dostoevsky's portrait of a A little cabin with spiders on the inside.
It's just a kind of sad, elegiac repeat of innocuous meetings and everyday occurrences.
And there is a murmuring and there is a staring out the window, all of which has a minor chord or key of melancholy to it, to me.
So there's something quite beautiful about this.
Vision of the afterlife of reviewing what was once the seat of power.
What was once the seat of enormous power.
Reagan. Power to wipe out all life on the planet, if he so chose.
And now he's just sitting down having a chat with a writer.
I mean, it's power stripped of power.
Just in the afterlife is stripped of drama, and power, the presidency, is stripped of power.
Just going through the motions, right?
And so this is indicating that this is sometime in the future, or it's sometime in the future relative to when Asimov and Reagan were around, which of course would mean sometime in the future could be now, right, relative to all of this stuff occurring in the past.
Now, the sort of sweet melancholy that I perceive in this dream, I think is also perceived by yourself, right?
Because you yourself say that you're not frightened of the ghosts.
And I think that's quite important.
I get that sort of sense of both enjoying some of the sweet nostalgia of If you've ever looked at photographs of yourself when you're a kid, some long-ago, long-lost holiday by the sea, or some day that you spend on a picnic where there are photos, and I get this sense of sweetness and melancholy even looking at other people's photos.
Like, you look at some even stiff portrait of a Victorian family having tea by the sea, sitting on their Macintosh squares 120 years ago, and you I sort of want to flow into that painting.
I look at all the details of the picture.
How did they choose that shirt?
What happened to that shirt? When was it thrown out?
Was it new? Was it old? When did each one of those people last bathe?
When did the women last have their period?
For me, I want to enter into that and know everything about it.
Which, of course, you can't do, right?
When the last person who knows your face dies, you're just in another anonymous person in a photograph.
But when you look at stuff that occurred for you in the past, for me, if it was a pleasant day when I was a kid, then part of me looks back and I smile fondly and I feel a kind of sweet melancholy in looking back upon those pleasant days long gone in distant lands.
And it's almost hard to tear myself away from the photograph as I look and I'm absorbed by the memories and the smells and the feelings and the vividness of the memory.
But the vividness also fails.
And you know that the accuracy also fails as our lives progress.
The accuracy of our memories decays.
Some of it is remembered and some of it is stuff that's half invented to fill in the gaps.
And, you know, memories are notoriously tricky quasi-documentary.
And I feel this kind of sweet sadness when I look at things in the past, especially where I was.
And it's a little hard to tear myself away from it, to want to go back and almost re-inhabit the day again and look at it from every angle.
And there, I think, is something like this, right?
So this happens every day, right?
So... There is a sense, in a sense, of being trapped in the past here.
Being trapped in the past, but not in a scary past, but in a past that is simply routine, empty, and ineffectual.
Not exactly ineffectual.
I mean, maybe Reagan and Asimov do like to chat at the afterlife.
Who knows, right? But you want to keep going back and hearing what they're saying.
You want to go back and hear what they're saying.
You tape it. You try to tape it.
You can't hear them say anything.
So you play a recording of their meeting from a tape player on the Oval Office desk.
I don't think that has much Watergate resonance, but it certainly might.
So you want to hear what they're saying.
And that is very interesting because, of course, when you were younger and you looked up to these man-gods...
With reverence. You hung on their words, right?
You listened to Reagan. You pondered his speeches.
You rewrote Asimov's stories.
You listened to those stories.
You read them. You immersed yourself in this, right?
You read everything you could get your hands on.
And, of course, I mean, there's minor parallels with this conversation, but I think this is quite different, because this is, in fact, a conversation, right?
This is not me. You didn't have a relationship with Reagan or Asimov.
You have a relationship with me and the other people listening to these words.
So you want to hear what they're saying to each other, these two men that you idolized when you were younger.
And it's almost like you're taking the job, you have the job, so you can hear this.
That's why you're in the office, ready to see it when it happens.
You want to penetrate the mystery of what these men are saying to each other, these man-gods that you worshipped.
And I think I can tell you.
I think I can tell you what they're saying.
And I think the dream is telling you what they're saying.
Because, as you quite rightly point out, The dream itself could easily give you the most remarkable ideas and thoughts and impressions.
I mean, it created the dream, which is an amazing thought and impression.
And so the dream could produce anything that you wanted, anything that you wanted.
The power of the unconscious could put anything into these men's, any words into these men's mouths.
All the wisdom of the ages that is bound up within us, deep within our minds, within our souls, could be summoned and put into the words of these two men.
And you want to hear that as if they have a great secret.
And they do. And they do have a great secret.
And I can tell you what it is.
The great secret, what they're actually saying to each other, Greg, I promise you, is this.
They're saying to each other, so what?
So what? So what?
Ronald Reagan is saying to Isaac Asimov, so...
You were a very prolific writer and published all these magazines.
I don't know, like a hundred books or some damn 500.
You wrote some ridiculous amount of words, right?
Traveled the world. Great success.
Made a lot of money. Books were made into movies.
So what? And Asimov is saying to Ronald Reagan, leader of the free world, won't you?
Sat in this White House.
People paraded before you and prostrated before you and worshipped you.
You filled the fantasies of millions of people.
You signed things into law and you signed things out of law.
You raised the military spending and you pumped up the deficit and you made thunderous speeches.
And you called the Soviet Union an evil empire and you made jokes about bombing it in a microphone when you thought it was off.
Everybody hung on your every word.
Did he dye his hair? Why won't he admit it?
And you had all the power that was available to a single man on the planet.
So what? So what?
So freaking what?
That's what the dream is telling you.
That these people are saying.
Now, these people never say this.
Gertrude Stein did. Gertrude Stein, the most honest lesbian on the planet, on her deathbed.
Gertrude Stein, I think, said to Alice B. Talkless on her deathbed.
What the hell was the point of all of that?
All that we did? What was the point of all that we did?
I mean, she discovered and nurtured Ernest Hemingway and other great writers.
Ford, Maddox Ford, Saturn.
I discovered painters and...
I was good friends, I think, with F. Fitzgerald, if I remember rightly.
Ran a literary salon.
Wrote a rose as a rose as a rose.
Had a wonderful sentence about her brother.
Little by little, we never met again.
And was toasted! As the literary maven and matron.
Paris, I think, she lived in. And at the end of her life, she had the honesty...
She was going to be wheeled in for an operation.
And she said to her wispy codependent companion, so what?
I look back on it all now, and so what?
What have I done? What have I done to change the world?
What have I done to make the world a better place?
What have I done that has any lasting impact?
So what?
What? Hitler's secretary.
Just before he goes in to take his poison.
1945, Berlin is falling.
She thinks, and he makes a speech to everyone before he goes to kill himself.
It's the Allies' approach. And she thinks, now he is going to tell us what it was all about.
Now he is going to reveal everything that he was up to.
And what does he say? Fundamentally, I don't know what it is in German, but what he said was, so what?
So what?
I did all this stuff, so what?
So what?
It was the same tripe that he'd been saying, same cliches, same emptiness, same nothingness that he'd always been spouting, the same energetic fury, concealing empty life-hating nihilisms.
It's just, so what? That's the Hamlet, right?
Quintessence of dust. So what?
And when you think about it, this is an invitation to take your place in the pantheon.
This is an invitation to all of you.
Take your place in the pantheon.
Don't worship men as gods.
Be a god. Be a god.
An honest and persistent and courageous philosopher never has to look back on his life and say, so what?
You and I, my brothers and sisters, are never going to have to look back at the end of our lives and say, so what?
In the way that people like Jung did and in the way that people like Freud did and in the way that Many, many other people in their lives have.
In the way that Churchill continually had to do.
Not even on his deathbed.
But he's faced with his persistent depression.
His black dog, as he called it.
Which was, uh...
So what?
So I've done this and I've done that.
Ran a war. Been in Parliament.
Killed some people they told me to over in the Boer War.
So what? So what?
I know this sounds like a very harsh judgment, but it's not my judgment.
I mean, it is in a way, but I'm just working empirically from what so many people say, who you think would...
F. Scott Fitzgerald drinking himself to death before he was 40.
Incredibly talented man.
Stephen King saying, I'm giving up writing.
I've wasted enough trees with this trash.
What you would think of as one of the most successful authors in the history of the planet.
What does he say? So what?
So what? Bet you if we could hear Shakespeare's last words, it would be something similar.
So what? The people that we worship, we think about it.
All of Isaac Asimov's books, all of Isaac Asimov's books, All of his writing, all of his articles.
Did it stop the growth of tyranny?
Did they? These words?
These stories? These articles?
Did they prevent war?
Did they strike at the root of evil?
No! No, God, but let's have a world government.
Just shift a pile of shit from one end of the seesaw to the other.
Don't drink this poison, it tastes bad.
Drink this poison, it tastes much better.
And Reagan, oh my god, Reagan.
Reading his goddamn feed books and Milton Friedman and Road to Serfdom and Hayek and all these people.
So what? What did you do?
What did you achieve? Oh, I won the Nobel Prize.
So what? That's great for you!
But did you stop tyranny?
I know that this sounds very harsh, and maybe it is too harsh.
But let's just stick with Reagan and Asimov.
So what? So Reagan devoted his life to politics and talked about Make it a smaller government.
Clinton got seven and a half million people off the welfare rolls.
Newt Gingrich had a contract with America and dreamed about how to sell and send handicapped people into space.
So what? So what?
Look at all... Look at...
What has it done? What has it done?
Now, philosophers, I don't think, have to say, so what?
They, I think, very often could legitimately say, my God, what have I done?
What beasts of prey have I loosed on the minds of mankind?
I think they could quite reasonably be expected to say that.
The Hegels, and to some degree the Nietzsche's of the world, But in this dream, you are listening.
Do you want to hear what these ghosts have to say?
They're murmuring to each other.
You try and listen to the recording, but you can't hear it.
And you can't leave.
You go back every day to hear what these, quote, great men are saying.
But the dream is telling you.
Thank you.
They're not saying anything.
You can't hear what they're saying.
Because you're listening for them saying something.
You're listening for them saying something.
And you can't hear what they're actually saying, which is nothing.
Nothing. So what?
These people wrote and talked and published and lectured and tyranny grew and tyranny spread and freedom died.
So I gotta think that if there was an afterlife they'd be looking down and saying well I fucked that up completely didn't I? Oops.
Not really what I wanted.
Not really what I wanted.
Oh, I can see a deer. How beautiful.
Not really what I planned.
Not really what I intended. And so there is a gotta be a so what.
There's got to be a so what.
As loud as the detonation at the birth of the universe floating around the universe of the human mind.
But it doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be that way.
It doesn't have to be that way.
I can't imagine looking back on this conversation on my deathbed and saying, so what?
Because the traction that we're putting on the shoes that can fly towards freedom is substantial.
Because the freedom that we're talking about is not dependent upon the permissions of other people.
The freedom that we're talking about is not dependent on whether or not 20 million other people also vote for Ron Paul.
The freedom that we're talking about is not dependent upon whether Ron Paul fulfills his promises for something other than deportation and stripping the birthright citizenship from people born of illegal immigrants.
Calling somebody a legal immigrant is exactly the same as calling a woman a witch.
It's just empty, hellish mythology.
It's a human being. Oh, born two feet south rather than two feet north.
Oh, totally different human being, right.
And so what I'd like to suggest as a possibility, Greg...
Is that you...
I know this is going to sound weird.
Possibility. Just try it on for size, right?
That you are infinitely bigger than both of these people put together.
That you are infinitely bigger than both of these people put together.
That you are infinitely more powerful, infinitely more knowledgeable, infinitely more wise than both of these people put together.
The dream is telling you they're dead, buried...
Insubstantial, inconsequential, and they're saying nothing to each other, because if they were saying something to each other that you needed to hear, the dream would tell you.
What is the dream telling you?
The dream is telling you that you're staying to hear nothing.
And I've talked about this before, and I will thunder about it again, I am sure.
That we can be far larger than those who came before.
And I know that I've said, and I said on the Sunday show, that I'm immensely in debt to the people who came before.
Of course. Absolutely. Absolutely.
And the way that I want to pay that debt, the way that I want to pay off that debt, is to rescue their disquieted, restless souls from the Living hell of so what?
What did I get done?
What did I achieve? That's the only way that I know that I can do any kind of real respect, I can provide any kind of honor to the people who boosted us so high, is to take their work so much deeper than they were able to go.
And so much wider than they were able to go.
And to crack this unholy mystery of why the world does not become free.
which they wanted, and I respect and massively respect that desire that they had and have.
The only way that I can think of to repay the restless ghosts of the people who failed is to try and take the burden home.
Wow.
Thank you.
to try and crack the Rosetta Stone that they went blind and mad, failing to read, is by going deeper, and And the deeper we go, the bigger we get.
The deeper we go, the bigger we get.
I have a facility to dredge this stuff up and talk about it in a way that connects with people and I think that's great and I'm very happy about that, happy to be of service to the planet as best I can, but I just have the ability to talk about it.
We all have it. Everything that you may think is startling or original in me is what you can do.
What you can do. I'm like the guy who says the word that's on the tip of your tongue.
You already know the word.
You're already searching for the word. It's already on the tip of your tongue.
I just said it two seconds before you did.
If you look at the size and scope and depth of this conversation, this is wider and deeper and further, I think, than anybody, any conversation has gone before.
Which means that those we thought of as giants are not giants.
Those we thought of as giants are not giants.
Because if we're going deeper, we're bigger.
And I know there's a lot of skepticism about this approach.
How are we going to free the world? By defooing.
I mean, it's so completely counterintuitive.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. My parents were bad.
Fuck it. Let's go save the world.
No, no, no. It is that impatience and that lack of introspection.
It is the haste that has crippled it all always before.
The endless haste of let's get something done.
Let's stop talking. Let's stop talking.
Let's stop thinking. Let's stop doing dream analysis and go vote for Ron Paul.
All been tried.
All failed.
If you look at the fact in this dream that you are in service to inconsequential ghosts who say nothing that is audible, *laughs*
that the power is gone But the people are not, which means, of course, the souls, the spirits, the undead.
The power was not Reagan, because Reagan's still there, right?
His essence, his soul, but the power is gone.
It's just a museum. It's just a museum.
And you really are sticking around, waiting to hear what they're going to say.
What are these great men going to say?
And they're just mumbling and mumbling.
So what? So what?
So what? Oh, you're a great science fiction writer.
Published a lot of books. So what?
The world went to hell anyway.
Oh, you're a great president.
You brought down communism, so they say.
What you really proved is that deficits don't matter.
You did all these things.
Made all these speeches.
So what? So what?
In the broad sweep of history, what did you do?
What did you do? Nothing.
Nothing. Machine of the world just rolled on.
You thought you were riding it, but you were riding it like an ant rides a steamroller.
I mean, I can't tell you how big I think we have to be To win.
I can't tell you.
We have to be bigger than the people who came before us.
We have to be bigger. And the only way that I know to get bigger is to go deeper.
To go deeper and deeper into the instincts, into the guts, into the infernal and beautiful machinery at the base of our souls.
To take apart the deepest aspects of human power and certainty.
That's the only way. Maybe there's another way.
I don't know how to get bigger without grandiosity.
I don't know how to get bigger without vanity, without going deeper.
I don't know how to get more powerful without leveling others, without putting other people down the only way that I know how to become as big as we need to be is to go so deep that we trust without putting other people down the only way that I know how to become as big as we need *whispers* Because I know how big we have to be.
We have to be bigger than history. We have to be Nietzsche's supermen.
We have to. Because massively large and powerful souls have completely failed in arresting this hellish cause.
More power, more subjugation, more brutality.
For an ever and ever amen. Well, we have to be big enough to stop that.
We have to be bigger than history.
We have to be bigger than the freaking history of the species.
I don't know how to do that without becoming megalomaniacal.
Without going deep. Without going to the roots of family and the unconscious.
Without both showing and provoking Incredibly deep and instinctual wisdom over and over and over again until people say, well now that I recognize it, I can recognize that I've got it.
When Steph does a dream analysis and part of it gives me goosebumps, that's because I can do it too.
When Steph nails someone productively and frees them from a paralyzing defense in three posts, which is more to the credit of the person I'm talking to than me...
I admire that because I can do it.
I mean, what we have to do is to redefine what people think of as knowledge, which is an incredibly deep and instinctive understanding of the world.
Always validated by rationality.
Always using the scientific method.
That's fine.
I'm always down for that.
And I think that it's not accidental that this dream has two empty, murmuring, insubstantial nothings where your idols used to be.
you are.
And the moment that you get that the ghosts are saying, run, there's nothing here.
Leave. There's nothing here.
There's empty. Ashes.
Failure. Shame.
So what? So what?
What did we do? We thought we were so great.
What did we do? We were seduced by power.
We were seduced by fame.
We were seduced by money. We were seduced by talent.
And we served that which we despised.
And we left the world worse off than when we started.
Was the world more free or less free when Asimov died?
He lived to be like 300 years old or something.
Freaking sideburned Methuselah.
Methuselah? Methuselah.
Was the world more free or less free when Reagan died?
Well, I'm telling you people, I don't care if I have to sweat my soul's last drop of blood out, the world is going to be more free when I die than when I was born.
And I have no control over the political.
But I sure as hell continue to bug everyone about their families, which is how I think it's going to work.
And if it doesn't work, it won't be because I didn't do something that I could have done.
It won't be because I didn't try hard enough, and it won't be.
That'll be up to you. That'll be up to you.
Whether you think... If the size of soul that we have to achieve is being one of millions of voters, if that's as being another ant in the voting colony, if that's the size of soul that you think we need to win, I think you're mistaken.
If you need to have the size of soul wherein Asimov and Reagan are insustantial ghosts saying nothing, I think you're on the right track.
I truly, truly think that you're on the right track.
And maybe there's been a genetic tweak that gives us access to these depths that wasn't available in Socrates' time or maybe even a few generations ago.
I don't know. Maybe we're the new band, even genetically.
I doubt it. But, you know, there's some step that we have to take that is just so much larger than anything that came before.
And nobody has to take it, of course.
You can do what you like, right? You can do what you like, but nothing less will do.
Nothing less will do. We have to be so big that we can look at people like Reagan and Asimov as the insubstantial, regretful, restless, blind, depressed ghosts that they actually were in real life.
World government.
What a clusterfuck.
This from a man who knows better.
Did he suggest to world government in science that scientific truth should be determined by bureaucrats with guns?
I don't think so.
It's always for the other people, right?
This tyranny is always, always for the other people.
Not for you, right?
The government should force people to do charity.
It should never force me to choose a wife or a job.
It's for other people. And why couldn't Asimov see this?
Man was smart enough. Man was brilliant at an IQ of 12 million.
Why couldn't he see it?
If we can't answer that question, we can't save the world.
If we can't answer the question, why can't people see it?
We can't save the world, my friends.
We can't. Because you can't fix what you don't and not.
You can't be a dermatologist and read an x-ray and be blind.
If we can't figure out why the smartest people on the planet can't see these incredibly obvious contradictions.
If we can't understand Why Ron Paul says that any initiation of the use of force is immoral, and I'm going to deport 10 million people and deny birthright citizenship to people here illegally, blah, blah, blah.
If we can't understand why somebody intelligent enough to be a doctor and a politician can't see that basic contradiction, we can't figure that out, we're not going to win.
And now that we're on the road, there's no turning back.
I think I mentioned this a little bit earlier.
Now that we're on this road, there's no turning back.
We can't turn back. What are we going to do?
Unlearn what we've learned? Or learn to love a blind and vengeful species?
No. There's no turning back.
We can't forget the knowledge that we have.
And we can't love the blind and self-contradictory when we love truth and integrity and virtue, consistency, honesty.
We can't turn back.
We have no choice but to push on, and the only possible destination that we can have, as stage one at least, is why do incredibly intelligent people not notice that there's a gun in the room?
That's the whole thing. That's all we're talking about.
Why do incredibly intelligent people not notice that there's a gun in the room?
Why do incredibly intelligent people create brutal rules for other people that they would never submit to themselves?
Did Isaac Asimov say that the way that the publishing world should work is there should be one central publishing agent run by religious people that get to shoot any author who dares publish without their permission?
Of course he didn't.
If you proposed this to him, he would laugh in your face.
If you said, hey, Isaac, I got a great idea.
Let's have world publishing. Forget this world government thing.
Let's have a world publishing. Same thing with Sam Harris.
Oh, world government. World government.
No, no, forget world government.
That's too ambitious. Let's go with world publishing.
Let's have world publishing, where a bunch of crazy people with guns get to say, who gets published and who doesn't?
And if you publish, see, without their permission, without their stamp of approval, they can shoot you.
Or they'd laugh. They'd say, that's ridiculous.
People should be free to publish whatever they want.
We need competition. We need the free market.
Because, you see, that's their fucking bread and butter.
And they're rich and notorious enough that they don't need the same political freedoms everyone else does.
They've got their villa, their Dachau on the Black Sea.
So why is it that incredibly intelligent people can't see this?
Well, I didn't see it for a long time.
And it wasn't until I freed myself from my family that I could see it.
And I think other people have had them in...
I always experiment on myself.
I'm the first person to take the quinine and see if it helps with the malaria.
I'm always experimenting on myself first.
And how do we become big?
How do we become big enough to lead humanity to this truth without becoming arrogant and dismissive and contemptuous and scornful and...
Peremptory and self-righteous and all that.
Some people would say, I have not always succeeded at that, and that may be true.
How do we become big enough to be bigger than history without becoming arrogant?
Well, we have to go deep. And that's where this dream is putting you.
That's where this dream is putting you.
That's where this dream is putting you.
Thank you.
It's telling you that you are far bigger than those that you worshipped.
This is what science has had to do.
Science has to be bigger than God.
Science has to be bigger than the universe.
We have to be bigger than history.
We have to be bigger than the unconscious.
We have to be bigger than blindness.
We have to be bigger than the history of the family that strikes vapid and unintelligent the greatest brains in the world.
We have to be bigger than clichés.
We have to be bigger than familial bromides.
We have to be bigger than blood propaganda.
We have to be bigger than the deepest histories of people's deepest childhood experiences.
We have to go into the prehistory of the individual and uncouple the shield that blocks sight.
And if we're going that deep, we have to go even deeper in ourselves.
We have to be below this stuff that blinds everybody, which is so primal and so instinctive and so deep.
We have to be even deeper than that.
We have to swim up to unplug this mess.
And it annoys people I know on the board when I ask them about their histories.
It's totally clear to me.
Totally clear to me. Guy I was debating with about Ron Paul, praxeology.
Guy doesn't know what to do with his own parents.
I knew that.
I knew that. That was clear.
If you're pro-Ron Paul, you haven't defoot.
You don't know the truth about your family.
That's why you have illusions about Ron Paul.
It's not about Ron Paul. It's about your family.
I kept saying that. And people get annoyed with me.
And I totally understand that.
If you haven't been down there, you don't know how clear the view is.
You don't know how clear the levers are that are working everyone.
You don't know how obvious this song is.
People get irritated. What are you talking about my family for?
We're talking about Ron Paul. It's like, no.
You're talking about your family in the guise of Ron Paul.
I know you're talking about your family.
I know. And people get annoyed.
But they only get annoyed because they know, too.
And I know. It lends me wide open to all of these, oh, well, whenever you're losing an argument, you just psychologize and blah, blah, blah.
There's a reason that Greg's unconscious was quiet for almost two months and then gave him this A dream that says, if you try to listen to people you worship as if they have something to say that puts them so far above you, then you are a custodian, a janitor.
You are mere menial labor.
labor.
And that's why I think the dream is so beautiful.
That you're lingering in the aftermath of power, listening to people you used to worship, thinking that they have something The dream is telling you they have nothing to say.
They're dead and gone. You are alive.
They are dead. That illusion is dead and you have to let it go and it's terrifying to let it go.
It is terrifying to let it go.
It is terrifying to be large.
It is beyond terrifying to say that I can be larger than history.
I can be larger than a president.
I can be larger than a science fiction writer.
I can be bigger than history.
I can be bigger than human history.
It's terrifying. It feels ridiculous.
But it's where we have to go to finish what we started here.
I mean, what evil hellish fairy Stamped on our foreheads, thou must be small when we were born.
Who said that? Who said that we couldn't be big?
Who said that we couldn't be bigger than history?
Who said that we couldn't start something new and powerful and wonderful and unprecedented?
Who said that we could not complete the conversation that Socrates started over 2,000 years ago?
Who said that we couldn't finish the circle?
I don't remember that being barred from me.
I don't remember signing up to say, you can be born, Steph, but you have to be just smaller than everyone who came before.
You can be born, but you can't try and complete the great work of history.
You can't. You can't.
I don't remember signing anything like that.
I really, really don't. And until somebody can show my pudgy little pre-baby hands having signed something like that, Then yes, I will try to finish the conversation that Socrates started over 2,000 years ago.
Because I love this fucking planet, people.
I love this planet.
And my God, look, look, look at how much we've been able to do in months.
Months. Mere months. Not even years.
Mere months. Look what we've been able to do.
Do you see what unbelievable, unleashed potential there is in the species?
We literally could be gods on this planet.
We are! But we just make ourselves so small.
We worship at this altar of emptiness of others, of heroes.
Well, no, no, no.
Don't love a hero, be a hero.
Don't look up to others.
Don't look down on others.
Be as big as the universe allows.
And I'm telling you, we're not even close to the limit.
We're not even close to the limit.
We can be 10,000 times bigger than we are now.
Bigger, deeper, more knowledgeable, more powerful, more wise, stronger, more courageous.
We have magnitudes and multitudes to go.
And we are magnitudes and multitudes ahead of most.
But there was no contract that I signed that I had to stay small, that I could not dream big, that I could not dream the biggest dream of all, which is freeing the world from force and abuse and governments and gods and bad families.
I never signed any such prenup.
And why? Is it impossible?
Well, no. We already had a Socrates.
Why can't we be the next ones?
Why not? What one man can do, another man can do.
And with the hindsight of history and the knowledge that we have now and the community that we could have now that could never exist before, we can't finish the job.
Yeah, you could say that it's never finished, but this will be a step forward to the point where we can at least call Socrates' starting point finished, if not the end of everything.
And I think that's what the dream's about.
I think the dream is about the size and the power that we need to have, and we need to stop worshipping people, especially politicians and writers who advocated world governments, incredibly intelligent, exquisitely retarded people.
I mean, he was a pen savant, Asimov, and Reagan was a vocal or political savant.
But we can't worship these mutants.
We can. We can do whatever we want.
But we're just worshiping fantasy, which evaporates us, right?
Evaporates us. They're not saying anything to each other, my friend.
But so what? And when the people that we have worshipped in the past, when we hear what they're actually saying in the afterlife, which is so what?
What they're really saying is fix it.
Fix it. Fix what I could not.
Fix what I could not.
Save the world that I could not save.
Love humanity in a way that I could not manage.
Dredge the depths up in the glory of the human soul and make it visible.
Because we couldn't do it.
And they're passing us the torch, and we have got to be so much bigger than they were that it is terrifying, and it is disorienting, and it is so essential.
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