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June 12, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:16
796 Radical Intimacy

A solution to our endless right-angle relationships

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Oh, just before we begin the podcast, I wanted to mention that I will be guesting on Free Talk Live, June 13, 2007.
That's tomorrow night, June 12, today.
So, if you can tune in, just go to freetalklive.com.
Thank you so much. Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's definitely...
12 o'clock-ish on the 12th or 13th, I think, of June 2007.
And a short bit of business, if you don't mind, before we start underway with today's topic, which is questions, comments, issues from listeners.
I just wanted to go over a short bit of business with regard to Freedom Aid Radio.
And that short bit of business is this, that...
I have created on the website an area for donators, and there are five donation levels, five escalations of donations.
If you have not donated at all, then you have no icon.
What you do get, though, for free, is A copy of a couple of chapters that I have read in the form of short stories from one of my novels called Almost, which I think that you might well enjoy, which is available.
You can just go to the homepage of freedomaderadio.com forward slash board, B-O-A-R-D, and click on the files icon.
And you can view and download.
Now, if you've donated anything up to $50, you get a free copy of my master's thesis, which I think is actually quite a good document.
It discusses four major philosophers, lots of annotated footnotes and philosophical goodness in that, and you get a copy of that for free.
And $50, that's a bronze donation.
$50 to $100 is a silver donation.
And you get a copy of The God of Atheists, my novel in PDF format.
$100 to $200, you get...
The God of Atheists PDF or audiobook format and any other novel that you want.
And then at the $200 plus level you get a kidney and apparently harvesting rights on my firstborn.
So you just get lots of novels and other sorts of goodies.
I am also releasing a certain Number of podcasts through this mechanism.
So, I had a very exciting and challenging debate about free will versus determinism with a listener recently, and I've posted that in the members section, the premium content of Free Domain Radio.
And I also posted my final thoughts on the board conflict, a wrap-up and a summary, and a perhaps quite controversial metaphor for understanding my approach to it.
That's also available for Silver donators and above, 50 bucks and above.
And I'm going to continue to add to this area.
You can get an RSS feed, which will let you know when new content is added to that.
But in my continuing quest to try and find some way to manage the predictability of donations, I have decided to start rewarding people who have donated and are working hard to support it.
The advertising budget for Free Domain Radio...
It's $100 a day at the moment.
So that's obviously $3,000 or so a month.
I'm using StumbleUpon, which for $100 I get 20,000 people to come to the site, of which About a thousand, it's about 5% to 7% will dig deeper into it, and from there I hope, of course, that some donations will trickle forward.
I have added some donation requests to the earlier podcast because there's a big gap there.
It could be months and months of listening before people hear a donation request after FDR0, so that's been put in place.
I've also been asked for a number of times for book recommendations, so I'm putting together a section to do with that, with flow-through revenues to come from Amazon for books that people buy after being recommended by this show, so just a little bit of business there to let you know.
And if you are listening to this and you want access to the premium content, And you don't have a board account.
If you could come and create me one and just email me, that would be excellent.
I don't have anything automated set up with PayPal wherein you log in and you get an automatic.
I have to do it by hand, which is no huge deal, but please let me know.
If you have donated and, you know, you switched an email or used a different email for your board account and you're not set up for the premium content, just let me know and I will do that for you.
So, that's how that works.
And you can leave comments and you can have discussions in the premium section of the board.
So, I hope that, of course, those are the ones I'm going to answer first, right?
Obviously, I am a slave to donators.
I work for you.
So, that's I will be on the Mark Stevens show Saturday, this coming Saturday, mid-June 2007, and tomorrow evening, Wednesday night, I will be on Free Talk Live, so you might want to tune into that.
That will be quite an exciting burst of exposure for us, so I hope that that will help.
All right, let's get to the meat of the matter.
This is Podcast 790, the gentleman who...
Who I talked about with some hopefully productive emphasis with regards to his father and moral corruption and so on, has written, I think, a very excellent response, so I'm going to read that to him with minor commentary, I guess. All right.
So he says, I've commented on my decision to use the phrase free domain philosophy elsewhere, but I'll repeat it here.
I used the aforementioned phrase to collectively describe the myriad theories you've posited here at free domain and included it only because I thought it was an effective way to convey such a meaning, not because I believe that the free domain philosophy exists in reality.
Well, I appreciate that, and I did see that post after I had made the podcast.
So, I appreciate that.
I would say, though, that...
People never use the word ideology to describe a positive thought system.
Ideology is always used to describe A sort of hard-edged, psychologically motivated and murky in strange ways.
I don't know. Stalin hated, sorry, Karl Marx hated his dad.
Ideology is always a rigid mental construct usually driven by emotional problems.
So nobody uses ideology to describe something in a positive manner.
So when you use the word ideology in that paragraph or the paragraph just after, I did not assume that I was not in any way implying that you formulate and promote your theories for money.
As I mentioned in the previous thread, I think you misunderstood the jump on the bandwagon line and its context.
The statement was made in response to your remarks somewhere in the Family and State series that a byproduct of defooing is financial gain.
Such as the money saved that would otherwise have been spent on gifts and travel expenses, etc.
Again, I repeat that I am no way meant to suggest that you're in this for the money.
Well, I think that may be a bit specious.
I would have to really check the timeline of this, but I'm pretty positive that I did not post that podcast.
That podcast was posted...
No, no, you're absolutely right.
No, but I didn't post the...
No, you know what?
I'm going to have to check.
I'm going to have to check. But jump on the bandwagon absolutely means that you're doing something for the money.
Jumping on the bandwagon is like...
If you've ever seen the show Entourage, right?
There's this guy who's got some friends who, you know, he's a movie star and they're his entourage.
Jumping on the bandwagon means that you're grabbing a hold of some unearned value, right?
That you're just jumping on the bandwagon, right?
So, if there is a popular book about atheism and then you write a book about atheism hoping to catch the trend, then you're just jumping on the bandwagon, right?
So, I mean, that's what the phrase means.
Like, I'm... I don't know what that means in terms of saving money from defooing or whatever, but jumping on the bandwagon, again, is not a positive statement.
I mean, it's just no question that is designed to say to people that they are grabbing something, not illicitly or evilly, but not something particularly earned, and it's a shallow and acquisitive approach to values and so on.
So I would just say jumping on the bandwagon is not A positive phrase, and it does mean something to do with a vaguely amoral cash grab that is usually not particularly earned.
You deride my decision, he says, to use the rouse-hostile opening in my post.
Fair enough. I won't object. It was, in hindsight, immature, and I regret doing it.
I do, however, have a question.
You are proud. That's probably not at all the right term to use, but it's the best I can come up with for now.
Of the fact that you openly and freely expressed your emotions in a podcast where you wept over the dilemma of doing FDR full-time.
This was undoubtedly commendable, and I can't praise you enough for being courageous enough to do it.
But it's not anger, such as I express just as valid an emotion as fear or sadness.
Well, of course it is. But I admit my understanding of the true-self-false-self theory is not strong, bordering on non-existent.
Perhaps I'll take you up on your suggestion to blah, blah, blah.
I suppose it's because anger is inherently destructive, or sadness is not.
Well, no. First of all, I'm not proud of that.
You know, it wasn't easy to be that vulnerable to a large group of unknown people who can all get in touch with me very quickly and easily, but it's not something I'm proud of.
It's not like, ooh, look, I'm so great, I can weep.
But it's not that I consider anger to be destructive at all.
Anger is a very healthy emotion.
But passive aggression is not anger.
It's designed to provoke anger in others.
It's manipulative. It's not real emotion.
It's a false self thing. It's designed to manipulate, to destabilize, to insult in a covert manner, right?
So it's things like using the word ideology rather than philosophy.
It's using the words, you know, I don't think you did in this phrase, you know, clinging to a belief rather than, you know, holding a belief.
Clinging to an illusion rather than, you know, believing in something.
All of these, it's the language that's used to insult an availed A manner that is destructive.
And that's not anger.
That's petty hostility, immaturity.
It's not honest and open.
Anger is very honest and open.
And it's appropriate.
When somebody openly insults us unjustly, then we can be angry at that person, and I think that's perfectly healthy.
But when we imagine an insult from somebody who's trying to put forward a theory in general and we attack that person, that's just fear, that's defensiveness, that's hostility, and that's not honest, right?
Again, I'm not saying you're dishonest.
I'm just saying that's sort of my differentiation between the two, right?
Anger is honest and appropriate and accurate and not easy, right?
Getting angry is easy.
Getting, you know, hostile is easy, easy, right?
But as Aristotle said, you know, it's very hard...
To get angry in the right way, at the right time, in the right circumstance, based on the right stimuli, and at the right person, and so on.
It's not easy, right? But it takes a fair amount of, well, it takes years of, at least it took for me, years of therapy to get close to where it is that I want to be in terms of being able to express that kind of stuff, so...
If your desire is to honestly communicate your feelings, that's great.
If your desire is to attack the other person because you're upset, that's false self.
That's manipulative. That's destructive.
So he says, you criticized me for not discussing the argument for morality with my father.
First of all, I don't criticize you for that.
I don't want to sound like, oh my god, I'm a three decimal place person, but I didn't criticize you for doing it.
For not discussing it, I just pointed out that you hadn't, and that there was important consequences to that decision to avoid the core of what it is that we talk about here.
And the only reason to have an ethical debate with somebody, fundamentally, or debate about society, is to work from the argument for morality.
So, I didn't criticize you.
I mean, it's not bad. It's just that it's instructive, right, to somebody who's looking in.
Your assumption, however, he says, is entirely incorrect.
The argument for morality... The 10 minutes you spent castigating me over this is unwarranted.
Although I didn't explicitly list the AFM as something covered with my father...
Well, the immorality of the state is not a principle.
Again, I'm totally nitpicky from this sort of standpoint, but this stuff is broad enough that...
Right, I mean, this is, you know, this is my perspective.
I don't mean, you know, I could be totally wrong with this, but if you're teaching somebody multiplication, right, and they're doing the times table, right, 12 times 12, 144, then have they memorized the answers or do they understand the principles, right?
So, if you say, what's 12 times 12?
144. It's like, okay, what's 12 times 13?
If they don't know, then clearly they've just memorized answers rather than understanding principles, and thus being able to derive the answers themselves.
The immorality of the state is not an argument for morality.
It's an effect of the argument for morality.
It's a conclusion. It's not a methodology.
It's not a principle. The scientific method is a principle.
The theory of relativity is...
A result of the application, one result of the application of those principles.
So, the argument for morality forms the basis, right?
So, if you think that...
I mean, it's complicated stuff.
This is just what I think, right?
But if you think that the immorality of the state is a principle, then you don't understand the argument for morality, at least according to what you say here.
And it certainly has been...
Pretty heavily gone into throughout the podcast series in 790, I assume you've read, I've listened to or read, you know, quite a few.
So... Again, the desire not to work from first principles is instructive, as it was before.
Here I think you fell prey to the large potential for error when psychologizing someone based off a small forum post, which of course I completely agree on.
This is a very dangerous thing to do. I made the mistake of not disclosing all the facts I admit, and so I take the blame here, but still you shouldn't have made such a claim in the absence of all necessary details.
But, certainly I don't have all necessary details, but you don't need all necessary details.
You don't need to measure every rock to find out that there's such a thing as gravity, right?
So, I think that you're...
Confirming what I thought, right?
That you're reluctant to approach things from the argument for morality perspective.
You have either misread my post or forgotten exactly what it is that I said, he continues.
I did not say that my father loved nothing more than to have philosophical conversations with me, but rather that he loved nothing more than to have any conversations with me, even if it was about philosophy, which, as I mentioned, is not his greatest of interests.
Sorry, it's bug central here.
To be honest, I don't like the way you portray me as self-absorbed by making such a claim.
I only do so because the emotive and physical cues given off by my dad suggest that it is true.
Okay, maybe it does sound a little self-absorbed.
Well, I don't know that I misread your post.
I certainly do understand that you also ask your father if he would like a coffee, how he's feeling today, what he had for lunch.
I'm absolutely sure that you don't call your dad, play a section of a podcast and say, Dad, go!
Don't talk about anything else.
I don't want to hear about your health or your business.
So clearly, but that's not what we're talking about.
Clearly, you have conversations with your dad that don't just involve philosophy.
I mean, naturally, you have information about your dad that's not philosophical in nature, which you put in the post.
So I fully understand that, and I accept that, and that all seems like entirely fine.
But... That wasn't what we were discussing in the conversation, right?
What we were discussing in the conversation was conversations about values with family members.
Right? So... I just, I'm not sure exactly what, I guess you feel that maybe I'm saying that, or I'm implying that you bore your dad with philosophy or whatever, I don't know, but it's sort of like going to a doctor and say, Doc, my arm hurts, and he starts working on your arm, and then you say, well, but what about all the other parts of me that don't hurt, right?
It's like, but they don't hurt. They're not what we're here for, not what we're discussing, right?
So since you're of trouble with the conversation was to do with values conversations with your father, that's what I focused on.
And then to say, but I talk about lots of other things with him, I think is...
I'm just missing something kind of important, right?
Which is that that's the issue, and that's where it hurts, right?
You said this is where it hurts, right?
So that's what we talk about.
I mean, yeah, of course, there's tons of other things you talk about with your dad, but...
You describe my attempts to praise my father as a sales job.
That is, I think, an important point.
You repeat that I have doubts about my father, a presumption I knew was coming after I made the post in question.
Well, I realize that this is going to sound facetious, but it really feels like you have to jump through hoops around here to prove that your affection for a family member or friend is actually genuine.
If I don't praise my father, it seems you assume I don't think I'm worthy of praise.
If I do praise my father, it seems you assume that I'm trying to bury subconscious knowledge that he is corrupt.
When you, Steph, announce your love for your wife, I assume you're being honest.
When I do the same for my father, you assume I'm not.
I think your response to this will be along the lines of, no one was criticizing your father, it was you who brought him up, which you raised very briefly in the podcast.
If that is the direction you're heading, it may not have been, but hear me out anyway, I responded by saying that in 790 plus podcasts, I don't think there is probably more than 30 minutes devoted to actually praising the family.
After hearing your expansive definition of corrupt, under which it seems all families fall, I felt I had to leap to the defense of the family.
Ridiculous, I know, because it seems that I'm one of the only people around here whose personal experience has given them a favorable view of the family and its potential, hence why I felt comfortable bringing out my father.
But again, I feel that I can't say all that without people assuming I'm hiding something.
Well, look, I understand that, and boy, if I had a dollar of donation for every time somebody said that I hated the family because of my psychological history, or my familial history, I would in fact not have to podcast at all because I would be retiring and rubbing suntan lotion on my nipples in some Bahamian resort. I would in fact not have to podcast at all So that is not part of the plan at the moment, but perhaps it can be.
So, yeah, absolutely.
I understand that it's an impossible situation where you feel that...
If you don't praise someone, then someone says, well, see, you don't like that person.
And if you do praise them, somebody says, ah, you're being defensive and you're projecting.
I understand that sort of Freudian maze or the trap with no way out.
So let me just sort of put it on the record here so that people understand what I am talking about.
Now, you should know enough about Free Domain Radio by now...
790 podcasts, you reference them, so I assume you've listened, right?
So, and this is why I think that the sort of principle thing that you're still missing is important to talk about.
Let me lay it out for you, my brother.
Not that it's true, just where I'm coming from, right?
If there's one thing that's core to philosophy, it is that, or empirical philosophy, is that concepts don't exist.
Concepts don't exist.
Concepts, because they don't exist, don't have moral qualities.
It's like saying, man, a man, is he good or bad?
Well, I don't know. Men, as a whole, are they good or bad?
I don't know. Concepts don't have moral qualities.
You can't cut down the concept of a forest and build a fire on it.
So, when people say, Steph, you are pro-family.
Steph, you are negative family, anti-family.
Well, they're just showing that they don't understand philosophy.
And I'm just going to say free-domain.
I'm not going to say free-domain philosophy.
I'm just going to say philosophy because we understand that that's what I'm talking about here.
Concepts do not exist.
Family is a concept.
Can you have your family in the room if nobody but you is present?
Of course not! Can you eat the concept of dinner?
Can you spend the idea of money?
Well, of course not! So, to be pro-family and anti-family, Or to say that, Steph, you're a pro-family or anti-family is complete nonsense.
And I only say complete nonsense not because I think you're stupid.
I think you're very, very smart.
Language skills are fantastic.
Brilliant. But you don't get the basics, right?
And after 790 podcasts, given your intelligence, there's a reason for that.
That's sort of all I'm getting at. They're the reason why you avoid principles after having listened to probably close to five to six hundred hours straight of philosophy based on empiricism and a critique of platonic forms and a critique of the idea that concepts have moral or epistemological validity.
It's not accidental.
It's not accidental that you avoid this core stuff, right?
So, I don't praise or condemn families any more than I praise or condemn Crowds.
You know, like Greenpeace saying, well, you can cut down all the trees, just leave the idea of the forest standing, because that's what we're here to save.
Well, doesn't make any sense, right?
So you can't be pro-family or anti-family at all.
You can only judge the interactions of individuals.
You can only judge the interactions, behaviors, utterances, and so on of individuals.
So... You know, the funny thing is that the one time he says, well, you keep saying that you love your wife.
And then he says, I don't think there's more than 30 minutes devoted to actually praising the family.
But you can't praise the family.
You can't condemn the family.
You can only praise and condemn individuals and behaviors and ideas.
Ideas about the family, not concepts themselves.
You can't blame numbers.
You can't say numbers are wrong.
You can say a mathematical theorem is wrong.
You can't say family is wrong.
You can say family's actions, theories about families, true, false, whatever, right?
So the amazing thing is that people say, well, Steph, you just condemned the family.
And I can't understand that.
And frankly, it's mildly offensive, but it doesn't really matter.
I mean, is Christina not my family?
Is my wife not part of my family?
Everyone says that I'm anti-family, and I have the happiest family life that I can conceivably imagine.
Yeah, we don't have kids yet, but that doesn't mean we're not a family.
She's my wife. She listens to me about Freedom Aid Radio.
She provides the most wonderful and fantastic feedback and helps watch my back at all times.
She's in on every Sunday show.
She's done almost 20 Oscar therapists, call-in shows where she's led talks on depression.
And she's not a natural public speaker.
She doesn't like it in particular, but she knows that it's very important what it is that I'm trying to do here.
So she's more than happy to pitch in.
She's magnificent, wonderful, amazing.
And so I find it astounding that people think that I'm anti-family.
I have a family that is the most wonderful, beautiful, amazing thing in the world.
But not because of the concept of family, but because of the specific actions of my wife.
So I just, again, I just don't find it at all understandable, sort of very fundamentally, how it is that people can come up with somehow the idea that I'm Anti-family.
I'm anti-hypocrisy, anti-corruption.
And you say it's an expansive definition of corruption?
I don't know that it's that expansive.
I really don't think that it is that expansive at all.
My definition of corruption is using ethics to destroy ethics, using integrity to destroy integrity.
The blatant hypocrisy of using values to undermine and destroy values.
That seems pretty specific.
I'm not sure what expensive means. My entire post, he says, was based off and in response to your previous definition of corrupt, which was, I repeat, anyone who considers philosophy to be merely an academic abstract pursuit and who does not apply philosophy to their own lives.
Actually, that's not my definition of corruption, and I'm not going to go back and try and find it in the podcast.
And I do apologize if I said that, gave that impression.
But again, after 790 podcasts, jumping on a single phrase just seems a little bit like there's a context for these things.
And one of the reasons that I put out more than one podcast is so that people can understand empirical philosophy in context, right?
In context. So, no, it's not corrupt to consider philosophy merely an academic discussion.
I would say that in terms of using values to destroy values, If somebody says philosophy is completely unimportant, I think it's a complete waste of time when you could be doing better, more pleasurable, funner things. I'm not saying that's particularly bright or, you know, helpful, but that's consistent, right?
But The problem that I have is somebody...
And again, I'm not talking about your dad in particular here, I'm just sort of talking in general.
Somebody who says, well, I'm willing to talk about philosophy for hours, but I don't think that it has any value.
Or, I'm willing to admit that the state is morally evil, but I'm going to continue to support its existence.
Right? I mean, you either reject the values, or you accept the conclusions.
You can't be...
You can't have integrity...
And live in opposition to values that you accept.
You just can't. That's the definition of integrity, is living in accordance with the values you accept.
I mean, Hitler had integrity.
I'm going to kill the Jews. Hey, look at me.
I'm killing Jews. It's not the same as ethics, but it certainly is living with doing what you say.
Say what you're doing. Say what you're going to do, and do what you're going to say, and do what you say.
So, I mean, the definition of a hypocrite, right?
Again, this is not me, this is just the world, right?
The definition of a hypocrite is somebody who acts in complete opposition to the values that he espouses.
So, if somebody says that philosophy is important, or integrity or values are important, and then acts in complete opposition to those, then yeah, that's kind of corrupt.
But it's not just somebody who says...
It's an abstract pursuit, right?
If I say, I don't care about nutrition, and I just eat whatever the hell I want, I mean, it may not be particularly bright or helpful, but it's certainly not hypocritical.
But if I say, nutrition is essential to a happy life, good health is important, shows self-respect, and blah, blah, blah, and then I just eat a whole bunch of junk and never exercise, well, that's kind of hypocritical, right?
That's kind of corrupt. So, that's my distinction.
He says, you mentioned that I think you're culty, many hungry, despotic, etc.
If that's the impression you got from my post, it certainly wasn't my intention, then I truly am sorry.
I don't think you could possibly know just how important and valuable I think the things you do here are, and I apologize if for any moment my post made you feel unappreciated.
Well, I appreciate that, and I certainly appreciate the intention, but...
It's kind of Weasley, if you don't mind me saying that again.
I don't want to be like three decimal places guy on the apology thing, but boy, if I also had a dollar for every time somebody said, if anything I did made you feel offended, I'm sorry.
That again, that's pushing the offense to the other person.
That's pushing the upset to the other person.
If I have mistaken your intention, there's no need to apologize.
If I have completely gone haywire off your kind and gentle and positive post, then there's no need to apologize.
And in fact, apologizing would be the wrong thing to do.
So if you've done nothing that is offensive or insulting or negative or hostile or whatever, then don't apologize, for heaven's sakes.
If you have done something that is negative or offensive or hostile or passive-aggressive or whatever, Then apologize, but then don't say, if you interpreted it this way, right?
This is just a contradiction, right?
I mean, this is very, very essential to apologizing, right?
I think you have a tendency towards passive aggression.
I just do, right? I mean, I don't think that I'm entirely scant of evidence for that, but this is a fundamental fact that you need to grapple with, I think, not the passive aggression.
You can take it or leave that.
It's up to you. But...
If I misinterpreted you, then don't apologize, because it's not right to apologize for somebody else's misinterpretation.
Right? If I say, go left and you turn right, and we have a tape we can replay, I'm not going to apologize for you mishearing or misunderstanding what it is that I said.
It doesn't make any sense. So, if you didn't do anything that was negative or hostile or passive-aggressive or offensive or anything like that, then don't apologize.
And if you did, then don't talk about how I misinterpreted things.
Right. So I really, really do appreciate it.
I think it was a great post overall.
I really do. I think it was honest in many ways.
I think it was non-volatile in many ways, which was great.
A nice change from recent activities on the board.
So thank you so much for posting it.
I hope that my response helps clarify certain things.
I certainly do appreciate it, and let me know what you think.
All right. So to move on, we have...
A question from...
Oh yeah, we have the new level of donation.
For those who have the superheroes of philosophy, who have donated more than $500 to Free Domain Radio, you have the very highest of the FDR supporters, Philosopher King.
Have a look at the website. You will see those noble heroes, and you will see the fabulous icon.
The highest compliment that I can give in the realm of Philosopher King.
So, this is a Philosopher King who writes to me, and of course, Philosopher King's moved to the very front of the queue when it comes to me responding.
He says, I talked about a golf analogy, or Greg and I talked about a golf analogy a couple of weeks ago, and so this gentleman wrote a post in his journal, and he He says, in part of it, I sort of bash the whole Santa Claus thing as being sadistic.
I don't recall if this was your take on it, or if it was just mine.
Here's the quote from his journal.
He says, even telling people that Santa Claus exists is bad enough.
It is really quite sadistic, actually, not just morally repugnant.
It isn't just lying about something in which you've avoided all of the information, exposing the truth out of willful ignorance.
It is lying while already knowing, and accepting the truth that he doesn't exist.
How horrified are the children when they find out that Santa Claus, that spin-off of ancient Norse mythology, isn't real?
How hurt are they to find out that they have been deceived and lied to?
To say in response that it was all just for fun really exposes the sadistic nature of these parents.
Is it the person who exposes the lie that is the bad guy, or the person who did the lying?
What I got really irritated about was his response.
So this is the gentleman who responded to this gentleman's post.
He said, Seriously, though, before I start editing, how would you feel about eliminating the Santa Claus part?
It comes off as whiny, and it's unnecessary to make your real point.
My parents weren't sick and sadistic, and I wasn't horrified and hurt when I figured out that Santa wasn't real.
I think sometimes you project your hatred for your parents onto society as a whole.
You and Stefan may hate your families and may have good reason, but keep in mind that not everyone's parents are like yours.
See what I mean about the only thing?
And he said, now maybe I'm sort of resisting seeing this for what it is, because this guy and I have been pretty close.
Friends for about six or seven years now.
I keep reading this over and over, and I'm just not finding what it is that bugs me.
Sometimes I'm stupefied by you and other board members' ability to identify these things, and in those cases I feel stupid, and perhaps I'm just not intelligent enough to see what you guys see.
I always seem to miss the most blaringly obvious points somehow.
He always makes the following comment.
Man, what is it with that board?
All those guys seem to hate their families, to which I can't really come up with a response at all.
Not in that moment, at least.
I wouldn't know where to begin.
Either it is that I'm not smart enough or I'm not confident enough, or like you had once said in a calling show, I already know how they will respond, at least unconsciously.
I'm not completely sure of that either, though.
Well, I think that...
It's important, and this is going to sound like maybe on the edge of manipulative, and maybe it is.
You can certainly let me know what you think.
I think you have to be cognizant of a couple of things when you're discussing ethics in this kind of way.
The first is that you don't want to, you know, wildly distort the scale of moral judgment, right?
So, you know, torturing a child Physically is sick and sadistic, right?
I think we can all pretty much go with that without a huge amount of moral discussion.
And so, you know, my question is, if you're going to say, telling children about Santa Claus is sick and sadistic, what are you going to call somebody who tortures a child physically?
Sick and sadistic?
Well, you see, then you've Then you're saying, on a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate sadism?
With all scales pointing to 10.
That, I think, is not rational.
We need degrees of pain. We need degrees of corruption.
We need degrees of evil. Just as doctors need degrees of sickness, right?
A head cold is different from a sucking chest wound, right?
I mean, so, I think that you want to not...
Overstate the case and thus undermine your credibility with people, right?
That's a very frustrating thing.
To be very passionate about ethics and then to have people deride or roll their eyes or scoff at your passion for ethics is painful.
And so, within the confines of staying true to principles and so on, I think that we should Try to win people's respect with a measured response to ethical questions.
And to remember that there's a scale, and we don't want to overshoot the scale.
And I wrestle with the scale, the intellectuals versus the public school teachers versus whatever.
I mean, I wrestle with the scale.
I don't have any hard and fast answers.
But I do know that...
While not all water is pure, there's a difference between seawater and Evian.
I think that you want to keep your heaviest bolts, in a sense, for your biggest prey.
You don't drop a bomb on a mosquito, and you don't swat a rapist with a fly swatter.
I think that you want to keep your rhetoric, if that's the right phrase, in line with the corruption that you're describing.
Horrified are children when they find out that Santa Claus isn't real?
Well, I think that the challenge that you're facing there, even if it were true that children felt horrified about the actions of their parents when those children were five or six or seven, whenever they found out that Santa Claus is not real, that horror is sublimated because there's no one to agree with it.
Right? One of the great challenges of philosophy is that it's social.
As I've talked about with some of the conspiracy theories that I have, which may themselves be conspiracy theories, I don't know.
But when we don't have any social agreement for what went on in our lives that was bad, it's very, very hard to process that.
At least it was for me.
Maybe it's easier for other people, but...
What I basically paid $20,000 to my therapist for was to finally tell me that my brother was a bad person.
And it took a year of talking.
She initially thought that I was being passive-aggressive.
It took forever to get this across.
But she finally did get it, reflect it back to me, and then I could sleep.
Because truth is a social pursuit.
Truth is a social pursuit, right?
This Randian fantasy of the orphan of pure integrity who needs no social feedback is a fantasy.
And Ayn Rand herself could not sustain it, right?
So truth is a social activity.
And we just know this empirically, right?
Because what is it that most people believe are true?
Well... Most people believe that what they're told is true.
Most people think that if everybody's angry at something, it must be bad.
Most people think that if everybody claims to love something, it must be good, right?
Because we don't have the time to invent everything for ourselves.
Right? If I am sick, I don't sit there and start reading Grey's Anatomy.
I watch the show. So, truth is a social pursuit.
And so, even if children are horrified, By finding out that Santa Claus is not real, they won't experience that horror if there's no agreement.
If there's no agreement in society or in those that are the kids or whatever, if there's no, right?
They won't experience that horror.
We are incredibly conformist.
As a species, for obvious biological reasons.
Piss off the tribe, they'll get rid of you, and you'll die alone in the woods, right?
You need someone to watch over you while you're sleeping, right?
I mean, we need that communal.
I mean, this is the strength, incredible strength and weakness of the species, right?
Well, it turns from weakness to strength through philosophy, but we are incredibly conformists.
So, even if it is true that children experience horror, given that all the other kids say, oh, what, you haven't figured that out yet?
Come on, duh! Right?
The kids aren't going to, like, they don't sit there and say, oh my god.
Like, if some kid comes in and, I don't know, he's had his hand bitten off, the kids are going to be like, oh my god, are you okay?
Oh my god! That's terrible!
Right? But some kid comes in bawling because he's found out there's no Santa Claus.
All the older kids don't say, oh my god, that's so terrible.
I can't believe they lied. Right?
They roll their eyes and say, oh, come on, I'm such a baby.
Didn't you know that by now? It's just a stupid story.
Right? He's not going to experience any sympathy.
Right? Right? So he's not going to experience it as horror.
It doesn't mean there's not horror there.
In fact, there's two kinds of horror.
A, I was lied to, and B, everybody knew I was being lied to, didn't tell me, and C, there's three kinds.
Now, they're scorning me for believing my parents, right?
So, trust is being scorned, and lies are being...
I mean, that's the harm, but nobody experiences that, right?
I mean, very few, anyway.
So, if you did, I think that's accurate, but you have to recognize that other people have very different experiences, and the vast majority of people, if told that telling children about Santa Claus is abusive, would just say, but you're nuts, right?
I mean, that's just the reality of the space that you're speaking into, right?
Like if somebody says to me, do you want to give a free-to-made radio speech?
In Morocco, in Arabic, I would say no.
Why? Because I don't speak Arabic, other than knowing the words to Queen's excellent battle cry, Mustafa!
So you have to know the space that you're speaking into as a communicator, right?
And my concern is always about you, my friend, because I don't want you to be in this situation where you are experiencing rejection at someone's hands, right?
Where your passion for the truth and your passion for ethics and your passion for integrity and virtue and so on results in you being scorned, right?
because I know that's a familial situation that you were enmeshed in or embedded in.
So, don't recreate that.
Okay.
Right? Don't recreate that.
Don't go too far beyond someone's listening to the point where they just roll their eyes and say, well, that's nonsense.
Because that's recreating your childhood situation, right?
This is why I think you're in therapy.
But this is the kind of stuff that you need to talk about with your therapist and say, I get so angry and so frustrated when this happens and it seems to keep happening.
And I think, again, this is just something to talk about this with your friend, right?
I mean, this is what I would suggest.
This is the radical intimacy that I think we need to strive for as human beings, but of course also as philosophers.
If you need to sit down with your friend and you say, listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee?
I'm going to bribe you with a cup of coffee so that you can help me.
Work something out, because I don't know what the heck's happened in my emotional responses, but I got really upset.
Nothing to do with you, right?
It's just, this was a trigger.
Maybe you can help me work on it.
I promise not to blame you for anything.
This is just sort of my experience.
You can help me work through it, because, man, when you talked about this stuff with Santa Claus, oh, man, I was hurt.
I was upset. Can I bribe you?
I'll even throw in a cheesecake, right?
Just let me ask you some questions and talk about your experience with things.
How is it that you felt...
When you read my article, right?
So you thought it was good, but you didn't like the Santa Claus thing.
Tell me what you felt when you read my article, got to the Santa Claus thing.
What was your experience? Just get information.
How is it that you show up for people in the world?
What is their experience of you in the world?
Right? I get lots of feedback.
Sometimes it seems a little too much.
I get lots of feedback on what it's like to experience de la steffe dans le monde.
But... Just ask people.
Tell me what your experience of that was, right?
Because you know what their experience of it was, right?
That's the frustration. And you just need to get that stuff out on the table.
You just need to talk about it honestly and openly.
If you're not ready to talk about it with this guy, just bring it up with your therapist.
That's what they're there for. For you to practice radical intimacy, which is just called the truth.
Right? I've always loved that bit in the old Aladdin movie.
Well, not that old, I guess. Robin Williams played the genie.
And, I don't know, this guy's lying to the princess, whatever her name is, I can't remember.
Esmeralda? No, probably not. Louis Farrakhan?
Can't remember. But Aladdin is lying to the princess, right?
And he's like, oh my god, what am I going to do?
How am I going to fix this?
How am I going to make this right?
Blah, blah, blah, right? And the genie just sort of has this big flashing neon sign billboard and says, hey, I know what, how about the truth?
It's like, the lights flash on the truth.
And I love that, because that's kind of like what we're trying to get through to here.
Right? That's what we're trying to get through to here.
How about a little something we call the truth?
Right? So, if your friend had an emotional response to a section of your essay...
Then ask him about it.
Right? I mean, you're friends.
And if you had an emotional response to your friend's emotional response, I've got an idea.
How about telling him? And I don't mean to sound facetious.
I really don't. It took me, like, forever to figure this crap out.
So I'm just trying to make light of it, right?
But just tell them.
I mean, this is such an obvious notion, at least it was to me when I finally figured it out.
This is just such an obvious notion that, I mean, when you get it, it's like, why would you ever think anything else?
But until you get it, it doesn't even cross our radar, right?
Most of us are just so badly trained in that kind of simple honesty.
Right? I mean...
This is also relative to the previous gentleman's post, this exchange we had, 790, and this one, wherein the person that he should be talking to about all of this is not me, but his father.
I think what would be much more beneficial, and I'll sort of put this out to this gentleman, is to sit there and, you know, If you don't know why your dad is not that keen on putting philosophy into practice in his life, let's just say that that's the case, then arguing about it with a virtual stranger on the internet is one way of approaching it, I guess, but...
It's sort of like arguing...
It's like two parents arguing about whether the kid wants fish or chicken for dinner, and the kid's sitting right there.
He wants fish. No, he had fish yesterday.
He always prefers an alternative. Ah, but I remember last week when he wanted chicken three times in a row, right?
I mean, just ask the kid.
I mean, there's a simple, clear, and direct way to deal with these kinds of things that don't involve lots of semantics and arguing about the content of words, right?
That's why I wanted to do these sort of two things together, right?
Because you're talking to me about your emotional reactions to your friends' emotional reactions to something that you were emotionally passionate about.
And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, right?
But I think we need to step into the realm of direct communication.
Right? That's why, you know, the one thing that this last guy who's talking about his dad and his this and that and the other...
Well, if this guy feels that I'm wrong about his dad, then his dad can spend 15 minutes calling in on the Sunday call-in show, and we can have a chat!
Right? So, that's all I'm sort of looking for in this sort of what I call radical intimacy, which is just real honesty.
Real honesty and openness, right?
And be aware that it's a very volatile thing to do.
To actually speak to another human being directly about what you think and feel, without attacking, without expectations, without, you know, you have to do this or it's bad, or you have to respond in this way, without trying to control the situation, oh my god, it's agony!
It's agony! It's agony! I remember, you know, I remember one of the few times in my life where I just had been completely unable to control, bursting into tears.
It was, I guess, many years ago by now.
Oh my god, time flash!
I was in my early 20s and I was in theatre school, and this very aggressive New Yorker from Stella Atkins School of Acting in New York, she came up and she was pretty harsh and pretty, you know, but, you know, what the hell, in hindsight, but then it was, of course, life and death for us. We were all living and dying for our careers.
And she did this exercise, right, where she says, you know, the problem with actors is that they wait for their lines.
Acting training was fantastic in terms of emotional authenticity, which doesn't mean by any stretch of the imagination that all actors are emotionally healthy, but most of the successful ones are blind narcissists, but she had us sit on opposite sides of a table,
and I was sitting across from a guy, and what we were supposed to do was, we were both given a scene, and he would read the line, and he would look at me.
And I wasn't allowed to react or to respond.
And I would just look into his eyes for like 10 or 15 seconds, and then I would glance down, pick up my line, and read it back.
And not read it back like with acting or just read it back flat, right?
Just with the idea of connecting to another human being.
Even through the realm of somebody else's language because it's just the talking and the listening.
Not waiting for your turn to talk, not expecting the other person to do something, just saying something while looking into somebody else's eyes.
And she kept correcting me as I was doing this, right?
And she was saying, you know, relax your shoulders, relax your neck, you're tensing up, keep breathing, blah, blah, blah, right?
So she was dismantling my physical defenses.
And I totally, like, literally almost fell out of the chair because I started sobbing so hard because, you know, my whole life I had been defended against people and fearful of attack and, you know, whenever somebody talked to me it was because they were manipulating me or trying to hurt me or trying to leg up on my self-esteem or something like that.
It's not a level or whatever, right?
So... And this wasn't just my family, right?
I mean, this wasn't just my family.
This was more than just my family.
And that's, you know, that kind of breakthrough where you realize, like, oh my god, I can't look at somebody, speak simply, and stare at them without bursting into tears, right?
I mean, really, people, I know that you're new to this conversation.
I've been working on this stuff for like 25 years, almost.
And it was 20 years ago that this occurred to me where I really got that I was not able to speak, even somebody else's words.
I was not able to speak, look at somebody and I, have them speak back to me without bursting into tears.
Like not being able to starve.
And I remember it was very kind. One of the guys, his name was Chuck.
He was in my class at theater school.
He went down and bought me a candy bar.
You know, it was incredibly touching, right?
I mean, just how starve for kindness.
A lot of us, not all of us. A lot of us are, right?
You bought me a candy bar. I always remembered that with enormous gratitude, right?
Hey, here's something to make you feel better, my friend.
I mean, those simple little gestures.
But what I'm talking about, this radical intimacy, is just talking to people about your thoughts and feelings.
And it's radical only because it's just so rare.
And because we always want to talk to other people about our intimacy issues.
We always want to talk about our parents with other people.
We always want to talk about our boss with our co-workers.
We always want to talk about our relationships with someone else.
So there's this incredible web of misdirection and distraction.
Throughout the world. The world is just an extraordinary series of right-angle conversations.
People talking sideways to each other about other people.
Which is one of the reasons why, now that I have the time, I'm able to work on all this sort of stuff full-time.
It's one of the reasons why I invite people to come on and have direct conversations.
Right? So... Ask.
If you have a particular question about me and my history, you can just ask.
I've got time. I've sort of worked it out with Christina that I have to be able to have conversations with people while she has patients downstairs.
They can vaguely hear me, but it's just a murmur, but I can't spend the whole day just coding and working on the board and writing and so on.
I have to have the ability to have conversations even when she has patients downstairs.
So that's opened up a little bit.
I sort of made that a bit of a requirement now, and we've been able to negotiate through that.
So, just, you know, talk.
We can talk directly. And if you're having problems with a third-party person, and you think that, and I think I have some decent skills this way, I mean, feel free to put them to the test, but bring them on, you know, let's talk about them.
But this kind of radical intimacy, radical honesty, simple, straight, direct, to the point...
Not aggressive, not manipulative, not I'm telling you this because you better apologize to me or you better be nice to me because I'm just telling somebody your experience without expectation, without control, without demands.
And listening to their response back, well, that's the program, people.
That's the goal. That's what we're about.
I don't talk about honesty being the first virtue as if it's all about, I'm honest that I dislike the government.
Honestly being the first virtue is being honest to the people around us.
Right? So, if somebody's trampled by something I'm posting about corruption and the family, if they think that that's insulting to their dad...
Let me ask you, who do you think the first person is that they should talk to about it?
Do you see where I'm going with this, my brothers and sisters?
I think you do.
Right? And this is just one example of about a bazillion.
It's the most recent one, so I do appreciate you being a guinea pig, my friend, for what I think is the next step that we need to take as a community.
If I do a podcast about family and corruption and you get upset because you think I'm insulting your dad, who should you talk to about it?
First, I'm not saying never talk to me about it, but who should you talk to about it?
Right? There's your feelings about two very important things in your life.
And look, I clearly get that your dad is very important to you.
That I respect. That is very important to you, right?
There's two very important things in your life.
Philosophy... I'm not saying they're the only two, so don't write back and say I also enjoy quiche.
There are two very important things in your life.
Philosophy... And your dad.
Just in this conversation.
Maybe you like your mom too, I don't know.
And a proposition in philosophy has upset you with regards to your father.
Right? So, who should you be talking to about this issue with your dad?
Should you be talking with the philosopher?
About your issue with your dad?
And should the content of that topic be upset at the philosopher?
No. Good thing you don't let him run free.
I bet you'd bring down a deer or two.
Somebody just walked by with an enormous dog.
But this is sort of what I'm talking about when it comes to real intimacy in human relationships.
The issue that you have is not with me.
How could you have issues with me?
You don't have a relationship with me.
I mean, you have a relationship to the podcast, but we don't have a relationship.
Right? And look, I mean, I'm sure that people can dig back.
Oh, Steph, you didn't do this, you didn't do that in these posts, that post.
I understand all of that. This is something I strive for as well, but I think it's a reasonable value.
I think it's a very important value.
I think it's a good value to have.
And it's so important.
If you think that I'm insulting your dad, the person that you need to talk to about it is your dad.
Not me! Your dad.
And you sit down, you say, Dad, you know, the strangest thing happens.
So, you know, I listen to this crazy bald guy on the internet, and he talks all about this philosophy.
It's called free domain, but he doesn't like it being called free domain.
He's very strange. But he's got some very important things to talk about, and he said that if somebody says that philosophy is important, or somebody accepts philosophical premises but doesn't apply them in their life, that there's a kind of corruption there.
Or at least a hypocrisy.
That really bothered me.
And let me tell you why I think it really bothered me.
Because you say, yes, the state is immoral and so on, but you don't really sort of change your behavior.
Or you and I have these secret—this is another thing that happens with philosophers quite a bit, right?
You and I have these secret conversations about philosophy, right?
You huddle under the covers listening to these podcasts, and then maybe you talk about it with a friend of yours, but whenever your friend and yours are at a party and you bring it up, he runs away.
Philosophy is a kind of guilty secret.
That you have, right?
And that's, again, not good, right?
I mean, that's kind of humiliating, right?
You know, if, I don't know, Greg and I meet up someday, right, and we go to some party, and people are talking about Iraq, and I sort of chime in with the conversation about Iraq that we've had a couple of times, and Greg, like, doesn't back me up and says, oh, philosophy is nonsense or whatever, I can't believe Steph's so into this kind of stuff.
Well, that's kind of bad, right?
I mean, that would be kind of humiliating for me, and obviously not very ennobling for...
For Greg. And, of course, that would never happen because that doesn't involve the use of the word but.
But, that's the other thing, right?
So, you know, you and I, Dad, will have these conversations about philosophy, then maybe we sit down with the whole family, and if I bring it up, you get embarrassed and change the subject, right?
So, those are the feelings that are actually important.
The feelings that are actually important are your feelings about your dad, not your feelings about whether Steph is jumping on the bandwagon.
Right? The immediate issue is your feelings about your dad, which you should talk about with your dad.
Right? That's the kind of radical intimacy that I'm talking about here.
And, Nate, your feelings about your friend's response to your Life Journal post?
You should write them down.
Again, we need practice, right?
We don't go off haywire.
Write them down, sort them out, think about them, write a couple of notes to yourself, and bring them with you even, and just say, you know, this is the stuff I want to get across, this is the stuff I want to talk about, and so on.
And you talk about your feelings with the person who...
It was kind of causal, right?
I mean, your feelings are self-caused, but the catalyst is somebody else, right?
You talk about it with the person.
That's why I keep saying, if there's an exit to the cage, like if you're at the bars of the cage, staring out, wanting to break free, you can never get through those bars.
You can never run away. You can never run away from a lack of intimacy.
You can only dispel. You can't run away from an illusion.
You can only dispel the illusion.
And that's a key part of this conversation.
This is the kind of radical intimacy that I'm talking about.
There's a reason that we have all of these right-angled relationships where we talk around people or among people and then whenever we have an issue with someone, we talk about it with somebody else.
Go talk about it with the person themselves.
Find out if it's a good relationship or not and do everything that you can To prepare for this, right?
Write it down. If you want to have a practice conversation with me, just give me a shout.
I'm happy to help.
But talk about your feelings about people with them.
This is the human community that I want to try to help to build.
Right? You don't let go of false relationships without putting the methodology in place to get real relationships.
And you might be amazed at how people react.
So if a friend of yours is saying something about you that is frustrating or upsetting, then you sit down and you say, help me work this out.
I feel frustrated and upset by what you said.
Right? And if somebody says, you really hate your girlfriend, although you think you love her, right?
I mean, if somebody says to me, you really hate Christina, though you think you love her, I just like, okay, well, you have no credibility.
it's not even any point answering, right?
And but if it bothered me, right?
If somebody said, you secretly hate Christina, although you claim to love her, If it really bothered me, I'd sit down with Christina and say, you know, this is really weird.
This totally bothered me and I can't figure out why.
Right? I wouldn't post back at the person and say, you bandwagon jumping ideology spouting BCF, you are, you know, disrespecting my relationship with my wife.
Right?
That's not the issue.
Right?
So, the one thing that I haven't received back from anybody who's listened to 790 or 789, 789 in particular, right?
I have had so many people tell me, oh my God, you're so insulting towards the family, my family is great, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
Well, the one thing that I haven't received back from these people is one single offer of bringing a parent on the Sunday show.
I mean, my God, do you know how fantastic, if your parents are like moral and raise you well, do you know what an incredible resource they would be, even for 20 minutes on a show, to other people?
How they could help other people, other parents, answer this question, the most important question of parenting ever, how do you raise moral children in a moral world or an amoral world?
How do you deal with the problems of isolation and education and Dealing with beliefs that are different from social standards and...
My God! What a goldmine such parents would be!
Or even if they're not, you know, God knows, perfectly moral or whatever, not that anyone is, but even if they just had 20% of the answers or 10% of the answers, I know, so few people even know the questions, let alone the answers.
Oh my God, that is one hot steering wheel.
But do you sort of see where I'm coming from?
Everybody's telling me, oh, my parents were great, they were wonderful, I can't believe that you insult them, and so on, right?
But then get them on the show, 20 minutes!
What, they spent 20 years, 30 years raising you, they can't spend 20 minutes to pass along their wisdom to a world dying of thirst for good parenting tips?
Right? Do you think I don't know what that means?
Right? I mean, come on!
So, that's sort of the proposal that I'd like to put forward, which is this honesty, radical intimacy.
Somebody's bothering you.
Somebody does something that upsets you.
Either talk to them directly about your feelings.
Right? About your feelings.
This is the leap that everyone makes, right?
I'm sorry to be so long about this, but this is hugely important.
This is the leap that everybody makes, right?
They go from feelings to conclusions, and then they argue about conclusions, right?
As opposed to arguing about feelings, which is the reality of the situation.
I feel upset about what you said about my dad is the accurate thing.
Right? That's a statement that can't be critiqued or turned around, right?
That's not a statement that's open to interpretation.
I can't tell you you don't feel something.
Right. But if you say...
Sorry, somebody's just trying to pick up a whole bunch of rock here with a forklift truck in the road, and I don't know if they're going to have it go or not.
They're back and back and forth, so let me just wait until...
Actually, I don't need to wait. I just want to let you know why I'm pausing, why my thoughts are going astray.
Right, but if somebody comes to me and says, you know, I was really upset, right?
If they've listened to the mythology series and they really understand it, right?
They say, well, look, I was really upset by...
What it is that you posted with regards to family corruption, right?
Then we can talk about their feelings.
But if somebody builds a story up which says, you are now disrespecting my dad and you hate all families and you're jumping on a bandwagon and you're promoting an ideology that you're hoping that people will embrace and you have a perfectionist streak and anybody who falls...
Like, all of that is just mythology, right?
Radical intimacy is honesty and only honesty.
Honesty, the truth and nothing but the truth.
The truth and nothing more. I feel this about what you posted.
I feel this about...
And people say, well, Steph, why don't you just say, I feel this, I feel that.
Well, you know, when you've done 20 years of work on this, 24th century of work on this stuff, and you've been through years of therapy, and you have a wife who's a psychologist, you have amazing feedback from, you know, experienced people, you've got other people watching your back on the boards, you have constant communication about how to dismantle your own mythology.
Like, when you got the PhD, you can teach.
Right?
But, you know, people aren't ready for that, right?
Recognize that this is not easy.
It takes a long time, a lot of practice.
The first thing we start is with honesty.
Steph, when you posted this, I felt X. And we can talk about that very pleasurably.
Happily. Because that's the truth of the situation, right?
The truth of the situation is you felt X. When I posted 789 or 790 or whatever.
The truth about Nate, you feel X with regards to your friend's response to your LiveJournal post.
And you should talk about it with him.
And to the gentleman who responded, and I really do appreciate that response, you should talk about it with your dad.
And if you don't know how, ask him for 20 minutes.
As a favor, he's already spending hours talking about you, about everything and philosophy.
Just 20 minutes.
Dad, do me a favor for 20 minutes, right?
Like if you said, Dad, can you read this short essay of mine for school?
Right? He'd read it, right? Just say, do me a favor for 20 minutes.
Call into this show. Because this guy's got some questions about integrity that I can't answer and it's troubling me.
Right? Not one person has said that.
Not one person has offered to bring a parent on to the show or have a private conversation.
Right? So everyone's like, oh, my parents are really great.
And I say, great. Then let's give them a venue to share their wonderful wisdom, because Lord knows they must have had a hard time figuring out all of this stuff in the absence of good cultural cues about how to be good, because we don't really have any.
Right? So they should want to share that wisdom and help other people, right?
They want the world to become a better place, which is why they were such good parents to their children.
They want to share that wisdom, right?
So let's give them a mic.
And if they're not comfortable with the mic, just have them send me an email and I'll read it on air.
So, nobody has taken me up on my testable methodology for parental virtue.
Everybody's saying, my parents are good, my parents are good, my parents are good.
Not so many people, sadly, taking me up on the test of a methodology, right?
Just arguing about feelings, right?
So anyway, I hope that that helps.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
I know that I can be totally bitchy about these things and anal about the precision and keep returning to the empiricism and keep giving you...
Horrible things to do, like go and talk to people about how you feel, but this is the essence of the conversation that we're having.
I hugely appreciate your participation in it.
Thank you so, so much for listening.
I look forward to donations.
It's been a tad skimpy lately.
I'm actually contemplating they're begging me at work to come back for a little bit.
I need some cash to throw at the Free Domain Radio advertising campaign, so I may do that.
If you could help me avoid that by throwing some money my way, I would hugely, hugely appreciate it.
Thank you so much for listening.
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