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June 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:10
798 Sex and Enlightenment - Two Listener Dilemmas

Two Listener Dilemmas

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 10.30 on the 14th of June, 2007.
I think I said December yesterday, but that's simply because...
The time travel experiments are still underway.
So, thank you so much for joining in to the conversation about philosophy.
Had an interesting and enjoyable chat with the fine gentleman at Free Talk Live.
Last night, you can find that on their website at www.freetalklive.com.
So, they had an enjoyable chat.
I think that we didn't get into enough specifics to draw any callers in, but perhaps if I come back, we can do that.
So, Might want to check that out.
So, I have some listener stuff, which I just wanted to get to, which I think is important and instructive, which we can all learn from.
And thanks. You know, you guys are just amazing.
Like, I just... Oh, man, I really wanted to point that out.
It's not, of course, always the easiest thing in the world to bare your soul...
To strangers. But sometimes it's a little easier, right?
Again, that's the part of the therapy thing, right?
We don't have emotional investment in your history, right?
You bare your soul to your mom about the pain of your childhood.
She gets all messed up because, you know, she obviously would have been a part of it, if not the cause of it in many ways.
So, with strangers it's easier, but I just, you know, man, I really want to compliment you guys.
It is an incredibly brave thing to do, and I also want to compliment the people who are responding to these, you know, really amazing posts about personal lives, you know?
I mean, there's... There's no shame in the human, right?
There's no shame in the experience.
And in the experience of abuse, in the experience of the stuff that's gone on for us in our lives, and just, you know, man, enormous hats off to those who are being honest and brave enough to post about their deepest and hardest things, you know? It makes you feel weak, but it gives incredible strength.
It gives incredible strength.
After you've had a good workout at the gym, you feel weaker.
You feel a little weaker. It gives you great strength.
So I just wanted to point that out.
I just can't tell you how admirable and noble and brave and powerful and strong.
This is how we put the bricks together that build the wall to keep the bad people out.
Is that we share, and it's an enormous amount of self-trust.
It's a very self-confident thing to share yourself with others, right?
Because it means that you can, if they reject you or scorn you, you know you can take it, right?
You don't hide, but you reveal yourself knowing that you're no longer a child, right?
So you can keep the bad people out.
So I just wanted to sort of point that out.
It's an essential part of the conversation.
I just am so amazingly impressed with how many people are stepping up to talk about these kinds of things.
And I just think it's wonderful.
I mean, we really should connect as brothers and sisters sharing this amazing, amazing conversation.
A journey of life, and I really think that it's wonderful that this kind of connection is occurring.
Practice it on the boards, get feedback, talk, and bring it to your personal lives.
I am trying to drive you into the arms of others, right?
So, that's, I mean, this is why, you know, let's get this culty thing, right?
Steph is culty! But it's not true.
I'm trying to drive you into the arms of others.
I'm trying to drive you into the souls, to mingle your souls with others, not...
With me, the board is a great place to share that, to practice it, to get used to it as an idea.
But I'm trying to drive you into the arms of others so that if you run through them, because they're ghosts, because they're false selves, because they're manipulative, because they're destructive, I drive you into the arms of others.
If you run through them, then keep running.
Run! And find people you can really connect with.
That is the true beauty of human life is in our connections.
That's E.M. Forster's commandment.
Only connect! Let's start with what's called a conversion question.
I certainly understand the use of the word conversion.
I might try to say something like enlightenment or something like that.
When you convert from one religion to one, a conversion is usually a transformation into an equivalent form, right?
So when you convert currency, it's the same amount.
You don't add value, right?
In fact, you subtract a little because someone's doing the conversion.
Just as a minor technical aspect of language, which I could be completely incorrect about, it's just my understanding of the word.
If you convert from Christianity to Judaism, you're not adding any more rationality to your life.
Or vice versa, and converting money and so on.
Convert Fahrenheit to Celsius doesn't change the temperature.
So I would say that enlightenment or whatever might be a better word, but what the hell.
Here I am criticizing the three decimal places people and fussing about syllables.
Anyway, so. Gentleman writes, I have a co-worker who gave me this DVD called The Secret and tells me that it changed her life and that I should take a look.
I'm sure that some of you are familiar with it, though I've never heard of it when she gave it to me.
I only watched about 20 to 30 minutes of it, and suppose its message of positive thinking is good, but it's just the same old religious jargon that you hear at Sunday school.
The sneaky thing about it is that they brought in some quantum physicists people, who they then gave the title philosopher, that obviously don't have the slightest clue about logic in order to try and give the video some scientific validity.
I was watching it just thinking, wow, anyone who doesn't know any better could easily fall right into this.
I don't remember his name, but the first man to speak of the video and who they kept coming back to has given the title philosopher underneath his name.
But ten minutes of research, I found out that not only is a high school dropout, but also he has like five get-rich-quick books under his belt, which made me a little skeptical that this might be what he's still trying to do with this video.
Yes, well, that's sadly true.
The white-haired guy, right? Hey, and nobody commented.
I think it's one of the best jokes I ever made on Free Domain Radio, but nobody ever commented it, which I guess would be my theory.
Put to the test and found wanting.
But they have someone, this chunky, bald, dark-haired fellow, who's called a metaphysician, which, of course, is not a title that makes any sense.
And I said, well, that makes me an epistemideologist.
And I thought that was a good joke, but nobody ever said anything.
Maybe nobody heard it in the babbling brook of the constant language.
Anyway. Anyway, the letter goes on.
When I went back to work the next day, my co-worker asked me what I thought.
I basically told her the same thing.
Positive thinking equals good.
All their factual information equals bad.
She asked me what my religious beliefs were, and of course I told her about my lack thereof.
Usually, this is about the same time religious people decide either to try to invite me to church or end the conversation.
But she didn't. She actually said that she's always been somewhat skeptical of Christianity, but just went to church anyway because she thought it was a good thing to do.
Then she told me she was interested in learning about the beliefs of atheism.
At this point, I basically just told her to email me, and I'd go over some of this stuff with her.
I don't really feel comfortable doing it at work, which is a public school.
All I need is a student to hear, go home and tell Mom, and I'm probably fired.
Well, that's quite wise and quite true, I think.
Ooh, duckies! There's a mommy duck with seven fuzzy little ducks.
And here's me without my barbecue.
So she emailed me. I ran her through some of the basics, told her that there were very rational reasons why I don't believe in God or religion, and that it's not just to rebel or to argue with Christians.
Then I asked her a few questions that I felt I needed to be answered before I could accept religious belief.
She, of course, couldn't answer them.
Then I actually got her to watch Introduction to Philosophy on God.
She came in the next day saying, wow, I never considered all those ideas.
There's so many holes in religion.
Yadda, yadda, yadda, which is the holy trinity of continuance of speech.
So there's a guidance counselor at our work who is involved in a church somehow.
I'm not exactly sure what her role is, but several people from work attend her church.
My co-worker friend, who attends her church, approached her with some of these questions, and of course her answer was, faith this, faith that, which my co-worker recognized at this point as bigotry, according to our philosopher here at FDR, and came to me and said, basically, yeah, she has no answer to other than to just believe, just because.
So here I'm thinking I've made a successful conversion of this person and the mental healing is about to begin.
Then all of a sudden, the email conversation simply stops.
She doesn't bring it up anymore at work.
So finally, I ask her if she's continuing to research the stuff or what's going on.
She says she's finding it to be a pretty dark ideology and that it takes away her hopes and dreams.
And she goes on to give me the subjective reasoning for why she's really not continuing with it.
Did I handle this correctly?
Any suggestions on an approach that may have been more successful?
I guess one of the most important things is not only pointing out the inaccuracies, but how life can be better on the other side.
I believe this is what I failed to do.
Well, I think that's...
I mean, I don't think you did anything particular that's wrong.
I think that there could have been a number of reasons that this whole sequence might have occurred, and you don't sort of tell me too much.
About this woman, so, you know, let me blindly and wildly hypothesize.
I think that she was attracted to you, right?
And I think that she was attracted to you.
There is a kind of, when you share something that's personal with someone, and you're of the opposite sex, I don't know if you're both single or whatever, but there seems to be an attraction element that is involved in that.
And I know that because my dating ritual was to read poetry to women or show them my books or whatever.
And so that's certainly a possibility that she was attracted to you.
And so she shared this The Secret thing with you.
Now, The Secret...
I don't even know if it's worth doing a podcast on The Secret.
Y'all let me know. I've watched it because Christina got it from her patient, one of her patients, so...
Let me know if you think it's of interest to go over the nonsense that is this crazy-ass fantasy land that people talk about.
In the secret, let me know if you're interested in doing it.
I'd be happy to do a podcast on it.
So she shared this thing with you, and you told her, well, you know, they're religious and blah, blah, blah, they're not spiritual, and so on.
And then, of course, I would say that there's a couple of different approaches to take.
And this is pretty advanced stuff, and I only say this because you're obviously very good and very wise and very consistent at approaching these topics.
So if you want, you know, the flaming nanchuks of truth, then here's how to wield them, at least in my opinion.
I mean, if I was really interested in trying to get someone to change her mind, getting a woman to change her mind, I would first of all, you know, try to find the common grounds of agreement.
You might want to listen to my conversation with the Iraqi, the woman about the Iraq war that was on the show a couple of weeks ago, the call-in show.
But you need to try to find areas of agreement, right?
It's important to be good.
It's important to be happy. The purpose of life is joy.
The purpose of thought is to facilitate joy and happiness.
You get that sort of idea.
If you wanted to get involved in a longer-term conversation, I wouldn't necessarily fire the canon of truth directly at her, you know, loaded up with everything that is...
What she would probably consider negative towards religion, load it all up with that, you know, fire it straight at her brain, it's probably going to send her reeling, and of course you know that she's embedded in a social church situation.
Well, what does that mean?
That means that there's going to be significant pressure in the other direction.
So it may have been a bit overwhelming for her to get the, you know, to get the canon of there is no God fired at her, because that is going to, you know, leave a God-sized hole in the middle of her soul, and that's going to feel like a net loss to her, right? Religion obviously gives her something positive if you just take away the positive from someone without offering an alternative.
Then it just feels bad, right?
Like it just feels like, I don't know, if your doctor says you need chemotherapy without telling you that you have cancer, then chemotherapy is just going to feel like the doctor is making you sick, right?
There's no, here's the short-term pain, here's the long-term gain situation.
And I think what you have, you have to care about someone.
I'm not saying you don't, right?
I'm just trying to give sort of the flavor of...
The purpose of us is to help people, right?
And sometimes that...
That means hurting them, right?
I mean, it's true. I mean, it's not that we're hurting them.
It's just a reality, right? Like, you know, when you go to the dentist and they have pictures of people who haven't taken care of their teeth, and it's like, ah, okay, I don't want to look like a great white guy over there.
So this is a little bit of a scare stuff in terms of here's the alternatives if you don't take care of yourself, if you don't take care of your soul through philosophy and so on.
So, yeah, sometimes you can get a lot of good dentistry out of piping the screams of somebody going through some horrible dental procedure because they didn't take care of their teeth and having other people go pale and go home and floss for three days straight or whatever.
So, there can be the inflection aspect of things, but that's really only useful if you're in a sort of public, if you're an educational public sort of arena.
So... But I think we fundamentally have to really care about the people.
And what I think that means is if you want a long-term conversation with someone, you have to find out if there's a problem you can help them solve.
Right? I mean, there's a reason why Christina waits for people to call her rather than going out into the street and saying, you need therapy.
I mean, it's true, probably, but she doesn't, right?
Because people have to...
Have to believe that there's a problem in order for them to look for a solution, right?
That's why doubt is so important, right?
So, one possible way, again, this may have been a lost cause to begin with, but one possible reason would be to say, well...
Okay, sit down with her and say, well, let's just say for the sake of argument that religion is completely false.
Can you think of anything that would be negative about that?
Could you think of any... Like, if you believe in something fundamentally that's not true...
Would that cause any problems in your life, do you think?
If you believe health information that's not true, then it will cause you health problems.
If you believe nutritional information that's not true, it will cause you dietary problems.
If you believe that in relationships, if you believe that getting beat up is a good thing and being treated well is a bad thing, Then you're going to have relationship problems.
If you think that beating your kids is the great way to make them into better people, you're going to have problems with your kids, right?
So, if you believe false things in every area of your life, it's going to cause you problems.
Magically, strangely, except in the realm of reality itself, where people think that I can just make up any kind of reality that I want without any particular negative repercussions.
Which is strange, of course, in a fundamental way, right?
So, you know, you could sit if you wanted to, right?
I mean, if you wanted to have the longer-term conversation with her, then I just say, well, what's the problem with believing in God?
Right? So she says, well, I have doubts about Christianity.
And in a sense, it's kind of like, well, so what?
Well, you know, so what, right?
Like, I don't know the capital of Timbuktu.
So what, right? That doesn't really cause me any particular problems in life.
As long as I know that it's a long way to temporary, I'm okay.
And so, I think that part of the question is sort of, like, so what, right?
So, oh, I have doubts about religion.
I don't know if religion is true. So what, right?
I mean, would that be, if religion was not true, would that be a bad thing?
Would it cause you any problems in your life if you had false beliefs, right?
And we all understand that with medicine, relationships, parenting, all this kind of stuff, right?
But, okay, so let's say it's not true.
Because if she says, well, if religion isn't true, I'm going to believe it anyway, just because it's socially pleasant, right?
Like, I don't really care, I just have some doubts, but I don't really care whether religion is true or not, because it gives me comfort or whatever, right?
I mean, I think that's sort of an important consideration.
You could have figured this stuff out ahead of time, if she had been honest and whatever.
And again, this is like ninth Dan belt, black belt of debating, but you could ask her beforehand, right?
Right, so she said, well, man, if religion isn't true, I'll...
I had no reason to get out of bed in the morning, right?
Well, you can talk about that and say, well...
Well, you have to pay your taxes, right?
You've got to get out and make money.
But no, I mean, if somebody says, well, God, if there's no God, then I'd have no reason to live, right?
Then it'd be like, well, good luck.
You know, that's saying the truth will bring you to suicide or decaying entropic inertia, then, you know, that's not something you can sell to if that sort of makes any sense, right?
I mean, you can't buy a product that people don't want.
You can't solve a problem that people don't have or don't think is a problem.
I don't buy a whole lot of psoriasis medicine because I don't have any psoriasis.
If I did, I would buy, you know, if I understood that I had psoriasis and believed that this medicine would cure it and whatever, whatever, right?
But you've got to establish whether there's, I mean if you want, this is just my thoughts, right?
Whether or not people have a problem.
So yes, I have doubts about religion, this person may say, but man, if there was no God, I'd lose all my friends, I wouldn't be able to talk to my family, I'd be totally rejected at work.
I mean, in a sense, your reaction to being an atheist at work was telling about what you were asking her to get involved in, right?
You were sort of saying to this woman who was religious, join me in my secret club of things we can't talk about at work because it'll get me fired.
I'm not saying you're wrong about that.
You're probably quite right about that.
But, again, that's sort of a high hurdle to ask somebody to join.
And you don't have embedded social relationships.
You don't go to a church. Like, what you're asking this woman to do is, like, ginormous, beyond-planetary motion, right?
And to sort of accept that and to understand that, it's okay when you're selling something that is going to make people's lives a whole lot more difficult, it's okay to be a little bit elitist.
I mean, I actually think it's kind of essential, right?
Therapy isn't for everyone.
Philosophy is not for everyone.
Philosophy screws up more people than it helps.
Because they don't have the strength.
They don't have the strength.
They don't have the ego strength.
They don't have the robustness.
They can't stand alone in an empty universe Lit only by the truth and build reality from there, understand reality from there.
Most people are embedded in social relationships and social networks that are based on falsehoods and lies, and you take all of that away and they evaporate.
They disappear. They don't exist.
They don't have the integrity, the strength to stand alone.
I mean, that's why it's important for we pioneers to...
Attack the lies. Most people can't stand in the absence of lies because that's all they know.
That's all they are. Right?
Who are you if who you are is based on a mythology?
When you take that mythology away, who are you?
Well, for most people, it's like, I am nothing.
I don't exist. Now, that is true because they don't exist in the realm of mythology, which means they exist in the fantasies of others, not within their own imagination and within their own creativity and with their own rational processing.
So, I think to understand...
The journey that you're asking someone to go on, it would be like, well, tell me about yourself, right?
Tell me what's going on in your life.
Like, if you go down this road, right?
I'm down this road like I know where it goes.
That's why I've always said at the beginning, like...
You think it's a set of stairs that you can climb, but it's more like an icy chute that you can hang on to, like your body's a luge riding machine.
Ski? Luge? Ski? I don't know what the hell it's called.
But you won't be in control of this process.
This process is going to take you up.
Like, I know that. I've sort of been down that road.
And so... Saying to people, really?
Are you sure you want to do this?
You know, that's what the coaches do, right?
Some kid comes along and says, I want to win a gold at the Olympics.
And the coach who's already trained 10 guys to win the gold at the Olympics says, go away, kid.
Go away. And the kid says, what do you mean go away?
I want to win the gold at the Olympics.
He's like, kid, get lost.
Get out of here. Never going to happen.
Right? And the kid slouches away.
Kid comes back the next day.
I want to win the gold in the Olympics.
Get out of here, kid.
You bother me. This goes on for a month.
Kid comes back every day.
No, I really want to do it. Then the coach might say, alright kid, sit down.
Kid sits down. Why do you keep bothering me, kid?
Says the coach. I really want to win the gold at the Olympics.
Like, well, you got this far.
You took a month of me telling you to go away, and you kept coming back.
So that means you really want it.
But let me tell you what it takes to win a gold at the Olympics.
You've got to get up at 4 o'clock in the morning for the next 5 years.
You've got to train 6 hours a day to the point where you'll be throwing up.
You've got to give up everything that you like to eat.
You've got to eat, like, skinless chicken and drink protein shakes until you feel that you're pretty much inhabited by chalky-tasting milkshakes.
It's pretty unlikely that you're going to be able to have or keep a girlfriend.
You've got to travel. You've got to sleep in buses.
You've got to run when you're exhausted.
You'll hate it. A good percentage of the time.
And after all of that, even if you do everything that I tell you for the next five years, the odds of you winning that gold are like less than 1%.
Even if you push yourself and you work as hard as you conceivably can, the odds of you winning that gold are less than 1%.
Failure is the norm.
For people who want to win the gold at the Olympics.
And you'll hate me as your coach.
You'll absolutely hate me as your coach.
So, why do you want to do it?
Kid says, well, I want to win the gold.
And the coach says, well, then I can't help you.
Kid says, why not? Coach says, well, because if you want to win the gold...
Then you're embarking on a grueling, self-punishing regime for five years or more where the odds of success, even if you do everything right, are less than 1%.
And I won't do that to a fellow human being.
I will not set up somebody for that kind of failure and that kind of self-castigation.
Kid says, self-castigation?
I won't do that. If I've got a race, I know I need to keep my sperm.
Guy says, uh, you're not an English student, right?
And then we go off on some comedic thing like that, and then we come back.
Now, the kid may at some point say, right, I guess I want to do this because I love to run, and I want to be the best runner that I can be.
And of course, I don't know why people want to do that, but let's just say, right?
But this is pretty standard fare when it comes to, you know, bad dramatic sports films, right?
Like, go away! You can't do this.
It's sort of important. And that's not a big approach that I take, but I certainly have warned that it's going to feel like hell, this philosophical journey.
Becoming a philosopher, becoming wise, is going to feel like hell.
You're going to hate me, as a lot of people do as they go through this process.
It's going to feel like hell.
You're going to be angry. You're going to be upset.
You're going to look back longingly at the blue pill.
I think it was the blue pill.
And it's going to be more than worth it at the end, but man, along the way, you're going to hate it and hate me and so on, right?
So once you recognize that, then it's maybe a little bit more clear to understand that sort of what you're doing is somebody saying, well, you know, I like watching the Olympics and I like to run.
And you're like, great! You're up tomorrow, 4 o'clock in the morning, and we'll start your training.
But you can't push this onto somebody, right?
You can tell them that it's hell, right?
You can tell them that it's wonderful when it's done, but if they don't have any discomfort, right?
I mean, if the alcoholic thinks that drinking is great and there's no downside, then you can't tell them not to be an alcoholic, but that's like saying, don't go home to the wife you love.
Why wouldn't I? It's all positive.
So, I think that it's important to just ask about the person.
So what?
So if religion is false?
Because if they turn out to be somebody who says, well, I believe in religion because it gives me comfort, it gives me a social network, then the truth or falsehood of religion has nothing to do with it.
If somebody says, I want to believe what is true, and I will stand for nothing less, and maybe they get the happiness factor that comes out of that in the long run, or maybe they just are proud.
I fundamentally could not stand to live in the fantasies of other people and call myself A person with any kind of self-esteem.
Like, you can't do it, right? You live in the fantasies of others.
You live in the fairy tale of God or state or whatever country, race.
You're a slave, right?
I mean, you've got to have the desire to walk upright.
You've got to have the desire to have some pride if you're going to pursue this, right?
And so if the woman says, well, yeah, I guess I have some doubts about...
Religion, but, you know, man, it's a great place to go on a Sunday.
I love the baking. I love the singing.
Like, I'd never give up my friends.
Then I'd be like, oh, okay, well...
Then there's not that much to talk about, right?
In fact, it'd be kind of cruel.
Because she's not saying, I want to believe in religion because I only want to believe in that which is true.
But she says, I want to believe in religion as an argument from effect.
The effect being comfort, society, baking, singing, or whatever, right?
Right, so if somebody says, well, I want to believe in religion because it has good effects, then the truth or falsehood of religion is irrelevant.
They may experience some occasional discomfort, long-term dyslamy or mild depression, and have an unfulfilling and unsatisfying life, but they can't connect that to...
Religion, right? They can't connect that to their belief in the religion.
In religion, it's very unlikely that they'd have the ego strength, if not the cognitive capacity.
I think actually just about everybody has the cognitive capacity.
Like, everybody knows that religion is false.
That's why religious people tend to be kind of shallow, empty, and whatever, right?
Highly conformist. I would just listen to the guy Christopher Hitchens debates with in a recent three-hour debate that they had.
Very annoying debate, by the way.
We'll get into that perhaps another time.
But... I just sort of ask, you know, try and figure out what sort of quest are they on?
What sort of quest are they on?
I mean, I'm only just trying to work empirically, at least from my own experience, right?
I only gave up on lies when I was...
I couldn't sleep for 18 months.
I mean, I can't say that I was motivated by the truth as much as I'd like to say, believe that I was.
It wasn't the case, just empirically.
It was truth or die, right?
Truth will go mad. Truth will throw myself off a bridge, right?
I mean, that's what it came down to for me.
I don't know what it was for you, but that's what it was for me.
And maybe it's less dramatic for other people, but that certainly was what propelled me out of the imagination of the fantasies of others, right?
To some degree in particular, actually, in particular, the Randian stuff.
So, yeah, I just ask questions.
You know, so what? What if religion is false?
What would that mean to you?
Like, oh, my God, I mean, I have to believe what is true.
I can't just believe stuff because other people tell me to.
I've got to get some pride and have an individual relationship with reality, not just be some conformist slave ducking head bowing toady to other people's rank imagination or rank fantasy.
No, I mean, and if, you know, like, I couldn't stand it if I ended up believing something that turned out to be false.
I would, like, I feel physically ill at the idea of it.
But then maybe they've got a shot.
But if it's just like, well, I... I've got some questions, but I really like the bake sales.
Well, you know, I'd take the bake sales if I were you, because this is not going to be any fun for you, right?
And you won't make it, right? You won't make it.
The reason that the coach tells the guy who wants the gold medal to go away for a month is that if the guy says, oh, okay, I'll go away, then he's not going to have the strength to overcome the obstacles, right?
The obstacles that are in the way of getting the gold medal are a whole lot more than some coach saying, go away, kid, you bother me.
So it's just a possibility, right?
Just be curious about the other person so you don't end up wasting your time.
Now, I think that sort of, again, on a practical level, what happened was she was interested in you in some manner, romantically, right?
And... So she shared something with you.
You shared something with her. She started to become intellectually awake.
And, of course, the brain-crushing death trap of religious conformity saw that there was movement in the Matrix and a desire to beg free.
Slammed down on that growing brain.
Somebody's getting out of the wheelchair.
Hit them with a bat. Crush them!
I mean, that's what...
These people do, right?
That's inevitable. So, you know, she sort of said, well, this guy is cute, I like him, whatever, right?
But I can't give up all this.
And again, right, people say, is the word ideology positive or negative?
Well, she used the word ideology.
All right, second listener question.
There is simply so much to discuss that I simply do not know where to begin my exploration, he writes.
So, I'm simply doing a stream-of-consciousness approach until I get my bearings straight.
Well, my friend, I'm the last person to complain about that approach.
So, he says, I do think that I have serious problems regarding sex.
This is either because of things that happened to me as a child, the fact that I've never had a real relationship, the fact that I've never really enjoyed sex, or the fact that I do not at the moment wish to pursue any sort of relationship whatsoever for the sake of school.
I may be brainwashed right now into thinking that school is more important than everything else at the moment.
I have a very unhealthy attitude towards sex, in other healthier people's opinions, I would imagine.
And I'm choosing to stay abstinent for as long as I can until I meet someone with whom I can share it with in a meaningful way.
But I don't know how to go about solving these problems concerning sex.
I could just not talk about it and find more deep-rooted issues that would automatically solve these problems.
I could use those experiences to delve further into my past.
There are so many avenues I could take on the path to mental health that I'm not sure where to start.
However, I'd imagine that any response to my post is as good a place to start as any, and the only way to go about solving my problems is...
Through conversation. If that conversation leads me to believe that I need to go over these issues with a therapist, so be it.
I would just rather be more open than closed because it seems like the right thing to do.
If it's not, I can stop being so open, but I need to know why that is a better idea.
Concerning my parents, they divorced when I was like seven or nine or something.
I remember the day it happened.
My mom was the bitch and my dad was the cool one.
I have no idea why he married her in the first place.
And there's the issue. Anyway, let's keep going.
The following punishments were all done by my mom.
I remember being spanked for stupid reasons that I cannot remember.
I remember that one punishment was being put on the stairs.
Oh, the stairs.
Those words just brought back chills.
I hated the stairs. I had to sit there and do absolutely nothing.
I was often sent to my room.
I don't even know what I did when I was sent to my room.
That's when I learned about time travel that sleeping passes the time often.
My mom would forget about me, and I would have to choose to come out to see if my mom would arbitrarily decide that I could come out.
Anyway, if I had more specific subjects to talk about, my writing would be much more structured, but I've never written about myself before at all, basically.
That's why I'm here. Hopefully I'll get better and better at it, and I think I am, but for now, I'm just doing the best I can.
Concerning me asking people to agree with me that I'm worthless, I wasn't aware that I was doing that.
Sorry, I'll have to look that one up.
Anyway, so let's have a look at this issue.
Oh, these fucking cool dads.
These goddamn cool dads.
Well, look, I mean, obviously you need to get a full physical checkup, right?
Check your testosterone levels, check your hormonal levels, check your pituitary gland functioning, all this kind of stuff, right?
Mental health, I don't know if you're overweight, I don't know if you might have, right?
I mean, just, you know, oxygenation of the blood issue.
Just go and talk to a doctor and get a full physical checkup done and say, look, dude, I'm...
Not into chicks, so give me a rectal exam.
Actually, you might want to break those two apart a little.
But just say, you know, I don't have a sex drive, right?
And there may be psychological reasons for it.
I may just be one of these people who is not particularly strong in terms of sexual drive, and sexual drive varies from person to person.
But go get a full physical checkup, right?
That's... That's the key and major issue.
But let's assume that physically you're healthy, right?
Because otherwise this could be a very short podcast, and I think that that's not the case, that you're physically unhealthy.
So let's pretend that you're physically fine, but go get the checkup, and let's pretend that you're physically fine and look for any other psychological causality.
All right, so look, the punishment that your mom...
Gave you this absolutely vicious and indifferent sadism, right?
Go to your room, and then you're then forgotten about.
Well, you're not forgotten about, right?
I mean, forgetting about you is primary to your mom's mind, right?
So that's something to understand.
You're not even worth remembering.
And, of course, then you're in an impossible situation.
So the torture of putting a child in an impossible situation, go to your room, and then you're never released.
Well, what do you do? Do you come out of your room?
Do you? I mean, obviously, you spent years of your childhood tortured with that very question.
This is the sadism, right? Do I come out of my room?
If I come out of my room, I could get out with even more punishment.
If I don't come out of my room, my mom might get mad because she said, I didn't tell you to stay in there all day.
Get your chores done.
So, that's like unbelievable torture.
My heart absolutely goes out to you.
And this is really sadistic.
This is really sadistic.
I mean, it's almost worse than just beating the tar out of you.
In fact, in some ways, it really is worse.
Because you're told that you're completely worthless.
You bring pain, and then you're forgotten.
So you have negative value.
We could go on and on about this, but this is just unbelievably sadistic.
Mom was completely evil as a parent.
So, obviously, when a woman had power over you in the past, it erased you.
Now, we'll get to a podcast series on sex.
I just have to get the right 70s disco background music.
Sex is an I am, right?
Sex is an I am. Particularly for men.
It is a presence, right?
It could be presence of false self, but it definitely is an I am.
And of course, when your mom had power over you, it was an I am not, right?
Your existence was specifically scorned, rejected, despised, ignored, right?
So, clearly there's some kind of paradox here that is a shutdown situation, right?
The whole point of abuse, in many ways, is to put us into an impossible situation.
The ways that parents do this are legion.
Parents will say, tell me the truth, and then they'll punish you for telling the truth.
They will say, go to your room, and then they won't come and get you, and so you don't know what to do.
They'll say, finish your dinner and be happy.
At the dinner table. Don't make faces, right?
And they'll give you some horrible Satan's boogers like Brussels sprouts or something.
Right? So they're constantly...
Don't cry! They'll scream at you.
Don't be scared of me! Right?
Constantly parents...
Not all, but many parents put their children in these impossible situations.
They're completely designed to...
To paralyze the cognitive functioning, right?
Yes is no. No means yes.
Do you want me to hit you? But it's paralyzed.
It's constant assault upon the ego that occurs in far too many households.
So, when a woman had power of you, things went very badly.
You were not allowed to exist.
You were not allowed to think. And, as you say, right?
Sleeping passed the time.
Non-existence, right? Sleeping is a form of temporary non-existence in many ways, right?
Unless you're having very vivid dreams or whatever, but...
So, to not be was the only way to get by, which is the rule for far too many of us.
So, you're a young fellow, according to your photo, and when I was your age, I felt this paradox, right?
That a woman having power over me...
My mom wasn't the way your mom was.
My mom was just more violent and brutal, but not sadistic.
That job was my brother's.
But... I think that...
I mean, I certainly recall the sexual desire that I felt for women gave them power over me.
Right? The sexual desire that men have for women, and, you know, feminism seems to be much more around getting women all the goodies and not so much the tough stuff, right?
So feminism is very much around, let's get maternity leave.
And equal pay for work, including pregnancy, but they're not so much into, let's get women to ask men out, right?
At least, maybe that's the case more, but it certainly wasn't the case when I was that age.
So, sexual desire...
For women, it gives women power over you, right?
So you've got to go and ask the girl, and the girl can say yes, and the girl can say no.
It's, you know, the more you want the girl, the more you're driven to ask her out, and the more you're vulnerable if she says no.
It's a whole mess, right?
In very many ways, right?
I mean, it is a return to the humiliation at the hands of a woman, or the potential humiliation, right?
So if you have experienced a lot of sadism and humiliation at the hands of your mom, then...
Sexual desire is going to return you to that state.
So, there's a challenge, right?
When you really want a woman, she has the power to deny your want, right?
And say, no, I don't want to go out with you.
And, I mean, I still remember one of the first times I asked a girl out, Shirley Middlebrook.
And, you know, because we had the lockers that were the same, because of his last name.
And... Ah, it's a mask. I still remember that.
And so, you go into the dances and so on, right?
So, you're so angry at your mom that you won't put yourself in a position of being rejected.
It's a theory, right? It's just a theory.
And you've every right to be angry at your mom.
Just don't take it out on your gonads, and don't take it out on the women who might be entirely charmed by a relationship with you.
But... At an even more fundamental level, and that's pretty fundamental to begin with, but at an even more fundamental level, I tell you, I am not an overly aggressive person, at least I don't think I am.
I would like to take a big sack, put in all of the fantasies that people have about the good cop parents, and...
Tie an enormous number of acme anvils to them and drop them into the ocean.
There is no degree of aggression that I could imagine that I would not like to apply to this fantasy of the good-caught parent.
Oh, my fucking God.
Everyone and their dog has this fantasy of, well, one parent was bad, but one parent was good, you see?
My mom, she was bad, but my dad, he was good.
Or, my dad, he was good, but, oh, bad, but my mom, she was great.
Although it usually tends to be the mom, but that's just because we have, I think, more men on the forum, but...
Oh, lordy, lordy, lordy.
This fantasy needs to be dredged up, and it can be like lifting the Titanic, feeling like a guppy with a chain.
This needs to be dredged up, exposed to sunlight, like the vampire that it is, and have it detonate into a cloud of flame upon receiving light.
This fantasy that...
You know, my mom was a total bitch.
My dad was pretty cool. I don't know what he was doing with her.
Well, that's exactly the core of the issue, in my opinion.
This is the core of the issue. If you don't know why your dad was with your mom, then you unconsciously know that you will end up with a woman like your mom.
Right? Right? Which is not going to be much of a spark to your sexual desire.
This is related to a post. I'm sorry that it took me this long to even address the issue, but this was related to a post that another gentleman had with regards to sexual desire.
Well... Remember how it had this...
I want to go into this whole thing now, but remember I had this thing like your parents...
Your kids do not love you, addressed to parents.
Your kids do not love you. Well...
This is also something that's valid that we can talk about.
Like... If you only love the pussy, it's not love.
What's the woman bringing to the table other than a wet hole, right?
What's the woman bringing to the table?
There's a woman at the gym, had a t-shirt on, said, I have the pussy, I make the rules.
And I said to her, "Man, that's one powerful cat." Sort of think of like one of those Bond villains with the cat on their lap and the cat's really the villain controlling the guy.
But this is one of the great tragedies of all too many women's lives, that they want to be loved for who they are, but there's this little pussy equation that somewhat skews the relationship, right?
I mean, women spend such an enormous amount of time on their appearance and not on their souls, and yet they want to be loved for who they are, right?
Look at my shiny hair!
Look at my beautiful skin!
Look at these fine breasts!
Now love me for who I am!
Well, that's nonsense, right?
And it's a great temptation for women, and it's something that biology and a corrupt culture has sort of combined to raise the value of women in an artificial manner, which, of course, inflation always breeds a loss of value, right? So when you inflate the value of women by attaching a vagina to the list of things they bring to the table, then the vagina and the penis, they cancel each other out, right?
Sure, the woman brings sex to the relationship.
Hey, you bring sex to the relationship, too.
It doesn't matter. Nobody's bringing more.
Vagina's not worth more than the penis.
So it doesn't matter.
That's like saying, hey, my girlfriend speaks English.
That's incredible. It's like, but you speak English, too.
Yeah, but her English is more important.
No, I mean, you both have to speak English.
So if you're both bringing sex to the relationship, it doesn't mean that the woman's bringing anything extra.
Is that old Beachy song, more than a woman?
What does that mean, says some comedian?
A woman and a six-pack of it.
So, if you don't know why your dad was with your mom, and you think he's a cool guy and a neat guy and a good guy or whatever, obviously you like to think of yourself as a good guy, as a neat guy, as a cool guy.
So, if good guys can just randomly end up with horrible, sadistic and evil women, why the hell would you date?
Why the hell would you date?
You know, it's somewhere on the board.
Have a look for...
Do a search on the board for Rudy.
I posted a short story about this sort of problem.
It's taken out of... I had to cut it from a novel, The God of Atheists, because it was too long.
But... Of course.
I mean, if you don't know why you're dead...
Anyway, repetition. I've received some comments on it.
So, yeah, your dad was not a good guy.
Your dad was not a good guy.
Good guys don't accidentally end up with bad women.
Good guys don't just sort of trip over a woman and fall into her vagina and have children with her and get married to her.
And they're just great guys and it's like getting hit by lightning out of a clear blue sky.
Life is not that random.
Psychological life, for sure, is not that random.
Your dad knew that your mom was a total bitch About 30 seconds after meeting her.
Right? Sorry if the planes are loud.
I'm very low today. To do these podcasts, I mean, the woods is nice, but I can't do them at home.
Christina's seeing patients all day, and I can't screech if I'm at home.
home.
So sorry about the planes.
I hope they're not too bad.
But it's not...
Good guys don't accidentally end up with bad I know this, because I was with some bad women.
And after therapy, that ended.
After I learned about myself, after I became philosophical in a real rubber-meets-the-road kind of way, after I stopped talking about values, started living values, poof, whammo, kablammo, shazam!
All the bad people bounced off The force field of wisdom.
And the good people were drawn in.
With the tractor beam of virtue.
Right? There's a reason that Superman is invulnerable to bullets, right?
Because he's a good guy. And bad people, they don't mess with you.
They don't come into your orbit. Or if they do, they don't last, right?
As we've sort of seen on the board and as I've had some sort of private tussles with people on email.
As soon as you assert your virtue, then you can get these people out of your life.
And once you're living virtue, then you're never going to end up with a woman.
Like, a woman like your mom, if you met her, you would feel, like, creeped out.
You'd feel like you wanted to take a shower.
You would smell almost like she was rotting on the inside.
She would look, no matter how good she looked physically, there'd be a cadaverous kind of ugliness coming off.
I mean, you just get that.
With your second brain, right?
Your gut. She is sort of like a second brain.
Check it out on the Colbert Report.
So, if you think your dad was a good guy, but somehow ended up with this murderous, destructive, vile, horrible bitch, see you next Tuesday kind of woman, then, then, of course, you're not going to have any particular capacity to process your sex drive.
Right? If I go down that street, I end up in prison for 20 years.
I just have to walk down that street.
There's a bunch of guys waiting to throw me in a potato sack, beat me with billy clubs, and throw me in prison where I'll be abused for 20 years.
Now, your hormones may say, hey, go down that street.
Let's go down that street. Come on, what are you, chicken?
Go down the street. The street, the street, the street, the street, the street, street, street, street, street, street.
But your sort of sanity would say, no, I don't think that's a very good idea.
Let's not do that. So, you're kind of paralyzed like somebody who's looking at heroin, right?
Yeah, maybe you want heroin, but you know that heroin, again, I'm talking about like heavy addiction, crazy, crazy.
And of course, that's only self-abuse, right?
I mean, what happened with your dad is he married your mom, gave her a kid, and then what was he doing the whole time that you were stuck on the goddamn stairs, stuck in your room, sleeping away your childhood?
Oh, heartbreaking. Heartbreaking, my brother.
What a terrible, terrible, terrible situation.
What the hell was your fucking dad doing?
Unless he was actually dead, in which case he's still responsible for marrying this bitch, giving her a kid to torture, then you guys need to have some words.
The way to recover your attraction to women, if that's what you want, is to sit down and talk with your dad and say, Dad...
What the fuck?
What the fuck were you doing the whole time that I was a kid and being so horribly abused by this woman that you picked out of a crowd to marry?
We all meet an airplane hangar full of potential mates.
You picked this one.
You gave her a child.
And you did nothing to protect that child.
You let her carve her evil into my very spine.
Dad, what the fuck were you doing?
And to get angry!
It's once we understand the truth about the moral choices that we make.
You don't have a self in this regard yet.
You're inhabited by your dad's view of himself.
And Rod was kindly talking about his legal issues the last couple of weeks on the call-in show.
And, I mean, you don't have an identity yet, right?
You can't have really good sex without an I, right?
I want you, I desire you, is an I statement.
It's like the I love you. And...
So, because of that, you don't have your own identity yet.
You don't have your own identity processing your childhood, right?
You have your dad's identity.
You have your dad's fantasy.
You're living in your dad's fantasy where he's a cool guy and your mom was a bitch, right?
That's his fantasy. That's not the truth for sure.
And that sure as hell wasn't your experience.
It was that your dad didn't help you. So, this is your father's experience.
This is your father's mythology, right?
This is your father's mythology.
We fight our way free of mythology all the time.
All the time. Other people are so insistent to press their narratives upon us, to swallow us up in their vile, self-justifying fictions.
They're lies, they're religions, right?
This is what religion feeds on.
This is the personal religion that almost everybody has, except, I think, we pioneers, but...
Your father's story is that I was helpless.
I was helpless. And your mother was a bad person.
There's nothing I could do. There was no way to know.
I did the best I could.
What could I do?
She would have done anything.
It could have been worse.
Right? I mean, of course, there's the Ron Paul thing, right?
So he said he was going to make the state smaller, and everybody says political action makes the state smaller.
Well, it makes the state bigger.
Well, but imagine if they hadn't acted, how much worse things could have been, right?
So a father must protect his children from all abuses, right?
Particularly from those of the mother and of the siblings, of course.
And a father who fails to do that, who serves his child up to the vilest kinds of abuses, We'll always, always, always, inevitably, make up a story which says, yes, I didn't protect you as much as I would have liked to, but if I had not done what I did, you would have suffered even more, right?
Like if I let your mother abuse you, but if I had confronted her, it would have been even worse.
This is why I say that the wrong poor stuff's all to do with the family.
Make up some imaginary universe where everyone is virtuous.
Right?
Where everyone is virtuous.
It's like Hitler saying, well, I'm a good guy, see, because, yeah, I killed 6 million Jews and homosexuals and gypsies and so on.
But boy, there was this other guy in the party, he wanted to kill 10 million.
If I hadn't gotten in and did what I did, 4 million more Jews would have been killed, so I'm a good guy.
There's no evil that can't be imagined.
Sorry, there's no evil that exists that can't be turned into good by imagining that it prevented a worse evil.
You know, Charles Manson could say, you know, when I was on my way to kill Sharon Tate and her baby, I met a guy who said he was going to kill ten pregnant women.
And I said, well, if I kill this one pregnant woman...
Will you not kill the ten? He said, okay.
So actually save the lives. Make up anything you want.
We can only judge the actions.
We can't judge the alternative universes.
Everybody likes to stuff things that they can't stomach, right?
The alternative universe is actually the physics of this universe, right?
Because people think that they can stuff stuff into this alternative universe and make up whatever ethics and whatever they want.
Existence of God, virtue of my dad, whatever.
But it's not true. The alternate universe that you think of so distant is actually your unconscious which runs your life.
You don't get to stuff anything outside of reality.
You just get to repress it into the root of your life and thus reproduce everything you want to avoid.
So, I can totally guarantee you that this is the history of your family.
The patriarchal line, to use the word patriarchal in its non-commonly accepted manner, the patriarchal line of your family, there's this endless thread probably back to the dawn of the species, which is guys saying, I'm helpless in the face of evil women Said evil women then find the children of these men, know that they can get kids and enact their evil upon those children, and that there's nothing these guys will do to stop them.
So then these guys make up this story that there was nothing I could do.
I did nothing, therefore I could do nothing.
I was not virtuous, therefore virtue was impossible, or what I did was the most virtuous thing.
I mean, that's always the option you have as a human being, right?
If you do something you're not proud of, You can just make up a story which says that it was the best that you could conceivably do.
Which is not...
It's not the case.
It's not the case. Because that as a universal principle means that there's no such thing as ethics.
If whatever you do is the best that you could conceivably do, then there's no such thing as ethics, right?
right?
This is just determinism in another guy's.
So, yeah, you need to break out of your dad's fantasy, right?
Especially the sick fantasy of, I was helpless in the face of evil.
No. Helplessness in the face of evil is you're captured by some evil gang.
A sack is put over your head, and you're beaten.
And it happens randomly.
Some home invasion.
You live in a peaceful neighborhood, whatever, right?
That is helplessness in the face of evil.
Finding a woman, wooing a woman, buying a ring, proposing, getting married, talking, giving her money, taking her money, getting your life enmeshed, having a kid.
That's not helplessness.
Please, fucking God, don't talk about helplessness in the phase of evil when it comes to having children with bad women.
More for women having children with bad men.
That is not exactly being abducted.
Somebody works five years to get a gold medal in the Olympics and then they say, I was helpless.
No, you got up at four o'clock in the morning, you trained, you practiced, you flew, you sat on buses, you went without sleep, you ate crap, you gave up relationships.
I mean, it's ridiculous to have a particular aim that you pursue for a long period of time and then say you're helpless.
It's completely deranged, but it's inevitable, right?
In a sense, right? For people who just want to justify themselves and so on.
So, Yeah, I mean, I would say, again, barring out the physical stuff, but even if you find that there is physical stuff that can be fixed, you're definitely going to need to deal with this stuff.
That's why I spend so much time on it.
And plus, I'm no doctor, but you need to reclaim your own narrative.
Like, you need to reclaim the truth, right?
You need to get out of the self-justifying bullshit narrative of your dad.
And you need to get, and we all need to get, there are no good parents when there is a bad parent, right?
There's no good parent when there is a bad parent.
That is such a fundamental thing that this splitting that goes on...
And you see this all the time, right?
In fairy tales, there's like the evil stepmom who's replaced the good stepmom.
That's the splitting, right? There's a good mom somewhere in there or whatever, right?
I had a good mom, but she was replaced by a bad mom.
I had a good parent and a bad parent.
It's not true. It's just not true.
And there's so many reasons as to why that's not true.
true.
We don't have to get into them right now, but there is no such thing as a good parent where there is a bad parent.
And once we accept that, then we can, once we accept that basic truth, then we can break out of the prison, a fantasy narrative that bad people use to justify their lives.
Thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to your donations eagerly and with great anticipation, and I will talk to you soon.
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