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June 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:13
809 Sympathy for my Father
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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. I thought that it would be interesting.
I had a very strange impulse yesterday.
And I thought it might be interesting for you just to see how I sort of go about working my way through these strange impulses.
And maybe it will be of help to you, and since it was with regards to my own family...
I thought that it might be of great interest to you, because, of course, we're all dealing with lots of these kinds of issues and problems, so hopefully this will be of interest to you and of help to you.
So, how to begin?
Well, I've been listening to this novel I wrote a couple of years ago called Almost.
Now, Almost is a massive tome.
Three books, really.
And it was a staggeringly ambitious project of mine, and I wanted to show how family dysfunction resulted in World War II. That the root of everything is the family.
I was not yet an anarchist when I wrote the book, but that's not particularly relevant.
But I wanted to show how Family dysfunction has its effects in the most broad and powerful of political spheres.
So I've wanted to show how family pathologies could account for something like World War II. And it was pretty ambitious.
So of course I take kids all the way from near birth to their pinnacle of professional success is in Foreign office in England, and so on.
And I leaned enormously on family history, the family history that I know about, which is not huge on the British side, and even less, of course, since there's very little family left in these years from the German side.
And... I mean, I think it's an incredible novel.
I really do. I really do.
And, of course, I haven't looked at it for quite some time.
I did read some short stories of it recently.
But... I like out as premium podcast, but I think it's an incredible novel.
And I think that the richness and depth of it all, I think, is great.
And I don't mean this in sort of any kind of self-praise, but it was a hell of a novel to write.
Oh my god!
Was it ever unbelievably depressing and unpleasant, but powerful for me and a great deal of release in the novel, in the writing of it.
But it's not the lightest and gayest of tomes.
So it was hell to write, and it's been fascinating to listen to again.
And to me, I was listening to some of the early parts where a character based on my grandmother is...
It's so odd, you know?
I was just thinking, grandmother, does it go back to World War I? Yeah, well, of course it does.
I'm 40, my dad's 70...
So, my grandmother, who was catastrophically depressed due to losing relatives in the war, I based a character named Ruth on her, and I was going through a bit where Ruth is listening to or responding to a visitor who comes with her father's letter after her father gets killed, her father's letter from the front of World War I. And, oh man, I was at the gym and I was like, I was getting really weepy.
To me, there's this This black family history of mine that goes back through generations, right?
I mean, we were part of the pillaging Viking asshole horde that came across with William the Conqueror in 1066 and have been asshole power mongers, you know, ever since, up until my grandfather's time.
And so there's a lot of agony in the family history, and of course I think that we inflicted more than we got as a bloodline But for me, I was listening to all of this and looking at...
I sort of get a mental image of a very dark stake that goes very deep into the ground.
And you can just see the top, right?
And you think, oh, it's just a little stake, and you try and pull it up.
And that's sort of my more immediate family history, if that makes sense.
That's sort of the more localized thing.
But then when you look at it and you sort of examine it, it goes down like evolution, like layer after layer, history into history, deep into the ground.
It's a shrub with the roots of a thousand-year-old oak tree.
A twig at top with a boobab tree underneath it.
And so, going into the family history, as I did in this book, and then re-listening to it.
I've got about 10 hours of the book, as an audiobook, up for the premium donators.
And so, I was listening to it again, and of course, I was A, admiring the artistry, but also B, just I found the story very powerful and moving and heartbreaking and so on.
And... Because I have a good parent in there in the form of Gunther, there is also some stuff that's very sad for me in terms of picturing a good parent or a benevolent authority figure as an adult with his relationship to children.
So, I've been listening to this story, this family history, and realizing just how back and black and dark and deep the family dysfunction goes.
And this is And not particularly more true of my family than any other family in Europe that has had European experience of the genocidal century, the 20th century.
So, nothing particularly unique about it, but...
I suddenly was seized by a very strong impulse yesterday morning.
I don't remember any of my dreams, but...
I wanted to take this book and send it to my father.
I wanted to take this book and I wanted to send it to my father.
And the reason that I wanted to do that...
It was not because I wanted him to say, ooh, what a great book, or because I wanted...
I mean, I wouldn't mind having him and other family members fill in more details, because what I have is very sketchy and happily filled in through imagination.
But the reason...
Oh, my friends, how strange.
The reason that I wanted to send this novel to my father was because I wanted to give my father some comfort.
I wanted to give my father, my aged, baffled and bewildered and corrupt father, some comfort.
Which was quite a surprise for me, let me tell you.
It was quite a surprise for me.
Now, I don't believe that there's any validity in Having impulses translate immediately to action so I can have a feeling without feeling like I'm going to do something rash, like, say, send the novel to my father.
But there is a kind of understanding.
There is a deep understanding, I think, in the novel.
About my family history on my father's side than because I follow a German family on my mother's side.
It's a British family and a German family in both the roles that each of the people play in causing World War II or bringing it about or supporting it or whatever.
And just sort of by the by, like I brought this up with Christina yesterday, And I could tell that she was acutely uncomfortable with the topic, and we talked about other things for quite some time, and I made a long conversation last night about how she couldn't handle this topic.
And the reason that she couldn't handle this topic is because when I talk about wanting to give my father comfort, or having this impulse to send an offer to my father to give him some comfort, to put him as a link in the chain that goes down to an evil pit almost of prehistory.
Almost of, I mean, back to the Dark Ages for sure, almost of prehistory.
When you place your life in the context of history, it can blunt some of the mere and sheer willpower that ultimately many of us ascribe to ourselves alone.
And Christina found this a very unsettling thought, right?
That I might have, or might feel, the need or the desire or the impulse to give my father comfort.
To see the suffering that his life has become, and of course, not just his life, but my mother's life as well.
To see the suffering.
And she felt unsettled by it, as I... I didn't feel this way, but perhaps a lot of people do feel that the only way to judge your parents is to feel nothing but hatred for them and all this kind of stuff.
But I certainly didn't feel that.
Because I was in many ways writing about my father when he was a little boy.
I may even use the name, right?
The name is Tom. And because...
I was writing about my father as a little boy.
I think that listening to this again, with more distance from this family, from hell, when we imagine our abusive parents as children, I think it's pretty easy to see some of the causality that set them down that path.
To imagine the worst person...
Even to imagine Hitler being beaten and thrashed and whipped as a child, our hearts would go out to him.
I think that would be pretty cold-hearted to not feel that way.
That's just sort of how I feel.
It's just a horrible, horrible thing to see a child.
Even if you know what the child's going to do as an adult, it's a horrible thing to even conceive of that level of violence against anyone, let alone a helpless child.
So, this empathy that I had for my father, thinking about the suffering that my father went through when he was a child, which I write about in this novel,
almost... Gives me some empathy for him and places him for me in a context, in a chain of causality, like a set of dominoes going down, right?
Each domino doesn't just fall over of its own accord.
They're knocked, they knock others, and so on.
And I think that the feeling that I had of empathy towards my father had a lot to do with Understanding more at an emotional level, as the book was very emotional for me to write.
Understanding at an emotional...
I spent half the damn book crying when I was writing it, so...
Understanding at an emotional level the sort of black prehistory of my existence, right, and the deep and dark roots that go into the ground almost to prehistory of my family, corruption and evil...
It gives me some sympathy for my father.
First, it gives me empathy, which is to understand, at a more emotional level, the emotional environment that my father grew up in.
Of course, it was a time of great violence.
I mean, my father is not old enough to have been born at the time that the...
The guy I write about in the book was born.
I had to sort of set it earlier so that he'd have the right age for...
He and his brother would have the right age to be involved in the layups of the Second World War.
But when you dig into your parents' emotional histories, which we all can do.
I don't think I have any unique ability in that area.
We can all do it. We all know exactly what our parents went through as children because it was so...
Endlessly repeated upon us.
When we were children, right?
So we all know our parents' emotional history.
Down to the last detail, we could probably, to the syllable, relate conversations that they heard as children or had as children or were inflicted upon them as children down to the last syllable.
So digging into that and really understanding some of the causality that influenced my father, I think, gave me a great feeling of empathy and And some feeling of sympathy.
And this was, of course, greatly troubling to Christina, as I'm sure it would be for other people, too.
And don't worry, I'm not going to lead you back to your foos.
At least that's not my intention.
Because then she felt...
Well, if you have sympathy for your dad, then aren't all of these scare stories in fact true?
Right? The scare stories that we all hear.
If we don't see our parents, right?
That it's cold, it's mean, cold-hearted children.
How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have an ungrateful child.
And that we are going to regret it.
That sympathy and empathy is going to come too late for us.
That after... Our parents die.
We will forever be mired in a wash of regret and sadness that we did not speak when we could, that we did not sympathize, that we held on to bitterness and grudges and we did not speak with sympathy and we did not listen with empathy when we could.
And now that they're dead and gone, we will never have a chance to embrace them with kind words and gestures and so on and so on and so on.
Like, that's the scare story, right?
That That we shall only understand the endless regret of our actions when it is too late to rectify them.
That is the mythology that drives a lot of people back into abusive relationships with their parents, right?
With the illusion that healing and understanding can come through empathy, through one-sided empathy.
I remember many years ago reading a story that was published on the back pages of the Globe and Mail about a guy whose father was dying and his father had never been physically affectionate, but as his father was dying, he taught his father how to hug and there was great comfort in this and so on, right? And so we have these stories, these fairy tales, these mythologies that we will gain empathy for our parents, but only after it is too late.
We will learn that smoking is dangerous only when we have contracted fatal lung cancer.
So, this scare story is something that's very, very fundamental.
And I think that my feeling of empathy towards my father and his history and his childhood and the circumstances, both political, economic, military, sociological, and personal, and familiar, and so on, that he grew up with, which is all something that I work with in the book...
Which, having listened to the book again for the first time in years, I really feel very strongly that I wanted to send this to my dad.
And the reason that I wanted to send this to my dad was not exactly forgiveness, but a kind of understanding.
A kind of understanding.
And the understanding is not forgiveness, and the understanding is not absolution, and the understanding is not, so, let's be pals again.
But it is a kind of understanding...
That gives me some peace.
And maybe if you sort of follow this through and try this with your own parents, even as an exercise, mentally or artistically, then it gives me some release.
And it gives me some sympathy for the obstacles that my father did not overcome.
Did not overcome.
And... Let me sort of give you a metaphor and see if it works, because I can't talk to you particularly in detail about my own dad, because this is about you, not me.
So... If my dad had been born in a small town somewhere in Wales or something, and he'd never been taught how to read, and he'd never been taught how to read, and as a child I was embarrassed...
At his illiteracy. I'd resented it.
Well, as I became older and I learned about his history and learned that he had never been taught to read, I think, I think, and this I think is what's going on for me with my own dad at the moment, I think that I would have sympathy...
No, let me say...
I think I would have empathy about where he came from.
And recognize that if my dad had been taught how to read, then I would not have been embarrassed by his illiteracy.
Right? He wouldn't have had this barrier called, I have to learn how to read as an adult.
Right? Right, so one guy is raised in some educated family, is taught how to read at the age of three or four.
My dad, obviously not real dad, but my dad was raised in some illiterate family, was never taught how to read.
Clearly, the person who's raised in an illiterate family is not going to have a big issue with reading.
But my dad does have a big issue with reading because he was never taught how to read as a kid.
Does that mean that my dad...
Can be forgiven for never knowing how to read?
Right? This is the delicate fulcrum of judgment, history, and responsibility.
for me anyway maybe it's useful to you too right some people can gain weight and it doesn't provide any particular health problems for them like 10 or 20 or 30 pounds But if I'm born with a congenital heart defect and if I gain 30 pounds, I'm likely going to die.
Does that mean that I'm sort of not responsible for dying if I gain 30 pounds?
Because other people can do it, right?
Other people can gain the weight.
weight, they don't die of heart attacks, but if I gain the weight, the extra strain of my heart will kill me.
So, I think understanding that kind of history, understanding the barriers that our own parents had towards being decent people, good people, I think is important. understanding the barriers that our own parents had towards being and I think it's important because it's true, and the truth is always important.
It's true that my father was raised under the shadow of unbelievable family losses, and In World War I, and that there was World War II, and he was sent to boarding school, where he had no experience with women, and God knows what might have happened there.
Untoward, I think, that child rape probably does not figure non-prominently in either of my parents' histories.
And my mother, born in Dresden, in Berlin, 1937, Jewish parents.
I mean, what a mess, right?
What a mess. I grew up in a terrible, evil family...
But a relatively decent world, right?
My mom grew up in, I'm guessing, a pretty evil family in a totally evil world.
No protection. Society insane.
Bombs raining down. People blowing up.
So, in a sense, I was taught to read a lot more than they were taught to read.
They were punished for even looking at a textbook.
I was at least given some scraps of knowledge.
So, for me, at least, having empathy with the barriers that were placed between them and being good people is important.
It's important. And the reason that it's important for me is it helps me not take it personally.
Right? I mean, that's the great challenge when we're kids and we're abused is we say, why me?
I mean, it feels personal when you're a kid.
It feels like your parents are angry at you.
It feels like my dad abandoned me.
But that's not true. When people are broken to that degree early on, or live in that kind of mind, or grow up in that kind of world, the barriers are pretty significant, right?
The barriers to reading, if you're never taught how to read, or if you're punished for looking at a book, are pretty significant.
It doesn't mean that you're not responsible for reading.
Especially if you say reading is a great value, a great virtue, and you say to your kids, you should learn how to read.
This is not to say that they had no responsibility, but once you learn the barriers that your parents had towards being decent or good people, the barriers that were inflicted upon them when they were victims as children, what it does is it helps you understand that it's not personal.
Right?
It's about them.
It's about their history.
It's not about you.
And there's a kind of sweet release in that, if that makes any sense.
I mean, they're fleeing their history.
They're fleeing the trauma of their past.
They're not abandoning me.
My dad didn't look at me and say, this kid's just trouble.
I'm out of here. I'd love to stay, but man, that stuff, kid.
Just a pain in the ass.
That's not what... That's not what happened, Ryan.
What happened was my father was dominated by...
A depressed and unstable and frightened and bitter and unpleasant mother and married a woman.
Even worse.
And Wright had to flee that because he was reproducing his past, which was hell for him.
because he himself didn't go through the process of evaluating his own parents, so he reproduced their history and then had to flee from it.
Yeah, you know, he was born a long way back from the starting line, as was my mother.
you That doesn't absolve them from running in the opposite direction, but it is important to recognize that, right?
Some people start at the beginning, some people start a couple of light years back.
My parents started a couple of light years back at the starting line, but they still ran in the opposite direction.
But still! So...
So, I was talking about this with Christina at lunch, and this is where the challenge, I think, lies.
This is where the challenge lies, and this is where I think UPB becomes so important.
Universally preferable behavior becomes so important.
Here's the danger, right?
Here's the danger of sympathizing, of empathizing with your parents, is that it turns into sympathy and guilt, and then you refoo, right?
Or whatever, or continue to foo when you should defoo.
And... This is the great, terrible, and heartbreaking danger that can occur.
That you say...
Ah, fuck you. Sorry.
When I say, it's about me.
I can't communicate to you except by talking about me.
Sorry, I don't mean to swear at you, but I can only talk about you by talking about me in this sense.
If I say...
My parents are a mere product of their histories and are not responsible for what they did to me.
Then UPB kicks in.
Think of a huge set of dials.
Not even dials.
You know those upy-downy-slidey things that reproduce in Windows and Macs?
But they're dials that go up and down, like a dimmer switch on a light.
Right, and think of moral judgments, or judgments about free will, or empathy, or sympathy, whatever it is, right?
Moral judgments. Right, and think of one dial for everyone in your life.
You talk about all human beings, but let's just, you know, you've got 300 people maybe you know, and there are 300 dials, and there's you, right?
And you can only raise and lower your own dial.
You can't raise and lower the dial of other people, that's their business.
But I will tell you this, that UPB says all of them go up and down together.
All of them go up and down together.
All these dials go up and down together.
That's all that UPB says.
And why? Because we're all human beings.
Because we're all human beings. Right, so if there's some new gene that is discovered that is common to all human beings, then that gene is common to all human beings.
That's how you know a human being is a non-human being, whatever, right?
So the dials of responsibility go up and down for everyone.
So let's say that my sympathy, and to some degree, which is less noble, my sentimentality, says in a heartbreaking way, my father was so damaged by his history and his environment that That he could not have done any better than he did.
That he was completely controlled by his history.
Because human beings are run by environment.
Right? My father was a billiard ball and history was the player.
The billiards player.
Well, I can do that. So what I do is I take the dimmer switch down to no responsibility.
Right? I take the dimmer switch down to zero responsibility.
But hey, guess what?
The dimmer switch for everyone goes down to zero responsibility.
UPP. The dimmer switch for everyone...
It goes down to zero responsibility.
And herein lies the problem.
This is the great fundamental challenge that we as a species are facing.
If I have sympathy for my parents because they could not help what they did, then I cannot help what I do.
If my parents were run by their history, then I am run by my history.
So everyone's scared that if they sympathize with their parents, they'll refoo, or they'll pretend that someone has value who doesn't, or they'll pretend that they can love someone who's abusive, or whatever, right?
So we fear this empathy, and you see a lot of this in...
I mean, sometimes on the board, too, this empathy.
I get this in my inbox regularly, too.
Harshness, right? Harshness.
And I think in a lot of ways, it's gentleness that wins.
But... We fear that if we sympathize with our parents and we understand their histories and the terrible furnaces of their undoing, that we're going to end up wanting to comfort them and wanting to be with them and sympathizing with them.
And we don't want to do that.
So we become harsh.
Which I think is a shame, because again, that's just allowing history to win, in a way, in a pretty significant way.
But let's say I don't, like, oh, I stopped seeing my dad because I think he's a bad guy.
And then I think about his history and where he came from and realize that he had a terrible start in life and say, well, he's just a product of his environment and he has no choice.
Right? Then I can gain a certain amount of sympathy for him.
But then I have no choice in not seeing him.
Because he was my environment.
If I forgive him because his environment dictated who he is, then my environment, which included him, dictates who I am.
This is a paradox, and I'm probably not going to explain it very well, and I'm sorry if you have to listen to this a couple of times.
times I just can't think of a good way of doing it.
If I forgive my father by taking away his free will, then I have to, by UPB, take away my free will as well.
So, I'm going to go to the top of the top of the top of the top.
If I take away my free will because I take away my father's free will in order to forgive him, then forgiving him means nothing because it's not going to change my behavior because I have no free will.
In this grim, endless unrolling of the bloody carpet of history, someone has got to take responsibility at some point.
And the moment that we take responsibility, it echoes up and down history.
Like a thunderclap, like you heave a boulder called responsibility into the still pool of determinism, and it ripples everywhere, even into the future, which is where we need it the most.
So, let's say that Christina does what I do, or takes this approach, thinks about her father or her mother when they were children and being abused and they were in war-torn Greece and so on, and has empathy and sympathy for them because of the difficulties of their own upbringing, and then says, well, I should see them again because now I understand.
Where they came from. I can forgive them because they have no choice.
But then your choice to defoo wasn't it?
Your choice to defoo was not a choice, right?
If our parents just blindly bounce off the past, like a billiard ball off another billiard ball or a cue, you can't have one billiard ball that can step out of the way of inevitability.
You can't. You can't.
It's all or nothing. It's UPB, Human Being's Universal Principles.
You can't say one human being is shaped exactly like a horse.
Not a human being. You can't say, I forgive my parents because of their past, because they have no choices.
And that should change my mind about things.
Because if you can change your mind based on an evaluation, so can they, so could they.
Did they have a tougher time?
Yes, of course. Of course.
But not in the value formation, not in the understanding of values and virtues.
This is my fundamental issue with regards to history.
I don't blame St.
Augustine for not knowing about atoms.
There was no possibility that St.
Augustine, even if he'd wanted to, even if he were a scientist, even if he were Democritus, he would not be able to have...
he would not be able to just scribble out the periodic table of the elements.
And that couldn't happen, because the knowledge didn't exist.
But with our parents, the knowledge did exist.
The gap between their values and their actions was very large and had been widened by their history.
It was not insurmountable.
If a policeman were to come up to my mother and say, Ma'am...
Do you think that it is appropriate to beat children?
She would say, no, I do not think it is appropriate to beat children.
And I know that because when she called the cops on me, she didn't say, oh, but I beat him.
Yeah, he's really angry, but I've beaten him for years.
She said, officer, I don't know what's going on.
He's just yelling at me.
So she called the cops because I was screaming at her.
And she didn't say to me, well, I can totally understand why you're screaming at me.
In fact, I think it's a good thing because I do it all the time.
No, she was appalled and horrified and called the cops for actions that she had done for years.
The only difference was that I was now bigger than she was.
As I have said before, I know that my mother did not believe that beating children was a good thing to do, because...
Because she did not do it when she could be caught, as I have said before.
Christina's issue with her parents, one of many, is that every time she expresses an honest opinion, they attack her.
Whether that's psychological or theological or philosophical or cultural or anything, really.
Now, if you were to say to Christina's parents, do you think that It's important to know your children.
Do you think it's important to know what they think and feel?
They say, oh yes, of course.
We absolutely would love to know what our children...
You can't say that you love someone if you...
And say, well, is it love if you continually criticize people's real opinions?
And they'd say, no, that's not love.
That's not what we do. We want to love our children.
We want to know our children. We want to really respect them as individuals.
They would know every single right thing to say.
Every single right thing to say.
They would know it all. And there would be no doubt.
And there would be no hesitation.
They would not search their memory for the right thing to say.
They would not search their memory for the right thing to say.
It wouldn't be like, hey, remember in grade school when we learned the capital of Constantinople?
What was it? Be like, oh, gosh.
What was it again? Detroit?
Detroit? Right?
There would be no searching. When you ask anybody what is love, they'll give you the right answers.
There's no mystery. When you ask people how children should be raised, there's no mystery.
People aren't confused.
Nobody says, well, you want to You want to put a yellow pages or a white pages over there, the body parts that you want to hit, and then pound them so then the blows are spread.
It still hurts a hell of a lot, but the blows are spread so that there's no evidence of beatings.
The force is dispersed through the yellow pages, right?
Everybody knows that.
You know, if you say to your parents, all other things being equal, should you beat your children?
I If you could get what you want without beating them, they'd say, no, I don't want to beat my children.
They make me do it. They just don't listen.
They disobey. You say to those stereotypical, hypercritical mother-in-laws, do you think that it's nice to criticize what somebody does all the time?
They'd say, no, that's not nice.
You say to a wife beater, do you think it's good to punch women?
No! No.
If you grill anyone about anything to do with ethics, they'll know the answer.
Ethics is not the hardest science in the world.
Consistent ethics, UPB, is tough because it confronts emotional defenses, which split the mind and destroy logic.
Create alternative universes.
But everybody knows.
Everybody knows the answers.
Do you think it's important to love your children?
Yes, of course it's important to love your children.
Do you think it's important to respect them as individuals?
Yes, it's very important to respect them as individuals.
Do you think it's good parenting to force your children to accept all of your values and not let them develop any of their own?
No, that's not good. Children should be allowed to think for themselves.
Everybody knows all the right answers.
Everybody knows I mean, this is not a mystery.
This is not a confusion. This is not a problem that is beyond the reasoning powers, right?
If you say to people, hey, can you step me through the theory of relativity?
They'll be like, I don't know.
I got relatives. Everything's relative.
I don't know. That knowledge can't be invented, but the knowledge of virtue we all have.
We all have. It's just applying it consistently.
That's a problem. It's the same problem with every science, right?
There's nothing unusual to ethics.
A guy who knows nothing about physics can catch a ball that you throw in the air.
He can track the vectors.
He can figure out the parabola.
He can catch the ball.
He knows where it's going to land.
land, he runs to it.
A baseball player who couldn't pass grade 8 math, grade 7 math, grade 2 math can catch a ball.
But knowing the principles in the abstract to apply them to situations that aren't intuitive...
Right? So, you say to a medieval baseball player, you can catch the ball, right?
Yeah, that's because of gravity.
And that's why the moon does what it does.
You'd be like, what are you talking about?
What the hell's the moon got to do with my baseball?
Plus, the moon never comes to the ground, and I can never catch it.
He wouldn't understand, right?
So, in the same way, everybody understands ethics in the personal.
That's not a mystery. You say to people, should we point guns at people just for disagreeing?
No! Of course we shouldn't, they say.
But then you start to talk to them about taxation, and suddenly you're talking about the moon with the medieval baseball player.
No, that's got nothing to do with it.
The moon's totally different. No, it's not.
Aristotle almost went mad trying to figure out what the hell made the tides go.
He couldn't figure out, couldn't conceive that the moon, which was so distant and looked...
Like, it just spun around.
Could have any effect on the tides.
Made no sense. Right?
But it did. And, of course, even if he had been able to say it, I'm sure some people did, there's no way to prove it.
So, everybody knows personal ethics.
I mean, yeah, they have trouble extrapolating it.
People love to talk about it in the abstract, but Or ignore it in the personal or in the present.
Everybody knows that.
And if you were to ask my father, should you leave helpless children with a sociopathic bitch of a mom?
He'd say, no, that's not the right thing to do.
And this, of course, is why people do get so miserable.
And I do agree with the people who say that evil people are unhappy.
happy?
I do.
It's just not enough of an answer to change the world.
What we need to do is get rid of the government so that the evil, the unhappiness that evil people generate accrue to themselves, not to the taxpayers.
And if you offer a lot of money, you'll be Anyway, we don't have to get into that, but my dad would absolutely say, yeah, beating children, that's bad.
That's bad. And they'd even say, I don't care what they've done.
Beating the hell out of children is bad.
And then they'd start making up the excuses.
Oh, well, yes, but she was a single mom, and it's not easy, and blah, blah, blah, and two boys, and it's a different time, and all that kind of stuff.
So they immediately got excuses, though, at the same time, they have absolute morality.
Beating children is wrong. So my dad would say, yeah, what I did was wrong.
And then immediately, right, because of UPB, because the argument for morality is so powerful, Ebert needs to start coming up with exceptions.
But your mother was very hostile.
I just had an affair. There were all these issues that were going on.
It was a different time. Fathers couldn't get custody.
I couldn't work in England. I was a geologist.
I was tied to the land. I had to go back to South Africa so I could send you money, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, then, it's not wrong.
Once the meaning of math excuses start coming along, then people are saying, yes, it's wrong, but it's not.
Right, and the entire history of human evil is summed up in, yes, it's wrong, but it's not.
*Gasp* Yes, using violence to solve problems in the form of taxation is wrong, but it's not, because we need to help these people.
These people need our help. Yes, invading a sovereign country that has never threatened us is wrong, but it's not, because we need to support our troops.
Because we're in there now, and if we leave, it'll be worse.
Right, and all that we're doing here is taking away the, but it's not.
Yes, it's wrong, but it's not, is the entire history of ethics.
Sure, it's wrong, but it's not.
Right and wrong exists, and it's objective, and it's independent, but it doesn't apply in this case.
I mean, that's all... That's all that the history of ethics is.
And we're just taking away, but it's not.
So that people can just say, yeah, that's wrong.
Now, that's totally unbearable for people, and there's a reason that they avoid it and come up with all these excuses, because the argument for morality...
But, see, it operates whether we like it or not.
Right, we can say...
Everyone who runs off a cliff falls to their death...
Except if they don't want to.
But still, when they run off a cliff, they fall to their deaths, right?
People are immoral.
Well, for two reasons. One is because the government pays for it and rewards them for it.
And secondly, because philosophers give them the, but it's not.
Excuse. Right?
But that's why. If people believe that they themselves can run off a cliff and fly...
Then you'll get lots of people running off a cliff.
If the physicist says, when you run off the cliff, there is simply no chance that you will fly, then fewer people will run off the cliff.
This is why ethicists are the primary drivers of evil, of corruption, non-virtuous behavior.
Because they say, well, here's your excuses.
So you can run off the cliff and fly.
Gravity is universal, but it's not.
Physics is absolute, you see, but it's not.
It is wrong to leave helpless children in the care of a malevolent, violent, sociopathic woman who beats them.
But it was a different time.
I couldn't get custody.
I had to go to Africa. I needed to make money.
Your mom was really angry. There was no way forward.
I did the best I could. So yes, it's wrong, but it's not.
Right? All the people who say, well...
Yes, it was wrong, but I had a bad childhood, and so I didn't know any better.
But that's not true. I mean, don't get me wrong.
I sympathize with my dad's terrible childhood as I sympathize with my mom's terrible childhood.
Oh, horrible, wretched, evil situations, circumstances.
Worse than mine. Absolutely.
Absolutely. But that's not the causal thing.
I mean... That's not the causal thing.
My brother and I had similar childhoods, but it turned out very different.
Some people had my mom's childhood and it turned out great.
Or at least better.
At least a hell of a lot better.
Some people had my dad's childhood and it turned out better.
The childhood is not the causal factor.
You may say that it's a necessary precondition for evil, but not a sufficient precondition for evil, but that's fine.
It still doesn't absolve from responsibility.
But my father would have said even at the time, should you leave helpless children in the care of an evil, violent woman, that you can't handle. should you leave helpless children in the care of an You can't handle her because she's so abusive and violent and scary, so you run away and you leave her children there.
Right? I can't fight the lion.
Let's throw the kids in front.
Let them have a shot.
Well, if you can't fight the lion, your kids, who are...
Four and two, or I guess four and, I think I was even younger than that, three and six months or whatever.
If you can't fight the lion, what chance do you think we have?
So, yeah, even then my dad would have said that.
So he knew what was wrong at the time, but did it.
Why? Because he had the, but it's not.
Yeah, this is wrong, but it's not.
And so you can't claim a lack of knowledge for what our parents did because they hid it, Christina's mom, right?
I mean, one of the evil things she did was pretend to call the cops when Christina was misbehaving, pretend that she was going to call the cops and have Christina thrown in jail.
I mean, that's hell. That's totally abusive.
Or she would grab Christina's ear and drag her into the hallway if she was doing something that was embarrassing to her mom and hissing her ear.
Well, she didn't do it in front of people, right?
I can't imagine Christina's mom saying to everyone sitting around in the living room, 20 people or 10 people or whatever, saying, hey, you know, Christina's just done something wrong.
I'm going to pretend that I'm going to call the cops on her and have her take it away to jail forever.
Everyone play along. This is going to be great.
I can't imagine her grabbing Christina's ear and twisting it in front of people and hissing inviolently in her ear.
I can't...
She wouldn't do that.
So she knew enough that it was wrong.
She knew enough that she had to hide it.
She knew enough that she had to isolate Christina and that no one else could see her doing these things.
She knew. She knew.
She knew. Well, she had strength, power, upper hand, right?
So then, of course, the test would be, now that she's old and Christina is healthy and strong, Christina grabs her ear and Christina threatens her with throwing her in jail because, you know, for past abuses, because her mom's like, well, would her mom say, well, that makes perfect sense to me.
Let me obey you even more.
No, her mom would be outraged.
Her mom would be outraged.
So they noted this wrong, and they would not...
And they altered their behavior to hide the crimes.
*Sigh* And yeah, they weren't taught a whole lot of great stuff, but they knew ethics deep down.
We all know it. Not even that deep down.
And the answer is right on the tip of everyone's tongue.
The answers are all right on the tip of everyone's tongue.
Yeah, the science is tough.
Catching a ball is easy. A four-year-old can do it.
Figuring out the math, figuring out gravity, that's not so easy.
But catching a ball, right?
Personal ethics is as tough as catching a ball.
But everyone has the...
But it's not. It's wrong, but it's not.
It's wrong, but it's not. And UPB eliminates the but it's not, right?
So, if we go back to them, we're almost done here.
I really appreciate yours. I sort of worked through this challenge, right?
This challenge of having sympathy for my father, which I do.
Or having empathy for him without necessarily having sympathy.
Understanding where he came from, which releases the personal attacks that I still felt, that he abandoned me, that he was just running away from his own history, running away from his own responsibilities, not running away from me.
I was just the innocent bystander.
This was the getaway car that clipped me on the curb.
Nobody was aiming at me.
Right.
So that's...
If we go back to this dial, and we just talk about this dial of responsibility, these dimmer switches, hundreds of dimmer switches for the people in your life.
If I dial down my dad's dim a switch of responsibility to zero, then mine is also zero.
And therefore, the fact that I don't want to see him, I have no responsibility for.
So knowing that his is at zero doesn't change my behavior because mine's now also at zero.
So I can't say I should or shouldn't do this, right?
Because if I say that his is at zero, then clearly I'm saying that he should not have to do this, right?
There was nothing else he could have done.
And of course, in hindsight, everything looks determined, but it's not.
So if I say to my dad, you're not responsible for this, your behavior, because of your history, because of your circumstances, sure, I get some sympathy, but I don't change my own behavior.
Because if he's not responsible and he couldn't ever have done anything differently, then I can't ever have done anything differently.
So not seeing him is just...
I can't give me a should and him...
I can't give myself free will and him determinism.
That's a dial. Because we're all human beings.
So, let's say that I give myself 100% perfect environment independent free will.
Right? That I have all the choices in the world and so on.
Well, then I can choose to change my opinion about my parents and go back to seeing them or whatever, right?
But the problem is that as I move my dial up to 100%, I move their dial up to 100%.
So the moment that I say, well, I should reflect upon my parents' history so that I can find the sympathy needed to forgive them and see them again, then I'm saying that I can choose my behavior independent of my environment, independent of the causality.
But then that's saying that they could do the same thing.
I can't just make up moral rules for myself and have exactly the opposite rules for other people.
That's pretty corrupt.
And it's just fundamentally illogical, right?
Bad science. Bad, naughty science.
Science with a spanking. So if I say, well, I can surmount my own stimuli, my own environment, my own history, and I can decide to surmount my past and forgive my parents and empathize with them and sympathize with them, change my behavior, go back to seeing them, or whatever, right?
Then I'm saying, well, human beings have the capacity to surmount their past and do something better than what they were given.
To rise above their history and do something better than what was programmed into them by their environment.
If the billiard player strikes the black and I'm the blue and I say, well, the black's coming towards me, I should step out of the way.
I should jump out of the way so it doesn't hit me.
Then I'm also saying that the black ball could have jumped out of the way of the cue.
The balls either have the ability to jump out of the way or they don't.
If they don't, then the click-click, right?
The guy hits the black ball, the black ball hits me.
The black ball has no responsibility because it's just responding to physics, and neither do I because I'm just responding to physics.
There's no point reflecting. I mean, you can reflect all you want, but it doesn't matter.
It's not going to change your behavior. Then it's just like saying, well, the blue ball you see and the black ball, they have consciousness, and they can reflect upon things, but they can't conceivably change where they go, because that's just physics and balls hitting each other.
That's consciousness without choice, right?
That's fine, but then if I say, well, this black ball's coming towards me, I've got to jump out of the way, then I'm saying that the black ball has the right to jump out of the way.
It can't just be one. It can't just be one ball.
That has the right to choose. They're either all or they don't.
So I hope this is helpful.
This is a way of me being able to empathize with my father and his history and the fact that, you know, in a lot of ways he wasn't taught how to read.
But then he grew up saying that reading is the greatest value and you should all read, but never dealing with that history in himself.
Which, you know, yes, it's hypocritical and this and that, and yes, he's not an ethicist, so I can have some sympathy even for the fact that everybody put up with his hypocrisy and made him a worse person by supporting the it's immoral, but it's not. It's wrong, but it's not.
Solving problems peacefully is right, but it's not, because we need to help the poor.
We need universal health care.
So, when I had this desire to send this novel, which is expulcatory to my father in many ways, by me really simmering in the awful situation of his upbringing,
in a sense, I did want to send it to him to give him some comfort, to say that I understood where he's coming from, I now understand that he was never taught how to read, and that's why he can't read.
But that's not specifically causal for me.
Somebody who was not taught how to read knows the pain of illiteracy, and that should be the prompt for them to learn how to read.
They really know. It's as easy to imagine that somebody who was not taught how to read spends their life trying to teach people how to read.
Sort of my belief with ethics, or my experience in the realm of ethics.
That's as likely a scenario in many ways as somebody who's not taught how to read who then refuses to teach his own kids how to read but tells everyone that reading is really important.
Or even teaches his own kids how to read, but never learns himself, despite saying to his kids that reading is the most important thing.
You can't predict that based on the environment, right?
It can go either way. Somebody who says, you know, your party lifestyle is going to kill you, might say, well, hell, I'm going out with a bang.
I'm going to take more drugs. Or they might say, well, okay, I guess that's a call to action, right?
So... Let me change my ways.
That's choice. I mean, there's some degree of this information and so on, but given that we all deep down find personal ethics as difficult as catching a ball, you don't need to be a physicist to be a baseball player.
So I hope that this helps, that it's not...
I'm not going to send the book to my dad.
And it's not that I'm...
Not going to send this book to my dad because I don't want to give him comfort.
You can't comfort bad people.
You can't. You can't.
And we can go into that another time, but very briefly, you can't comfort bad people because you either give them a form of forgiveness, which means that they become self-righteous, and blame you for judging them to begin with, and use that against you in perpetuity, or Or you say that there's nothing to forgive, in which case you erase your own history and their craziness infects you, right?
You can't comfort bad people.
You just can't. I mean, you can try, but it's never going to work, right?
It's not that...
Part of me, of course, would like to send this to my dad and to his other relatives before they die so that I could get better information for the book, better stories, more accurate history.
But the reason that...
I'm not going to send the book to my father.
It's because it's sentimental.
It's a fantasy. Right?
It would give some sweet release to a father, like if your father was never taught how to read, and...
Himself struggled to learn how to read and so on, but had never told you this, and then you finally figured out that he'd never been taught how to read, and you sent him a letter saying, Dad, I really totally understand.
You were never taught how to read. It makes total sense.
Congratulations for being such a great dad and teaching us how to read and struggling to do it yourself.
Like, I really admire that. That would be like if he'd kept the secret that he'd never been taught how to read.
There'd be kind of like a sweet release in that for him.
But that's not my dad.
Right? Right? That's not my dad.
My dad said that reading was the greatest value, that being good is the greatest, and he's a Christian now, and yet acted against it in his whole life.
The reason that I was moved to think about it is that, like all of us, I desperately want a father to whom sending a book like this would be.
A sweet release. Like I would like to have had a dad who learned how to read despite never being taught.
Because I could respect and admire that.
Not a dad who just talked about the virtues of reading while never teaching his own kids how to read.
That's just kind of hypocritical, right?
And I'd love to be able to put more accurate family stories into the book.
But of course, it's a paradox, right?
What I really want is a family...
That I could sit down and have this project with.
I could be the chronicler, and I could turn this into an even better book.
Like, it's a masterpiece, but to make it an even better book.
I'd like to have a family that that were possible.
But of course, this is the paradox, right?
If I did have the family, and I did have the father, that I could send this book and provide relief.
Then I would not have this book at all.
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