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July 1, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:13
815 Sunday Call In Show July 1 2007 (the sound is not too good, sorry!)

The ethics of childhood and truly scary mythologies

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Time Text
Well, thank you everybody for joining on this pinch-punch first day of the month, July the 1st, 2007, for 14 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. And thank you so much for joining.
We are still on Gizmo, which is available at gizmoproject.com.
And thank you so much for joining in.
Hopefully we'll be able to get back to Skype at some point soon, but unfortunately Skype costs are still down, because apparently conference calling is very tough to do on a computer.
So, thank you so much for joining.
We have a tight and focused group this afternoon.
And if I could just ask people to, while I'm talking, to turn off their microphones until they have something to say.
And of course, we have a chat window if you're on the call and you want to sort of pop that up.
Just because we do have a don't use the hold button, which I think is F8 or something like that, because that will give us the piano from hell.
What is that noise?
I don't know. But this is another free program.
I'd be happy to pay for the chat program, but I don't think that works too well.
And I don't know how it is that we can turn off other people's voice, so we'll just have to struggle through with the sound issues as they stand.
So let me just start off with an open apology, which is quite correct and requested and valid, that in a recent debate that I had with a listener wherein I pointed out a lack of integrity of somebody's Somebody's posting on the board and associated it with a mistake about Celsius and Fahrenheit and so on.
I made a mistake with the Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Shockingly, I got the mathematical formula backwards in my mind.
And one of the things that I said was that there was evidence of lack of integrity because of a misinterpretation.
Temperatures, that was entirely my issue.
Now, I wasn't corrected, which would have been helpful, of course, is neither here nor there.
And so, yeah, so I made a mistake, and of course it was unjust to associate a lack of integrity with that action.
I still stand by the actions with regards to this person as a whole, because to say there's like a year-long history of this kind of stuff, but that particular association, that they were not debating with integrity because of the Celsius Fahrenheit mix-up, It was entirely my mistake, entirely my fault, and the association of that with the person and the lack of integrity because of that, completely unjust on my part, absolutely unreserved, complete and total apology.
I'm not going to change my decision with regards to my participation, because again, there was lots of other things, but that particular association, completely and totally wrong, absolutely unjust on my part.
So, a thousand apologies for that.
I'm happy to do a topic, but there have been a lot of podcasts released lately, so I would like to throw it open to people who have questions, comments, issues, or problems.
Feel free to shout out and jump in, and I will be more than happy to do anything that I can to wriggle out of any other contradictions that I may have put forward.
So if you'd like to speak up now, it would be a good time.
Oh, and also, I'm sorry, if people could click on the record button, which is on the call thing, I don't...
I'd just like it if we could record this.
I have a recording going, but I always find these recordings can be a little bit sketchy at times, and I almost lost the one from last week for a variety of reasons, so if you could just click on the record button, which is on the call, that would be...
Record the conversation.
Beautiful. Okay, so questions, anybody?
Comments, criticisms, issues, challenges, arm wrestling...
Feel free. I'm sorry, have I shocked you by saying that you might want to have some questions for the college show?
I know that the pattern has been a little bit inconsistent over the past, say, year or so, but, you know, it could be helpful to come up with questions or problems.
I'm certainly more than happy. I mean, this is your forum.
This is your chance to take to the mic.
And give me what for or talk about anything else that is of interest to you.
Christina is also here if you want to talk to somebody who's got a nicer voice.
All right. Well, I can come up with my own questions.
Steph, why are you so cool?
Well, that's tough. Sorry?
Sing something. Well, I do have...
Well, I won't go into that.
This Wednesday is the official recording date for the fabulous I certainly do appreciate everybody's indulgence with my little singing fetish.
It is most kind of you to download and occasionally shovel some mild appreciation my way.
I certainly do appreciate that.
It is my little fetish.
And of course, remember, I'm a frustrated actor.
So, that's something that is part of the benefit of what it is that you might get out of this chat about philosophy is occasionally putting up with my vanities and peccadillos.
But... You know what I should do?
I should have, instead of there being a contest for what I should sing for a particular podcast, I should have a contest that you can have me not sing for a particular podcast.
We're going to get a lot more participation out of that.
That would be excellent. I, for one, I thought that you didn't make it as an actor.
Well, you know, if you'd seen me act...
Well, actually, you know, I hear some of that.
I did some additional readings of The God of Atheists because I was only about two-thirds of the way through The audiobook version of the novel, and so I've been working myself into a fine state of passion, tears, and laughter through reading my own writing, and I've been really, really enjoying rereading The God of Atheists and imitating the 13-year-old girl.
So it has been a great deal of pleasure for me, and of course that was some of the most successful acting I ever did was the preteen girl's And so we can spend some time on that.
Christina certainly has spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure that one out.
And, well, I can't blame her.
All right. I think that the acting background does help.
There's a couple of things that sort of pointed me, and I don't believe in faith or anything, but there are a couple of things throughout my life that have pointed me in this direction, right?
So a lot of the things that I did In my youth, let's say, or my even youthiness compared to now.
And certainly, theater school was one of them.
I mean, it took two years of voice training, which has allowed me to do lots of high-pitched girly screams, and even in a couple of bad foreign accents and so on.
So I think that aspect of things really helped as far as that goes.
I think it would be tough to have an animated podcast or a podcast with, you know, sort of emotionally charged voice if I hadn't taken a lot of voice training.
Not that it's fake, it's just...
It really helps connect your voice to your emotions in that hysterical and shrieky kind of way that I sort of managed to get along fairly regularly.
So yeah, I think that did really help.
If I sort of look at the preparation, there was a lot of writing.
I was writing with the basis of the podcast, right?
So I did a lot of playwriting at theatre school and did lots of other kinds of writing, and I think that was very helpful.
The voice training and the acting training was very helpful in terms of connecting voice to feeling and so on in a very non-British kind of way.
And, of course, the academics that I pursued as a graduate student has been very helpful in giving me some background for the stuff that I've been trying to talk about, and it gave me a strong grounding in empiricism, right?
So, trying to understand the philosophy, sorry, trying to understand the facts of history and looking at it empirically has given me some, I think, a good deal of grounding in stuff that's actually happened and trying to figure out rational reasons for it, which has led me further and further to, I think, good and useful theories. The business side of things, it certainly gave me a lot of material for The God of Atheists, which was not bad.
I think the business side of things has really helped insofar as I've been able to try and apply those principles and those who've read the sort of business reports that are available to the premium members.
So I sort of try and sum up the decisions that I've made every month for Free Domain Radio so that people can understand and give me feedback on where it is.
I think that I'm going. Certainly the technical skills that I developed as a long-term programmer, 10 or 15 years as a programmer, have been very helpful in terms of letting me build some, I think, decent interfaces and a fairly good website and know some of the technical side of things.
So, yeah, there's been a whole bunch of things that came together to make this sort of possible, but, of course, the key is Christina.
I think that through her influence on my thinking, we've been able to come up with Something relatively new.
Like, there's not much point being another guy who talks about the efficiencies of Austrian economics, because there's tons of people who already do that.
Or, you know, how the government is bad at a whole bunch of things, because there's lots of people who already do that.
But I think that...
The reason that I think the show is a success is because we take on personal issues, which is a challenge.
quite a challenge for the people who take on those personal issues, and for me, and also for Christina, who gets to listen to me endlessly work through how I should respond to various things on the board and in my email.
So that's a real challenge, but I do think that that's a very helpful approach.
So, if you could self-mute, that would be excellent, just because we're getting some background noise.
But if you have questions, you can either type them into the chat window.
You could email me at s.molyneux at rogers.com.
Conceivably, though, you could actually talk to me on the microphone.
That would be nice. I leave the field open for you.
Hello. Waiting for the listeners.
Hello. Mr.
MB, you had some questions that we've been going back on the board that might be much more easily resolved here.
The board is not very good at...
The board is good at...
Someone? Someone? It's not particularly helpful for working from first principles because it's really exhausting to sort of build an argument up from first principles on the board and there's such a capacity for misinformation, not conscious or intentional, but just confusion and back and forth, so...
Yeah, I mean, the question is, and it certainly is an interesting question, on the one hand, I talk about, in a recent Ask a Therapist, the girl who thought she had cancer when she was 15, began posting requests for prayers online, and got a good deal of affection, and then I think sometime later found out that she did not have cancer, And then people said, well, what do you look like?
Posted a picture of a pretty girl, got lots of affection, and got a little bit addicted to that because she was so incredibly starved for affection verbally and physically brutalized at home.
And I said, you know, that's not something that you should blame yourself for.
And then, of course, I say about my own father that he is responsible for what he did as a mature adult in his mid-30s and so on.
And UPB, universally preferable behavior, I've always said, is not applicable to children.
I mean, it's a gradation, right?
I mean, obviously, somebody who's six months old has no responsibility for pooping up the place, but if I were to do it more regularly, then that would be an issue.
We're all aware of that. Somebody who's 17.9 years old is not quantitatively different.
Sorry, it's not qualitatively different from somebody who's 18, which is a usual time for maturity.
The human brain stops developing.
And so we do know that somebody who's 15 years old has an immature brain relative to an adult.
So for somebody who's 10 years prior to full maturation of the brain, which is 15 to 25, versus somebody who is 10 years post the maturation of the brain, which is 35 versus 25, To me, that's just an enormous difference.
And of course, the most fundamental thing is the dependence factor, right?
This woman was basically entombed in her house and not allowed to leave and brutalized and forced to sleep on the floor and verbally humiliated and so on.
And that's just the situation of slavery.
I just can't see how that really...
Ah, good, I goaded him in.
Excellent. Now I don't have to insult your mother to get you to speak.
That's fantastic. Please, go ahead.
Could you just turn your mic up a little bit?
If you can, you're a little quiet.
Yeah, how about that? Well, I can volume normalize later.
It'll just make your voice a little less pleasant sounding, but go ahead.
All right, how about that? I'm up to...
He's good.
Okay. The gradation, I think, and, you know, a baby or even a baby can't be...
I'm sorry. I do have to interrupt you just because I can't express this clearly enough.
If you're not, turn your mic off because we're just getting too much echo for me to be able to follow what this gentleman is saying.
That would be great. Thank you. Okay, I'm going to try it again.
I was hearing a horrible echo of myself.
Am I clear to you? Yeah, that's better much.
Thanks. Okay, sorry about that.
And they can't be held morally responsible for the same things that an adult can, for example, pooping or throwing things or whatever, because they don't know any better.
But at some point during that gradation, say, whenever it is for each individual, they do know that lying is wrong or whatever the case may be.
And at that point, isn't it wrong?
Well, you know, that's an interesting question, and I'm sorry that you got a fair amount of echo, but I think I got the general idea.
The general idea is that this girl knew that what she was doing was wrong, but she did it anyway, and doesn't that make her sort of morally culpable or morally responsible?
Responsible. My approach to that would be to say that, I don't know if, and again, this could be just subjectivism or a projection on my part, but...
If you've ever been in a situation of extreme emotional duress and this girl went through unbelievable emotional brutality and physical brutality, there is an extremity at which point it's very similar to physical starvation.
Emotional starvation in a child is very similar to physical starvation.
And so, of course, if you're physically starving and you can only survive by stealing a loaf of bread, Yeah, you know that it's wrong to steal a loaf of bread, but you're going to try to survive anyway, and I think that this girl had gone through such an extremity of abuse that the affection that she got was required for her psychological survival.
She needed some scrap of kindness when she was locked up in her house for months upon months.
She needed some scrap of kindness, some scrap of benevolence, In order to survive psychologically, and this is the psychological equivalent of what happens to babies in orphanages who are not caressed or held, they wither and die.
You can actually kill a child who does not get affection.
A perfectly healthy child, no affection.
They just wither and they die.
And the same thing can happen psychologically.
So I sort of view this as a sort of starvation situation.
I felt the way that I did with regards to that.
Of course, my father was in no situation when he was an adult.
He was financially independent.
Well-educated. Nobody was enslaving him or entombing him.
He was not subject to anyone's despotic or tyrannical or brutal will.
So, for me, it's not the same kind of situation.
And certainly, for me, as I sort of mentioned before, if moral judgments are going to be brought to bear on the situation, I think that the context of the situation needs to be understood, right?
So, if morals be applied...
To a child that is brutalized and imprisoned, I would first veer towards those who are brutalizing and imprisoning the child, because I think they're the real cause, right?
I mean, if I lock you up and starve you of food, and then the only way that you can get food is to lie to somebody over the internet, then it's more me than you, who's morally responsible, I think.
But tell me what you think. I'm trying to type in a bit of speech because the quality was so bad.
If I'm clear, I'll just keep talking, I guess.
I am getting that part, so perhaps you can...
I'm sort of able to pick the words out, and I'll try and repeat them back to suit my own advantage.
No, I'll try and repeat them back so that people can hear it if there's too much of an echo.
I don't know how much further I really can participate in this debate because I'm completely torn.
I understand what you're saying about the gradation period And that morality has to be applied differently because while a baby or child is indeed human and universally preferred behavior applies, they are in a different situation.
They're dependent. They're essentially slaves.
So I just don't know what to think of.
I have to think about it some more.
I see both sides of the situation.
One, UPB, and the other, UPB with gradation.
Sorry, did you say that children are human beings or subject to UPB? Well, I see both sides.
I see as human, UPB should apply.
As soon as a child understands or has been taught or understands that lying is bad, then the part of the universal belief that says lying is bad should apply to them.
But at the same time, I understand that a child is different than any other individual and adult and that the child is indeed a slave, is dependent for their survival.
Right, now you do realize that this girl was in a potentially life-threatening situation with regards to her parents, right?
I mean that the level of abuse is really quite extreme.
Yes. So in my view, I sort of would put her as a child prisoner.
Now, if somebody is unjustly imprisoned, and the only way that they can get food is to lie to the guard, I would have no problem whatsoever with them lying to the guard to get food.
Yeah, I see that, and that's why I'm confused, because I understand that, but where does the gradation end, and at what point does that person, the prisoner who has to lie to get and at what point does that person, the prisoner who has to lie to get food, where does the and suddenly UPB applies to them, and they can no longer lie?
Just survival? No, I would say that it's with regards to their capacity to choose in their life, right?
I mean, morality does require choice, which is why if I put a gun to your head and tell you to do X, Y, and Z, you're not morally responsible for doing X, Y, and Z, because I've got a gun to your head, right?
That's how we know the difference between lovemaking and rape, right?
There's violence involved.
And I'm not saying you don't understand and appreciate all of these differences.
I'm just trying to sort of break it down from at least how I see it and see if it makes sense.
Where there's choice, then we can give a moral responsibility, right?
So a baby clearly has no choice about where it poops, right?
So, you know, we can't blame the child morally.
If somebody has a brain disorder, schizophrenia or something, then their capacity to make rational choices is highly diminished, if not...
And so we don't hold people for their choices.
So where there is coercion...
One's moral responsibility is diminished.
And she was in a situation of extreme coercion.
And so for me, the moral choices that she would make...
There's a lot of stuff that's circumstantial, right?
So if she was raised in a happy, healthy, positive, free household and she was lying to people over the internet and getting money and so on, then I would say...
And if she was an adult, I'd say, well, that's not particularly good.
But of course, she was only doing what she was doing because she was enslaved and imprisoned.
Right? So, it's just...
She was the...
She had a lot of guns pointed at her.
Pointed at her. And so it's hard for me to say that she has complete and free moral choice and is morally responsible for how she...
...of enslavement.
I feel like we're doing the show in a tuberculosis ward.
Whoever's coughing, please turn off your microphone if you're not participating in the chat.
So the criteria for, I guess, unity or morality or adult morality is not knowledge of what is right, but the ability to choose.
Well, sure. I mean, I think that's embedded in preference, right?
That's why preference is part of universally preferable behavior.
Preference indicates the ability to choose, and where there is no ability to choose, Then it's hard to apply ethics to a situation.
Clearly this girl would have chosen not to be imprisoned in her home and physically and verbally abused, right?
That would not have been her choice.
And so, to me, the preferable behavior, the universally preferable behavior, the reason that preferable is in there is because it indicates a preference and the capacity to choose and this girl didn't have it.
My father had it, right?
I mean, my father had the capacity to choose As an independent adult.
And yes, he'd had a terrible childhood and so on, but that still gives you a choice, which is how to deal with that, right?
He knew that he had a terrible childhood, and he chose not to deal with it.
So, if I am born with a congenital liver weakness, and I know that, and I continue to drink like a fish, well, I'm going to die a lot quicker than somebody who's not born with that kind of defect.
Or I can say, well, you know, I'm born with a congenital liver defect, So I better not drink at all, because it's really dangerous for me, right?
So if you know that you've had a bad childhood, and my father knew that, and you decide not to do anything about it, but just to go and follow every whim that strikes you, then you're acting very irresponsibly, right?
I mean, you have a choice to do something different as an adult.
Yes, I never disputed whether your father was wrong.
That was the part I agreed with.
But it's just the application of the same morals to the kid that I was confused about, and Still am, but now I'm leaning more towards the choice being the determining factor.
Right. I mean, one of the things that you had posted on the board was the child who was begging.
Oh, man. This is so annoying.
Who has their microphone on?
This is not the biggest brain surgery feat in the world, people.
Turn your microphone off if you're not participating in the chat.
It's not that hard, really, I promise you.
I can't edit these sounds out because this program does not save...
The audio to stereo, it only saves it to mono, so if you could hold off on that, that would be excellent.
But, yeah, you had said that a child who is pretending to have a limp because they're begging in the streets is somebody who would be morally wrong for lying about...
But for me, it's like a kid's just trying to survive.
It's a state of nature, right? Any child who's begging in the streets has parents...
Or like parents or a society or some organization around supporting them, right?
So they're just doing what they can to survive.
I for one would not. The child has no choice, right?
Because if the child doesn't pretend to have a limp...
That's why I posted it because at the time, the criteria for me was knowledge of what's right or wrong.
And the boy who's limping or pretending to limp to gain extra begging money knew it was wrong but did it anyway.
And that was my point. But now I understand...
Really, it's the choice.
You can't choose if you don't know it, so knowledge is involved.
But you have to be able to choose to do right or wrong in order to be culpable for it.
I think so. Yeah, somebody may have left this channel open and left their computer.
We could try another number. It's not the end of the world.
I mean, if it's just something we have to live with.
It's just weird, because it's intermittent, right?
So I don't know why it's happening at some points and not happening at others.
Was there anything else that you wanted to sort of add to that?
No, at least not now.
I think I agree with you, but I do want to think about it some more.
I'll post my updated thoughts on the thread.
Thank you. Right, right.
And I do apologize for that you had the impression, and I wouldn't dispute that impression, that I was breaking off the debate.
And I do apologize for that, and I certainly didn't want you to feel that, you know, well, you know, Steph, the guy who talks about philosophy and come and debate me, then doesn't.
I just felt that there was something so elementally lacking that I couldn't describe because I had talked about UPB and its lack of an integration or its lack of applicability to children.
So I'm sorry that I left that impression.
I certainly do enjoy these debates.
The challenge that I have, and it's not your fault or anything like that, and there are times when I could certainly handle it better, is that, and I'm not saying this is true of you in particular, but people jump in, having listened to a couple of podcasts, And then I sort of lay everything out from the ground up.
And there's a reason that there's so many podcasts.
It's not just because I love to talk, but because there's a lot of ground to cover.
And so it's sort of like wandering into a graduate course in physics out of kindergarten.
For most people, not because of intelligence, just because of a lack of exposure.
You know, wandering into a postgraduate study in physics and saying, OK, well, I got the 2 plus 2 is 4 thing, but can you run me through the rest of it?
And it's like, well, no, not very easily.
And not very quickly.
And that's why, if there is this kind of thing, I try to work more with verbal conversations because it can help a lot more to try and figure out what the gap is.
Hey, can I have you clarify one last thing, please?
Of course, yeah. Hey, if you've got questions and nobody else does, you can have me clarify 50 more things.
Correct me on 100 more, if you like.
Just a moment ago, you restated that universally preferred behavior can't apply the same to children.
But by the word children, a child, you don't mean age.
You mean dependence, right?
Because if a little ten-year-old was really a good thinker and emancipated himself, ran away and supported himself, and then therefore was no longer a prisoner or a slave, they would be culpable the same as your father would for immoral actions, right? No, I would not say that.
And that's simply because...
A break in UPB requires an objectively biologically different state, right?
So we don't apply UPB to somebody in a coma because they're in a coma, right?
We don't apply UPB to somebody who has a brain illness or some sort of mental retardation and so on because there's an objective biological difference between a child's brain and an adult's brain.
brain it's not just physical it's mental right I mean and so where they're going to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be able to be 16 and you know whenever puberty is that when you're suggest not when you're not suggesting but is that when this biological happens again there's a gradation there is a gradation for sure and there is a gray area in here right I
I mean clearly somebody who's 25 and not And I don't know what the correct answer is.
There is a gradation, but I think that certainly this girl at the age of 15, which is when she started this, was still 10 years away from brain maturity and, of course, had been completely under-socialized and brutalized to the point where she was much younger than that emotionally.
Okay. That's all I have on the topic.
Thank you. No, listen, I certainly do appreciate you coming in and asking, and of course, you'll get a chance to re-listen to this if you like, and if there's stuff that I'm saying that makes no sense, please let me know, and we at least, I think, have common definitions to start with, which is good, right? It's good.
There's a little window that pops up the side of the dismal thing that shows the conference call information.
Yeah. Yeah.
If I press that, am I going to start the music or is that...
No, no. Just start the music.
Okay, fine. So you press music, it's okay, but hold it back.
Alright, I've got it. I've got it.
Uh, yeah. Okay.
So, yeah, Rod, if you just wanted to start your story again, just so I don't have to try and stitch together the, um, the last thing you were watching...
Yeah, sure....that movie. No problem.
And, uh, okay, so I went to a, uh, a movie yesterday with some chums and, um, It was the new John Cusack movie, 1408.
It's a horror movie where he visits a hotel room that's haunted or something like that.
And I've never been much of a fan of horror movies, but this is actually the first time I've walked out of a movie theater after having paid to see a movie in the middle of the show.
And it was kind of interesting.
I felt like I was really just I have no patience for this type of storyline anymore.
I've stopped watching DVDs that we've rented or something like that before, like the movie Saw, which is kind of a similar type thing where a person's in an inescapable situation where they're kind of being slowly tortured or something like that.
But, yeah, the thing about the movie yesterday was that it just I don't know.
There's something different this time.
I think I finally just got the whole sunk cost thing.
I said to myself, I paid this money, but I'm really not enjoying myself at all and I'm going to walk out of here.
When I was thinking about it later, I started wondering if the experience of watching this horror movie type stuff where there's a character in a situation that They can't escape.
They're being slowly tortured and it's just driving them crazy.
I think it kind of reminds me of childhood with the older brother who just loved to tease me and put me into impossible situations and things like that.
I'm just wondering if you've had that kind of an experience with horror movies yourself, because I think that you had a bit of a similar experience with an older brother.
Yeah, I have had that, and I've noticed that for people on the board, there's a particular threshold wherein we become resensitized to this kind of horror, right?
And I don't mind, I guess, we saw a Nicole Kidman movie called, I think it was The Departed, which had a kind of ghost quality to it.
I think that stuff can be good.
Oh, sorry, am I too loud?
I went up a few octaves. Hello!
Oh, a few octaves?
What do you mean just in terms of volume?
But there is a kind of resensitization that occurs to violence.
So when I was younger, I would see more violent films, and it wouldn't really bother me that much, but when I started to go through a real sensitization, an awakening to my own history and the brutality that I had experienced, I stopped having the ability to even stomach The violence that was in films.
I remember this very clearly. I think it was in the mid-90s when I was watching Casino.
And I had seen violence in the films before, Goodfellas and beforehand and so on.
And in Casino, there's a scene where they put a guy's head in a vice and squeeze it, right?
And the lights pop out and those kind of stuff.
And I left that movie.
I found it absolutely unbearable.
Like, you could not have paid me enough money to sort of sit through the remainder of that.
I left the theater and I have avoided violent films ever since.
So I do find that kind of stuff to be...
It's a phase that you go through when you get back in touch with your own history where you resensitize yourself to violence and the horror that is encoded.
And what it does is, of course, you connect with your own history to what the filmmaker is trying to do, right?
The filmmaker obviously was either abusive himself or heavily abused and is trying to reconnect that into the audience, right?
It's trying to recreate his experience in the audience, right?
So there's art wherein you...
There's art wherein you've processed your own history and there's art where you are re-inflicting your history on someone else because you can't feel it yourself so you have to inflict it on others and a lot of the really violent films definitely are along those lines.
Does that sort of make any sense? Yeah, definitely.
And actually when you were saying about the filmmaker trying to connect with the audience too, I remember Oh gosh, it was probably a couple years ago now that I read something in this article I was reading about how there's a strong upsurge in the number of horror movies that were being released and that were very popular in the mid to late 70s.
And I guess that that's a similar thing that's been happening recently now, I think.
There's a lot more horror movies and I think they're centered on an inescapable situation type thing where most horror movies are, I guess.
It's interesting how the, kind of like the light geist or whatever of the times between the 70s and now are pretty similar.
We have that stagflation or going into near hyperinflation and the whole thing with the Vietnam War and Iraq today and all that stuff like that.
I wonder if there might just be something that...
I don't really believe in this whole collective unconscious, but there's so many people, there's a critical mass of people in society right now that are not experiencing all these horrors, and it seems like they try to go to these shows to shock themselves into seeing it.
I think that they're trying to shock themselves into seeing it, because then they would go to root causes, right?
Then it would not be like the movie Saw.
I haven't seen them, but I understand the premise.
You've got to do something horrible to yourself to get out of a sort of situation, cut your leg off or something.
If people were really trying to deal with the root causes of horror, then it would be more innocuous and more personal, right?
So you wouldn't be in this exaggerated, cut your leg off situation.
Which provokes horror without the roots, the empathy, the child.
And you would, instead, you would show a child being frightened by being put into impossible situations, which would actually connect and resonate and would not reproduce the horror in an empty way, in a sort of mere stimulatory kind of way, but actually would get to the root cause of these kinds of issues.
And so I think you're right insofar as there's a lot of horror in society and there's a great deal of fear About where we're going as a society, right?
I mean, everybody realizes in their gut that this is all unsustainable.
We have, you know, great shows like The Daily Show, which is an agony of humor, right?
And the liars and the falsehoods that go on in the state and the violence in Iraq and the constant contradictions of those in power, their own sort of self-contradictory statements.
And, of course, this goes right back to parenting, right?
The people who grew up with these kind of horror movies in the 70s are now making their own kind of films, right?
They've risen through the ranks, a lot of them, the writers and the directors.
And they're trying to turn the world into horror to normalize their own experience, right?
So when you have gone through a horrible experience, you either process the emotions, which has a lot to do with philosophically and morally identifying the culprits, and process the emotions, or what you do is you try and normalize your emotions by re-inflicting the horror On everyone else,
right? So, if you sort of grew up in France during the Second World War and you saw the Vichy government selling hordes of Jews to the Nazis and collaborating and so on, then you either say, my God, governments are like living hell.
They failed to protect us. They collaborated with the Nazis and sold all the Jews.
They gave all their records of who the Jews were and got them all killed.
There's something incredibly horrifying about governments and we need to process that.
You can either deal with that and become a market anarchist or really start to dig into these things, or what you can do is you can create a philosophy called existentialism, which is about the vague horror and ennui of existence, and then you can try and convince everyone that it's not your government or it's not the people around you who did all of these monstrous and horrible betrayals.
It's the world in general.
You normalize the behavior, and it's a way of not having to confront those who've actually done it and judge them.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
The thing about going back to the movie Saw, like you said, it's a situation where there are a bunch of characters that are placed into, it's kind of like a twisted game with certain rules, and the rules are that you either,
if you want to escape, you have to either main yourself or kill someone else or something like that, and the You know, evil mastermind bad guy who's in charge of it all is kind of laughing at them the whole time saying, you know, like, you brought this on yourself type things and it's like, you know, creating a world of impossible rules and then when the rules are invariably broken, then you laugh at the person for breaking the rules and say, well, look what you've done to yourself now.
And it just so, it reminds me so much of an abusive parent that does something like that where You know, you've broken the rule, and now here comes the punishment.
Well, the rule is completely impossible in the first place.
Right, and of course, if it was portrayed accurately, like if it was portrayed...
I mean, obviously the filmmakers have seriously twisted pasts, and if they actually were honest about their pasts, you would feel incredible sympathy for the child, and you would feel a great deal of anger towards the parents.
And that would be healthy, right?
Because that's the reality of the situation, as far as one's emotional response.
To a parent brutalizing a child.
As it is, what you just feel is sort of a nightmarish kind of world view.
That the world is like this.
And you don't feel sympathy because it's adults who are being tortured.
Oh, you know what? Actually, what you just said, actually, this is perfect because that just made me realize something about the movie.
In the movie, the people who are being tortured are all people that have kind of checkered pasts.
The audience actually does kind of say to themselves, well, these people do sort of deserve it because they've done bad things to people before or something like that.
So yeah, it's like the filmmaker is saying, yes, these people are in horrible and impossible situations in which they're being maimed and killed, but they kind of sort of deserve it, but not directly, but you still don't feel any empathy for them.
Or at least you're not supposed to.
Right, and so he's recreating this sort of Old Testament world wherein the Supreme Power punishes in brutal and genocidal ways, but the people kind of did it to themselves.
And you see this very... It's a very common theme in movies, right?
It's what you call the blame the victim thing, right?
So in the movie, I think, Phone Booth with Colin Farrell, this guy's trapped with a sniper in a phone booth, and it turns out it's because he was rude to a pizza guy, or something like that.
Sorry for the spoiler, but, you know, it's not that big a deal of a film.
But... But, I mean, that kind of situation, you see this all the time.
If you watch medical shows, right, then the people who are, you know, it's very easy to create empathy for the people who are sick, right?
Just make them nice people. And if you make them nasty people, then, you know, you just work on the emotional flavor of things.
All of this is designed to bypass the natural reality that the children are always victims, because the children are helpless and dependent.
And this is what parents do.
This is somebody taking on the emotional flavor of an abusive parent.
That's why these films are so disturbing.
Because the parents say, it's your fault that I'm hitting you.
You're a bad kid, and that's why I'm hitting you.
You didn't listen to me. You don't respect me.
You don't do what I say.
I told you three times to take that milk carefully down the stairs, and you spilled it.
And so they blame the children.
This idea that brutality is justified by the victims' behavior is enormously common.
It's what the Nazis thought.
Why are we killing you?
Because you're Jews. Not because we're evil, but because you're Jews and you're bad.
So this idea that you project your own evil, your own dark side onto other people and then attack them for, you know, this is this blame the children thing and this is what a lot of these horror movies are about.
Yeah, I think that's a very accurate way of looking at it and at least it's kind of satisfied my own curiosity behind that question.
The second part of this now is something that is very interesting to me personally, and that's the fact that I was, when I went to this movie with three buddies of mine, and I walked out, and then afterwards we met up, and they were asking me, like, man, you just really didn't like that at all, huh?
And so they were talking about how they thought it was a great movie.
It was just fantastic and wonderful and all these, you know, Oh, it's so great because of this and that, and I was just thinking, like, because to me, the violence and the torture and all that other stuff is just so overpowering.
Like, it's just like, I mean, it is really like just a mental scream to me, and it just kind of drove me out of there, and I'm wondering, like, what's up with the whole People really enjoying stuff like that.
I mean, I can't relate to that at all, and I'm just wondering if you have any insight into that.
You mean as to the psychology of the people who say this was cool and enjoyable?
Yeah, and maybe even my own psychology for hanging out with people like that.
Well, I mean, you're in a process of transition, right?
I mean, as we all are. I mean, there's no end to this journey, save the brick wall of mortality, but...
I mean, you're in a process of transition.
And there is, of course, a fairly self-destructive masculine culture, you know, which is wherein you're just not supposed to have sensitivity and empathy towards these kind of things, right?
All the blow-up movies in the world, right?
I mean, all the Michael Bay movies and so on.
And I'm not saying they're not enjoyable in a kind of cartoony kind of way, but where there's real violence and sadistic violence in movies, It's kind of an infection, right?
And if it's merely just cool or interesting or, you know, neat or whatever, this kind of sadism, then this is somebody who...
These are people who just don't have anything.
These are people who just have...
They don't have empathy towards the victim, and why do they not have empathy towards the victim?
Because they themselves were victimized, right?
I mean, the reason we don't have empathy for victims is not because we've never been a victim, but because we have been a victim, and we reject that helplessness, right?
When we have been victimized, truly victimized, as children, we feel helpless and terrified and all of these horrible, horrible feelings, which we wish to avoid, right?
We want to avoid that feeling of helplessness.
So, the way that we do that is we don't have empathy towards the helpless, because having empathy towards the helpless would be, or towards victims, would be to have empathy for ourselves.
Having empathy for ourselves means that we end up with anger towards those who abused us, right, or who victimized us, which means that we actually have to make decisions and act in the real world, rather than just conform and go along with the general cultural norms, which is tough for people, right? Not, I think, innately, but just because they've been brutalized, so...
So there's a lack of empathy for the victims in the movie, and unfortunately for you, there's a lack of empathy for the victims of the movie, i.e., you.
Right. They didn't say, wow, tell us how you felt.
What was going on for you? That seemed like to get up and walk out, just help us understand that.
There wasn't any of that. It's like, wow, that really bothered you, but it was cool for me, right?
There wasn't any particular curiosity about your experience, right?
That's a very good point.
I think I felt that sting yesterday, but I didn't consciously focus on it like what you just said there.
Yeah, I got into a conversation with him after the movie and It was a very uncomfortable situation.
Like, I was trying to explain myself and saying that, you know, this is a metaphor for an abusive family, and then they're kind of pooh-poohing that and stuff, and just saying, dude, you're looking too much into it.
That was just like, you know, a fun romp of whatever this and that, you know?
It's like, dude, it's a movie.
There's no need to get so deep about it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't know. This was your genuine experience, right?
Whether or not the movie is a metaphor for this or that or the other is something that's interesting for sure, but this, of course, is the kind of coarse male friendships that all too many men and some women, of course, are stuck in, right?
Where you just have friends who poo-poo any genuine or real or deep experience that you have that's meaningful and important to you.
And this is why philosophy is a total bit, right?
Right, right. I mean, to put it technically, right?
It's like... Oh, great!
So not only do I feel bad about my whole childhood, not only do I feel really angry at my parents, but now I'm sort of noticing that my friends are ignoring my real and deep human experiences.
Great! When did the prices begin?
No, I do.
I mean, there's something to the whole transition thing and what has occurred in my own experience in my own life over the last year and a half.
Obviously, they haven't been sharing that.
It's kind of like I'm a little bit ahead of the game, so to speak, and I'm wondering where to go from here type thing.
I'm kind of ready to just start fresh, if you know what I mean.
What do you mean when you say you're a little bit ahead of the game?
Well, as far as...
I've been trying to have this conversation with a few of my friends, It's been challenging sometimes because there are very bright people that I think get what I'm saying but not fully connecting with it, I think.
I feel after, of course, 700 hours of poring over philosophy podcasts and things like that, I do think that I have a lot of Experience that other people don't have.
I'm having a very difficult time trying to figure out how to convey that experience to other people without sounding kind of aggressive as I'm doing it.
Like, no, why don't you see this?
I'm not being really bad about it.
I'm getting kind of frustrated with myself.
Maybe it's just because I'm expecting too much of the people that I'm talking to to get this stuff or something.
I don't know. Well, those are all excellent questions.
And the reason that I asked you why you felt a little bit ahead of people, I mean, if I'm in a race, you know, a running race or something, and I'm a little bit ahead, then I'm like 5% further ahead, right?
Or maybe 10% further ahead than somebody else, right?
So, I mean, if the average level of wisdom is 100, right, what would you, where would you put where you're currently cruising at?
If the average level is 100?
Yeah. Oh, gosh.
I'd probably say about 195, perhaps.
Well, I think that's generous to the majority, because I don't think that you're twice as wise as the average individual at this point.
Yeah. Right, I mean, this is like intelligence, right?
Somebody with an IQ of 195 is like 10,000 times smarter than somebody who's got an IQ of 100, so I would sort of say that it's more along the realms of IQ in that it's asymptotic and not linear.
Oh, okay. You know what I mean?
Like, wisdom is the connection of truth, right?
I mean, intelligence is just like a series of steps, right?
But wisdom is when you get the whole ecosystem working together.
And you can take the principles from art to psychology to philosophy to economics, and you've got the common principles.
It's a unified field theory. Philosophy is the unified field theory of human experience.
And you're able to make connections at so many different levels now in terms of truth and value.
You're able to be sensitive to your own experience and make decisions that are counter to the social group that you're in, leaving a movie and so on.
You've been able to do some amazing and incredible things in your personal and professional life and so on.
So I wouldn't say that you're like It's not just to praise you, although I think that it's a hugely incredible and admirable thing to do.
And people... Because I spent so long doing it, like, I'm always incredibly impressed when other people do it so much more quickly, right?
And I was a little bit of an icebreaker, but still, I just think that, I mean, the abilities of the people who are on the boards and people in these shows and people who write me and people like yourself, extraordinary and fantastic and amazing.
And, you know, it's like if you struggle for 20 years to learn something and somebody else picks it up in a couple of months, I think that's great, right?
So I wouldn't say that you're just a little bit ahead or you're, you know, 195.
I think it's like, I don't know that there's the same scale, right?
If I can't speak Arabic at all and you're fluent in Arabic, you're not like twice as good at Arabic as I am.
Right? I mean, there's no scale, right?
You're infinitely better at Arabic than I am because I don't know Arabic, right?
And wisdom's different, right?
Because when people encounter wisdom, the average person encounters wisdom, it's a great blow to their ego.
Because they think they know how to live.
They think they know what is true. And all philosophers have suffered throughout history from the calumny and attacks of the average.
Because it takes an extraordinary amount of delusional vanity to believe that you know how to live.
Because clearly, when you look around the world, everything from wars to governments to religions to divorce rates to child dysfunction and ADD medications and the fact that depression is the second largest killer I mean, people don't know how to live.
That much is clear. But they think they know how to live, right?
So when somebody who's average comes in contact with somebody who's wise, and the first wisdom being saying, I don't know how to live.
That's what happened to me when I realized that I was in a bad romantic relationship that had been for many years, that I was involved with corrupt business partners, and so on.
I thought, well, you know, I don't know how to live, right?
There's an incredibly humbling thing that you need to go through, which Socrates talks about metaphorically through the Oracle of Delphi story, where he's told that he knows nothing, and he says, well, yeah, I know that I know nothing, but how does that make me the wisest person?
And so... It's different from Arabic, even, because people sense wisdom and oppose it.
People sense wisdom and reject it.
People sense wisdom and undermine it.
People sense wisdom and attack it.
They know when wisdom is around, and the only way that you see them know that wisdom is around is that people are attacking it.
And we see this quite continually on the board, and I see this in my inbox.
Where wisdom shows up, and it's not always true, but it's often true.
Where wisdom shows up, the only way that you know it's there is because people are attacking.
And I think that... You get that in your gut, right?
That if you were to bring this kind of stuff up and talk about empathy and talk about childhood and talk about...
I mean, that people would...
You would run up against people's defenses, right?
And those defenses would be...
People would roll their eyes.
They'd poo-poo what you're saying.
And the moment that you started to really get through to them, they would reject and scorn you, right?
They'd just walk off and say, I don't know, you're in some cult.
I don't even know what you're talking about. They would just attack you, right?
And that's something that philosophers and thinkers and people who are genuinely wise have had to deal with.
There's a reason that the metaphor of Christ getting nailed up on the cross in the popular mythology is because he said, maybe we should stop killing each other so much.
I mean, that's the popular mythology story.
And he gets nailed up on the cross, right?
And that's what Hathor Shrugged is all about, right?
That the wise people, the people with knowledge, get attacked because it hurts the vanity of other people that you're implicitly saying, look, You guys don't know how to honestly and genuinely experience this movie even at that level.
You know that you're going to get attacked for being wise.
And so we get stuck in this waiting room, right?
And this is where I try and get people out of, right?
By saying, go talk to people or get them out of your life.
But don't stick in this waiting room where you're kind of hoping that you can smuggle wisdom into your relationships.
People who are not wise are incredibly alert to the presence of wisdom and they will attack it.
Right. Actually, that's going to be kind of on the slate for my next major advancement in my personal life.
I'm currently living in a roommate situation right now because of the financial stresses that I was under for a couple of years.
But now that I'm seeming to blast off financially right now, I think I'm really eager to get back into a living by myself type thing.
I think it will help a lot to just kind of Clear the mechanism a bit and refocus on what's important.
Yeah, I think that's important.
And I think that your gut level instincts with regards to your friends is going to put you in a null zone.
It's going to put you in a very uncomfortable place where you're going to be torn between getting along with people and going along with people or being real and genuine and talking about what's important to you.
And that is a very difficult place to be in, right?
In a sense, there's no loneliness like that.
Because you feel like you sort of, as I said before...
You're married to society, but you're having a really hot and sultry affair with philosophy, right?
It's like, how do I get my slutty girlfriend into polite company, right?
I mean, it's really a tough call, right?
I mean, how do you bridge those two worlds?
It's really, really, it's a tough situation.
I would suggest, I mean, however people deal with it is up to them, but you can't hide forever, right?
Yeah. Well, I think what I'm, you know, what I've been trying to do for A while now is, you know, like I've mentioned before, is to take all this philosophy stuff out of the laboratory and actually live it.
And it seems to be working in so many areas of my life.
The family, you know, I eat food and, I mean, my gosh, that just uncapped enormous amounts of emotional energy and creativity and stuff.
And then doing this thing with my career, you know, leaving a salary job for self-employment has been just exhilarating beyond belief.
And it seems like there's these tethers that are holding down a Zeppelin or something that's just struggling to rise into the air, and it seems like as each one breaks, the stress on the other ones that are remaining is increased by that much.
It seems like that's what's starting to come toward the forefront now in my experience is this kind of lack of, what am I trying to say, I guess just kind of depth You know, in some of my personal relationships.
I think that's definitely going to have to be the next tether that goes.
Because the rest one wants to rise.
Right, I mean, but you're already doing it, right?
So people say, well, I don't want to end up lonely and so on, but you went to go and see this film with your friends and you chose to leave, right?
That's not accidental, right?
I mean, you could have gone to see, I don't know, Shrek 3 or whatever, right?
But you went to go and see this film with your friends, which you knew was a horror film and would involve brutality of one form or another, and you left, right?
So, you know, this can either happen unconsciously or it can happen consciously, right?
And that's sort of what I sort of try and nag people about, is trying, you know, this is not accidental, what is happening with your friends right now.
This is the next thing, right?
This is the next thing that you have to deal with, which is to find Whether your relationships can handle your true self, right?
And so it's not accidental that this is the film you went to and that you walked out.
Yeah, it's very interesting that you mention that because I normally, when we're selecting movies and stuff like that, I just flat out say, you know, I don't go to horror movies.
And this time, for some reason, I accepted it.
And it's interesting that you focused on that too because, you know, it is very much an unusual thing For this to have happened.
And, you know, when I say for it to have happened, it almost sounds like I'm saying that it was out of my control, but of course it was completely in my control.
And, yeah, it's like I kind of orchestrated this scenario myself.
Yeah, I mean, I think you did, right?
Yeah, absolutely. When you start to wake up to reality and to logical philosophy, you've got to, like, there's not a lot of...
There's not a lot of time to fuss because things start to happen.
Things start to happen in your life.
You start to become more assertive.
That brings your relationships into sharp relief.
That's one of the reasons I put out so many podcasts.
You can't say to people, listen, I'm going to be locking you into a space shuttle next week, but I'm not going to give you any instruction manuals.
Because it really does happen that rapidly when you begin to wake up.
It escalates, it gets asymptotic, it affects all of your relationships relatively quickly and either we can see what's going on or we end up being sort of bound and gagged and thrown onto an incredibly accelerating conveyor belt wondering what the hell's going on, right? Because when you start to wake up, your whole being comes to life and your true self, which has the power to give you incredibly insightful dreams and the power to give you creativity and strength, It starts to engineer, right?
You become real.
And if you don't know what's going on, it can just feel like you're out of control, if that makes sense.
No, it makes perfect sense.
In fact, what's funny is it seems that I don't recall dreams very often at all, but I do somehow manage to engineer not quite living dreams, but just these kinds of...
You know, kind of meaningful situations over and over again.
In fact, like last year, in leading up to my de-fooing, you know, as I was gaining more and more traction in fully understanding my relationship to my mother, especially, during that span of time, I actually kind of sort of dated about,
well, I did. I dated like three different girls during that time, very briefly, but what was really just amazing about it was these three girls all Very closely represented different aspects of my mother's personality.
And it was just so amazing that during that time, and I know that, like we said, it's important to keep the instructions coming because throughout this whole time, I was kind of dashing myself against the rocky shores of bathing.
And if it wasn't for this kind of daily or weekly tether, Sometimes, sometimes a week, tether to rational philosophy.
I think I would have completely washed out of that improvement program, you know?
It was just like... I mean, because it was really a tremendous challenge to somehow start up these relationships and then face the fact that I was looking at an aspect of my mother and then when everything just went to hell, of course, with these relationships, then to pick myself up from that and then say, okay, now, This is what we have to learn from this one.
And then, of course, a few months later, I was into another relationship with another girl that was just another aspect.
It was kind of like a slow motion horror show in its own right, but it taught me so much and so effectively.
I think there's something about, for some reason, I tend to be the kind of person that absolutely has to live and experience in order to get the true It's interesting how I've been subconsciously organizing or orchestrating all of these experiences for myself to live through.
Like you said, I think this might just be the most recent one.
It's interesting that the order that these things all came into.
The order of first with the The relationships with these women and then of course the break with my mother and then the encounters I had with my boss and then the break with my job and into my new career and now I'm orchestrating encounters with my friends.
And it's kind of interesting how they're all going in this order because it's like the most immediate, I think, thing to me is the most final here.
It's the one that is literally my day-to-day, I see this Every waking day is, you know, it's just a circle of friends and stuff.
Right. When we trigger growth in ourselves, it's like the pituitary gland starting puberty.
Like, we don't know what the hell's going on, right?
Half the time, it's like, hey, I'm getting smelly.
Hey, I'm getting hairy. Hey, my voice is going out, right?
We don't know what the hell's going on, right?
But it's happening anyway, right?
We can either sort of understand the process or not.
It doesn't matter. It's still going to happen anyway, right?
I mean, that's when you start.
It's really, really hard to stop.
And I don't want to sound at all condescending in any way, shape, or form, but it sounds like you're ready for the next thing.
And I can tell you what the next thing is, and it'll blow your mind, but I can tell you what it is if you like.
Yeah, hit me.
All right. The next thing is that you are involved in an unconscious conversation with your friends.
They are not passive in this conversation.
not only is there a reason why you went to that film, but there's a reason that your friends invited you to that film.
The world is full of silent conversations, right?
What we talk about on the surface is tiny.
It's tiny. It's nothing.
It's the weather. The world is full of incredibly deep and powerful conversations if you listen and if you see.
Because you think that you're driving this process, but in very, very many ways, your friends are driving this process unconsciously.
Their unconscious knows what you're up to.
They're defensive.
They're false selves. They know exactly what you're up to.
They can smell you coming like blood in the water for a shot.
They can smell you coming miles away.
They know that you're growing. They can see it in your hesitations.
They can hear it in your voice.
They can listen in the pause.
There is an incredible jungle drumming of communication that occurs from unconscious to unconscious in the world.
And your friends are engineering this as much as you are.
They don't know it, but you can.
Yeah, absolutely. You're spot on with this.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Like when we were trying to pick out a movie yesterday, one of my friends was saying, oh yeah, this isn't a horror movie.
This is more like sci-fi.
And kind of like trying to say that, you know, this is very, very apparent now.
That's fantastic. I mean, this is what people get confused about.
Because they say, I mean, the amazing thing is that when I say to somebody, you know, you think about defooing, everybody, no, not everybody, but people jump on me, right?
Like I'm somehow instigating all of this.
But, of course, it's actually our parents who defoo with us.
Right? And all we're doing is making that real.
And they do food with us years and years ago, when we were little kids.
Maybe when we were babies, maybe when we were fetuses, I don't know.
But I do know this, that Christina's parents and my parents kicked us out.
right all we did was say this is who we are and we got rejected and rejected and rejected and rejected and rejected and rejected and scorned and belittled and rejected right so it's like you know if you're passive aggressively just dumping all over your girlfriend and then she finally says well that's it I'm not going to take any If you call me bitch one more time, I'm leaving you.
And you say, oh yeah, bitch?
Well, you know, is it fair to say that you're breaking up with her?
I mean, she's telling you exactly what it's going to cause her to not want to be with you anymore.
You do that exact thing, of course you're breaking up with her.
Now, she may not say, that's it, I'm leaving.
And you get to say, look, she left me!
Right? But it's the parents who kick us out.
We don't defoo with our parents.
It's our parents who defoo with us.
Right? Because we're the ones who say, look, this is who I am.
This is what I need from a relationship.
And I'm willing to provide it. I'm not asking for it to be one way.
But I need this to be a real relationship.
I need to have a voice. I need to be heard.
It needs to be reciprocal.
And we have to share at least some values in common.
Right? That's sort of not an unreasonable thing to ask.
And it's our parents who say, no, no, no, no, no, screw you.
And then everybody says, oh my god, Steph, you're telling people to defoo.
It's like, no, I tell people to go talk to their parents.
And then it's the parents who defoo, because it's the parents who say, no, no, no, I reject, I reject, I reject.
So when you go and talk to your parents for real, they kick you out.
And your friends are heavily engaged in this conversation with you.
They take you to this film.
And I bet you a million to one they knew you were going to leave.
And I bet you a million to one that they knew that their reaction to you leaving was going to be highly troubling to you.
There is a contraction that's going on around you that's expelling you from this sort of blank social wound.
You are being expelled from this group.
And you are doing that for sure because it's unbearable in certain situations.
This is why I think it's just so important to be aware of the unconscious conversation that goes on back and forth all the time.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. No, this was a very...
It was something that was very...
I recognized it immediately that there was something terribly important about this and that I had to ponder.
It's really interesting, though.
I like how you reminded me that I mean, everyone is subconsciously brilliant and I keep losing sight of that, that these things don't happen completely randomly like that.
It is kind of, you know, like I said, there's a subconscious intelligence there that is guiding a lot of these encounters and that's something that I completely I'm just left out of my considerations of this, and I thank you for reminding me of that.
No, no problem. That's why I was concerned when you said I'm a little bit further ahead.
What's happening is that when your friends de-friend you, or whatever it is, what they need to do is they need to come up with mythological justifications that make that okay, right?
Sure. Of course, this happens with parents too, right?
When I stopped seeing my brother, he came up with all these stories about, you know, Steph is intolerant, he's culty, he's addicted to rationalism because he can't feel, he's judgmental, he holds a grudge.
You know, he has all of these fantastic, wonderful stories as to why I'm a bad guy for not seeing him anymore, right?
But those things, they don't just appear out of nowhere.
You have to work to lay the foundation for this kind of mythology.
It doesn't just pop up out of nowhere.
And so what is happening is that your friends are beginning to lay the foundation of the mythology as to why they don't see you anymore.
Well, he got oversensitive.
Suddenly he was unable to watch a movie.
He just psychoanalyzes everything.
He has all these weird emotions.
I don't know what's going on.
He listens to this guy on the internet.
It's all too creepy.
What they're doing is they're creating a story that lets them get rid of you and retain their own false sense of self-esteem.
Now, I think that you're going a little bit closer to the truth, right?
Because you're saying, this is how I feel, and I think there's good reasons for it, and here's the analogy between this film and the family, and this is how it makes me feel.
But what they're doing is they're dragging you into the situations, right?
The impossible situation is you being taken to the movie by your friends, right?
Not the movie.
That's the impossible situation.
They're putting you in situations where your true self is going to reveal itself and they need to have a number of these situations put together so that they can get rid of you and feel like they're doing the right thing and you're just some crazy guy.
Yeah. That's...
I think that's a spot-on observation right there.
And I could be wrong, and the way to find that out is to talk to them genuinely about your feelings, but in the same way that everyone is a genius of narrative, right?
And the whole thing is to try and make your narrative match reality, like science, right?
So you don't do religious nonsense, but actual scientific experiments.
When your narrative matches reality, then you're a philosopher and then you're incredibly wise.
But when your narrative is the opposite of reality, then you're mythological and culture-based and manipulative and you have a false self dictatorship, which results in a real-world dictatorship and so on.
So you're trying to get out of this mythology and the way to test all of this sort of stuff.
I mean, if you reveal your thoughts and feelings to your friends and they roll their eyes and scorn and this and that, right, then for sure they're building the mythology of eviction, right?
And that's the best way to sort of figure that out.
I think you know the answer to that, which is why you feel as if it's on.
Well, I think I know the answer to that, which is why I brought it up today after months and months of thinking about it.
So, yeah, I think you got it.
All right. This is good.
I've got a big smile on my face.
Are there any other relationships that I can completely shatter and destroy for you?
Because I smell, it's like blood in the water.
I smell some. No, I'm kidding.
Look, I'm really sorry. I mean, it's a terrible thing to go through.
It really is. Yeah, it is in a way, but it's also very exhilarating because, again, I'm focusing on what I want my life to turn into.
And because I'm recognizing, again, that these are tethers that are holding me down and I want to go higher, then what's exciting to me is I'm here.
I'm at the point where I've got the knife in my hand I'm ready to cut.
Right. It's super exciting.
Christy lost all of her friends. Now that's different because she's not that likeable to begin with.
Christy lost all of her friends.
I have maybe one friend left, other than the people on the board and in these shows.
But it is. But do you know what I sort of felt, and Christy and I talked about this quite a bit, and I apologize in advance for the swearing, but it's like, if the price of me being a deep and powerful and large soul Is that people tell me to get lost?
Then fuck it. That's the price.
I'm not going to put myself in a little fucking matchbox to make everybody else feel that it's okay to be small.
Like I'm not going to crush myself down into a little frightened atomic mouth of nothingness because other people don't like it if I'm deep or powerful or wise or intelligent or perceptive or whatever.
Like I'm not going to crush myself.
For the sake of the little petty lives of other people.
And if that's the price, like if the price of outgrowing this shoebox is that the shoebox breaks, fuck it!
You know, I've only got one life to live.
I'm not going to live my life in this little fucking shoebox just because it bothers other people when I grow.
And it's not the easiest thing in the world, right, to actually get a hold of, but it's like...
Too bad. If I outgrow this clothing called others, I outgrow this clothing called others.
Because otherwise, the world is never going to change.
The species is never going to advance.
There's going to be no evolution if everybody stays small because they want to just get the approval of petty, frightened people.
Yeah, that's the thought.
So, go be alone.
Get me to a cave.
No, look, I mean, and the other thing, too, is that...
Yeah, we're going to need a bigger house, that's right.
Let's really make this a cult and have everyone live on their basis.
The other thing, too, is that, for me, it's sort of like this.
It's like, I'm on this sinking ship, and I'm not a bad swimmer, but I'm not a great swimmer, and there's, like, a shore that I can just sort of see on the horizon.
I don't know what's there.
The wind is choppy.
There are sharks. It's raining, lightning, whatever, right?
But I know that the ship is going down, and I know that if I stay here, I'm going to drown.
That's what happens when you start to grow.
So for me, it's like, okay, fuck it, I've got to grow.
I'm growing, whether I like it or not.
I can pretend I'm not going through puberty and stay in some little outfit, but some little...
I'm going to outgrow that for sure, right?
So I can either sort of be ridiculous and stand here with scraps of kids' clothing around me or I can actually try and make some better clothing.
So for me it's like the ship is sinking and if I stay here for sure I'm going to drown.
I'm going to eat my sharks and I'm going to die.
Now, I don't know if I'm going to be able to make it to that shore, but I do know That's the only chance I've got.
And so when you start to grow, your relationships are like ships that go down, right?
And the far shore is like, what happens if I'm just genuine and honest and real?
What happens if I'm actually authentic with people?
And most people, yeah, I'll drive them away and this and that and the other.
But the people who remain, that's the shore that I'm striking out for, right?
There is a period of fear, there's a period of loneliness, but the alternative is to go down with the ship, and that for sure is not going to work.
Absolutely. No, this is great.
I'm in your debt again, Seth.
This is good stuff here, I tell you what.
Good, good. Now listen, I just wanted to ask if anybody else had any questions or comments just before we wrap up for the day because I have to go and rip up a tree because I'm full of adrenaline.
Is there anybody else on the chat who had any sort of questions or issues?
Go bench-press your Volvo.
That's right, that's right.
Anybody? Bueller?
Anybody? Anybody?
No, Volvo hasn't left the driveway, that's right.
My studio is stationary.
Alright, well listen, thanks everybody.
I hugely appreciate it. Do, of course, keep me posted about how this goes.
And, you know, that's a great breakthrough I think that you had this week.
Congratulations. Empathy's a bitch, but man, it sure beats the alternative.
Thanks a lot. All right.
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