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July 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:16
827 The Mythology of High School

An examination of gangly archetypes, with reference to the show 'Freaks and Geeks'

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
I hope you're doing well. I apologize vastly and profusely in advance for this.
Oh, somewhat lengthy podcast.
So, if you could listen to it in one go, I would really appreciate it.
This is going to be a rather challenging exploration of something that I have been working on for the past week or week and a half.
So, it's one of the hardest one truths that I've had in this sort of philosophical series.
So, I hope that it's of some use to you.
I extracted the tooth.
I hope it's gold. Just before the regular announcements, looking forward to your donations.
Thank you so much to the donators from yesterday.
Fantastic. Food is back on the table.
The philosopher has his nutrition.
Please keep them coming. I really do appreciate it.
The symposium, we have reached, I think, halfway or a little bit more to our goal of 15 people for the Freedom and Radio live symposium, Illinois, Chicago-based, on the 25th of August, 2007.
Please send me an email or drop past the boards under general messages.
There is a little poll for yes, I'll come, no, I won't, for the FDR symposium.
So if we have enough people by the end of the month, I will be more than happy to have it on.
Otherwise, we shall wait for another time.
So, I had also...
I guess you've already heard it, this Evil Girlfriend podcast.
Alright, because we have a long podcast ahead of us, I hope that you can make it through in one sitting.
In other words, I hope the traffic is really bad, or your insomnia is crippling.
Let me tell you a little bit about the background of this podcast, just so you can get a sense of where it is that I'm coming from.
I... I watched a series with Christina that was made in the...
I guess it aired in 1999, I think, or 2000, called Freaks and Geeks, which is like a chilling reproduction of high school in 1980.
Yes, Freaks and Geeks. Back before the dawn of time.
Close to the Big Bang. In 1980, I was 14 years old.
The lead character is 14.
The lead character has geeky friends.
He plays Dungeons and Dragons.
He's a little on the scrawny side, which is one reason why I started working out, and all this kind of stuff.
There's just... I mean, it's an eerie number of parallels.
He comes from a nice, though occasionally bit-blind family, and the traditional stereotype of the wise children trying to make their way in the world without any particular help from intelligent or experienced adults, that the adults come from another planet, is really part of the equation.
And it's interesting because...
This exploration of high school cliques is a staple, right, all the way from, I don't know, Breakfast Club onwards, and it's a staple, and gosh, was it the Mallory Towers books that I used to read when I was a kid had the same kind of thing?
It's also the same kind of thing in Harry Potter and so on, the sort of group of cliques that is the staple of the high school tribal society, the Lord of the Flies among the lockers.
In this, there's two particular groups that are We've explored one of the freaks, and those are the people who are just real outsiders and who are rebellious and not particularly into obeying rules, come from real broken homes, almost exclusively, and they take drugs and just real outsiders and people who have...
Some pretty stunted interactivity skills, but they sort of cling together.
And then there's the geeks, and the geeks, it should be noted, are distinct from the nerds.
The geeks are people who have odd physical attributes, but are not marked by a particularly high intelligence, right?
So there's the nerds who have their own pecking order based on particular abilities in science or math, or it could be I was in more of a writing nerd group, but...
There's the geeks, who are just sort of physically odd, or out of the typical mold, and generally quite awkward when it comes to sports and so on, but who are not, you know, giant brains sitting atop awkward bodies, right?
So they, of average intelligence, it would seem, and of unimposing physical stature, let's just say.
So there's three of them, right?
There's Sam, who's like this 70-year-old Jewish grandfather trapped in the body of a 14-year-old boy.
And there's Sam, who's like a young and sweet and dewy-eyed young boy.
And then there's Bill, who's pretty much a heartbreaking character, who just is a complete uber-geek in terms of he's tall and gangly with these goldfish bowl glasses and a really bad haircut and so on.
And Then, of course, there are the jocks and the cheerleaders, all the sort of standard high school stereotypes within high school movies.
I found this show to be quite powerful.
Really, really, really. I got it for like 50 bucks for...
I guess 18 shows, plus a whole bunch of...
I haven't looked at any of the extras, but, you know, go order it.
I mean, it's just fantastic.
Whether or not you were a teenager in the 80s or whatever, it doesn't really matter.
The archetypes are the same.
It was so bizarre.
I mean, I'm telling you, it was so bizarre.
To see characters and this long-haired, skinny guy who was the dungeon master, who is, like, the same as the guy who would occasionally co-dungeon master with me, or we'd sort of alternate at times...
And he's pulling out the Fiendfolio and the Monster Manual and all the D&D books as they were back then.
I don't know where the hell they got these. It's 20 years later or whatever, I guess.
But just astounding.
And the musical references and so on are just spot on.
It took forever, of course.
It only ran for one season because it was going up against The Bachelor or some nonsense like that.
And there are like over 100 songs in the show which are pretty specific.
They made the show before...
You would get your standard licensing agreements to include DVD re-releases since 1999 when it was negotiated in 1998.
And so someone had to go and get all of the musical references approved and so on.
And it was just...
I mean...
It's good storytelling.
It's not great storytelling. The characters are good but not great.
But it was a real re-evocation of a time period in my life that was...
Not so high, right? Not such a high arc in my existence.
But... I don't particularly want to talk about...
I mean, what do you care about?
What my high school... I guess I was junior high at this time.
Junior high school experiences were like.
What I think is sort of important is that...
I literally, I swear to God, for hours...
I was like bawling about...
This one particular character whose name is Bill...
I mean, really funny looking, right?
I mean, not such...
I mean, he has the... not completely freaky looking, but, you know, with the glasses and the bad haircuts and the bad clothing and the physical gangliness and the awkwardness and the lack of coordination and so on.
Just a kind of heartbreaking character.
And I'll sort of tell you a little bit about what I was thinking about when I was feeling so sad about the fate of Of this guy and the accidental nature of these kinds of fates.
This kid...
Let's just take the...
Martin Starr is the name of the actor.
This kid...
Was born...
Just kind of...
Funny looking, right?
And with bad eyesight. And I just sort of want you to think for a moment, if you wouldn't mind...
I mean, I just happen to be born with good eyesight.
I need some reading glasses now.
If I'm spending a lot of time on the computer, I really need them, but it's more comfortable.
They're like the least powerful cheaters you can get.
So I've never had any eye problems or ear problems or anything like that, and I've always been pretty athletic.
But imagine, right?
I mean, this is how astoundingly shaped...
What we call our personalities are.
I've talked about the social mythology and so on.
But let's just talk about the base biology of who it is that we call ourselves and how all that is shaped.
Imagine if you'd been born with really bad eyesight.
Really bad eyesight. Like, to the point where you need, like, serious Coke bottle glasses to get any, like, everything is a total blur without your glasses.
Of course, people don't really know that until you can speak and say what looks better with glasses on and what looks worse, right?
So for the first couple of years of your life, everything is just shapes and blobs, right?
Right? Your physical coordination is going to be enormously affected.
Because somebody throws you a ball, all you see is a slightly moving blur.
So the connection between your body responses, your reflexes, and all these kinds of things, the connection is really hazy.
So you're not going to develop Those sort of fine motor skill coordinations that occur during the time when your body is first learning to work itself, right?
In relation to the world, right?
You don't reach up and scratch your ear and miss because that's all primary sense biofeedback, but in terms of interacting with the world, you can't really do it very well.
It's not your fault. You're not born gawky.
It's just the bad eyesight, right?
What is it going to mean to your personality development if you can't see people?
And I went out when I was in my, I guess, early 20s, very early 20s, 21 or so.
When I went to the National Theatre School, I lived with a woman for about two years, and she was also somebody who had bad eyesight when she was a kid.
And this wasn't discovered until she was like five or six years old, as tends to be the case.
And she had real trouble with eye contact, and she had a very rich inner life, which of course is going to be the case.
If you put somebody in a sensory deprivation tank, they're going to start having hallucinations.
The body needs stimulus, and it will provide its own if it's not provided externally, which is what dreams are about at night.
So she had a high degree of emotionality and difficulty making eye contact and so on, and I felt that this was entirely because of her undiagnosed eyesight problems when she was a kid, right?
How do people respond to you when you're a kid?
If you have bad eyesight, And somebody throws a ball and you just sort of stand there smiling because it's just a blurry shape and you don't catch the ball.
How are they going to respond to you?
Again, assuming that they're not wise adults.
Say, well, maybe there's a vision issue.
Let's go sort it out. They're going to feel like not positively inclined towards you, not admiring.
Because they can't see your inner life.
And of course, very few parents bother to explore their children's inner lives.
So that richness is not...
Evident to you. What is evident to you is that you can't catch a ball, you trip, you fall, you drop things, because you can't connect with your movement and the world very easily.
It's like half-blind, right?
It's worse than blind, in a sense, right?
So, how much of your personality is shaped by the mere accident of your eyesight?
I mean, isn't that just unbearably tragic, in a way?
This guy Bill, at one point in the series, he says, you know, it'd be great to be a janitor.
I get paid more than teachers, no bosses particularly around.
And, I mean, he may not have been the brightest kid in the world, but what is it that would make him want to...
Like, what is it that would make him end up as a lonely janitor for the rest of his life?
Bad fucking eyesight! Bad fucking eyesight!
That he would feel that that is the best that he could do.
Or that that would be a viable career goal or aspiration for him to have.
I mean, isn't that just heartbreaking?
And so along with the poor eyesight, he just happens to be tall and skinny and, you know, he's got bad hair and so on.
Oh man, I'm telling you, it's just...
It is so sad.
It is so sad. That we are molded by what is beyond our control.
I mean, in some ways it seems like, and I know this is dangerous free will, non-free will territory, but nonetheless, in some ways it almost feels like we are molded by circumstance the way that the wind molds a rock, right?
I mean, a rock doesn't choose.
So... He ends up getting involved.
He's attracted to this girl named Cindy, who in the horrible mismatch of that age towers over him by a good, I don't know, half foot or something, who's a cheerleader.
And she's sort of very flirty and coquettish and sits with her arms straight and crossed over her front and bats her eyes and grins and smiles and looks and so on, right? So she's very flirty, right?
When you think about that, I mean, there's a strong genetic component to acne.
To some degree, there's a pretty strong environmental, in terms of your family being your environment, in terms of your weight.
Are you overweight?
A lot of that's got to do with How you're fed and what food is in the house and what you're taught about nutrition and all this and that, right?
So there's one Sam, the Jewish kid's father is a dentist, right?
And the kids say, is there any cereal in the house?
And he says, no, no sugar cereal for sure.
That stuff will rot your choppers. Right, so he has better teeth because his father's a dentist or whatever, right?
So, it's the accidents of birth, and it's the accidents of the house that you're born into, right?
So, this girl, Cindy, who is very...
And the reason I'm using these is that you can...
I mean, these were pretty good archetypes, and you will know kids like this from your own school.
And, of course, if you rent, you can't...
I can't replay for you my teenage years without the mime group from hell.
But you can rent or buy this, and I really would recommend it.
It's really good. It doesn't matter how old you are.
It doesn't matter when you went to high school. This is worth a rental or a purchase.
You can see these characters, right?
So we can at least share this experience in common.
But this girl, who's, you know, bats her eyes and grins and looks up sideways and looks up through lowered lashes and sits in a coquettish manner and so on, right?
She... Is she naturally coquettish by nature?
Well, no, of course not. This isn't a personality...
This is what she can achieve based on how she looks.
I haven't mentioned this more recently, but if you can imagine a pimply overweight girl doing the same coquettish, grinny kind of flirty stuff, she'd just be laughed at.
She'd just be laughed at.
I remember I tried...
I've never ever been good at this, but I had a desire to do this, right?
I tried to be a superior guy, right?
A haughty and superior guy.
Gee, I stutter when I even think about it.
I tried to be a haughty and superior guy when I was sort of around this age, 13 or 14 or whatever.
And I was lining up to learn skating, right?
Skating. Oh, God, the horror.
The horror. Of course, I didn't grow up with skating in England.
I come over here. I'm like 12 in Canada.
You're supposed to learn how to skate, right?
So... Rent the skates, go out on the ice, can't get up, can't get up, keep falling over, can't figure out what the hell's going on.
Finally realized that, with the help of some hockey kids who came over and knocked me over and yelled things at me, I finally figured out that there are in fact skate guards that you're supposed to take off.
That actually did help quite a bit in terms of being able to waddle my way across the ice.
But I was standing outside the hockey arena, And, man, some bugs out today.
I took my car, so I don't have any bug spray.
It's all in Christina's car, so sorry for the odd slap and tickle.
But this girl said something to me that was kind of, I don't know, like you experience everything as a put down, or at least I did.
I didn't have any secure emotional base from which to absorb these kinds of things, right?
So, I tried to be haughty and superior...
And I said, I have pity on you or something, little Lord Fauntalroyd and so on.
And of course, because I was a little, this girl was like a year or two older and like a head taller and so on, and I was a scrawny little kid, right?
She just laughed at me. She turned to her friends and he said, can you believe this kid?
He said, like, I have pity on you?
I mean, that's too funny, right?
Which is nature's way of saying that you can't pull it off, right?
You cannot pull off haughty and superior when you jump on the ice with your skate guards on and are half a head taller than those you are trying to be superior to, right?
So you can't get away with it, right?
Now, if I'd have been six foot two with wavy hair and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
Then maybe I could have gotten away with it, right?
And maybe then that statement wouldn't have been laughed at but might have had some power or something, right?
And that's sort of what I mean when I say that who we are is...
And again, I'm talking the absence of philosophy and the absence of wisdom, when we have to judge everything by appearance and so on, right?
But who we are is not just the social mythologies and all the stuff we've talked about before, but who we are is what we can get away with, right?
So if you're a cute girl...
Then you can be coquettish.
And that becomes who you are.
And if you're not a cute girl, then you can't be coquettish.
Because people will just laugh at you.
So you don't do that, because you don't like to be laughed at and scorned.
If you're the head of the football team with broad shoulders and wavy hair and whatever, right?
Then you can sneer at people.
And if you're this gronny 14-year-old blonde kid with a funny accent and bad skating ability, you can't sneer at people, right?
So you don't. You veer away from that.
You shy away from that. And so we're like water, and we're constantly trying to find a way down the sort of social cliffs using the path of least resistance.
What can I get away with? Well, you know, how did I end up funny?
Well, people thought my accent was funny, and so I was encouraged to make jokes.
And the jokes that I made, because of my accent, were considered funnier than if I'd had some non-Fawlty Towers accent.
Right? So, part of the humor was developed because...
Of my accent, right?
I was not considered to be the wittiest guy in boarding school, but in Canada, suddenly I was hilarious, right?
So that works, so I sort of work more on that, right?
Now, none of this is, I don't think, terribly stunning, but it is incredibly important, I think, just to sort of think, right?
Who would you be if you'd had bad eyesight?
If you just sort of happen to have bad eyesight?
Who would you be if you'd been born with a hair lip?
Who would you be if you'd had really bad acne when you were a teenager?
Who would you be if you'd grown to be a foot shorter or a foot taller?
Who would you be if you'd had natural coordination and athletic ability?
And this is not even taking into account who you'd be if you'd had different parents, a different upbringing.
I think that there is an original self There is a true self which knows all of this, which is why we get anxious under the dominion of the false self.
So I think that, of course, we are trying to undo all of these accidents and return to who we are.
And that's hard, right?
Because so much of who we are is what we were able to get away with based on things that we inherited, either familially or biologically or culturally or whatever.
Who are you if you're in Canada, right?
Who are you if you're excellent at hockey versus if you're not?
You're a different guy. This tyranny of the accidental, this accident as identity, is really what we're left with in the absence of wisdom, in the absence of philosophy, in the absence of truth.
We're left to imagine that accidents...
Is identity. Accidentalism is identity.
Randomness is I. Not I. We think I am when really it is I am allowed.
I'm allowed to be coquettish because I'm pretty.
I'm allowed to be funny because I have an accent.
Sorry, I almost fell. I'm allowed.
What is allowed? What is allowed?
Of course, then we grow up and we have to ask the government permission for everything because our very identities are founded on what is accidental and what is allowed and not what is.
And we're trying to get back to the what is, not what is approved, what is allowed, what is encouraged, what is discouraged.
So, with that framework in place, and if you've got to pause, now's the time because we're going to go into a new section again.
I tell you, this is going to be long.
With that in place... Let me tell you about a scene that just broke my heart.
I think it's in the 14th episode or whatever.
And this tall, gangly, gawky, coke-bottle-glasses guy, Bill, is playing basketball.
Haverjack! Somebody cries, throws him the ball.
And, I mean, he goes down the court like he's got broken broomsticks for legs and tries to do this layup, right, and fails completely.
And, of course, the other is like, oh, nice going, Haverchuk, you know, and they sneer at him and scorn him and so on.
That's all a little exaggerated, and maybe it's different in the States.
It never was quite that bad in Canada.
When I first came to Canada, I was used to a game called rounders in England, where you get three pitches and you get to hit the ball, and if you don't like your hit or you think you can do better, you just wait for the next pitch, right?
And I was a pretty good hitter.
I played a lot of cricket and played rounders, so when I came to Canada, I was slightly more successful at baseball than I was at...
Hockey, or skating.
And so what I did was I was put back in two grades.
I sort of came to Canada. I originally lived in a town called Whitby with my mother's brother.
And I went for half a year to school.
I was in grade 8.
And then when I came to Toronto, they put me back in grade 6.
So I went two years back.
And that was partly because my math skills were not up to scratch with my language skills.
And because my mother didn't intervene, so I had to, it's pretty boring, do this two years over again, at least for most of it.
So I went out and cracked a pretty good shot of a baseball, and I said, everyone was like, run, you limey bastard, run.
They didn't say limey bastard, limey.
Run, right, they said, and I was like, no, no, no, I'll take the next one.
Right? I didn't realize.
I did make it to first base and so on, which...
It was the only metaphorical use of that term for quite some time.
So it wasn't so bad from that standpoint.
But this guy is really bad, Bill, in the show.
He's really bad at basketball.
He goes down, tries to do the layup, and everyone just scorns him and so on.
Even the gym teacher is like, ooh, gee, I wish he'd made that shot.
And the fat kid is like, ooh, this isn't good as soon as he gets the ball.
And I was really, really sad about this, of course, because it is a really heartbreaking scene to see somebody who is, you know, trying to work...
I mean, you can see the guys running around pulling the levers in his brain, you know, wondering why half the cables are broken and the other half are connected to the wrong things, and he really is a gangly, you know, half-running, half-falling guy, right?
You're not sure he's going to be able to get it all together, right?
It reminds me of a short video I saw called The Bush Pilot, where somebody's supposed to be piloting President Bush and so on, so...
There's a kind of heartbreaking aspect to this scene, at least that was for me.
It was around this guy who, through no fault of his own, I thought, as I was sort of thinking about it, is just really bad at basketball and is scorned for, you know, the lack of coordination that results from having bad eyesight as a baby and as a toddler.
No. His physical attributes, which are not his responsibility, and so on, and so on, and so on.
Just, I swear to God, just bawling.
I couldn't stop. I just seen such agony, such pain.
And, like, after a while, I began to get suspicious of my own agony, right?
Whenever you feel that much pain, you're carrying too heavy a burden, right?
So, I had to sort of look at...
What extra burden was being placed on me, which was more of a mythology rather than reality.
So I had to harden my heart against this and look more deeply into what might be going on in this basketball scene.
Because now that I don't have a job other than this, I have the time to analyze dramedies from the 90s.
But it's important. I really think this is going to be very important for you.
At least it certainly was for me.
I don't think I'll be alone in that.
So, there's backstory to these characters, and I think that the backstory is quite accurate.
In some ways. Right?
Like, in most art...
That has any kind of depth.
And this is not art without depth.
What happens is they get the superficialities right, but they get the depths wrong.
The inevitable conclusions, right?
So, this guy Bill is the single son of a single mother.
I've said it before. I'm sure I'll say it again.
This is the most disastrous combination that I've seen in terms of a familial situation.
I've never seen a single son of a single mom who becomes even remotely sexually successful.
This is how bachelors are born, and this is how bloodlines end.
I have a scene regarding this in The God of Atheists, of course.
And his mother is a waitress, And formerly, she was an exotic dancer, and I knew a guy like this many years ago in my neighborhood.
He was an objectivist, so we would chat from time to time, but he was too strange for me.
And his mother was a really flirty and physically attractive woman, and he was also physically gawky and under-groomed, to say the least, and with thick glasses and so on.
He did at least go to the gym, which actually made it stranger in a way.
And his mother would be sexually inappropriate in the way that I can imagine a stripper mom is, although this guy's mom wasn't a stripper mom, insofar as she would have her girlfriends over for Victoria's Secret parties, which we don't even have to go into because I'm sure that nothing more needs to be said.
And this guy didn't date, and other people that I've known in this kind of configuration, they don't date, right?
They don't date. And there's not a lot of possible reasons that you could put out for this.
I've sort of tried to settle on one particular theory, which is that the women are destroyed by their own sexuality and And again, we can go into more depth about this another time, but there's no point in making this a 12-hour podcast when I can keep it down to a cozy 11.5.
But the moms are destroyed by their own sexuality, and so what they do...
The sons inherit the mom's ambivalence towards sexuality, right?
So a woman who overuses her sexuality to gain attention and to attract men to her doesn't feel like a very attractive person on the inside, right?
Some rich guy who has to spend all his money on his friends doesn't feel like he's really deserving of friends without spending all the money.
We're all aware of this, and I don't think this is particularly controversial.
And so... The son is the flip side or the unconscious or the dark side of the mother's hypersexuality, and so he has a horror of sexuality because he's feeling what the mom doesn't feel, which is the horror at sexuality, the horror of the fact that she has to use sexuality to gain any kind of attention because she doesn't feel like she's worth much as a personality, as a person, as an individual, let alone a woman, let alone a sexual being, and so on.
The sexuality is not icing on the cake.
It is the cake.
It's nothing else, right? So, this Bill fellow grows up under-groomed, under-cared for, and of course the horrible hypocrisy, in a sense, in this kind of situation.
And again, I'm using this because I've got evidence actually outside the realm of TV and video.
The mom knows how to be sexually attractive, right?
She's a stripper. She dresses.
I mean, the mom in this show is an attractive woman.
She dresses nicely, not too slutty.
And so she knows, but she doesn't intervene in her son's obvious gawkdom, right?
But that, of course, is because he is the flip side of her sexual dysfunction, right?
Overuse of sexuality. And...
So here we have a young man...
Who is ridiculously under-trained, right?
And these boys are all ridiculously under-trained in some pretty important and basic things in life, right?
So they have one conversation where one of them says...
I'm not giving any spoilers away.
It's one conversation where one of them says, you know, what if so-and-so comes to school horny?
And this girl who's gunning for one of the boys, and the other one says, no, girls don't get horny.
Only guys get horny. It's like, oh, all right.
Well, I mean, this is just not people who've been raised with any attentiveness by the mom, right?
So, and again, this is all too murky and Freudian for words, so forgive me, but I think it does work, and if you're patient, I hope to be able to pull this gymnastics off, so to speak.
Just damn slowly, and I'll try to keep tangents to a minimum, really.
So, I can't remember.
Let's call the mom Candy.
I don't know what her other name is.
Vixen. With three X's.
I don't know. Anyway, so Candy the mom, Bill represents her own disgust at sexuality, which is why he is so anti-sexual himself and so under-groomed, right?
She can't have a stable relationship with sexuality.
It can't be cake plus icing, right?
It's either all icing and you get sick of it and then you can't have dessert, right?
It's one of the two.
So she kind of fundamentally is using him, right?
And So there's a role here that this guy has to play.
So she's using him to mirror the despised sections of her personality.
Sorry, this is so obscure, but I'll give you another example that might be more clear.
If I'm a jock...
Right? Then I have like a jock dad and my kid is...
And I'm sort of secretly horrified at if I was bad at sports, I'd think like really bad of myself, really badly of myself.
And so if I have a son who's bad at sports, then that part of myself gets expression, right?
I get to project that horror or the disgust that I would have if I were bad at sports with myself.
Right? I place a lot of value on being good at sports.
This is how I conceive myself to be of value.
So if my kid is bad at sports, then the part of me that I have contempt for, if it was bad at sports, I project onto my kid and attack him.
So you use the kids as dumping grounds for the rejected and unwanted and unconscious aspects of your own personality.
This is something that I inhabit and know very well.
I really do inhabit and understand this situation very well, because my mother, who was quite obsessed with her appearance, or at least was until I last saw her, eight or so years ago, she was very obsessed with her appearance, always interested in looking her best.
This decayed over the years, but only because her mind and common sense decayed.
But she was very obsessed with her own appearance, but...
I got a lot of, you know, here's five bucks, go to Goodwill.
And we'll go to Goodwill and I'll pick you out some stuff, right?
And this being dressed by the mom situation is not particularly good for boys.
Right? And the hypocrisy, of course, is that the moms are all down with physical attractiveness because they use it themselves, but they inflict the flip side of their own fear and distaste of using sexuality to get attention and then finding that that is not satisfying.
Right? So there's resentment.
Anyway, so I was this kid, right?
And then I went through a bit of a, I guess, ugly duckling to a swan kind of thing, which again I also talk about in The God of Atheists, so you don't need to have me go on about it here.
But what happens is that the Son, as an individual, is actually rejected.
By his mother, right?
This single son of a single mom, especially when the mom's physically attractive.
And I'm sure it happens in other ways with other kids, because even the single sons of a single mom whose moms aren't physically attractive seem to go through the same sort of thing, which I can't really go into here.
I'm trying to sort of keep this, believe it or not, relatively short.
So the sons are rejected, put down by their moms, right?
Now, if we...
And they're used by their moms, right?
Exploit it for psychological gain.
Sorry, this is coming up in the book that I've written.
So, let's go to the other side, to the jocks.
So, the jocks are considered to be of value because they have athletic ability.
So they're pushed on by their parents, who themselves have issues about personal value outside of accidental things like being good at sports.
I mean, no, you have to work at it, but so what?
Lots of people work at lots of things, right?
I went to theatre school for years, didn't emerge as a particularly talented actor.
I took singing lessons, didn't emerge as a particularly talented singer.
There's some base physics and biology that are required for these things, and they're also not...
You know, I can't think of sports as particularly important, right?
They're fun, and I enjoy sports, but they're not really very important, right?
In the big scheme of things, right?
And five years later, who cares who won the Cup, right?
Other than sad losers who need to merge with the hurt.
But, so...
The sons are then praised for something that is accidental, which is their innate skill, and then they apply themselves at it, at this innate skill they have for sports, because they are praised for doing so.
Right, again, it's not a personally earned virtue, you're just flowing downhill.
What is approved of? Scoring a goal.
What is disapproved of?
Being bad at sports. Okay, I guess I'll do what's approved of and not do what's disapproved of.
So, in this sense, The jocks and the geeks are mirror images of each other, but they're both working on the same principle.
The jocks have their identities, their egos, artificially inflated for...
Accidental or inconsequential reasons because it reduces anxiety for their parents, right?
So a jock dad feels happier, feels less anxious, feels more proud of his son if his son is good at sports.
So, I mean, there was a supernanny, I think, once where some guy who was a real sports nut had a kid who was into theater school or into theater sports or whatever and wanted to go to museums, you know, just nothing but contempt for the kid, right?
It provokes anxiety in him.
You have to prove your value.
You have to show your value. You can't just be valuable for who you are.
Or, heaven forbid, for wisdom or virtue or kindness or integrity or any of those sorts of things.
That's definitely off the table.
You've got to be good at putting a ball in a hole in one form or another or a goal.
So, the jocks have their egos artificially inflated and they can't question that because if they question that, if the jocks question the value, Of their ability at sports and so on, then what happens is they reveal to themselves relatively quickly, in fact very quickly...
Oh, it's beginning to rain.
Okay, let's cover up the microphone.
Move a little closer here. I think we can make it one more time.
So the jocks have their egos artificially inflated.
They can't question that.
Because then they realize that they're being exploited by their parents and that they're not being highly regarded for anything other than accidental qualities, right?
So that's not something that they can really do, right?
So they seek to maintain this artificially inflated sense of importance or value.
they must seek to maintain it, otherwise the corruption of their parents becomes evident.
This is why they have to continually maintain with bullying, with putting down the geeks, with pushing them into lockers and so on.
They have to maintain it because the alternative is realizing that, by heavens, they're not worth as much as they think that they're worth, and they're only having it pumped up for the sake of their parents' egos, and that they're not loved for who they are, and that they've been given entirely the wrong standards of value, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I think we all get this in general.
And we're aware of this, I think, when we think about the jocks, right?
Now, here's what I worked on, though, for a couple of days, and I think it makes sense.
Let me know what you think. In the same way as the jocks need to maintain their artificially high egos in order to avoid the knowledge of their parents' exploitation of them and corruption of their relationship, In order to avoid the knowledge that they are mere ego props for their parents' vanities and insecurities.
In the same way that the jocks need to artificially maintain their upstanding, the geeks need to artificially maintain their downstanding.
Because the ego of the jocks is artificially inflated by exploitive and corrupt parents.
The egos of the geeks are artificially pushed down, crushed, because they are rejected by their parents.
And so the jocks need to keep that lead balloon up in the air.
And so they're constantly climbing on people to keep it up there.
But the geeks need to keep their helium balloon underwater.
So they're constantly grabbing everyone and saying, hold this and push this down and Because otherwise, if the jocks fall, they're going to be attacked.
And then they're going to realize that they're not loved for who they are, but rather for the show they can put on on the sports field.
If the geeks rise, then they will meet the resistance of their parents, right?
Who wants to keep them down?
Or, in this case, the single mom.
Who wants to keep her kid infantilized?
Who wants the kid to hold all the terror and horror she has in the face of her own sexuality?
All these kinds of things, right?
If the jock says, Dad, I want to be loved for who I am and not because of my sports ability, if he keeps that up, he's fundamentally going to get the answer, no.
Dammit, you're here to serve my needs.
You go out there and you win so I can feel proud as a father.
Right? It's my needs. Don't you dare fail because that makes me feel like shit.
You're there to manage my feelings.
In the same way, if the geek tries to rise, he's going to meet the rejection and the scorn and the contempt of his Mother or father or both, right? Because they need to keep him down for their own ego gratification to reduce their anxiety, right?
Because they're probably people who are not successes themselves in life, so they need to cripple their kids so that their kids don't make them feel like losers, right?
So you have to...
So when you're a geek and you're a kid in this kind of situation where your parents are keeping you down and pushing you down and scorning all chances that you could have to rise or be more successful or whatever...
When they're not challenging you and they don't love you for who you are and so on.
When you're just dumping ground and management technique for your parents' anxiety and so on.
then we all understand how the artificial ego of the jocks has to stay high, but it's harder to see how the artificially low egos of the geeks needs to stay low.
Right?
So in one of the episodes, again, no spoilers, I promise, in one of the episodes, Bill, the gangly guy, he's frustrated because he's continually put in deep, deep outfield, I know the feeling. And he says, well, how am I supposed to get better if they don't give me a chance?
How am I supposed to get better if they don't give me the chance to play?
Right? Right? But that's not true.
Right? That's not true.
I mean...
I mean, when I first came to Canada, I couldn't skate.
How could I?
Never tried, never did it, never rollerbladed, never roller skated or anything like that.
So what did I do?
Well, I went and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced and practiced.
Now, of course, nobody ever wanted me on a hockey team.
But at least I could get around the ice and, you know, do a couple of cool moves and skate backwards and so on, right?
Right, so...
So, there's nothing stopping this Bill kid, if he finds it humiliating that he lacks coordination, to work as hard as he can to retrain himself.
Maybe it's possible, maybe it's not, but we never saw him try.
So, here's the other situation.
In episode 14, somebody passes him a basketball and he turns and does that banging stilt, broken leg jaunt down.
The basketball court, and there's nobody around him.
Right? There's nobody around him.
And everyone is like, oh God, this can't be good.
And they're right, but it's not accidental.
There's nobody around him. Nobody's chasing him.
So what he could conceivably do is he could stop, take aim, gently lob the ball into the net.
And maybe it would take two tries.
But he would stop and try and really put the ball in.
But instead, he tries to do this, not wildly complicated, but not particularly easy layup, which he can't do.
So this is not accidental.
He actually is participating in his own humiliation.
Takes the ball, doesn't pass it to someone, goes and tries to do the layup and fails.
And then people are like, right on cue, right?
Right as he needs them to, to avoid the actual humiliation that he has experienced at the hands of his mom, the actual rejection, right?
He has to normalize it, right?
That which we don't accept, we repeat.
The pain that we don't go through, we must re-inflict on ourselves and on others.
So... If you look into this, right?
The desire to keep our egos within...
Let me try this another way.
Our need to keep our egos in the place our parents put it, In order to avoid the realization or the feeling that we have been exploited by corrupt people and that they've lied to us about loving us and it's actually only been manipulating us for their own comfort and to reduce their own anxiety and increase their own pleasure in shallow and horrible ways.
In order to avoid that, we have to keep our egos where our parents put them.
If that's artificially high, then we have to be artificially high and we have to bully.
If it's artificially low, then we have to keep them artificially low by continually re-humiliating ourselves.
Oh, man, I can tell you.
Oh, I can tell you, I can tell you, I can tell you.
When I went through this phase, right?
Again, I talked about into go, so you don't need to have more of it here.
I got a haircut and got good clothes and, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
Facial cleansers. Deodorants!
All the good things. And I went from, like, geek to, I don't know, dare I say stud?
Probably, yeah, I guess so. In the space of, like, a week, right?
I showed up and everyone thought I was the new kid.
Like, I literally did have that kind of transformation when nobody recognized me.
And it changed everything, right?
This is how you realize these things, right?
This is why I say in Tagoa that Gordon learned how to get to the marrow of things...
By realizing how important externalities are.
You get to depth by realizing the importance of shallowness.
Sorry, I don't mean to be too Buddhist on you.
Shallowness is the sound of one deep hand clapping.
And once you realize that, that was it for me and my mom, right?
I mean, for that phase...
Once you get how easy it is to get a decent haircut and some decent clothes, and they weren't expensive, once you really get how easy that is, and once you realize that your mom knows all about it because she does it for herself, right?
It was not six months, I think, after this phase that we kicked my mom out.
It's agony that To realize the boxes that people put you in for their own damn needs.
The agony is not that they put you in those boxes.
If my mom said, look, I'm not going to buy you any new clothes because it makes me anxious.
I'm going to give you a freaking bowl cut with pinking shears, believe it or not.
I had a little freaking Italian deli awning on my forehead.
It's not like I got a long time to play with my hair, but the little time that I got was not good.
My mother shaved her head when we were younger because she felt it would make her hair grow thicker.
We were called ridiculed to skinheads, and then I got these goddamn pinking shears bowl cuts, and then I went bald.
Me and hair. Let's not get started.
So, once you realize just how used you've been and how lied to you've been in these areas, and this is true for the jocks as it is for the geeks, and this is not, you know, oh, all sympathy for the jocks and none for the geeks, right?
But it's just important to understand, because when you think about the mythologies that are put forward, and think of the Michael Moore films, and think of the poor, right?
Well, I would say that Nine times out of ten, if not 99 times out of 100, the poor are staying where their egos were allowed to be.
Nobody tears down a poor person like other poor people.
Nobody tears down a poor person trying to raise himself than other poor people who resent it.
And this, of course, goes all the way back to the parent, right?
So, if you understand that what goes on in high school is a complicated ecosystem of leveling, of keeping people in the places that they themselves need to stay in, that they themselves need to stay in, in order to avoid understanding how much they've been exploited by their parents, I think it helps us.
To feel a little bit less of the pitying agony that certain types of people inflict on us through their own incompetence, right?
And their desired for and willed incompetence, their refusal to practice, and their continuance of being hurt by the jocks, right?
I mean, the show does show how the jocks feel humiliated in math class the same way that the nerds feel humiliated in gym class.
So, I hope that this helps understand that it's really important to look at your own ego and self-esteem and say, what was allowed for me when I was younger?
And to what degree am I just maintaining all of that now in one degree or another?
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
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