Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

July 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:36

834 Sunday Call In Show July 29 2007

Talking philosophy to girlfriends, forging nations in blood, and the pillaging of parents

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Well, thanks everybody so much for joining us on the Gizmo Backup, soon to be forefront, home of the Freedomain Radio Sunday chat.
	Appreciate you dropping by.
	I hope it's beautiful where you are.
	It's just been an absolutely wonderful day today here in Mississauga, Canada, home of my version of Ancapistan.
	So, I hope that you had a wonderful week.
	A couple of items of business before we get underway.
	The first is that, yes, I will not stop talking about it.
	The new book, she's out!
	There she blows.
	And as I mentioned in a podcast recently, the book is now loose like orcs in Fangorn hacking down, hewing down trees to convert pulp into philosophy.
	So I appreciate those who've ordered it so far.
	There's been a nice flurry of activity.
	And I've got it printed right in the inside jacket to increase its value...
	Not just in a philosophical, but in a monetary sense, that this is version 1.0.
	I chose a generic cover to increase its value.
	This is going to be like Superman number one.
	I hope so.
	I hope that you will order it and I hope that you will enjoy it.
	I've been listening to the audiobook of it and I am pleased.
	You know, it's funny when you write something and then you don't work with it for a week or so and then you start listening to it or reading it again.
	Sometimes there's this feeling of like, ooh, there's some gaps or ooh, this doesn't really follow.
	but actually I'm very pleased with it and I'd like to thank Greg for going through it with a fine-tooth comb and also Monsieur LeToutel who was kind enough to give it a proofread but of course I'd just like to remind everyone that any errors which remain in the book are of course their fault so thank you so much for being the scapegoat That's important. It's not a huge book.
	It's about 25,000 words.
	Actually, 23,000 words.
	But I think it's going to be I think it's going to be an important book.
	I really do. I think I've tried to...
	It's heavily concentrated philosophy.
	You know, this is like you can either have the concentrated orange juice mixed with water, or you can inject the platonic form of orange directly into your brain.
	We're sort of going for the latter in this.
	So it's actually a bunch of them which have been ordered in the last two days have already been shipped.
	The first one took a while.
	The first one that I had for proofreading took a while.
	But the orders have shipped.
	You should get them next week.
	And I'm going to set up an area on the board for comments, criticism, mad praise, groupie nude photos, particularly from Rod, and all of those kinds of things.
	So that would be...
	I'd really appreciate it. So drop past freedomainradio.com.
	You can also go to lulu.com.
	And you knew, of course, that it was going to be a pretty gay-sounding name to get the book published.
	I'm sure that's not a massive shocker.
	For anyone, but you can go to lulu.com, you can go to freedomainradio.com, and of course I have it everywhere on my signature file at the freedomainradio.com boards.
	Just click there, and you'll be good to go.
	For more information about the book, just go to the homepage of freedomainradio.com, and just below the next thing I will get to is a link which talks about more details about the book.
	You can hear the first Ten minutes of it read in audio or video format.
	So that's numero uno, number two.
	The third annual podcast awards are up now.
	Voting continues until August the 11th.
	And of the over 4,000 submissions of podcast shows, Free Domain Radio made it to the top ten in the educational format.
	So I would really appreciate it if you would come by and vote.
	It would be massive exposure for us and it would be huge.
	There's a ceremony and so on.
	And so I've already got my tiara thong outfit ready to roll, and I'll be able to add a lot to our credibility, I'm sure.
	So, I would appreciate that.
	The link to that is the Podcast Awards.
	The link is tricky to remember.
	It's podcastawards.com.
	So just click on podcastawards.com.
	If you can't remember that, just come to Freedom Main Radio, and it's right there at the banner.
	You just go scroll on down to Education, and we're fifth down, Free Domain Radio.
	You can vote once every 24 hours.
	And I know we have a lot of people out there who are excellent with JavaScript.
	So get to it.
	And that would be huge for us.
	Not only do I get to win a laptop desk.
	I have no idea what that is.
	Oh, it's only worth 50 bucks.
	Wow, look at that.
	Ooh. But the exposure would be good, and bragging rights for this kind of stuff is very important.
	It's sort of hard to explain.
	I've just dropped almost three grand on advertising and bringing people to the site, but the bounce rate remains very high.
	Only one out of ten people stick around for any duration.
	But I think if we can say, voted the most educational podcast in the 2007 Podcasting Awards, that would, I'm sure, be an enormous incentive for For people to stick around a little bit longer before realizing that it was not in fact at all educational, just a British guy ranting and venting.
	But it will at least get them to start downloading, which would be something because I measure myself.
	I measure my manhood in bandwidth.
	So I hope that you will get people voting and tell people that you vote.
	You can send the link and pressure people, bully people.
	I'm not particularly one into emotional manipulation or abuse, but in this case I'm willing to make an exception.
	So let's get voting, people!
	And it will be absolutely beautiful.
	A kind gentleman has just said, I have a massive band with Steph, and that's most kind.
	Certainly, I think that's true in the summer, but shrinkage factor in Canada is pretty horrendous.
	That's why I want to move to Trinidad and Tobago.
	All right, do we have any questions from the listeners right up to begin with?
	I have two topics which we can start chewing through, but I'm more than happy to toss those overboard to focus on you, The listeners who keep me in vittles.
	So, if you have any questions or comments, you can type them into the window, or you can yodel.
	Let's make it yodeling today.
	So feel free to start with that, my Rickola buddies.
	Okay, maybe people don't know how to yodel or they don't get the Rickola joke because they're currently looking it up on the internet.
	Trust me, it's really not worth it.
	Okay, well, that's no problem.
	If you don't have any topics to start with, I would really...
	I'm going to start with this.
	This is a gentleman who posted yesterday on the board.
	He said, girlfriend, not impressed.
	And, of course, this would be...
	This is a pretty personal topic for this gentleman.
	And I think what's happened is his girlfriend has got a side of my bandwidth and now is looking at his bandwidth and, sadly...
	Anyway, I'm not sure I can milk the whole bandwidth penis joke too much longer, so let's just go on with his post.
	What do you say? Sounds like a good idea?
	Yes, I think so.
	Let's give that a shot. Help, he said with an unhappy face.
	My girlfriend just told me that she found the whole free domain thing irritating and boring.
	She's not bad. She agrees with a lot of what Steph is saying and says she enjoys listening to some of it quite a bit.
	But other parts are just incredibly dull to her.
	She says she's tired of everyone just talking, talking, talking, and no one doing anything.
	Like Steph's anarchism, it's this wonderful hypothetical thing that's unattainable and completely useless to even talk about.
	I mentioned that if it wasn't about action, sorry, I mentioned that it wasn't about action, but rather about knowing that you're right.
	And that action against the state right now would be throwing a small rock at a freight train.
	She circled back around to finding the whole thing boring and uninteresting.
	Is there a theme here? I'm trying to figure it out.
	I'm trying to read between the lines with my philosophical brain.
	She says she'd rather listen to something entertaining.
	It stung quite a bit to hear her say that she found my new hobby irritating.
	Just as it irritates me to have it described as a hobby.
	Oh wait, that's me, sorry. And now I feel like I'm constantly trying to shove this crazy philosophy down her throat.
	Sex jokes aside, please.
	I've been trying to share this with her, and she's been overall very supportive of it, but I guess it just got to be too much.
	Do I need a break from Free Domain?
	Does she need a break from me?
	Sometimes I feel like I've gained all this fantastic freedom in my life, but I've lost my ability to crack social jokes with people without throwing some sort of philosophical slant in the middle of it.
	I'm not sure what else to say on the topic.
	Any input, I guess, is welcome.
	So that's one gentleman whose relationship I've managed to mess up.
	And another gentleman has written to me.
	This was a podcast that I recently did for premium podcast subscribers or donators called The Dinner Party from Hell.
	Hell, hell, hell. The fallout from that was that things have gotten more unpleasant with the woman in question that this man confronted in a very nice way at the dinner party, but unfortunately his own personal relationship has suffered considerably as a result,
	insofar as a significant other is not getting along as well as he would like to with her, because clearly she sided to a large degree with the woman in question who was spouting some pretty mystical nonsense, and then this The person quite nicely tried to ask her for evidence, and there was a great tension and hostility in the room as I described the sort of causes and effects of that in the new book.
	Did I mention the new book, On Truth?
	The Tyranny of Illusion? Lulu.com?
	Yes, I think I did. Did I? Yes?
	Okay. So this gentleman is now facing the same sort of issue, and there have been a number of those things coming up, which is that people are talking about free domain, or philosophy, or the podcast, and they are...
	Running into some pretty significant resistance from the people around them.
	And that, of course, is a real challenge.
	And that is something that can be quite a strain on relationships, right?
	I mean, if you become very excited about a set of ideas, then when you begin to share those with the people around you, it can become really challenging.
	Because they feel perhaps threatened, they feel that you may be becoming obsessed.
	Of course, there is an issue that can occur where people just feel that you're getting involved in some kind of cult and all of this sort of stuff.
	So, that is something which we really have to be aware of.
	There was an interesting... I'm sorry, I was just trying to find it in StumbleUpon.
	Let me just try it again here, because I was having a look at some of the reviews in StumbleUpon for the show, and what happened was that he sort of wrote how wonderful he enjoyed the podcast and so on,
	and then he sort of did an edit later where he talked with great derision about the content of Of the website.
	And that was not so good.
	So what he did was he said, oh, I love Steph's articles and the articles about the politics and the philosophy and all the abstract stuff.
	That was all great. But then he came in and edited his review later and said, oh, listen, by the way, it's now become a cult.
	So enjoy the early podcast, but now it's become a sort of claustrophobic, heavy-breathing, confessional, reveal all your secrets and split from your family and say goodbye to all of your friends and relatives and donate money, and it's become this cult.
	And of course we go through these spasms every now and then.
	And I sort of wanted to hand out some tips, if it's at all worthwhile.
	Oh yeah, there's also another gentleman who, maybe that's worth reading as well.
	Thanks, somebody just reminded me of that.
	On the board, or about the board itself, a gentleman who has been around for a little while, and was a generous donator, and so on, kind of...
	Boy, I don't know.
	How can you put it exactly?
	Kind of freaked a little, and that may be a kind way of putting it, or not, but what this gentleman wrote Well, he wrote the following under the heading OMG, which is Greek for my bandwidth isn't as big as Steph.
	No, that's not it.
	So I'm just waiting for this to come up.
	And I can't remember how long this gentleman was around, but he was around for quite some time.
	And then in the premium section of the board, he wrote, Oh my God!
	He said, Because of a number of reasons, I had stopped listening to podcasts for a while.
	Earlier today, I had some available time and decided to try some podcasts.
	Oh my God!
	I can't bear...
	he misspelled that bear, like bear necessities of life listening to it anymore and can't for the life of me understand how anyone can I don't regret giving you my attention and donation for some of your early work but you have lost my trust, my respect and my attention goodbye and then he, well, never came back and this is someone who posted over 500 posts on the board, right?
	So, that is...
	I mean, that's a shame.
	Obviously, it would be nice to know what the content is...
	Of the disagreement, right?
	I mean, this is something that I view with a good deal of contempt.
	And this is not...
	It doesn't mean it's right or wrong.
	This is my emotional reaction to this kind of stuff.
	And this is something that's important for you to know when you're talking about this sort of stuff with people in your life.
	Forget about the free domain philosophy or the chattering, freckled head of Steph or anything like that.
	But just when you're asking questions about truth and reality and virtue and so on...
	There are people who just aren't going to be interested.
	And that's okay.
	I was just talking about this with Christina last night.
	The question is, is philosophy sort of like a talent, like songwriting?
	Everyone can write a song, but not everyone has sort of the innate ability to write a good song.
	So the question is, is philosophy kind of like a talent?
	And if you are getting into philosophy, and you sort of try and, quote, inflict it on other people, is it sort of like, well, I really like...
	Taekwondo or, you know, working with Kali sticks or something like that.
	And so I'm going to drag every single friend of mine to the dojo to practice.
	And that, of course, would be a little bit narrow-minded.
	And you sort of say, this is something that...
	Oh, did you find...
	Oh, somebody found this. Sorry, let me just read the StumbleUpon review before I get back into that.
	And thank you for finding it. I couldn't.
	This is the StumbleUpon Review.
	Freedom Aid Radio. I came across DeFan Molyneux's writing a while ago and always thoroughly enjoyed the content and delivery.
	With this in mind, I tentatively started to listen to his work in podcasts, a format I generally despise, but much to my surprise, I actually made it through a few.
	I prefer to read it, but I suppose he has to satisfy his voracious fans.
	Anyway, if you like podcasts, listen, otherwise read his articles.
	Update. Things are now quite bizarre.
	It is all a bit cult-like with Molyneux as the leader of a strangely devoted flock, bizarre pressure to drop family associations, and a weird group's therapy-slash-confessional vibe.
	Good articles and early podcasts, but my advice is to stay clear of the forums and latter shows.
	And, I mean, this stuff is...
	You know, we don't have to have any real discussions about the cult aspect of that.
	I mean, that's all kind of nonsensical.
	But I think it is really important...
	To sort of come to this conclusion within your own mind about whether what you're doing is like a talent, like you just got into carving ducks.
	I don't mean live ducks.
	I mean duck a la orange.
	You got to carving duck decoys or something like that.
	I mean, does that mean that everyone in your life has to sort of go about carving duck decoys?
	And does that mean that everyone in your life has to, you know, get involved in your particular hobby?
	Well, no. But the question is, is philosophy a hobby or is philosophy something more important?
	Than a hobby, right?
	So, for instance, if you are, you know, a chunky couple and you have each maybe an excess, a significantly chunky couple, each in excess of 100 pounds or something like that.
	Well, if one of you decides to start exercising and eating right and becoming more healthy, that's not a hobby, like carving ducks that are made of wood for decoy purposes or whatever.
	And that sort of is really the question.
	Is this a hobby like duck carving or nanchuk twirling?
	Or is this a hobby like good nutrition?
	Now, it certainly doesn't...
	Sorry?
	Or a way of life or this kind of stuff.
	This is around mental health.
	So if you have a relationship with your girlfriend or boyfriend and you sort of scream at each other and throw things and have all of this...
	Horrible, hysterical, mundo-latino kind of hysteria, then the question is if one of you sort of reads a book on relationships that says, you know, the screaming thing, not so much with the goodness, then if you sort of learn about better ways to communicate or ways that are not as defensive or hysterical or aggressive to communicate, is that just kind of like a hobby like duck carving or taekwondo?
	And you say, well, that's just your thing.
	Well, no, of course not, because philosophy is fundamentally about relating to people in a way that model trains and duck carving...
	Not exactly, right?
	So if you are a part of a chunky couple, a part of an abusive couple, and you decide that you want to eat better and exercise and lose the extra weight and become healthier, or you say, you know, I'm no longer going to have these scream fests that we have in our relationship, we're going to have a calmer, more rational way of discussing things, that to me is quite different from you just picked up a hobby, right?
	And that, of course, is the challenge, right?
	That if you come up with better ways to And of course, free domain radio is fundamentally, as is all philosophy, is fundamentally about the methodology, not about the conclusions.
	We are theorists of science.
	We are only, incidentally, scientists.
	That's why people love debating the DRO theory, and I think it's an interesting theory that answers a lot of questions.
	It may or may not be what ends up, but the non-aggression principle and the universality of universally preferable behavior is the key, and then whatever shakes out of that is great.
	But we're not marketers.
	We're economists, right?
	So... So when you start to get into this kind of stuff, it's not a hobby.
	It's not an obsession.
	It's certainly not culty. I'm not telling anybody what to think.
	I'm trying to give people good tools on how to think as I struggle to sort of learn them through my life and sort of give people some shortcuts so they don't have to waste decades in the wilderness like I did.
	But this is not a subjective thing.
	This is not a hobby. And...
	If you've ever been around, you know, chunky or unhealthy couples or, you know, couples who maybe they both smoke a lot of drugs or whatever, when one of them decides to go clean or you get to a couple and both of them are drinking, one of them decides not to be a drinker or one of them decides to lose weight and exercise or one of them decides to stop screaming and being abusive, It's destabilizing to the relationship.
	If you want to stay in the relationship, and I think obviously give it your best shot, you know, I mean, the odds aren't always the best, but you always give it your best shot in relationships so that if it doesn't work out, you've got closure, and you don't have those long, protracted, slow peel-off-a-hairy-arm band-aid removal breakups that just go on and on and are hellish.
	So give it your all, but recognize that it is destabilizing, right?
	If you start to learn about nutrition, and you say, you know, I can't eat this kind of crap anymore, and you get really enthusiastic about nutrition and good health and so on, then, yeah, look, I mean, let's be frank, it is an implicit requirement or demand for change in the other person.
	I mean, if you're part of a fat couple, you start exercising, you say, hey, great, I'm going to join a gym, I'm going to join a volleyball league, I'm going to go swim, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to go to the health food store, I'm going to pick up 10 books on nutrition and so on.
	Well, yeah, there's a feeling for the other person that they're being left behind, that you're moving on to bigger, better, and higher things, and that you're leaving them behind.
	And there's going to be one of two responses to that, right?
	I mean, either the person is going to get resentful and start to criticize you for what it is that you're doing, or they're going to get on board with thinking about things in a more clear and positive and healthy manner, right?
	Now... The way that you find out whether or not there are legitimate criticisms, and of course there are always legitimate criticisms of any particular philosophical movement or any movement in general, right?
	This is great. As long as we have reason and evidence as the way of resolving our disputes, dispute away, right?
	The challenge arises though, my friends, when people criticize you in broad sweeping generalities and don't provide any substantive content, right, to what it is that you're doing.
	So, if Christina decided to diet, not that she'd ever need to, except maybe her hair do, if Christina decided that she wanted to diet, or change her diet for whatever reason, then if she began to lose too much weight, or couldn't get out of bed, or something like that, hair all fell out, then I'd say, that's not good, right?
	And here's what's not good.
	The evidence of what's not good is that you've got these negative health effects and so on.
	But if Christina changed her diet and had more energy and so on, right?
	It's hard to imagine, but I guess it's possible.
	Then I would say, well, that's great.
	Or I could say, I find something about this diet that is not working.
	But of course, if she has more energy and she's enthusiastic and she's excited and so on, or she's feeling happier because of this diet, I have a problem.
	I find the diet irritating because I don't want to do it.
	I want to sort of sit... And rot away on my fat and not change, right?
	But Christina obviously is changing and becoming healthy and more energetic and so on.
	Well, it bothers me, right?
	It bothers me because it's an implicit requirement that I change, right?
	All relationships, except for the most casual ones, and even those are embedded in this to some degree, are ecosystems, right?
	You can't change one aspect of it without changing everything else, right?
	It's like those things where you go back in time and you step on a butterfly and It changes the whole world when you come back.
	I mean, that's how delicate relationships are.
	Every change that you make, particularly in the fundamental areas of truth and intimacy and authenticity, it has a massive effect on your relationships.
	You've really got to be aware of this because you don't want to get sideswiped by this.
	And of course, I've said this a million times before, but maybe people haven't heard it.
	I'll say it again, but really slowly and in Arabic.
	No, I won't do that. But, if you start to change your ideas, your fundamental philosophy, and you start to learn to become more rational and work with more empirical evidence, people will bother people.
	Now, what I really have a lot of contempt for, and no patience for, and this is not the right way of approaching it necessarily, this is just my perspective, I have all the patience in the world for people who say, Steph, I think that you're wrong in this, that, and the other argument.
	It's like, great, you know, instruct me.
	I don't care about my ideas.
	I don't care... Where the ideas come from.
	Somebody comes up with a cure for cancer, I don't care if Osama Bin Laden comes up with a cure for cancer.
	I'm taking it, right, if I've got cancer.
	So I don't care where the ideas or the better ideas come from.
	If somebody has found an error in something that I've proposed, fantastic!
	Fix it!
	That's what I'm interested in.
	And so when people come in and say, Steph, I think that you've made a mistake on X, Y, and Z points and so on, that's great.
	What I have an enormous amount of contempt for is when people just come in and say, Oh, Steph, you're just wrong.
	Or, Steph, you know, it's just culty.
	Or, Steph, you know, like, you're just lauding it over people.
	Or, Steph, like, just generalize.
	Or, you know, these podcasts, they suck, they're dangerous, they're corrupting, they're isolating, they're, you know, cult.
	Like, whatever, right? And we just come up with a whole bunch of adjectives.
	Right? People just fire up this shotgun with a whole bunch of adjectives and then they just let rip.
	Right? And what they're doing, of course, is they're hoping that your insecurity, whatever weakness you've got in your self-image, and we all have them, I'm never going to get rid of all of these, at least I don't think I ever will.
	So people just fire up all these adjectives, they shoot them at you, and they hope they're just going to get through some part of your armor.
	And armor, I don't mean sort of irrational defenses, but just genuine self-esteem, self-regard.
	So when people say like, oh my god, I can't believe I ever liked these podcasts.
	They're just ridiculous, this, that, and the other.
	It's like, well, maybe.
	But I take the time to lay out my arguments from the very atomic ground up.
	And if you're going to get involved in the conversation, that's fantastic.
	But don't pull immature bullshit like saying, you're just stupid, man.
	You know, these podcasts are just stupid.
	That's just like... That would be embarrassing for a valley girl, right?
	And yet you have people who will, of obviously great intelligence, who will literally think that this is some sort of valid argument.
	So, if you're aware of the fact that when people just provide generalized emotional attacks or criticisms upon you, like, oh, it's all weird and culty, it's like, well, what does that mean?
	It means you feel weird and you feel upset, right?
	If I say... X seems weird and culty or whatever, right?
	I'm not saying anything about X. I'm saying about myself.
	Again, this is all in the book, so I don't have to get into it since I guess a lot of people have ordered it so far, but I'm just talking about my own feelings, right?
	So don't make that mistake with people in your life, right?
	So this guy's girlfriend, he posted on the board, he said, my girlfriend says it's boring and it's irritating.
	Now he thinks that she's saying something about free domain radio, but she's not.
	He also thinks that she's saying something about him.
	You, my boyfriend, are interested in things that are boring and irritating.
	But she's not saying anything about him.
	She's not saying anything about philosophy.
	She's not saying anything about Free Domain Radio.
	All she's talking about is herself.
	All she's talking about is herself.
	Don't get distracted.
	Even if she says, no, I'm not talking about myself, I'm talking about free domain radio.
	She's not. To talk about free domain radio is to say, well, Steph, I had a look at your intro to philosophy series and here are the 12 catastrophic errors that you've made and here's the proof.
	Right? In which case it's like, great, I'll pull them down, I'll re-record them, I'll give you all the credit on the planet because I don't care who comes up with the great ideas, just let's get the great ideas out there.
	That's talking about free domain radio.
	Here's the errors you made. I went through your article on proving libertarian morality, which has stood the test of time for 18 months, and God knows how many hundreds of emails I've got attacking it six ways from Sunday, and it stood.
	I think it's solid, myself.
	I think it's pretty incontrovertible, but anyway.
	That's getting involved in philosophy.
	But if you just say, I find this boring and irritating, or oh my god, it's just culty, or trashy, or dumb, or stupid, or repetitive, or what's the point?
	You never act. That's all just that person's feelings about themselves, about their own interpretation.
	This is back to the mythology series.
	So when somebody feels threatened by something, they attack it.
	And don't get confused by what they're attacking.
	Just focus on their feelings.
	So if your girlfriend says... I find this, your addiction to free domain radio is both boring and irritating.
	The only important words in there are boring and irritating.
	And the only thing that you need to talk about is, well, tell me more about your boredom and irritation.
	And the person who is projecting in this kind of way will continually, continually say, I am bored and irritated because free domain radio is boring and irritating.
	They will continually try and equate the two and say that their emotions...
	are a just and complete and total and natural and healthy response to the external stimuli, right?
	Like if you staple my hand to my forehead, I'm going to say, I'm feeling pain and a sort of weird kind of ice cream headache because you've stapled my hand to my forehead, right?
	And that's probably quite reasonable.
	It's the external stimuli that's generating my internal state and pretty directly.
	But when a conversation about truth and reality and philosophy and virtue, when it makes somebody feel bored and irritated and they...
	I haven't proven it wrong.
	Like, if somebody came to my door every day and started lecturing me about Jehovah's Witnesses or the Flat Earth Society, yeah, I feel bored and irritated.
	Why? Because I know that it's not true.
	And I can easily prove that it's not true.
	Well, except for the Flat Earth thing.
	So, that makes sense, because I've already corrected it, right?
	But if I've never taken any effort to correct anything...
	And I say it's boring and irritating.
	All I'm talking about is that this stuff troubles me.
	I don't know exactly why it troubles me.
	I feel threatened by it.
	And so I'm just going to use...
	But I also don't want to get involved in the intellectual debate.
	Maybe I don't feel smart enough.
	Maybe I feel that...
	Look, I mean...
	Everybody gets, when they start acting with integrity, that their relationships are all going to change.
	And they also really get deep down that most of their relationships aren't going to make it.
	We all think we're so close to the people in our life.
	You start... Questioning and asking, thinking, reasoning, looking for evidence.
	You're ejected, you know, faster than, I don't know, the chimp in a bad Sputnik launch.
	So, you just talk about their feelings.
	So tell me more about this irritation.
	When did you start to feel this irritation?
	And don't say, because they'll try and draw you into debates about content.
	Forget about the content. Just look at the feelings.
	Forget the content. Well, you know, Free Domain Radio is It's boring because it's so pointless, because there never will be a free society in our lifetime, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	But, I mean, that's like saying, well, I never go to movies because movies aren't true.
	I don't watch Battlestar Galactica because there's no such thing as a faster-than-light drive.
	And a guy who lived in Miami in the 80s is never going to live to the 23rd century.
	Like, this is silly.
	Of course we indulge ourselves in lots of things that don't have any point.
	What's the point of chocolate, you know?
	It just tastes good, right?
	Well, what's the point of philosophy?
	Well, it's exciting, it's thrilling, and it's clarifying, and it's beautiful, and it's wonderful, and it's scary, and I mean, it's the amusement park of the brain on steroids.
	But if somebody says, well, I'm irritated at Free Domain Radio because there's no point to it, right?
	Right? Well, then you can ask them what that feeling is like and what they consider something is that has a point.
	But don't start saying, no, free domain radio does have a point, because that's not what she's talking about.
	So this guy is going back to his girlfriend and saying, no, no, no, it does have a point.
	It helps you review your relationships and live with more integrity.
	She knows that. That's why it's irritating and boring to her.
	That's why she doesn't want to deal with it, right?
	Because she knows all of that. If it genuinely didn't have a point like a video game, then she probably wouldn't be bored and irritated.
	Right? Anyway, so just when people in your life get irritated by your love of philosophy, you just ask them about their feelings.
	Don't defend your philosophy.
	Don't defend the practical purpose of it or the value of it or don't try and defend why you love what you love.
	Just deal with the heart of the matter and ask them how they feel.
	So... Alright, so that's it.
	I'm done. Questions, comments, issues, problems?
	Yes. Your time, it's the call-in show, not the monopoly of me.
	I can hear a hiss. Oh, can I hear someone speaking?
	Can I hear someone speaking?
	No? Wow, nobody.
	Okay, then I'll just do one more short thing, and then we'll call it a day if we have no questions, issues, comments, or problems.
	Yeah, just ask them how they feel, all right?
	And then, of course, what they'll do is they'll get irritated even more.
	Because then they'll say, oh, stop psychoanalyzing me.
	Stop it. Stop psychologizing me, they'll say.
	So you're attacking something I love, not giving me any reasons for it, and we can't talk about how you feel.
	Well, that's just a hatchet job.
	And you've got to stare at that in the face.
	It's an unpleasant thing to see.
	But that's just a hatchet job, right?
	That's just somebody who's taken a long, low whiz on your soap bubble of happiness.
	I think that's the title of a song in there somewhere.
	Right. Okay, so if we don't have any comments here, I would just like to read you a very short article from the April 23rd issue of Maclean's.
	I spend a lot of time in the toilet, so I'm really behind on my magazine reading.
	Um, just be happy that, uh, I still have one barrier to podcasting.
	Christina's laughing, but she's also crying.
	Alright, so this is under the bad news from McLean's April 23rd, 2007.
	From the bad news section, here it is.
	How soon we forget.
	At Vimy Ridge, 19 years ago.
	It has been said that a nation was forged in the fire of war.
	But now...
	What? Too much?
	Okay. But now, some historians are offering an alternative view.
	In a book called Vimy Ridge, A Canadian Reassessment, historians argue that Vimy's significance has been exaggerated over the years in a blatant attempt at nationalistic myth-making.
	If that's true...
	Then it's been a sad failure.
	New Pauling shows that barely a third of Canadians know what Vimy was, that Vimy was our key victory in the First World War.
	Less than half of 18 to 24 year olds are familiar with the poem In Flanders Fields, which is actually about the guy in The Simpsons.
	Let's get one thing straight for those who would so easily forget.
	3,598 Canadians died at Vimy Ridge, securing a victory that had eluded both French and British troops.
	That's A triumph and a sacrifice worth honoring and celebrating, no matter what the nitpickers say.
	I actually wrote my very first novel.
	Oh gosh, I wrote this. My very first novel was a science fiction novel I wrote when I was 15 called By the Light of an Alien Sun that was about pretty much soft porn with pizza in a space station, which was read out loud by my English teacher to the class until she had to stop.
	So, that was my introduction to public reading.
	The second one was called The Jealous War, and it was about a guy in the First World War who went to Vimy Ridge.
	So, I know a little bit about this, but we won't get into all of that.
	But, what we will say is, a nation was forged in the fire of war.
	I mean, Christ almighty.
	I mean, what the hell is wrong with these people?
	It's like, you know, all this crap that surrounds the soldiers, right?
	The fallen, right?
	They never say the people, like the murderers who got shot, right?
	The fallen, right?
	Like they tripped. I mean, it's just ridiculous.
	The flags, the taps, the 21-gun salutes, the softly weeping widows all dressed in black, yet still with makeup on.
	It's just absolutely insane.
	And the sensible question, I think, the sensible question is 3,500 people.
	And 98 Canadians died at Vimy.
	For what?
	For what? I mean of all the wars to pick as something that victory played a role in.
	For what?
	Vimy was taken again by the Germans not two weeks later.
	All these thousands of men got killed and the numbers of wounded were staggering.
	And until recently, there were still young men who had had themselves gassed in the First World War who had to spend their entire lives in hospitals because the mustard gas had eaten away the lining of their lungs to the point where they could not exist without ventilation equipment.
	Think of that. 18 years old, you live for another 80 years, 98, you're still in a hospital.
	You spend a whole goddamn life in a hospital.
	And you're the lucky one.
	Of all the conflicts...
	To talk about noble sacrifice and death?
	Almost 4,000 young men herded to a machine gun slaughter to capture a piece of France?
	For what?
	Oh my God!
	I mean, are these people insane?
	The lines at the end of the First World War were almost identical to the lines at the beginning.
	10 million men!
	Murdered in the most incredibly ugly, vile, and horrible ways.
	This is where we got the term shell shock.
	This is what got Freud his fame, because they couldn't figure out why the hell people were going insane after being under continuous bombardment from shells for days upon days upon days.
	Typhus. You could nick your foot in that mud, a rat could bite it, and you could die.
	I mean, the horrors of the First World War are just absolutely staggering.
	And for what?
	For what?
	Well, it was a great warm-up to the Second World War.
	This guy who wrote the poem in Flanders Fields, considered to be a very sort of famous war poem, died.
	Just got his head blown off later on in the war.
	And everyone's like, ooh, this poem about the First World War, it's so elegiac, it's so beautiful.
	It's like, fucking right, it's beautiful sitting over here.
	This guy wrote this poem sitting on the back of an ambulance full of dead friends.
	Not so pretty.
	Not so elegiac.
	So this mass slaughter fest of the young of Europe celebrated in song.
	Oh my God, it's too horrible a voice.
	A nation was forged in the fire of war.
	No! No!
	Men were shot down like fucking dogs.
	And died in the mud with their bellies spilling out, crying and screaming for their mothers.
	Running in little circles in the mud as their intestines spilled out all over their legs.
	Died like fucking pigs.
	Nation forged in the fires of war.
	I'll tell you what. I'd like to take this fucking writer and throw him back at a First World War trench and say, oh yeah, no, don't worry, you're helping a nation get forged because there's a fire of war around.
	Oh, I'd love to.
	I'd love to. How about we go back in time and we say to these guys who are about to charge up Vimy Ridge and get killed, and why did they do it?
	Because they were so brave?
	No! Because they would get shot if they didn't do it.
	Because if they didn't take their guns and run up this stupid fucking hill and get themselves shot down like chickens at a slaughterhouse, they would get shot by their own commanders.
	So I'd like to go back in time and say to these trembling, terrified 18-year-old little boys, And say, hey, I'll tell you what, we can whisk you off into the future and you can write nice little articles about war from a comfortable place in Canada that's never seen any war.
	Or you can run up the hill and get your fucking head blown off so that you can forge a nation in the fucking fire.
	Anyway, it's just something that we need to be aware of when we see this incredible...
	people just shitting icing onto these bloody corpses trying to make it into some heroic noble thing. These guys died like dogs.
	And they were herded onto this hill and they were told, you run up and get shot by the Germans or I'm going to blow your fucking head off.
	And this is some noble thing that we're supposed to be impressed by and we had a nation forged?
	Oh man. Anyway.
	It's okay. I have somebody said, Steph's got to stop reading this magazine.
	I think it's going to shorten his life.
	Actually, no, that's good. The rage is healthy.
	You know, it cleans the colon.
	Oh, dear. Right on my chair. Anyway.
	All right. Listen, I don't want to continue if people don't have any more sort of questions or issues or problems.
	I am more than happy.
	Oh, yes, we're still waiting on the Freedom Aid Radio Live Symposium.
	Chicago, Illinois, Saturday, August 25, 2007.
	Christina and I will be there.
	One of us will be talking about philosophy.
	One of us will be doing an exquisite Hawaiian hula dance.
	Only if you're there can you find out who.
	The answer is Greg. Anyway, but I just wanted to mention that again.
	We don't have quite enough people to make a go of it.
	We get 15. We're good to go.
	But anyway, so we have a gentleman here who has a problem.
	I am all ears.
	Ears and anti-war spleen.
	Go ahead. All ears and forehead.
	Right, exactly.
	There's a funny picture.
	So, let's see.
	Over the last few months, I've been...
	Well, I put my mom's email address on my block list or whatever.
	It just automatically shunts itself into the archive without me having to read it.
	But I guess she's gotten tech savvy enough to change her email address or something now.
	So anyway, a couple of emails got through, and I read one of the recent ones.
	The last one was, apparently she's been saying on these emails over the last, I don't know how many of them, that she's been thinking about coming out here to talk to me about all this stuff.
	Sorry, go ahead. Exactly.
	So this one, it was as if she was picking up in the middle of a conversation or something like that because it was this new email address and she was saying, like, I'm serious about this.
	I want to come out there or fly you back here or whatever.
	And of course, the first thought that comes to my mind is, well, take that money and go to a therapist, please.
	Right, right. Don't spend money on flying me home so that I can tell you, please go to a therapist.
	Right. But anyway, it's just...
	Well, sorry, interrupt for a sec.
	What is the implicit statement in that, right?
	That she wants to get you out there and talk to you and so on.
	What is implicit in that for you?
	The implicit statement, I think, is that I'm feeling bad.
	It's your fault.
	I want you to come in and put some balm on these wounds so that I don't have to feel them anymore.
	And really, she was actually saying something like, We don't have to talk about this or you can talk about anything you want or blah, blah, blah.
	So basically what she's saying is, I don't give a rat's ass what you have to say.
	I just want to see your physical husk so that I can feel like I'm not a complete screw-up.
	Right, right. And I think there is very, very much, it's not even implicit, right?
	I mean, once you see it, right, it's very clear that you are the one with the problem, right?
	That she needs to get you to come out and talk to her because you are the one with the problem.
	Yeah. If I could just talk to you, everything would be fine, right?
	It's just kind of, it almost, I'm sure that she, well, I don't know, I'm not sure what her attitude was when she wrote it, but just the way I read it was when she said, you know, we can talk about anything or eat nothing at all or whatever.
	It's just like saying that, you know, it really doesn't matter what you say as long as you're physically within reach of me so that I can, you know, cry and hug you and get tears all over your chest, you know?
	Ew, yeah. You know, it's just, it's such, I mean, the image that comes to mind is just nothing but excruciating, you know?
	It's just like, I do not want to subject myself to hours of that, you know?
	But minutes would be okay?
	I don't know if I could get her to knock it off, maybe.
	Right. No, I mean, it's just like, so I'm at a point now where I'm thinking, my gosh, am I going to have to actually, like, You know, talk to her and say, please don't do this or whatever, because it just seems like I'd be, I don't know, it seems like I'd be giving her something I don't want to give her, you know? Yeah, don't engage.
	Don't engage. Don't engage.
	No, I mean, there's nothing...
	First of all, tell me this.
	Why... Is it...
	You said that you had got your mom's emails to go into an archive folder.
	Yeah, it's on Gmail.
	You can... If you archive something, it's no longer in your inbox.
	Well, then you can set up a rule that says, if anything comes from this address, just throw it into the archive right away.
	Why can't you? And the only reason I did that is just some, I don't know, maybe you just thought of some kind of morbid curiosity.
	Someday I'll go back and look at them.
	But I have no idea how many there have been that have gone through there for the last several months.
	I don't know. Right.
	Now, this is going to sound all freaky and mystical, but your mom is actually the ancient Greek, no, the ancient Aztec Gog, Ixtapix the Quill.
	No, I'm kidding. What I'm trying to say is that there is still an opening, right?
	We have these incredible unconscious conversations with each other, right?
	So my question is, why didn't you set up a rule that says if any emails come from my mom, delete them?
	Darn good question. I don't know.
	I think that there might be some...
	Well, this is interesting because right now I'm actually going through the process of preparing for my upcoming move.
	And I'm, you know, sorting through all my paperwork and throwing out the stuff I don't need.
	And it's just, it's actually pretty hilarious.
	I'm actually going through envelopes of receipts from 2002 and finding receipts for like a $2 cheeseburger and things like that.
	I mean, I'm the kind of person that doesn't throw anything away just in case I might need it someday.
	Right. And I'm getting a lot better at that, actually.
	I mean, the last time I moved, I threw away probably half of my stuff.
	Right. But it's still kind of a lingering thing, and I'm sure that it has some, well, I'm pretty positive that it has some kind of a childhood source.
	I mean, we had stuff packed away in storerooms and junkyards and stuff out on the farm that were, I mean, my gosh, just ancient stuff that was completely useless.
	But anyway, yeah, it's that kind of thing where I just, There's some reason I must feel that there's some kind of value to these emails that they're going into an archive and not into the delete bin, you know.
	Right, right. Look, that's why they're still coming, right?
	I mean, at least that's the factor that you can control.
	Again, I don't believe in psychic phenomenon one tiny, tiny little bit, but your mom knows you better than anyone and the planet will ever know you, God help you.
	But it's true, right?
	We know our parents and they know us better than anyone, right?
	So... To me, this question of hoarding, I mean, it's a fascinating question, and it has a lot to me to do with insecurity, right?
	I might need this someday, right?
	And, you know, maybe, like, you know, people who, like, I'll save this bit of string because I might need it someday, right?
	And I have to fight this in myself and just sort of do a balance of the time and value requirements, right?
	This is not particular with your email hoarding, but...
	I could just go buy some more string.
	The time I'll spend looking for the string, which is worth like 12 cents, is not really worth it.
	But I think that there's something that's important about this, which is that you're hanging on to this stuff because you may want it at some point in the future.
	And that's because you are deferring some closure that you need to get a hold of.
	Now, right?
	And you're saying, well, I'm going to save this stuff, and so if I ever need to remind myself, or if my mom ever dies, and I want to go and...
	Well, when my mom dies, if I want to go and review this stuff, it'll be there, and so on.
	And I'm not saying you should, right?
	But if you were to set up a rule that said, delete my mom's email, like, from this IP range, right?
	Whatever your mom's coming from, you can get...
	I think you can get a hold of this kind of stuff, right?
	But, you know, if it comes...
	With my mom's name in it, or if it comes from this IP range, or this email address, or whatever, delete it permanently from the server.
	What would it feel like for you to put that rule in place?
	Hmm, that's a good question.
	I've actually pondered this several times over the last few weeks, too, just to...
	Because I've kind of hit it in the back of my mind.
	I wonder how many emails are going, you know, coming in and going into this archive.
	I haven't actually checked, but...
	It's just been something that's been kicking around in the back of my mind.
	Usually every time I go to clear off my voicemail that I've gotten from her, usually I get one once every week or two.
	Sorry, you've been spending a little bit of time around lawyers at the moment, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, because you're excellent at debating answering the question.
	And I think you've probably picked this up.
	I think it's in the air. I think it comes out of lawyer's skin, this kind of ability.
	So I'd just like to applaud you on that, and it's good to know that you can actually be your own lawyer now in the future.
	They have a special gland, yeah.
	Okay, so back to the question.
	The question would be, what would it feel like?
	I feel like it would be much like the feeling that I had when I had that final phone conversation with her.
	It would be difficult to do, but a relief when it was done.
	Okay, so tell me about the relief we don't have a problem with, but what's the difficulty feel like?
	Let's see. I guess I must have some kind of lingering doubt that I'm not being a total jackass or something about all this stuff.
	And I know that when I rationally go through what I'm feeling about it, I know that the result is always the same so far.
	It's that, no, you are doing the right thing because look at the content of the emails and the letters that you have read from her.
	And the content is always pretty much the same.
	I'm not going to admit that I've done anything wrong.
	The only thing I'm guilty of is doing the best that I could.
	And that was actually a quote from this last email that I just found.
	And, you know, it's just a It's that clinging to the, I was the victim here, and I can't change anything, or I can't fix anything because I don't admit that anything's broken, that kind of thing.
	Go ahead.
	No, I was just saying that, so when I think about this stuff, when I actually consider her real words, the words that she's finally crafting in all of these communications to me, they're all The same.
	I want you to manage my happiness.
	And I know that's wrong.
	But at the same time, for some reason, I'm not willing to completely close the door on it, and I'm not sure why.
	And when you do think of...
	You said difficulties and so on, and that's pretty ambiguous.
	What is the actual feeling that occurs when you think of just deleting everything in your archive that could be conceivably from your mom, never reading a single email from her again, And again, I'm not saying you should do this.
	I just want to understand what the feeling is that comes up for you.
	Because you've used words like difficult and so on, but that's also like climbing a mountain, which is not a feeling.
	So what's the feeling that comes up?
	There always seems to be like two sides to this coin.
	They always seem to come in this pair.
	It's On the one side, it's I can't wait to be free of this.
	I can't wait to be completely my own person.
	And the other side is I don't want to lose my past.
	Okay. I think that's why I brought up the whole thing about hoarding and things like that when we first started talking about this.
	There's something about I don't want to lose.
	I'm reminded of a dream that I had when I was a little kid that I was walking through the house that I grew up in Well, the house I lived in my whole life up until I left for college.
	I was walking through this house and the feeling that I got was that it was either a disembodied voice or someone that was standing behind me or something like that.
	I didn't see anyone. I was completely alone except for some kind of a consciousness or a voice telling me that it's time to go now as if I'd died or something like that.
	And what I was doing is I was looking around the house Thinking about this horrible sadness was filling me.
	I was thinking to myself that I don't want to leave this.
	I can't believe this is the last time I'll ever see this.
	It was this horrible sense of loss that I would never see this again.
	I didn't want to go.
	I didn't want to leave it. What's interesting to me about that now looking back at it is that there was no one there.
	I wasn't saying I don't want to leave these people.
	I was saying I don't want to leave this place.
	I mean, there was literally nothing but...
	I remember just looking at these tall windows that we had in the living room.
	It was like a two-story living room with these really tall curtains and a corner where the Christmas tree would always stand and piano and things like that.
	And I was just looking at this area of the house and this horrible sorrow came over me.
	And the whole time, there was nothing about people in it at all.
	Right. So what I get a strong sense of from that is a kind of sentimentality about the past, right?
	Yeah. Okay.
	Tell me...
	I'm trying to think of a way that this is not too leading, right?
	Because, I mean, you're absolutely right on the edge of getting this, but it's much better...
	Well, let me add one more thing before you do, just to see if I'm following it.
	And I feel like...
	The house that I grew up in was pretty cool.
	I did enjoy living there.
	There was a large living room with a cathedral ceiling and off to one side was a loft that was like the family room upstairs with the TV and stuff.
	And I did enjoy living there.
	I'm kind of a design and architecture geek just by nature and it was always interesting to me to run around this house and to explore the different levels in my mind and stuff.
	It always felt like there was such potential there.
	It's like I'm nostalgic for the potential that was never realized.
	It's like I want to go back and give it another shot type of a thing.
	But of course I can't do that.
	There's no way for me to ever do that.
	And I feel like by focusing this sentimentality and this energy of I want it to be better on the past.
	I'm completely robbing myself of the future where I can aim this energy into the world that I'm creating for myself instead of into the world that was created for me.
	Yeah, listen, that's just incredibly beautifully put.
	I mean, really, that's just beautifully, beautifully put.
	Well, of course, you can, quote, go back and make it better, right?
	You can fly out to see your mom and have another conversation with her.
	You can't go back in time and make your childhood better, but the option exists in the present of going to see your mom and attempting to create with her what was not created in your childhood.
	I'm not saying it's a practical possibility in that you could do it and achieve it, but you certainly could try, right?
	Yeah, I keep getting this.
	Whenever I indulge in that fantasy, though, I always come around to the thought that it's just gonna be an excruciatingly failed attempt again, I think.
	Because what I want is not...
	I don't think it's...
	Until she's really gone through a heck of a lot of effort and a lot of soul-searching pain, I don't think that there's gonna be anything In a conversation like that, except for just bandaging a woman that won't heal.
	Right, right. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it.
	I don't see it even being at all possible.
	I mean, it's not going to be a successful conversation until she's done any...
	Actually, I just caught myself saying that.
	Until she's done this.
	And I'm keeping this door open in my mind thinking that she's going to, but she's given me absolutely no sign whatsoever that she will.
	And I keep thinking that, you know, maybe one of these emails is going to say, hey, guess what?
	I've been to therapy. I'm better now.
	You can come home now. And it's just, I don't know.
	I don't think that's going to happen.
	Well, yeah, and I don't think so either.
	But first and foremost, it is very healthy that you felt that when you were a kid.
	It's very healthy that you felt that hope when you were a child.
	Yeah. Right, because when you...
	If it's a child, we fantasize about good relationships.
	We keep that flame alive of the definition of a good relationship, right?
	So when I was a kid, I always...
	I see couples fighting and so on.
	I'd be like, oh, my mom would fight with the boyfriends or her ex-husband or whatever...
	And to me, it'd be like, well, why?
	Like, what's so complicated?
	Just be nice to each other.
	And that, of course, made it both bitter and sweet to be in that situation, right?
	So the fact that you kept a sentimental yearning for a better kind of relationship when you were a child was absolutely the healthiest thing.
	Because you kept a standard of life which was very different from what was actually happening.
	Yeah. Right?
	You kept a standard of connection.
	Alive. And of a good relationship alive that was not occurring anywhere in your environment, if I understand it rightly.
	Yeah, I was, I don't know, I kind of think of myself as having grown up as an emotional wolf child.
	You know, I was literally left to figure out how to manage my emotions completely by myself.
	I mean, I was, you know, on the one side I had a I've mentioned this before.
	I had the raging Old Testament God-Dad that would, you know, swear at his machinery down the barn and hurl lightning bolts at it.
	And my mom was, of course, the dewey-eyed Jesus that was just nothing but getting nailed to crosses every day.
	Well, listen, the whole polytheistic marriages like Thor and Jesus, that never works.
	Yeah. And it was, you know, so, of course, you can imagine, you can pretty easily imagine...
	What occurs when Thor and Jesus have issues to work out.
	You know, it's just nothing but flames on one side and tears on the other.
	Absolutely. And so, yeah, it was...
	And I remember, I think, when I was...
	Oh, shoot. It was probably...
	Well, I know that I was the one that somehow got my dad to go into therapy like around the age of...
	When I was 10. And then later on, when I was probably 15 or so, I think about that age, I remember yelling at him in the truck one time when we were on the way to work.
	I used to work with him as a carpenter.
	He was a general contractor.
	Just yelling at him that this isn't acceptable.
	And he was saying that, well, there's nothing I can do.
	And I just said, get help then.
	If you can't do it, then you have to get help.
	Shut him up. It always seemed like I was the one instructing people for 35 years my elder on how to live.
	And I was doing this having absolutely no idea how to live myself.
	I just knew that there was a better way than what they were doing.
	Well, I wouldn't say that you had absolutely no idea.
	Well, I didn't feel that I had any idea.
	You were told that you had no idea.
	Looking back at it now, I think I did a pretty darn good job.
	At the time, it felt like I was cornered.
	I was an animal that had been backed into a corner, and this was my survival instinct.
	It turns out it was a pretty darn good instinct.
	At the time, it was terrifying.
	It was coming from the same The same part of me that reacts when a swarm of bees is heading at me.
	You know, no time to think, just do.
	I'd just like to back up for a second, and again, I really appreciate your honesty here.
	It's great. I'd like to back up just for a second because I'd like to try and see if we can refine one statement that you made, which I think is true but not the complete truth.
	Okay. The one thing that you said which really...
	I mean, what you're saying is all great.
	You said, I was sort of a wolf child in that I was raised with no emotional instruction whatsoever.
	Ah, yes. No, I was given instruction.
	I was given a lot of instruction.
	I was given instruction that when you have a conflict with something, you overpower it with the force of your own selfish emotion.
	Whether it's my dad yelling and screaming at inanimate objects because they're not doing what he wants to do, Or if it's my mom, completely smothering and enveloping a flame with this wet blanket of, I'm just a victim.
	That was what I was instructed to do.
	And I've had problems with this my whole life, is that I either completely flame out at people that I get into a sufficient enough disagreement with, or I stick out my bottom lip and wait for them to feel sorry for me.
	Right, right, right, right.
	No, that makes total sense.
	But I think what you were instructed in, fundamentally, because what you're talking about, in a sense, is your observations of your parents.
	Okay. Right, so what you're saying is, well, I was raised like a wolf child.
	Nobody instructed me on how my emotions should be managed.
	But what I saw was my dad raging and my mom, you know, sobbing a river.
	And so I learned, in a sense, through imprinting.
	So what you're saying is that you learned through observing your parents' behaviors.
	In a sense, you were imprinted upon through that experience, if that makes sense.
	Yeah, I think that's fair.
	But I think that there's one aspect that you're missing, and this is probably, I'm guessing, as to why it's hard to get closure.
	Because what you're missing is your parents' relationship with you.
	Uh-huh. Right, so you talk about, well, I was very isolated and then I saw these two people raging at each other or crying or whatever, right?
	But what I think you may be not, what may not be as conscious for you is your parents' relationship with you because you were taught what you were for with regards to your parents, not with them regards to each other, but what role you were supposed to serve for your parents.
	Yeah. So I'm trying to picture what that role is right now.
	You actually mentioned it a little bit earlier.
	Oh, the bandage?
	Yes. Yeah.
	There was a phrase that would come up over and over again when I was a kid.
	And it always came around when I, or my brother and I, were...
	We were resisting doing chores or something, you know, if it was time to mow the lawn or if it was time to wash the dishes or do this or do that.
	There was a refrain that my mom used to like to use that was, I don't understand why you guys don't want to do this because when I was a little kid I just wanted so badly to make my dad happy and so I would do all this stuff so, you know, gleefully or whatever she said, you know.
	And the implication was is that I would always jump Johnny on the spot to do this stuff, why don't you?
	And I can't understand why you don't blah blah blah.
	The other thing is that it's interesting how she would also use that same kind that sounded the same but in a completely different context was that when she was describing how she was trying to deal with my dad's rages She said,
	I would rush around and try to make everything right before he got there so that he wouldn't have anything to rage about, but then he would find something to rage about.
	And so the thing that doesn't make any sense to me, and actually it does make sense to me because I think I figured it out, but she always would say that When I was a kid, we had such a great life.
	Everything was so wonderful.
	The neighbors would come over with their sleigh and pull us around, and I just wish that you kids would have had that too.
	But what doesn't make any sense to me is that someone who had such a wonderful childhood being married to someone who she claims, well, who was horrible to her for 40 years.
	How does someone who has a wonderful childhood Subject yourself to 40 years of misery all of a sudden.
	I just don't think that that happens.
	I think that there must have been something with her own father that, you know, when she said that...
	Because I'm putting these two things together.
	She would always run around and do things for my grandfather because she wanted him to be happy or something like that.
	And she would always run around and do things to make sure that my dad didn't blow up.
	It seems like those things go together.
	Yeah, for sure. And what I get from your mom when she says, I just wanted to make an angry man happy, which was your grandfather, right?
	And your dad. Well, how would your grandfather feel if his daughter said, I had a really angry and vindictive father?
	Mm-hmm. Yeah, when I was growing up, actually, my grandfather died when I was a senior in high school, and my grandmother did a lot of the raising of me and my brother.
	My mom had a business that she was running, so after school, my brother and I would pretty much always go over to Grandma's place and hang out there, and she'd always take care of us during the summers and stuff, and so I lived a lot of my childhood with my grandmother, and my grandfather was alive the whole time, and he was there. Well, what's really interesting is I think I can probably count on two hands how many times I actually spoke with the guy.
	Sure. And I remember being afraid of him when I was a kid.
	And he was kind of like a sphinx that would just sit there in his chair and smoke cigarettes and every once in a while he'd kind of like mumble something but not much.
	And it was weird.
	Like, I mean, there was some kind of deep down in the very brain stem of my...
	Little kid brain, I was able to be afraid of this guy, and I think I may have had the right instinct there.
	I'm not sure why, though. There's something about him that really creeped me out, though.
	But when everyone talks about him, when he died and everyone started talking about him, everyone was like, that was another strange thing.
	It was like, my grandmother made a point about how Grandpa would always have one beer in the morning, and she said, And she very forcefully said, and that was the only beer he had.
	He was not an alcoholic. He only had that one beer every day.
	Which makes me wonder, well, you know, the lady does protest too much.
	Right. And no one was accusing him of being an alcoholic.
	She just brought it up herself. So that's interesting.
	And, of course, that would fit with my father's personality as well.
	That he was probably in...
	I think when...
	Well, I think he was an alcoholic.
	He didn't drink when...
	When I was growing up.
	But, you know, it's definitely the personality type to fly off the handle of things.
	Anyway, I'm probably tangentializing too much here.
	Oh, listen, this is not the show to complain about that.
	Am I going away too far from where you're going, though?
	No, no, it's fine.
	I mean, definitely, this is like two negative magnets, right?
	Getting your consciousness to connect with this stuff, right?
	Because it's tough. Right. But, I mean, you've certainly given a lot of information that I think makes a very consistent pattern and also explains, I think, why you're having trouble letting go and also, I think, explains why your mom is having such trouble letting go and why she would never go and seek help herself.
	So I'll run through a basic potential theory and you can let me know what you think and how it fits.
	Okay. So...
	You have a dictatorship within your family, which is a cult of personality.
	And the cult of personality is, the patriarchs are wonderful.
	And if you don't say that the patriarchs are wonderful, you're going to get in a hell of a lot of trouble.
	And the patriarchs, of course, by definition, insofar as that would be logical...
	Are not wonderful, right?
	I mean, if I say to Christina, you better say, you better give Freedom Made Radio a good review or I'm going to punch you in the head, right?
	Then I'm not a really very good philosopher, right?
	I mean, plus I'd lose, right?
	She's fast. So you have these patriarchs in your family going back God knows how many generations who lauded over the women and the women are not allowed to say anything negative about the patriarchs, right? And of course, that is an unstable, insecure, petty, dictatorial, vain kind of personality.
	It's both highly insecure and narcissistic or megalomaniacal as well, right?
	So this is kind of like a Stalin situation, right?
	You couldn't say anything bad about Stalin, right?
	If you remember this thing I talked about from one of Solzhenitsyn's books that everybody's applauding Stalin and nobody wants to be the first to stop.
	So they literally sit there applauding until their hands start bleeding, right?
	Because The first person to stop is going to be seen by the secret police and shot.
	To take an extreme example.
	So there's these kind of exhausted and bloodied cheerleaders in your family, which is the women, talking about how wonderful the patriarchs are.
	Because your mom said, I always wanted to please my dad.
	And that means more than just making him happy by bringing him a coffee or something, but it means thinking that he's a great and wonderful person.
	So your mom had a terrible childhood, but she says, I had to please...
	My dad, which means that she has to tell you that she had a great and wonderful childhood, right?
	Because that pleases your granddad.
	Oh, right. Right, so then what happens is, of course, she didn't have a great and wonderful childhood, but she praised raging and angry men, right?
	She thought they were the bee's knees.
	They were the best thing since sliced bread, right?
	Yeah. So, naturally, our values are our future, right?
	What we praise, we become.
	So, if you make up this weird alternate universe where raging and angry men are the best possible men that can draw breath, then, naturally, who are you going to end up marrying?
	A raging man?
	Of course, because they're the best men you can get.
	I had a wonderful childhood.
	Oh, I thought you were talking about me.
	No, no, no. But your mom is going to end up marrying someone like your dad, right?
	Yeah, right. Absolutely.
	Because she's not allowed to experience the truth about her own history.
	She's not allowed to experience her own fear.
	She's got the Stockholm Syndrome where she has to praise her abuser, right?
	Right. Right?
	So, if she were to meet a kind and gentle man who was the opposite of your granddad, she would...
	Deep down, she'd be really attracted to him and she'd yearn for him.
	Sorry about talking about your mom and yearning.
	But she would then encounter a huge resistance within her.
	She'd feel extraordinary anxiety.
	She would feel incredible disloyalty to her own father.
	And what that would mean is, she would then fear being attacked for questioning the virtue of her father.
	Even implicitly, by saying a different kind of man is great too.
	So then when you get born, when she gives birth to you, she has to tell you that she had a wonderful childhood, that all she wanted to do was to please her father.
	And she loved pleasing her father and she loved making him happy.
	Right? Because she's not allowed to have her own opinions, right?
	Yeah. She's not allowed to have her own experience.
	she is there to serve the narcissistic needs of her father.
	So, this is all, I think, making sense.
	I mean, it does fit what I've been thinking about all this stuff for a while.
	There's another facet of this that's been kind of I'm sorry, just before we go on to the next facet, not that I'm thinking that's going to be a tangent, but let me just finish this thought.
	Sure, sure. So, if the pattern in your family is that the children exist only to serve the narcissistic needs of their parents, right?
	Ah, yes, yes.
	Then you are not allowed to make your own choices based on what you want.
	Right. You are only there.
	To make your mother happy, you were only there, your only purpose, the only reason she had you, in a sense, is to manage her feelings, the same way she managed her father's feelings and she managed your dad's feelings.
	So the fact that you're saying, no, your feelings are your business, my feelings are my business, I'm happy to talk about them if you're rational, but I'm not here...
	To just serve your needs.
	I'm not an empty shell that you can use.
	I'm not a drug that you can use to make yourself feel better.
	I'm an independent human being with my own thoughts and feelings and experiences.
	We can share those, but you cannot exploit me that way.
	Right. That's a darn good connection right there.
	And so, now she's feeling extraordinary anxiety.
	Because you are absolutely detonating the family cycle, that the children are just there to make the parents feel better.
	Which means that the parents are just exploiting the children.
	This is all theory, right?
	I mean, you can listen to this back and see how well it fits, right?
	But what I'm trying to say is that you were trained down to a T exactly how to use your emotions, which was to sublimate them or subjugate them To the narcissistic needs of other people.
	You were not a wolf child.
	you were very carefully and closely instructed, and not just by example, but by interaction.
	Yeah.
	So this guy that you had in business who had all these needs, right?
	Yeah.
	Right? He needed stuff from you, and he never paid you, right?
	Right. Right?
	But it's the same thing, right?
	You exist to serve his needs.
	You can't say no!
	Uh, yeah, that's...
	yeah, yeah, yeah. And that is a...
	No, it's really amazing that...
	Sorry, the last thing I'll say.
	The last thing I'll say, I promise. That is a total...
	That is a total inversing...
	Inversing... Inversal...
	Of the actual parent-child relationship in a healthy family.
	In a healthy family, the parents are there to serve the emotional needs of the children.
	So the reason that you felt like a parent to your parents is you were.
	the parents sublimate their own emotional needs to be there for the children so your parents were using you the way that an infant is supposed to quote use its parent yes
	Right. And so the reason that you can't...
	The possible reason why you can't...
	Well, does that help at all with why you can't send your mom's emails to delete?
	Yeah, probably.
	Actually, I think, yeah, because I... I feel like...
	Let's see. What's the image that...
	You know, when you said... Okay, the word that just popped into my head is abandon.
	Abandonment. Right.
	And so just like an abandoned child, I'd be abandoning this wailing child of a 60-some-odd-year-old person.
	Right. Yeah.
	Right.
	You basically, what I'm saying to you is that you have a child who's five years old who's lost in the snows, and you need to turn off the beacon and go home.
	Yeah.
	But the reason you need to do this is, you know, you may become a father yourself one day.
	And you don't want to be stuck in this habit.
	Because then you will feel that your children owe you something.
	That when you get upset, it's your children's fault.
	And if you're not happy, it's because your children aren't doing something right.
	And they will then be like people who owe you a debt, who haven't paid you like this guy in business, right?
	My children are supposed to make me happy.
	And if I'm not happy, damn it, they're taken from me.
	Yeah, I'm getting a sense of, like, why are you doing this to me?
	But the thing is, is I'm literally doing nothing, you know?
	It's the absence of my positive action, of a positive requirement.
	When I leave that out of it, when I leave that requirement out of it, then it's, and like you said before, it's when you give These black hole people this stuff for so long, they come to expect that it's their right to have it.
	And so when I'm stopping that, then it's a violation of something that I'm perpetrating.
	As if I'm taking an action to steal something, when in actuality I just stop giving.
	Well, I think that's an excellent analysis with one minor correction that's actually not minor at all.
	is that this is probably another reason why there's a certain amount of guilt, right?
	Because you feel...
	you use the word giving two or three times in that analysis.
	Uh-huh. And why would I pause you on that one?
	Just theoretically, you know, just maybe by the by.
	Okay, so...
	the word giving.
	So the Dr. Seuss, the giving tree.
	This wonderful tree that sacrifices itself to give to the child.
	No, but you were talking about giving in terms of your mother, right?
	That you give her all these things and then you stop giving her stuff and so it feels like you should be giving her stuff and you've given her stuff in the past and so on, right?
	That was sort of the phraseology that you used?
	Sure, sure. So giving is, oh, it wasn't given, it was taken.
	Yes! Yes!
	Like you don't give Uncle Sam your taxes, right?
	Right, right, right, right.
	Of course. Where you were robbed!
	You were pillaged! Not just of your emotions, but of your entire goddamn childhood.
	Watching these two freaking lunatics go at each other.
	Right? And then having this drippy, pathetic, clingy mom, like, sapping your spinal fluid out of her tear ducts.
	I mean, you was robbed, brother!
	This is true. I no longer submit to getting raped.
	It's not like, hey, I'm not putting out anymore.
	It's a fine distinction, that is, isn't it?
	I think that's an important one, and that's because, right, because you've got to continually fight your mother's perspective here, right?
	It's your mother who doesn't want you to delete these emails.
	It's your mother who thinks that you should give her stuff, and now you're being selfish by withholding it.
	You've got to fight the mother desires that have, right, you are totally trained to give everything to your mom, to be there for her pleasure and her need.
	Right? That's her desire, not yours.
	Your desire was to have a childhood where you were actually talked to and tended and listened to and cared for.
	And happy. Yeah, and happy.
	Not to just sort of fight your way through these frickin' World War I trench of Zeus and the Virgin Mary, right?
	I mean, that wasn't what you wanted, right?
	What you wanted was to have a reasonable childhood with good, kind, and loving parents.
	Not perfect parents, but good, kind, and loving and decent parents.
	Right? But that was all robbed from you because...
	They would rather steal from children than face their own problems.
	Yeah. I mean, you don't give blood to a vampire.
	I mean, he grabs you, he holds you down and goes to town, right?
	This is good stuff again.
	Okay.
	Your mom thinks that you should have given it.
	I feel very comfortable with that.
	Yeah, your mom thinks that you owe her.
	That you should give these things to her.
	The same way that somebody on welfare thinks that the taxpayers owe that person.
	Right, because after all, that's what I was created for, right?
	Yeah, yeah. You are a livestock, right?
	I mean, the farmer thinks that the cow owes him a whole bunch of milk, right?
	Right. And if the cow doesn't give any milk, well, the cow's in a hell of a lot of trouble, right?
	Right. It's either milk or the meat, right?
	Right, right. And we all get that when we're kids, right?
	It's like, okay, well, I guess I've got to go and take care of mom because, holy crap, am I ever going to be in trouble if I don't, right?
	But that's not, right, being forced to be this bizarre child parent, having your childhood robbed, you know, being pillaged for the sake of other people's anxieties and fears and insecurities and, you know, I mean, that's not giving stuff.
	I mean, you were just pillaged as a kid.
	You were trained to be like a little dancing monkey to bring in emotional income from mom and dad.
	That's not a choice.
	That's not a gift. That's just robbed.
	Indeed. Yeah, so that makes me feel almost completely at ease about this stuff.
	I mean, it's like... It seems to fit into the puzzle quite well.
	Yeah, I mean, to me the metaphor that might be a little bit less personal is let's say that we won and tomorrow the government was abolished and there was no requirement to pay taxes anymore and there never would be ever again.
	But somebody still kept sending you letters calling themselves the IRS and you decided to file them just in case you ever did have to pay taxes again.
	Right. Right?
	No! There's no government!
	Right? I mean, yes, you had to pay taxes when they had a gun to your head, and you had to serve their emotional narcissistic needs when they had power over you, right?
	But the government is gone, baby.
	It's blown away. I mean, we are a stateless society with regards to our parents, which means voluntary association for mutual benefit, not one-sided pillaging for the sake of corrupt and narcissistic people.
	So, just, you know, if there was no government tomorrow and you knew there never would be again, Hanging on to letters from the fake IRS would be sort of silly, right?
	You'd laugh at them. And I'm not saying this is the easiest thing.
	I mean, this is the journey, right? I'm not...
	This is the hardest part of defoeing, right?
	If you've really made the commitment and it makes sense at an intellectual and emotional level, this is the hardest part.
	I mean, we're still working through this, Christine and I, when we get communications from our family of origins, it's still not easy.
	But, you know, the reality is that the government is gone and we can get letters from the IRS, but there's nothing behind it anymore.
	Right.
	Yeah, I need to figure out how to automatically block phone numbers, too, then.
	Thank you.
	Because that's a weekly or bi-weekly occurrence that I have to keep being reminded of this when the voicemail shows up.
	Absolutely. Absolutely. Or change your number.
	Yeah. Like, get one unlisted IP number or whatever.
	Or forget about having a phone and just use...
	Use Skype or whatever.
	I mean, it's all just possibilities, right?
	But it's just do whatever you have to do to, if you don't want these communications, and I can't imagine why you would, other than, you know, you've been trained to respond like a puppet to your parents' needs, as we all have, who've had these kinds of families.
	But whatever it takes to keep, to stop having these buttons pushed, right?
	Because every time these buttons are pushed and you run calls, you get an email, right?
	It retires your process.
	It's like a boulder. If you're trying to climb a mountain, these boulders keep coming down, right?
	Right. No, it is very, it's draining.
	I mean, it's even just the act of hitting the voicemail button and then saying delete without listening.
	Yeah, it's stressful.
	It still is a stressful action, yeah.
	Yeah, no, I mean, listen, you need to find ways, and there's lots of ways to do it.
	Thank heavens, these days are not like rotary dial, heavy breather phone systems, right?
	But there's lots of ways to do it, and you need to do it, right?
	You need to know what life is like without these buttons getting pushed.
	Yeah, definitely.
	Absolutely. Cool.
	No, I'm... Yep.
	Yep. I've been actually thinking the last few weeks about when I've changed my address, I can probably change my phone number at the same time.
	And I'll start calling myself Rob Thorson or something like that.
	Just kidding. Vixen with three X's.
	Yeah, absolutely. Giddy up.
	Max power. Absolutely.
	Absolutely. Right, the magnificent.
	I could just change my last name to Zilla.
	How's that? Absolutely.
	Perfect. Perfect. Then you can always get work in Japanese films as an extra.
	And Blue Oyster Cult video remakes.
	Dude, nice obscure reference.
	Nice obscure reference. It's my theme song.
	So, yeah, this is good stuff.
	I'm going to ponder on it, and I can't wait to listen to the recording.
	So, thank you once more.
	Appreciate it. Listen, your honesty is a key, as it matters.
	Otherwise, I just sound like an idiot arguing with a hand puppet like most of the other podcasts.
	So I really do appreciate your honesty with this.
	And, of course, I know that you have an enormous amount of fans on the boards and in my emails, which, you know, you guys are the DFU rock stars, right?
	And not because, oh, not everyone has to DFU, right?
	But when you're in these kinds of situations, that's essential, right?
	So you're... Incredible ice-breaking bravery is showing the way for a lot of people, and it's really great of you to do what you're doing.
	That's cool. Hey, if I'm a rock star, though, I've got to draw out my hair.
	Absolutely. And the FDR leather thongs will be available relatively quickly.
	So what it's going to be is two tiny little pictures of my bald head that fit exactly over your testicles.
	Gift with purchase, right?
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	It's the FDR brain sack.
	That's what we're going to call it.
	Boy, you know, I'm going to get some emails about that.
	And you wonder why you don't have more female listeners.
	The nice, the near little grad student that's assigned this podcast in the future to go over for her thesis, she's going to be bluffing.
	Yes. 300 years later and I'm still grossed out.
	Well, listen, thanks. I appreciate that.
	And let me just open it up to anybody else who might have any last questions before we sign off for the day.
	Thanks again. Hey, my pleasure, man.
	Anybody? Anybody?
	Bueller? Anybody? Anybody?
	No? No problem.
	And well, thank you so much, everybody, for dropping by and listening in to our show.
	And thank you again for our extender caller.
	I really do appreciate that honesty.
	Have yourself a fantastic and wonderful and munificent week.
	And I will talk to you guys soon.

▲