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Aug. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:50
855 Ask A Philosopher 3

Irrational anger, can we learn love? - and freedom from fear...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's just before two o'clock. I have written a new article, which is available on the website, and I'll throw it up on my blog as well, which I hope that you will enjoy.
It's a sort of history of my tongue-in-cheek history of my attempt to apply The theories I was taught in university back towards my professors, and I think that you will enjoy it.
So, sorry again for this only being half the team, but Ask a Therapist has actually become Ask a Therapist's husband, and so I will do my best, but I thought an answer of sorts is better than none at all, so this is for people who've sent stuff in.
Sorry if it's taken a little while to get to it, but things have been busy here at the Rationality Mothership, so...
This is from a gentleman who writes, Hi, Christina.
Hi! Thanks for being willing to do this stuff.
It can't be easy with very little to go on.
Well, that's true, but only if you're interested in accuracy.
Well, here goes. I grew up in a very dysfunctional food.
My father was a passive alcoholic, meaning he drank himself into oblivion most nights.
And my mother, well, from listening to Steph's podcast, let's just say I fully understand where he is coming from.
Anyhow, here it is. My wife and I were having a mild disagreement about something, and I experienced a complete emotional overreaction to the situation.
To be more specific, it seemed like my wife was not listening to my point of view on the issue and really got angry at a deep level.
Of course, I apologized later, etc., but it really surprised me.
What can be causing such an emotional overreaction?
What does this mean? How can you control it such that it doesn't escalate beyond all reason, any insights gratefully received?
Well, my brother, that is an excellent, excellent, excellent question.
And these kinds of altercations, these kinds of spontaneous escalations, Occur all too regularly, particularly in romantic relationships.
So I really do understand where you're coming from, and it is, of course, an essential question.
How is it that we make sure that our pasts have little, or as little effect as possible, that its functional aspects of our past have as little effect as possible on our interactions in the present?
So I'm going to put forward a general framework, and you can let me know how it works for you.
Now, when we have a...
I'm not going to call it an overreaction or anything like that, because in a way, it's not ever an overreaction.
It's just a reaction.
The moment we label it an overreaction, it becomes negative, something we much control and stop and so on, and that is a self-rejection that renders us rudderless, right?
I mean, the great challenge is to respect your emotions without being a slave to your emotions, to respect To view them as courtiers and as educators but not dictators, right?
So when you feel angry, the challenge is to view that anger as a helpful I mean,
to use an example I've cited a number of times before...
Up until the end of the 18th century, early 19th century, Chinese women had their feet bound, hobbled around and so on.
And so, of course, they had to learn how to walk.
I mean, imagine if you could sort of restore your feet, right?
It was sort of painful and you'd have to learn to walk all over again.
That doesn't mean that human beings are fundamentally clumsy.
It just means that we're injured when we're young and the rehabilitation is painful.
but it doesn't mean that we're fundamentally broken because we have this amazing capacity to regenerate health and vitality from a psychological standpoint with all but the most egregious of early incidents, early abuses, and so on.
So when you look at a strong anger, a strong emotion of anger, a very strong and overwhelming and sudden emotion of anger, the great challenge, as I've talked about with the concept of real-time relationships, which you feel as it happens, the very great challenge is To be able to say, you know what, honey, can we just stop this for a moment?
I just feel this overwhelming sense of anger.
And I'm not saying it's you.
I'm not saying that you're doing something to me or causing it or making me feel something or anything like that.
I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is that I am feeling an overwhelming sense of anger.
At this moment, right?
And I mean, I've said this to Christina before.
If something's happening that I feel angry, I'll say, you know, I feel angry.
I'm not blaming you.
I'm not saying you're the cause of it or anything like that, because I don't know.
Maybe, maybe not. It doesn't really matter right now.
The important thing is not to identify where it's coming from, but to identify that it is happening, right?
And that is a real challenge.
And to be able to begin to express those kinds of things in a relationship as they're happening to you.
It's an incredibly vulnerable experience.
I'm not exactly sure why it's so hard or it makes us feel so vulnerable, but it certainly is and it certainly does.
And it probably has something to do with rejection, like undefended rejection is a very painful experience, right?
So when we are rejected as children, we come up with all of this noise and static and distraction and all this sort of stuff to help us avoid feeling rejected again.
And, of course, the problem with that is that by avoiding the rejection, we actually avoid the circumstances which bring around the rejection in the first place.
So, numbing ourself for the sake of continual pain, the continual pain that is being inflicted on us, makes sense when we're kids, but doesn't help us avoid those situations again when we're adults, right?
So, it's a short-term self-drugging or self-medication that's essential to survive, but, unfortunately, It ends up with us being defenseless in those situations in the future.
So the fundamental question, and this is a question that is common to everybody.
I mean, I think everybody in the world, but let's just say everybody who's gone through particularly difficult childhoods.
The fundamental question when it comes to our emotional apparatus is this.
Are we sensitive or paranoid?
Let's roll that around in your brain for just a moment because it really is a very essential question.
If we have gone through an abusive history, are we sensitive or are we paranoid?
And I would submit that your entire life's happiness comes down to how you answer that question.
To take a metaphor, to take a metaphor...
If we have been punched really hard in the thigh, some guy gave us a charley horse.
I remember being at Camp Bolton when I was, I guess, 13 or 14 years old.
I spent a couple of summers at Camp Bolton that later became a model for their ad thing.
But there would be these dances, right?
And At these dances, you'd be slow dancing with a girl, and some guy, and usually it was the guy who couldn't get a girl to slow dance with him, some guy would come by and punch you surreptitiously in the thigh.
You know, pretend to sort of bend over.
And then you'd have this charley horse.
And so you'd sort of be listing like a ship with a hole in its side as you were attempting to be suave with some young lovely.
But let's say you have this charley horse.
So your thigh is throbbing.
It's really painful, right? So if you have this charley horse...
And somebody comes and pushes their finger hard into this bruised or this painful area.
And you cry out in pain.
Are you hypersensitive irrationally?
Like it wouldn't normally hurt for someone to jab their finger into your thigh.
But if you've got a charley horse, then it really does hurt, right?
I mean, to push a pen into somebody's skin doesn't really hurt unless it just happens to be an open wound, in which case it's going to hurt like hell.
So this sort of question comes down, are we sensitive or are we paranoid?
So if you're in a situation where somebody is manipulating you to your detriment and this strikes a chord, let us say, is in harmony in an evil way with experiences that you had as a child...
Then, when you get angry, are you sensitive or are you paranoid?
Are you sensitive or are you oversensitive?
So, if somebody simply pushes a pen into my skin, that is a negative action.
I mean, it's sort of a weird thing to do.
But I won't jump up and cry out in pain unless they happen to do it on a wound that I have.
In which case, it is a highly malicious action.
Just jabbing your finger into my skin is not evil.
It's sort of weird. It's inappropriate, but not evil.
But if you do it where I have a wound or a bruise, then clearly you're trying to cause me more pain, right?
In which case, I'm not...
Paranoid to be upset and hurt by that behavior.
So if you sort of follow this metaphor, I think it can help illuminate this sort of question.
So you've had a difficult past, and then strong feelings, strong fear or anger or hostility or whatever rage comes up in a particular situation.
Are you unjustly making an association, like somebody's just pushing their little finger into your skin, Or are you justly reacting to a destructive action?
I mean, this is sort of a very, very important question, right?
So what this gentleman says is, my wife and I were having a mild disagreement about something, and I experienced a complete emotional overreaction to the situation.
To be more specific, it seemed like my wife was not listening to my point of view on the issue.
Really got angry at a deep level.
Of course, I apologize later, but it really surprised me.
It's a very fundamental question.
Which is, is this an overreaction?
Is this an overreaction?
So, if you're paranoid, in other words, if your wife is listening to you, but you are completely misprocessing the entirety of the situation, if you are paranoid and if you are making things up, then...
The problem is that you are completely and totally screwed as a human being.
You are completely and totally screwed as a human being.
That's not an argument to prove anything.
It's just this is the natural consequences.
For instance, if I misinterpret kindness as hostility and I react to somebody who is being nice to me as if they are attacking me, Then I want to head north, I'm completely lost, and my compass doesn't work.
It's like that Seinfeld where George does the opposite, right?
If everything I do must be wrong, if I do the opposite, it should be perfect.
But it's not even that clear.
Because it never is a complete negative, right?
So if you misinterpret things to the point that you get them completely wrong, and it's not that somebody's jabbing a finger into your bruise that causes you to cry out in pain, it's when somebody gives you a hug, you punch them because you feel like they're, I don't know, trying to throttle you like an anaconda or they're trying to steal your money or something, right?
In which case, your marriage is doomed.
I mean, just frankly, I'm not saying this is the case.
I'm just saying if we accept this premise that up is down and black is white and you're totally boss-ackwards about...
Your emotional reactions are completely incorrect or inappropriate or whatever to the situation.
Then what does your love for your wife mean?
Then you'll love bad things and you'll hate good things.
So it's just important to understand that if you believe that your emotionality is an unjust and oppositional response to the stimuli that you love...
What hurts you and you hate what is good for you and so on, then you are completely doomed, right?
I mean, as far as this marriage goes and so on.
And so I don't think that's the case.
I really don't, right?
I mean, then you wouldn't recognize the value of writing to...
Well, sorry, Christina, but I am your sort of backup.
Or I'm Christina's backup.
So... The question of the efficacy of one's emotions is really, really central to any form of happiness in this life.
Right? If you doubt your emotions, you are crippled and paralyzed as a human being.
And when I say doubt your emotions, what I mean is, if you believe that it is entirely possible and or probable that you feel the exact opposite of what is true and just, if you doubt your emotions to that degree, Then you're completely crippled.
Not doubting your emotions does not mean that you act them out.
If I say, I'm going to trust that when I'm angry there's something to be angry about, this does not mean that I become abusive.
If Christina does something that makes me angry, I don't get to say, you witch!
I'm angry, you've done bad things, blah, blah, blah.
That's just acting out your emotions.
To trust your emotions is to trust that you're not such a short-circuiting nightmare that you're processing everything backwards.
But to say that I am sensitive, not that I am paranoid, is an essential aspect of self-trust.
Of self-trust.
And it's where you've got to go.
I mean, it's where you have to go.
I mean, unless radically proven otherwise.
And this is not going to happen.
So, the question then becomes not, am I overreacting or am I whatever, whatever, right?
But... What am I processing that I have been sensitized to in the past?
This is a great gift.
To take a sort of silly example, if you have injured your bone or you broke a leg or something like that, it healed badly, and now you get aches and pains Twelve hours before there's going to be a thunderstorm, a change in pressure, and it causes your marrow to do whatever it does, and your aches and pains.
Ah, my bunions! Oh, tell me when there's going to be a storm!
Well, you're a damn valuable person to have around if you're a pirate, if you're on a sailing ship, right?
Because what they do, you know, red sky at night, sailors delight, red sky at dawn, sailors be warned, what your pirate buddies are going to do is they're going to say, does your foot hurt, my lad?
And you say, no.
It's like, then a pirate and we will go in the morning.
And if you say, yes, it hurts, then it's like, no pirate and let's go to karaoke.
Right? So this kind of early warning system that people who've been in abusive situations have is not paranoia.
It's sensitivity. And by that, I do not mean hypersensitivity or oversensitivity or anything like that.
What I mean is, it's just...
It's an early warning system.
Wouldn't you want that?
I mean, you don't want that to the point where you put yourself in abusive situations.
But it is the warning signs that...
We can see that other people can't see.
Why? Just because we've been trained and we've been sensitized to these very things.
So, as far as emotional accuracy and self-trust goes, I actually would strongly advocate that an abusive history is a great asset.
Provided there is A. Self-trust and B. A refusal to act out.
In other words, honesty. So if your wife is doing something that seems innocuous but makes you mad, then you say to your wife, I know it seems innocuous, but I feel really mad.
Because that's the truth of the situation.
I know it seems innocuous, but I feel very angry.
I don't know if it's what you're doing, I don't know if it's what you're doing, but I think we need to explore it.
Because this is very helpful.
This is very helpful.
So, for instance, if I... I don't know.
There are some kids over at my house, and we're playing...
Some game and there's some kids playing hide and seek or boo or something and there's some kid in the living room and I jump up and go boo and this kid screams and faints and I find out he's got a panic disorder or a weak heart or something that makes that game inappropriate.
Well, that's important for me to know.
Right? Because the first time this happens, obviously I'm not to blame.
I don't know, right? If I feed the allergic kid peanuts without having any clue...
Or with having evidence to the contrary, it's not my fault.
If I find out this kid has peanuts and sneak some peanut butter into his sandwich, again, freaks and geeks, go watch it, then clearly I am malicious.
Right? If I hug someone without knowing that their arm is broken, then that's accidental.
If they tell me their arm's broken, and then I sneak up and hug them again, then clearly I want to cause them pain and so on, right?
So... The reason that you will say to your wife, I mean other than integrity and honesty and good for the relationship and so on, the reason that you will say to your wife, what you're doing is really, I feel really upset at what you're doing.
This doesn't mean that you're causing it or anything, but this is what's happening.
When you do X, I feel really bad.
Well, what does she do with that knowledge?
When you say, when you push on this part of my thigh, I feel really pain.
It causes great pain sometimes.
For me. Not emotional, but physical, right?
Well, if tomorrow she comes up and pushes on that part of your thigh again, what does that mean?
It means that she now knows that it causes you pain, and she's doing it.
That's not good, right?
That's not good. So, that's why you sort of are honest about these things.
But I think that...
If you're patient, then you can get some really productive and wonderful things out of these kinds of interactions.
So if you feel angry, you say, whoa, whoa, stop the train.
Something's going on. I just felt really angry.
So let's step back and figure out what's going on.
And I can guarantee you, my brother...
That you will find out that your wife was not listening to you, but was pretending that she was, or was claiming that she was.
And in your experience, right, in your family and so on, I'm not saying your wife is your mom or anything, but in your experience in your family, that leads to bad things, right?
That leads to bad things.
The reason the lung doctor says stop smoking is because he's seen people die of cancer.
He knows where it leads, right?
So he's sensitive to the negative aspects of having a cigarette.
So we've seen where hypocrisy or pretending to listen or having a value called listening but not in fact listening or listening only to manipulate and control.
We know, we survivors, we heroes of the childhood apocalypsi, we know where this leads.
So we see 10 people die, 1,000 people, a million people die of cancer.
Somebody puts a cigarette in, we recoil because somebody's not smoking a cigarette.
We recoil because we know where it leads.
Is that an overreaction?
No, hell no. Because people do die of cancer in horrible ways because they smoke.
So, no, I would not call it an overreaction at all.
I would say that you're sensitive to it, which is damn good.
You want to be sensitive to these things.
You want to be sensitive to these things.
You don't want to wait until your entire jaw is rotting away before you feel a toothache.
The earlier you feel it, the more likely you'll be able to save the tooth.
Sensitivity is good. Sensitivity is good.
It's just that, unfortunately, in our childhoods, it is used to control, manipulate, and undermine us and try to destroy us.
So no, don't assume that you're overreacting.
Assume that you're perfectly accurate.
Not that it's all your wife's fault and this and that, right?
I mean, don't stop blaming her, but just say, hey, you know, when you push on that, I feel real pain.
And it's because we know the effects of these kinds of first causes that we are sensitive to it, and we mistake that for overreaction hypersensitivity, right?
We think we're allergic, but it's not.
It's an immune system, right?
Right? I mean, an allergy is a hyper-response of the immune system to innocuous objects.
We don't want to think of our emotional apparatus as allergic to reality, right?
We're not making things up.
We're not paranoid. We want to think of our immune system...
But we want our immune system to be as sensitive as possible, right?
So that it gets whatever is getting us early and quickly.
So I would really...
Just walk away from the idea that your emotional apparatus is wrong.
The fundamental effect of power, the fundamental purpose of power is to tell us that our emotions are screwed up and incorrect, to take away our rudders and our guides and our navigation and our compasses so that we're adrift at the whim of those in power.
We have no integrity. We have no emotional integrity.
We have no faith or trust in ourselves.
But we are rendered weak and self-doubting by continual attacks upon the veracity and integrity of our emotional apparatus and our instincts.
No, I say a thousand times no.
We are not broken.
We are not broken.
Our emotions are not our enemies.
We are not paranoid. We are not imaginary.
We are not allergic to reality.
We are sensitive to infection.
And that, and that, is the great strength that we bring to bear that will save the world.
So, from saving your marriage to saving the world.
There we go. Next. This is from the gentleman who...
It was suffering from the depression, which we talked about a few podcasts ago.
Is it possible to learn how to love?
In my recent introspection and analysis of my childhood, I think I have developed, sorry, I think I have identified some of the causes that have disadvantaged me in terms of knowing how to develop normal relationships.
Between birth and high school, our family moved about 14 times.
Which meant that I was leaving friends all the time.
I think this may have made me subconsciously avoid making connections with people to avoid the feelings I got when I had to leave.
My parents' relationship was also completely devoid of love from the time I can remember.
I only realized this retrospectively, as it was completely normal for me, as it was all I knew.
The first inkling I got of this was a friend of mine who stayed with us for a while, commented, What's up with your parents?
I've never seen them hug. At the time, I dismissed it, but now I realize that it was very true.
During my high school years, my dad worked away from home to avoid conflict with my mom.
After the divorce, he told me that he didn't divorce her for 15 years prior because he wanted to keep the family together for the sake of my brother and I. He also said that he isn't sure if he did the right thing, that maybe it would have been better if he had ended it when we were much younger, and apologized to me.
I did feel fairly close to my dad, although there was no ongoing relationship per se when I was growing up.
I remember vividly a moment in my childhood when I was six years old.
During the then-regular mother-child ritual of exchanging a kiss in the words, I love you, my mother did it, but I didn't reciprocate.
She asked me why I refused, and I couldn't consciously identify a reason.
I just knew it didn't feel right at the time.
To this day, I have never used that phrase or kissed anyone, and I now realize I have no idea what love is, but I'm quite sure I have not experienced it.
In other types of relationships through my life, I've always kept a small circle, usually having only a single person who I would consider a good friend at any one time.
I also knew that some of my actions towards people in terms of emotional connection weren't based on my own feelings but copying social norms.
I don't mean I didn't feel any connection to people.
I did. It just wasn't as much as I should in compared to society's norm.
This norm guy's got it made.
I have never had a romantic relationship, but have felt in the past that I would like one, probably because I could see that some other people in them were very happy.
I guess this could have even come from the media, the love stories in movies and on television, but I'm not really sure.
About 18 months ago, I was put on antidepressants that did not have any noticeable effect on my depression.
But they did have the side effect of removing any type of emotion connecting me to other people.
I do not feel any type of attachment with other people anymore.
If my friends or family were to die tomorrow, I don't think I would be upset.
And that makes me feel guilty for not reciprocating their feelings.
Although these antidepressants aren't working for their intended purpose, I've been told that I will probably have to be on them for life, even if my other treatments, ECT starting next week, and talk therapy are successful because they would be required to prevent any future relapses in the future.
Sorry for the long-winded letter, but I'm wondering if you think that it's possible to have any type of romantic relationship in the future.
Thank you very much for what you do.
Well, of course, you're welcome. I'm not a doctor, of course, but I have read enough to know that...
It's not true that you will have to be on antidepressants for the rest of your life.
I do know that people will make a fortune selling you antidepressants for the rest of your life, but antidepressants are one of the least medically correlated cures in the history of the planet.
80% of the supposed cure of antidepressants comes from the placebo effect.
And the other 20% seems to me to fall roughly within the perfectly acceptable bounds of statistical error for self-reporting situations.
So I'm going to read an article on the profitability of depression, the business of depression, a little bit tomorrow or on the weekend.
So that you can get a sense of what's going on.
But no, I do not believe that depression, with rare exceptions, is biochemical in nature.
And I do not believe that you will need to be on antidepressants for the rest of your life.
I think that is exploitive.
I think that is nonsensical.
I think that is destructive. And I think that that advice is fundamentally so corrupt that it takes my breath away.
As we've talked about before, you were in the mental health system for a hell of a long time.
And nobody ever mentioned that it might have something to do with your history and your family, right?
Because they don't make money from curing you, my friend.
They don't make money from curing you.
I spent 18 months with insomnia and depression, and I cured myself through a rigid application of therapy and principled living.
Reject the concept that your body is out to get you.
Thank you.
This is medical theology.
It's medical theology.
Exactly the goddamn same as the Catholic Church saying you're plagued with original sin and you've got to pay a priest for the rest of your life to be free of it.
Well, you're plagued with a biochemical deficiency and you must pay us for the rest of their life to be free of it.
Nonsense. It's nonsense.
It's worse than nonsense. It's corruption in the extreme.
Even the serotonin link is deficient of serotonin.
It's never been proven. Never been proven.
For some of the depressants that are on the market, antidepressants that are on the market at the moment, The statistical correlation, once you took the placebo effect into account, right, so people giving sugar pills or inert pills and asked to sort of respond, was virtually indistinguishable.
It's just a whole bunch of flim-flam, a whole bunch of nonsense.
Your soul is sick from error.
Your brain is not deficient in serotonin or any of the other nonsense that goes on.
I'm not trying to be paranoid.
I'm not making things up. This is just the studies.
It's just the correlation. I'm a scientist, or at least I love science and respect the scientific method, which does not prove this correlation.
I never took sleeping pills.
I never took antidepressants.
I tell you, it was a hellish journey, but you don't have to go through that again.
At least I'm trying to put out a resource there that can shorten that.
So... No.
Do not. Do not look upon yourself as fundamentally and biochemically broken.
Your body is turning against you and making you miserable.
That is a not healthy perspective to have.
It's like all these kids on Ritalin.
It shrinks the brain mass 5-10%.
Ritalin on kids.
And there's no biochemical markers for ADHD. None.
And boys who have, quote, ADHD, have a symptomology that approaches normal when they're in the presence of their fathers, right?
If their fathers don't live with them, right?
So this is just boys raised by moms who have no idea how to raise boys.
Anyway, enough science.
We'll get into that another time.
But no, first of all, don't look at yourself as fundamentally broken, and don't take any of this nonsense, right?
People who never helped you make the correlation between your history and your present, right?
Have no goddamn right to tell you that you're fundamentally broken to their own profit and your detriment.
So, is it possible to learn love?
Is it possible, as you ask, to learn how to love?
Well, you already know.
And you say it very clearly in your letter.
You already know how to love.
You already know. So, when your friend says, what's up with your parents?
I've never seen them hug.
Well, you remember that statement.
Right? You remember that statement.
You say, between birth and high school, our family moved about 14 times, which meant I was leaving friends all the time.
I think this may have made me subconsciously avoid making connections with people to avoid the feelings I got when I had to leave.
No. No, that's not true.
And look, I mean, with all due sympathy, you're a very, very brilliant fellow, but this is just the propaganda that your family inflicted on you.
This is not true. This is not true.
The problem that you have is not that your family moved and thus you had to say goodbye to friends.
I know that's painful and I understand that.
That does not cause one to be fundamentally disconnected from people.
The problem is that you were not fundamentally or even tangentially connected to your family, to your parents, at any time.
Now, the effect of that was that you had to keep moving and your parents were restless and gypsy-like and piratical.
They had piratitude.
They were nomads because they weren't connected to anyone or anything.
So for them, moving was easy because they don't connect to anyone.
So it was as a result of their lack of connection that you grew up without being able to connect to people and the friendships and saying goodbye and moving, all that was just an effect of your parents' fundamental lack of connection to themselves.
To themselves. To themselves.
To themselves. So, again, you always, always, always, always, always, always have to go back to your relationship with your parents.
Core relationships, foundational relationships.
That's where your dysfunction arises from.
So you didn't end up with a lack of connection with people because your parents moved around.
Your parents had no connection with themselves, which they then inflicted on you, which allowed them, or in fact propelled them, to move around.
Continually. Right? So, you want to make sure you don't look at symptoms and say that they're causes.
You don't want to look at effects and confuse them with causes.
It's going to send you on a wild goose chase.
So, you don't want to look at the leaves falling and say, "Well, that's causing the cold." Then you'll miss the whole unifying principle of fall, winter, right?
And here's the clincher, right?
You know! You know what love is!
You say, I remember vividly a moment in my childhood when I was six years old during the then regular mother and child non-reunion ritual of exchanging a kiss and the words I love you, my mother did it, but I didn't reciprocate.
She asked me why I refused, and I couldn't consciously identify a reason.
I just knew that it didn't feel right at the time.
Well, why do you remember this vividly?
Because you know exactly what love is, and you know exactly what love is not.
One of the central reasons for your depression is that you have not localized the corruption that your parents had to them, but you have universalized it, as children are wont to do, to the world as a whole.
My parents are unloving, therefore the world is cold.
And of course what that means is that everyone is unloving, everybody will betray you.
That gets your parents off the hook at the expense of destroying your future.
I'm going to say that again, because this is very important.
You can identify your parents, you can extrapolate your parents' behavior to human nature, to the world, to all women are bitches, all guys are assholes.
I'm not saying that's you, but this is a common one, right?
Nobody's trustworthy. Everybody's going to betray me.
I mean, you can dilute your parents' specific bad actions to the world as a whole.
That certainly lets your parents off the hook.
But the unfortunate thing is that then you do become paranoid.
Right? If one black guy steals your wallet, you don't get to say all blacks are thieves.
Right? If your parents are jerks, cold, manipulative, unavailable, lying, false, hypocritical, whatever...
You can extrapolate that to the world as a whole, but that just has them win.
It has bad people win. It has bad people take away the good things in your life.
Like if someone betrays you, the rational response is, hey, that person betrayed me.
And I need to look at the habits that I have that brought this person into my life.
I need to look at any markers that this person had beforehand that...
I could see, so I can protect myself against this again, right?
If I rub marinade on myself and jump into a shark tank and get bitten, there are certain things that I can do to avoid getting bitten again.
No marinade, no shark tank.
Or if there is, no shark, right?
Those would be some fairly reasonable things.
But when we extrapolate these things to everyone, then there's no possibility of escaping it, right?
I mean, if I'm in a room where there's not very much oxygen and I feel weak, and I say, well, I'm on a planet with very little oxygen, there's no point leaving the room.
It's just going to be the same everywhere else.
But if I say there's air out there, there's outside with good oxygen, then I'm going to leave the room.
But it's very painful, because actually we're put into that room.
So, you absolutely know what love is because you rejected a lack of love from your mother, right?
You did not reciprocate.
But unfortunately, in that moment, you created a standard which left you bereft of love, right?
In general. Sorry, it's a little windy here.
It'll pass by in a moment. And that's the real shame.
Now, of course, you have a situation...
Wherein you've become very guarded, right?
Because you were exploited. Your mom didn't love you, but she said that she loved you, which is manipulative, self-serving, and destructive.
Which, of course, is exactly your father's quote motives for staying with your mom.
Oh, it was for the good of the children, blah, blah, blah.
Nonsense. Nonsense.
It was for his own comfort.
So just from these two incidents, I can absolutely guarantee you that your parents say that they do things for you when they are in fact doing them for themselves.
They are using you to manage their own emotions.
So your mother says she loves you not because she knows you and loves you or knows anything about love.
Your mother says she loves you because it makes her feel better.
It makes her feel like a good person, a good mom.
Well, this is what earthling mothers say to their offspring, to their spawn, to the fruit of their loins.
I love you. Right?
Input, mother-child. Output, love and affection.
Right? It's fundamentally destructive to say that you love anybody when you don't.
It confuses the child.
It's exploitive.
It's for your own needs.
Right?
My mom would hug me when she felt lonely.
Ew! I'm not a fucking chew toy.
I'm not a fucking pacifier.
I'm not here to serve your bottomless, neurotic, narcissistic needs.
And you got at the age of six, and I bet your bottom dollar you got it way before then, too.
That your mother was just saying, I love you.
To make herself feel better.
To play a part called good mother in her own mind.
It had nothing to do with you. It's so destructive and exploitive.
I can't even say it.
Sentimentality, right? Which is why you associate love with things that occur on television.
These sentimental stories.
When love is strong. Love is standing out for the best in someone.
Love is confronting someone you care about.
When they're doing things that are beneath them.
I was saying to Christina the other night in relation to some other situation.
I said, you know, she was thanking me because I had helped her get a sort of foo influence off her during the evening.
Something had happened. We don't have to go into it.
And she said, well, thank you so much for always looking.
I was like, I always want to look out for you to keep you safe, to keep you protected, to keep you secure.
I mean, if we were in the woods and a log fell on your leg, I'd lift it up.
And if we're walking down the street and you get a foo attack in your mind, then I'm going to help you roll that off, right?
Even if you don't see it at the time.
Right? I mean, if you're blind and I see a boulder coming down the hill towards you, and you can't hear or whatever, then I'm going to make sure you get out of the way.
Right? Because I love you.
Because I want to take care of you.
And she does the same for me.
But love is strong. Love is not sentimental.
Love is not fucking teddy bears and little stitched pillows and all that dewy-eyed crap that passes for love, all this hallmark bullshit that passes for love.
But love is strong.
Love is interventionist.
Love is being there to support the best in the person who's earned it.
And love is humility to submit To reason and evidence.
So... Yeah, don't think that you don't have a knowledge that you have.
Don't pretend ignorance. Just another way of defending your parents.
You don't have to be taught love to know love.
In fact, you know love a hell of a lot better if you've been taught the opposite.
Right? If you have been misfed, fed bad food your whole life as a kid and you grow up with...
Eating problems with your nutrition or overweight or whatever, right?
Then I guarantee you the possibility very strongly exists that you will end up knowing a hell of a lot more about nutrition than somebody who received a mere average or mediocre diet.
Something not particularly harmful but not particularly great.
If you're fed all this bad crap when you're a kid, and the difference is that this stuff can be reversed psychologically, but if you're fed all this bad stuff as a kid...
You're going to end up knowing a hell of a lot more about nutrition if you take that route than if you weren't fed bad stuff as a kid.
So, you already know love, right?
You don't have to know nutrition for healthy eating habits to keep you healthy.
And you don't have to be taught what love is in order to know what it's not.
That we get instinctually.
I bet you at the age of two or three, and if we could go back in our memories even further, you would be younger than that when you figured out the hypocrisy, sentimentality, and empty, useless, pawing, grabbing, you know, filling up their own emptiness with your scant resources as a child.
I bet you got all of that right away.
So you know exactly what love is not.
Which is... Very, very important in helping you understand what love is, right?
You already know that you're missing something.
At the age of six, you don't say, I love you.
You stop saying it thereafter.
But it's time to recognize that your parents are not everyone.
The world is not your family.
Your family is not the world, although it was when you were younger, and I can understand that as a self-protecting mechanism.
But it's time to climb out from under this abysmal shadow.
of your history and start taking risks and start evaluating and start falling down and start recognizing that you have a damn right to happiness and love and joy and that your knowledge what you have suffered is strength it can be strength next hello this is a lady So this is what has been on my mind.
I'm having second thoughts about this school I've been attending for the last three weeks.
I'm going full-time, so it enables me to work.
I moved back in with my parents about six months ago from not having lived there since I was 15.
I'm now 22. Pretty much, I was pressured into going to school, so I agreed to the first thing that came along just so everyone would get off my back because I'm constantly being compared to my sister, who I guess is everything going the, quote, right way in her life.
I know I did it for the wrong reasons, but I just wanted my family to be proud of me.
But I'm totally miserable, bored, and uninterested in this school.
I don't want anyone to be disappointed in me because my family has no faith in me to be something great.
But I'm just really unhappy with this school, and I can't imagine doing it for another year.
I also got a job offer that is a great opportunity.
My gut tells me not to pass it up.
So my question is, what do you think would be the best way of going about things?
Thank you! Well, my sister, I do have faith that you can be something great, something magnificent, something wonderful.
But there are a few barriers between here and there.
A few, shall we say, stepping stones between...
The slavery of the present and the glory of the future, which we should have a wee chattel about so that at least you can see where it is that I'm coming from and see how well it fits you.
Now, I have no history here, but I know that if somebody leaves home at 15, it's not because they are surrounded with an extraordinary multitude of joys.
So, obviously that was not good.
Clearly, you are the scapegoat, right?
So we have... It's always the case in a dysfunctional family...
Oh, my God, it's so wearyingly the same.
You know, Tolstoy said, every happy family is alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Nonsense, as Paul Johnson has pointed out.
It's nonsense. Every happy family has a great deal of variety.
Every unhappy family is always the goddamn same.
Right? Every man who is free has a different occupation.
Right? Everyone in prison is doing the same damn thing.
Variety is in liberty, as we can see with the example of the free market.
So, yeah, in every family there's the same goddamn pattern.
Especially with two siblings, right?
So, the same goddamn pattern is this.
One sibling is the hero of the family and all the good things on the planet.
And they are held up as a standard to the other sibling, who is richly humiliated for that.
And, uh... This is, of course, natural and inevitable.
This idea of a standard that is used to abuse others, it's the same in every goddamn ideology, right?
So, in Christianity, there's Jesus Christ, right?
Buddy Jay, who is held up as a standard by which all other human beings are humiliated, right?
Sinful, can't reach those levels of perfection, even remotely, and so on.
In communism, it's the collective man, right?
The sinewy worker for the people, the stern-jawed, right?
In the military, it's the guy who goes back for his buddy and, you know, even the bodies of the buddies.
You're retarded. You might as well go back for your spam.
So, there is this standard that is held up.
And in democracy, it's the obedient and civic-minded citizen who is held up as the ideal.
The military soldier who fights for his country is held up as the ideal.
The person who goes out and votes gets involved.
Zero emission footprint, zero carbon footprint is another bullshit standard that is held up.
And all this stuff is designed to make you feel bad about who you are, to never measure up, never be involved.
Enough. Because if they can get you to feel that you're never enough, you're just so much easier to control.
If they can set up a standard that you don't fulfill a tenth of a percent of, you feel minuscule.
You feel tiny. You feel like nothing.
You feel like dust in the wind of perfection.
And that means that you'll shut up and pay your taxes.
Go to war and be a slave.
Sorry, it's a long way and a hyperbole from where you are, but I just sort of mentioned this, that there is, of course, almost inevitably, a sibling who is considered to be the ideal human being, and all the other siblings are as nothing.
And it can be that just one sibling is singled out.
We've seen a couple of board members, right?
But there's always this reward and punishment situation or scenario, and it's always the truth-teller who is downgraded, who is attacked, who is bullied, who is rejected, who is held as contemptible and fundamentally, right?
Of course, the parents, right?
If parents produce one great child and one bad child, then clearly they're not good parents, right?
Clearly they're not good parents, right?
I mean, if I claim to be an expert gardener and I have two roses and one is dying and one is doing great, then clearly I'm not a great gardener.
It's just luck. But here's the question, my sister, which will set you free.
The question which is interwoven in your, you know, admirably brave and frank email to ask a therapist.
Here is the question that will set you free.
Are you sitting comfortably?
Are you strapped in, my sister?
The question that will set you free is this.
Why are you attempting to gain the approval of people who despise you?
You're like some black guy dancing around saying, Oh my God, I just wish I could figure out how the Klan would accept me as a member.
Like some atheist outside a church saying, God, what do I have to do to be a member of this church? .
Why, oh why, oh why, are you trying to please people who despise you and who you so clearly also despise?
It really makes no sense.
and It's like a Jew being frustrated that he can't join the Nazi party.
And the reason that I say that, of course, is that you mention it very clearly.
Right, so you tell me that you left since you were 15.
Well, of course that indicates that your parental situation is a nightmare.
Pretty much, you say, I was pressured into going to school, so I agreed to the first thing that came along, just so everyone would get off my back, because I'm constantly being compared to my sister, who I guess is everything going the right way in her life.
I know I did it for the wrong reasons, you said, but I just wanted my family to be proud of me.
But then you also say that your family has no faith in you to be something great.
I scared some walkers with my rant.
Sorry.
Right, so you say, I just wanted to get them off my back.
Okay.
But I don't really see how obeying bullies gets them off your back.
Right? I mean, explain this logic to me.
I just gave this asshole my lunch money because I wanted him to stop asking me for my lunch money.
Uh... Huh?
Say what? I mean, help me.
Step me through this logic, my sister.
I caved to my parents' demands so that they would stop making demands on me.
me.
Well, sister, you are training them to escalate their demands on you.
I don't want anyone to be disappointed in me, you say, because my family has no faith in me to be something great.
I totally get that.
And I say this with all the sympathy on the planet.
I really do. You might want to listen to the Women as Slaves podcast series that was more recent.
Because, I mean, it breaks my heart the way women are raised.
Not be able to express a preference.
Always go along with the flow.
Always bow down. Always be a slave.
Always praise those who enslave you.
And then complain, complain, complain.
I don't want anyone to be disappointed in me because my family has no faith in me to be something great.
Fuck your family, my sister.
Fuck their opinion of you.
The important thing is your opinion of you, not their opinion of you.
Who gives a shit, fundamentally, if a bunch of assholes you grew up with don't think you can amount to squat?
Who cares? Who cares?
It's your life!
It's your job! To figure out what your capabilities are, what your capacities are, how great you can be is up to you, not to them.
Don't want anybody to be disappointed in you?
How about being disappointed in yourself?
You are the standard that you have to rise to.
It is your self-respect that is essential, not whether other people respect you.
You must do things that make you proud of who you are, of yourself.
Not be a slave and hope that if you conform, people will stop yelling at you or putting you down or beating you up.
Don't live the life of a slave.
Don't live the life of a slave.
You're telling me quite clearly my parents are negative or abusive or they put me down.
They bully me, they ride me, right?
Right?
So clearly they're not nice people and they're not good for you and they're not interested in your preferences and they're not curious about you and they don't have any love for you and they don't care about you other than as a little machine that they can wind up to dance around in a broken manner so they can feel stronger.
Your gut says don't pass up this job opportunity.
See you next time.
Thank you.
Well, I obviously can't tell you, and only you can tell you whether this job opportunity is right for you, but I can tell you that staying in school to get your parents off your back is, I mean, you might as well just jump off a cliff.
You might as well just play Russian roulette.
It is going to completely destroy your capacity for future joy, love, happiness, security, success in life.
Every day that you stay in that school, if you're only there because your parents have bullied you, every single day you stay in that school, you are reinforcing the idea that you are only here to keep other people off your back and obey them because they might get mad at you.
What is that going to do to your future?
What is it doing right now to your sense of control over your own destiny?
To your sense of self-efficacy, of self-esteem, of value?
Well, I went to school because people might get mad at me, you see?
You're 22 years old!
And I totally understand, and I really do sympathize, with the basic fact that if you ditch school, everybody's going to roll their eyes and say, Gah, what a loser.
What a loser.
Can't even stay in school.
Can't get anything right. Never going to amount to anything.
Goddamn loser. Whatever this is they're going to do.
do, I totally get that that's going to happen.
And I totally get that that's painful.
And you can totally make the decision to obey assholes for the rest of your life and be miserable.
To gain temporary relief from anxiety by obeying people who can bully you.
So that you don't have to go through the pain of being bullied.
But you do have to go through the pain of being bullied if you ever want to live a life free of being bullied.
In order to stop eating shit sandwiches, they've really got to taste like shit.
So you say, well, I want them to be proud of me and blah blah blah, but they're bullying me and they're making me do this, that, and the other.
Well, nonsense. You don't want them to be proud of you.
I mean, please. I mean, I have a little more respect for my intuition and intelligence than that.
I mean, and it was a good try, I understand that.
I just want my parents to be proud of me.
Nonsense. The question to ask is, are you proud of your parents?
And are you proud of yourself?
And you're not proud of your parents, I know that, because you're telling me very openly that they're bad to you, they bully you and so on, right?
So you're not proud of your parents.
So if you're not proud of your parents and you don't respect them and you don't like them and you think they're bad people, which is exactly what you're saying to me, what do you think I'm going to say when you say, but I only want their respect?
I want them to be proud of me.
Nonsense. What you want to do, my sister, is to avoid the pain of being bullied by them.
And so you conform and so you say that you want these things and it's mealy-mouthed.
It's nonsense. You want to avoid the pain of being bullied and I sympathize with that and that we can work with.
But if you tell me that you just want them to be proud of you, you're lying to both of us.
And we have to face facts, right?
We have to face facts, and the facts are that your parents bully you and get you to do stuff, because you do it to avoid being bullied.
And you can do that. It's a perfectly viable choice.
But it's not because you want that respect, and it's not because you want to be free, and it's not because you want to have any self-respect.
It's because you want to avoid the short-term anxiety of disobeying people who are brutal.
So, sure, yeah, absolutely.
Don't, I mean...
Don't stay in school because other people tell you to.
Right? Don't surrender your autonomy out of fear and call it wanting people to be proud of you.
You look in the mirror and you say, I'm standing here in this school because I'm afraid that my parents are going to get mad at me.
I'm a 22-year-old woman.
Ten years past puberty.
I've been able to have children for almost a decade.
And I'm standing here in this school, in this mirror, in front of this mirror, and looking at years of education that I have no interest in.
I will submit to all of this empty, useless education that I don't care about because I'm afraid that mommy and daddy will be mad at me.
Can you really say that with a straight face to yourself?
Can you really say that?
I'm a 22-year-old adult, and I'm going to piss away years of my life because I'm afraid that mommy and daddy will be mad.
Please. Please, sister, don't even imagine that that's a remotely sensible thing to say.
And once you get that, oh, I'm here because I'm afraid mommy and daddy are going to be mad at me, then get them the hell out of your life.
You're 22 years old, what the hell do you need them for?
Take the job if it's the right job for you.
Trust your instincts and get the frick away from these idiots.
It's your life to live. Time to break the cycle.
Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you all soon.
Buy my book on Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion.
I really appreciate those who are purchasing it and the fine reviews that we're getting back from it.
I promise you it will absolutely help you in your daily life in a very powerful way.
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