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Sept. 2, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:14:27
856 The greatest gift...

...from the most unlikely source...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody. It's Steph.
It's 11 o'clock on the 2nd of September, 2007.
And I look forward to your donations.
It's been a little dry, of course, because it's a long weekend.
And late last week, I guess everyone's getting ready for school.
But if you could remember to feed your friendly neighborhood philosopher, I would certainly appreciate it.
And also, if you could buy a copy of my book on truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, I would really appreciate that too, and I'm sure that you will appreciate it even more.
So, without further ado, let us move on to something which has dropped into my inbox, which I think is quite fascinating.
And I hope that I will be able to do the subtlety of what my thoughts are justice.
It's always hard to It's funny, you know, whenever I finish a podcast, especially the really complex ones, I always feel like, oh man, I didn't get it.
I didn't do it justice. I didn't get down to getting done what I wanted to get done in terms of accuracy and flow and metaphor.
But then when I listen to it again, it's usually a little better than I thought, so I'll hope that that also is the case here.
So I've received an email from my brother.
Now, for those who don't know, I'll give you the two-second history.
My brother and I, I have just one brother, and he's two and a half years older than I am.
And... In the Randian world, he would make Peter Keating look like Howard Rock.
A relativist, a subjectivist, an emotional bully, a pretty sadistical older brother, torture, teasing, some physical violence, and so on.
And cleverly, of course, because I'm so committed to values when I was younger, I hung around with him.
I mean, we'd go for sometimes, sometimes up to a year without really talking, but anyway, we ended up going into business together because he went to therapy and he also went to the Landmark Forum.
And this made him...
it made him better, for sure, I mean, in a lot of ways, but it didn't really take in the long run.
So I stopped seeing him because a variety of significant, significant problems that occurred about seven or eight years ago.
I just simply broke with him and stopped seeing him.
I wanted to see my nieces, though, who I was a strong affection for.
And so we had a bit of a halting kind of relationship for a year or two after I got married.
But then problems inevitably arose again.
and so I stopped seeing him.
Anyway, so I blocked his emails, but I have one email account, a Hotmail one, that I didn't ever block him because I haven't ever received an email from him.
Earlier this year, he wanted to get in touch with me because he wanted some photographs that I had of us when we were kids because he was going to visit our father, who lives in Ireland but spends a lot of time in South Africa because for many years he lived in South Africa.
So, anyway, so I received this email, and I think it's very interesting.
I think it's very complex.
I believe it's very complex.
You can let me know what you think. But I think it's very interesting, and I hope that I can do, the subtlety of it, some kind of justice.
And when I say interesting, I don't mean it's really bad.
I mean, it is bad. But there's an interestingly positive or...
Almost, almost kind aspect to it when you read below, sort of two or three levels below the surface.
So let me see what I can...
Let me just read you the email and then...
This is an email that he wrote to our father.
I guess he's back from South Africa.
And I imagine, at least it would seem likely to me, that...
My father and my brother spent some time at least talking about me on Christina's suggestion because my father kept writing me emails a number of years ago that were chastising me vaguely and sometimes not so vaguely for not seeing my mother, who I have not seen in eight or nine years or had any contact with whatsoever.
Which I'm glad she's living this long.
It makes defooing all the more valuable, right?
I mean, it'd be kind of a bummer if you defooed with someone.
They died the next day. So long life and health to my mother makes that much more valuable.
So my father kept talking about how my mother was alone and she needed me and this and that.
And so in Christina's instigation, I wrote down the list of the crimes that my mother had committed against me and, of course, against my brother as well when we were younger, right?
Because as he's gotten older, my father, he's turned from an agnostic to a religious person because of guilt and so on, right?
Not many people like him, so he turns to an imaginary friend, as we do when we're very young and solitary.
And so I told my father about the crimes, the violence, the humiliation, the brutality, the insanity, and all this kind of stuff, the abandonment...
That it occurred in my family when my mother was in charge of it when I was a kid.
And said, well, this is why I don't see her.
Because she was... And he wrote back and he said, yes, your mother does seem to have some criminal tendencies, but still in the larger picture, blah, blah, blah.
But definitely things shied away from that.
So I've been very clear to my father about the crimes that my mother committed against me when I was a kid.
And that kept him at bay.
So he hasn't emailed me in a while.
Or if he has, it's just been news and weather and so on.
But I'm guessing that when my brother and my father were together in Africa, they spoke at length about me and my decision to slither away from this hellish prison of a family.
And the funny thing is that it's defooing in the moment, but it's not really defooing, because I now have a new family, which is my wife.
And it's wonderful, so...
So having rejected them, right, and this of course is a subject of great consternation to people when you reject them.
So it's my guess that they spent quite some time debating this issue, my decision to leave the family, when they were together in Africa this last summer.
And so my brother wrote an email to my father entitled, Relax, relax.
Dad! Relax, dad!
And the content of the email was this.
Dad, consider your job as a parent is to screw up your kids.
The kid's job is to get over it.
After seven years of apologizing to Steph, I finally realized three things.
One. That this is a game Steph plays, and he gets out of having to take any responsibility for himself or his life.
It's simple when it's everyone else's fault.
2. It's his loss.
I had a beautiful time with you in South Africa.
I love seeing Mom, and I'm proud you are both my parents.
3. I will always see the world as blue, and Steph will always see it as green.
I love him, but candidly I think he's full of shit, and his philosophy of righteousness is boring, and at this point more than a little pathetic.
Your time and opinions are yours, Dad, but I think it's a disservice to the Stefan I used to know, who was powerful, loving, and vibrant, to indulge him as some sorry victim of his past.
It's also a disservice to people that truly have suffered greatly, such as victims of concentration camps, sexual abuse and other horrors, who are able to forgive and move forward with love in their hearts.
Just my opinion, and not likely worth the paper it's written on.
Love, bro.
As I said, I don't want this to sound like fake, mature, or zen, but I actually found it quite funny to read because it's just so brilliantly and wildly hypocritical that I actually found it.
It's a short-circuiting nightmare of consistency, but it has, as these things always do, an amazing genius behind us.
Everybody's a genius and everybody's a philosopher.
You either make it conscious and use it for the power of good or you leave it unconscious, and it usually turns towards a rather rancid service of corruption and destruction.
But, I mean, the guy is brilliant.
I mean, it really is amazing.
It is absolutely and fundamentally astoundingly brilliant.
it.
And when you decide I mean, my brother is very intelligent, of course, and he has fantastic language skills, very funny.
But when you decide to turn the gifts that you have towards the surface of corruption, badness, evil, and so on, it is incredible what people come up with.
How amazingly detailed and florid and consistent.
Oh my god, it's genius!
It really is! You have to admire it.
As an evil contraption that is a work of brilliance.
So, I'm going to have two goes at this letter, with your kind indulgence.
And, of course, what do you care about, my brother and myself?
Not much, if any, but this, of course, is such a common situation, and I would imagine that my friendly British listeners know that pathetic thing that goes on in England, right?
That this kind of mad rage...
Is all the rage in England.
It has been for quite some time.
But in other areas as well, you will see this kind of rage to one degree or another in your communications with your family through the DFU process and afterwards.
So I'm guessing, if you are trying to and succeeding in living with integrity, that this is going to be your inbox as well.
So let's have a...
Let's have a little toodle, shall we, through the letter.
At one level, we'll look at the hostility, the tortured hostility, or the clear hostility.
And at another level, and this may surprise you, at another level, let's look at the tortured love that is in this, right?
But let's go through the first level, just so we can be clear what is being talked about up front.
So that we can do some work to unravel it and see what lies underneath.
So his dad, consider your job as a parent is to screw up your kids.
Your kid's job is to get over it.
Well, of course, what this means, of course, I mean, this is ha-ha, half a joke, but ha-ha, not so half a joke and not so ha-ha.
So when he says, he's a parent, right?
He's got two kids and teenagers.
Your job as a parent is to screw up your kids.
Your kid's job is to get over it.
This is a brilliant...
I mean, the man is a genius.
It's a brilliant, brilliant statement.
What it basically says is that if you hurt your children to the point where they don't forgive you, it's their fault for being immature.
Right? Right? Your job as a parent is to screw up your kids.
The kids' job is to get over it.
Because you screw up your kids by being hostile towards them and manipulating them for your own self-interest and being hypocritical and cold and cruel and all this kind of stuff.
Not to mention physically, sexually or emotionally abusive.
But the job of the parent is to screw up the kids.
The kids' job is to get over it.
Which, of course, means that if the kids don't get over it, it's their fault.
And, of course, the parent who screws up the child by rejecting the child's genuine experiences and using the child for his own selfish self-aggrandizement or justification, this parent, as the children get older and come up with criticisms about the parent, Then, if the kids don't get over it, the parent gets to continue the abuse.
I mean, this is brilliant. So, if you coldly reject your kids for their natural states, because you're, whatever, a bastard.
Use the technical term. Then, when your kids grow up and have criticisms of you, Then they are failing to get over it, in which case you can reject their experiences of pain as well.
Oh, get over it.
I mean, all parents screw up their kids and kids have to just grow up and get over it, right?
It gives you a lifelong pass to continue to reject your children and to blame them for any discomfort that they cause you and to hold them in contempt for I'm sorry,
you're so upset.
I mean, that kind of mealy mouth, fuck you kind of apology...
And all of these apologies, when I pointed out that these were not real apologies, were instantly converted into rage, right?
So they throw sand in your eyes, these kind of bastards, right?
They throw sand in your eyes, and then when you say, hey, you just threw sand in my eyes, then they punch you in the face, right?
So you get these kinds of apologies, which are, I'm sorry that you're such a frail and weak person that you're bothered by things that I took, actions that I took in the past which I had nothing but the best intentions with or for.
You know, I'm sorry that you're so pathetic.
Well, you know, I must say, that's not really much of an apology.
In fact, it's sort of an insult.
Well, if you can't handle an apology, screw you.
Fuck you, right? I mean, it's that kind of nonsense that goes on, right?
So, seven years of apologizing to Steph.
I finally realized three things, and of course, what is also funny about this...
Is that these three things which he claims to finally realize based on seven years of him striving to be a wonderful human being and help me to heal the wounds of the past that he inflicted and others.
He says, I finally realized three things.
But of course, these are the three things that have been a constant complaint of his or a criticism of his towards me since I don't know how long ago.
I can't really remember a time where they didn't occur, right?
So when I was sent to boarding school because of accidents of age, I was, you know, six years old and very young and the smallest kid, and I was picked on quite a bit, to some degree.
I shouldn't say it wasn't too bad. It's mostly verbal pick-ons, and I never got into any fights or anything, but I found it a scary environment.
It was a cold, weird boarding school environment, which my dad had kindly offered to send us to because he had such a wonderful experience there himself.
And of course, back then, my brother was like, you know, oh, stop sniveling and stop having, stop having self, you know, stop being so self-pitying and you're only embarrassing yourself and like all of these kinds of things.
Where he thinks that I just blame other people, never take responsibility for my life, and full of self-pity and self-righteousness.
These complaints have been going on since day one, right?
But of course, naturally, I mean, he's going to want to position these as conclusions that he has regretfully come to after 42 or 43 years of accumulated evidence when he's been only trying to do the best, but I continue to hang on to my mythology and all this kind of stuff, right?
So, So when he says, this is a game Steph plays, and he gets out of having to take any responsibility for himself or his life.
It's simple when it's everyone else's fault.
And, of course, the amazing thing is that this is, obviously, in all accuracy, a self-portrait of my brother.
So, my brother is taking no responsibility for what he has done, right?
So he says, after apologizing to Steph, but he never says what for, right?
For physical attacks, emotional attacks, abuse, you know, a teasing is a bad word, but it's sort of a mental kind of torture that goes on with this sort of stuff.
So there's never anything that occurs, right?
Joining in with mom and physically abusing you, right?
There's never any, it's like, well, I've apologized, you know, but there's never any detail about what you're apologizing for, which doesn't serve the self-portrait of somebody who keeps reaching out to somebody who's just self-pitying, enraged, and immature, i.e.
me, who just doesn't want to reciprocate.
Doesn't want to take any responsibility for himself or his life, he says about me, but of course in this situation he's not taking any responsibility.
He's not detailing what he was apologizing for or the wrongs that have been done that he committed, not just as a child, which I would have some forgiveness for, but which continued as an adult.
It's simple when it's everyone else's fault, but of course that's this situation, right?
So he just says, well, you know, I've done all this apologizing and And it's completely and now totally the ball's in Steph's court, and it has been for years, and I've struggled and striven to reach through to Steph, but he just rejects me, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that, of course, is a situation where he's taking no responsibility and blaming me for everything, right?
So when he says Steph doesn't take responsibility and blames everyone else, well, that, of course, is exactly a portrait of this email from his standpoint.
Now, the it's his loss, right?
So the second point that my brother makes, it's his loss.
Also, absolutely fascinating, and oh, oh, oh, so silly, right?
I mean, this tactic, which is used by elder siblings, right?
Which is when the younger sibling is hurt or upset or has a desire, right?
To join into the games which are usually better that the older siblings are playing and so on.
The older sibling basically has the power of exclusion, right?
Of saying, no, you're too young, you can't come with us, and you're too little, and so on.
Go find your own friends, and blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, that sort of stuff may work when you're sort of seven or eight or nine or ten years old, but this idea that we're all having great fun over here, Steph, but you're excluding yourself.
You're only hurting yourself, right?
Right? So if your older brother hits you and then you're sort of crying and you don't want to come, it's like, okay, but we're going to have a great deal of fun.
You're just hurting yourself, blah, blah, blah, right?
I mean, that kind of... This is what is so funny about this email is it's timeless in a weird kind of way, right?
I mean, the idea that I could have been over with this guy and my mom and my dad.
I don't know if my mom went to Africa.
I doubt it, right?
But the idea that I could...
Be over with my brother and my father in Africa and that, you know, there's a wonderful time that's being had there by everyone and I'm excluded.
I mean, that's just so completely bizarre.
That's so completely bizarre.
And so inappropriate to the age that we're at, right?
I mean, I'm 40 fucking years old.
I mean, at what point do I get to feel okay about not being invited to the screechy tea party?
Oh, too strange.
So here, then he says, I will always see the world as blue and Steph will always see it as green.
Again, absolutely brilliant.
He doesn't say that it's a moral difference that we have, which of course it fundamentally is a moral difference.
It's a difference that reaches all the way from metaphysics to epistemology to ethics and perhaps onto politics.
Who knows? But my brother is a relativist and a subjectivist and so on.
And naturally has all of the absolutist rage that relativists and subjectivists always have.
He says, I will always see the world as blue and Steph will always see it as green.
Which, of course, should absolve both of us of any responsibility.
Right? I will always and Steph will always.
Right? It's like, I will always see colors and Steph, who is colorblind, will never see colors.
That would sort of be an appropriate sort of analogy.
But, of course, if it's foreordained and preordained and it's always going to be the case and there's no possibility of anything else, then why get angry?
Right? Right?
Why would you get angry?
You see, it makes no sense.
And if it's just a matter of opinion between us, like aesthetics, blue and colors, right?
If we just have two different subjective experiences, and we have no capacity of seeing anything differently, which of course is the subjectivist standpoint, My brother always sees things as blue.
I will always see things as green.
So blue and green are clearly not better or worse states, not correct or incorrect, not subject to rationality or argument or debate or improvement.
There's no preferred states.
There can't be, if that's all you can see.
But if that's the case, then why would you get upset?
If it's just how it is, how it always will be, then why would you get upset?
But of course, when there is a difference of opinion, if you're a subjectivist, then no opinion is better than any other opinion.
Everything is relative, right?
Now, see, here's the problem that you have when you're a subjectivist, and I've had this argument with a couple of subjectivists, and it blows their freaking minds, so this is, I guess, another little arrow for your quiver, so to speak.
Man, it's beautiful out here.
I'm just doing my nature walk by the river.
And because it's a long weekend, there's nobody here.
One person. I thought it might be too crowded.
I have to sort of apologize to everyone for yelling in the woods.
But if you come across a real subjectivist, let's just say, let's go even more personal.
Let's say you have a brother who's a subjectivist.
Now, in a subjectivist, of course, no opinion is better than any other opinion.
Can't be, because they're a subjectivist.
So, if you have a brother, and you disagree on an opinion, and no opinion is better or worse than any other opinion, he believes, then clearly, in order to make the relationship go more smoothly, he should simply adopt your opinion.
Right? To metaphorise it, let's just say I'm such a crazy guy that if you don't wear a green sweater, then I won't have lunch with you.
And you really want to have lunch with me.
You say, I really, really want to have lunch with Steph, the crazy guy who really likes green sweaters.
And you say, it doesn't matter to me what I wear at all.
There's no such thing as better or worse dress.
And I say, I'm only going to have lunch with you if you wear a blue sweater.
I can't remember if I said blue or green.
It doesn't matter. A blue sweater.
And you say, well, it doesn't matter to me what I wear, but I desperately want to have lunch with you, and it doesn't matter to me what I wear.
And I say, great, well, I'm only going to have lunch with you if you wear a blue sweater.
And then you say, fuck you, I won't wear a blue sweater.
Do you see how insane that is?
If no opinion is better than any other opinion, which is, of course, the subjectivist position, if no opinion is better than any other opinion, and you desperately want to be close to someone who won't accept any but one opinion, just take on that opinion.
It doesn't matter, right? Nothing's better than anything else?
No opinion is better than any other?
So if you say, it doesn't matter to what I wear, and I'm desperate to have lunch with you, and I say, great, let's have lunch, You just have to wear a blue sweater.
And logically you'd say, great, if that's all I've got to do is wear a blue sweater, fantastic!
If all my brother wants to do is be close to me and he thinks that all opinions are equal, he should just adopt my opinion.
It's no skin off his nose, all opinions are equal.
Nothing's better or worse, so why not just adopt my...
Ah, but he can't, right?
This is the genius of these emails.
They're just amazing. They're just brilliant.
Now this is the best part.
This is the part that literally made me laugh out loud.
I love him, he says.
I love my brother so much.
Oh my god, my brother, my brother, my brother.
But candidly, I think he's full of shit.
And his philosophy of righteousness is boring, and at this point, more than a little pathetic.
I mean, that's just...
Oh my god, you've just got to love it.
So... So he's saying...
Oh my god, I guess he's saying...
I love Steph, who is full of shit, self-righteous, self-pitying, blames everybody else...
And completely and totally pathetic.
And I love him!
I have nothing positive to say about the guy.
Everything I say is the worst stuff.
I mean, he just left out the, you know, I don't know, raping hamsters or something.
I love this guy to death.
But oh my god, he is the worst guy on the planet.
Self-righteous, full of shit, boring, pathetic, repetitive, self-pitying, blames others, stuck in a story, manipulative.
But I love him!
Oh my god!
I mean, my god.
You could not write this in a script and have anybody...
You put that... You put those words into somebody's mouth, the audience would laugh.
And come on, tell me... Help me, you don't find this a little...
Oh my god, little buddy.
Oh my god, I'm sorry. I'm sorry.
Oh my god.
Oh god.
Must breathe, must breathe.
I'm sorry.
I just fast forward for a sec.
Ah!
Ha ha ha!
Oh no.
Okay.
I'm fine.
I mean...
I don't know. Okay.
On with the show! Oh my god, people.
You just gotta see how funny this is.
Okay. So.
Oh god, you've just got to see how just perfectly deranged...
So first he starts with...
It's just the difference of blue and green, right?
And this he does to avoid the problem of having to change his opinion since he's a relativist, right?
Since there is no difference between blue and green from a moral or any...
It's just mere aesthetics.
It's mere personal choice. It's mere personal preference, right?
So, if he says, it's just a matter of personal preference, and I desperately want to be close to Steph and so on, then clearly there's nothing to apologize for.
For him, right? Clearly, if there's no difference, if I believe that there's no difference between a blue and a green sweater, then I never would apologize for wearing a green sweater if you preferred I wear a blue sweater.
I could never apologize for that because it's meaningless.
Like, it means nothing.
It's blue and green.
So, earlier on, he says that there's no...
Like, he's apologized for seven years or whatever...
But for what?
It's just a blue and green thing.
I like ice cream and he likes pecan pie.
Would you ever walk up to someone and say, I apologize for liking pecan pie?
Well, of course not. It's just a subjective preference.
It means nothing. It's just such a tangled, amazingly brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, brilliant, I promise you, an amazingly brilliant entangled knot.
And underneath, which we'll get to shortly, oh, the tortured love.
So, of course, when he attacks me, when he says, oh, it's a game Steph plays, full of self-pity, self-righteous, and blames everybody else, and so on, right?
Boring, and that I'm insane, and just really a nasty, self-righteous, pathetic, full of shit guy, right?
But of course, that's not exactly the difference between blue and green.
Right? That's not the difference between blue and green.
I mean, if I say that, you know, he just likes ice cream, and I like pecan pie.
But people who like ice cream are totally full of shit, and self-righteous, boring, and totally pathetic for liking pecan pie.
Oh man, it's brilliant.
It's brilliant. He has to say that it's just a difference of opinion in order to put me down.
To portray me as the intolerant one.
Hey, it's just a matter between blue and green, but Steph gets all hung up on the difference between blue and green and won't forgive anyone who likes blue.
But of course, then he has the problem of if it's immaterial, why doesn't he just change his opinion?
If it doesn't matter, if it's just blue and green, he has to portray me as the intransigent one.
But, of course, the reality is, if it's just blue and green, just change your opinion.
Right? I mean, naturally, of course, since I work at home and I'm a guy, right?
I mean, I'll go in gym shorts, or not gym shorts, but even rattier than gym shorts, and some shorts with paint on them or whatever.
I'll go with Christina to get some lunch with that, and she'll ask me to put on some nicer shorts, right?
Do I think it's a moral argument?
No. Do I put the shorts on?
Of course I do. Do I think it's particularly important?
No. But it makes Christina happy, so why not?
I mean, what do I care, right?
It takes me two seconds to put some nice shorts on.
Because that is truly a difference between blue and green.
I'd consider it a massive violation of my integrity to change shorts.
It makes Christina happy, so I'll just change, right?
And that's the reality. When you say to somebody, everything's subjective, you just change your opinion to match theirs if you want to have a relationship with them.
It doesn't matter, because all relationships...
It's just blue and green. Brilliant.
And then he says, And of course, why does he have to praise me in the past?
Remember, he copied me on this email, which is not accidental.
I don't accidentally type in my name, right?
So, why is it that he wanted to portray me as better, stronger, wiser, more noble in the past, but shrunken and deficient now?
Right? So, let's say that I have a doctor who is treating me for cancer.
And while I was in that doctor's care, I got worse and worse and worse.
And then I left that doctor and found that he'd been practicing really bad medicine.
Or I left him because I'd been found that he had leeches and nonsense like that.
And prayer. It was some faith healer nonsense and crystals and so on.
So my cancer got worse and worse while I was in that doctor's care.
And then I go to a new doctor, who's actually a real doctor, and I get better.
Much, much better. Better than I even was before I got cancer.
Well, what is the doctor, the quote doctor, who made me sick, or who exacerbated my illness, what's his defense going to be?
No, he was doing great under my care.
He was doing great under my care.
And he's doing much worse now that he's left.
Like, what's he going to put in his other ads, right?
So, let's say it's some high-profile thing, right?
I leave, which destroys his credibility or undermines it.
What's he going to say to his new patients?
Right? I'm some high-profile patient and I left this doctor's care.
Oh, he's going to have to say to that new guy, oh, that guy's crazy, what a hypochondriac, he has no idea.
He was doing great under my care, and now he's left my care, he's doing terribly!
Right. That's inevitable.
That he has to portray that when I knew him, when we were together, when we were close, quote close, that I was great.
That when I was his best buddy brother, That I was strong and...
What does he say here?
Powerful, loving, and vibrant.
But now that I have left him, I am weak and pathetic and boring and useless and self-righteous and blaming and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So I couldn't have left him and become healthier.
And heaven forbid that the thought even cross his mind, which of course it has millions of times, that...
It was an act of taking responsibility for my life that had me get the fuck away from that poisonous vat of the foo.
Foo bar.
The foo cage.
Fucked up beyond all repair.
Foo bar.
The cell of the cells.
Biology. Biology.
That it was me taking responsibility that got me out of that family.
Me taking responsibility for my own life.
And saying, you know what? I'm not going to spend the rest of my life trying to change people.
I'm not. I'm going to accept them as who they are.
I'm not going to ask them to change for me.
When we have the fantasy that people will change for us, then we get stuck in these relationships.
You accept that people aren't going to change.
Who are these people now?
Do I want them in my life?
Right? Forget the fantasies of change and omnipotence and, ooh, I've got this magic power to reshape people according to my own will and better values and blah, blah, blah.
No. Who are they?
Especially your family.
You've known them for decades, right?
As they are, are they people that I want in my life?
That's taking responsibility for your decisions, not living in a fantasy realm of changing others or swallowing hurt or whatever, right?
And once you say, well, who are these people as they are now?
And do I want these people in my life based on who they are now?
Not based on my fantasies of change or what they might become.
What I could remake them into.
I could just clone them and turn them into sane people or whatever.
Taking responsibility means rejecting responsibility for the most part.
And this is the paradox.
It seems like a paradox, but it's not.
Taking responsibility means rejecting responsibility for the most part.
Taking responsibility for voting means rejecting voting.
Taking responsibility for your life means rejecting responsibility for other people.
Because you are not responsible.
I mean, assuming they're not your children, this family, right?
You're not responsible for other people, for their choices, for their decisions, for their values, for whatever they're doing in their life, for their reactions to what you say.
You're not responsible for any of that.
So taking responsibility for my life was rejecting a false responsibility, a myriad of false responsibilities, right?
So I was in business with corrupt people.
Taking responsibility for that meant giving up the fantasy that I could somehow work to ameliorate that corruption or change them or make them better or show them a better way or lead by example or whatever.
Rejecting all of that responsibility was taking responsibility.
I only can control what I do.
I cannot control what anybody else does.
It's impossible.
To shove a Cadillac up your nose.
So taking responsibility is rejecting responsibility for the decisions of others.
And I don't mean that with any hedge, any qualm, any holdback.
Rejecting responsibility for others' decisions, others' choices.
so you're not responsible for the decisions and the choices that other people make some sorry victim of his past right To indulge him as some sorry victim of his past.
Now that's fascinating, right?
The insults are highly personal.
It's my values, it's my self-pity, my self-righteousness.
All of these things are highly personalized.
It's all about Steph.
But when it comes to those who abused me, Suddenly, oh look, the neutron bomb has gone off.
There is the past, but there are no people here.
What am I a victim of?
Being beaten? No!
The past! Am I a victim of sadistic torture?
By my brother or my mother?
No! Do you go back to the past?
It's an empty city.
It's an empty world. The only thing that's there is the past.
There are no people doing things.
There's just the past happening.
I am a victim not of abuse, not of abuse by specific people, but the past.
Oh, look, it's the past.
Waving. Wave to the past, everybody.
There's nobody there. It's also a disservice, he says, to people that truly have suffered greatly.
That truly have suffered greatly.
Truly have suffered greatly.
Well, of course, I did suffer greatly.
And he's saying, but truly, really suffered greatly.
Really. Not faking it to make other people feel guilty.
Not hanging out in a distorted mirror of self-pity and blaming everybody.
People who've really suffered.
Concentration camp victims, sexual abuse, and other horrors.
Those people have really...
Steph didn't really suffer at all.
Well, and of course, that's sociopathic in essence, right?
Right. My victims are faking it.
I hurt them because I love their pain.
But then when they cry out in pain, they're just faking it and trying to manipulate me.
Steph, he's just wallowing in self-pity.
He was never really hurt.
Of course, there's zero empathy in any of that, right?
But he can't have empathy because he was a perpetrator, right?
Now, these people who I have, I guess in my brother's mind, right?
I have a pain scale of 2, and these other people have a pain scale of 10, but I'm clamoring forward saying, oh no, mine's 10, mine's 50.
But even those people who genuinely do, who have suffered real pain, those people are able to forgive and move forward with love in their hearts.
Oh no! God help us.
God help this fucking planet.
Move forward, he says, with love in their hearts.
I wonder, I just wonder, I wonder, in general.
I wonder if love in your heart means that you say that it's your job to screw up your kids.
I wonder if love in your heart says that people that you have abused don't take any responsibility, they blame everybody else.
I wonder if, like moving forward with love in your heart, looks like calling somebody full of shit.
Philosophy, self-righteous, is boring and pathetic.
Does that sound to you like somebody who is committed to moving forward with love in his heart?
I would submit, not so much.
Not so much, right?
Because, you see, I'm a little machine that is supposed to provide other people what they want.
I'm supposed to say to people, I forgive you because they feel bad.
Right? And if somehow I get the program wrong and say, you know, I don't forgive you, then I must be banged like a broken television until I get the words right.
Because you see, I'm really only supposed to be there to qualm the guilty horror of bad people.
Right? I'm not supposed to have my own judgments or my own experience.
That's bad!
I am supposed to be a little forgiveness machine, the way that my brother is, towards my mother and father.
towards everyone in that family except for me.
You see, this is the amazing thing about this letter, right?
So he says... I love seeing mom and dad, and I'm proud.
I love seeing mom and you, and I'm proud that you are both my parents.
I'm proud that you are both my parents.
Of course, these are the parents who abused both of us, of course.
But at least I sort of remember it and recognize it.
So this is the moral hierarchy.
This is the moral hierarchy that is put forward.
You can scream at your helpless kids.
You can beat them.
You can throw objects at them that they must duck like terrified and tiny ninjas.
You can scream at them.
You can keep them up all night.
You can abandon them to go date guys in other countries, leaving them for two weeks with 20 bucks so they have to go to their friends' places and beg for food, basically.
You can abandon your children to crazy, evil, violent German women.
If you are that German woman, you can also abandon your kids and then move out to Vancouver when they're like 15.
Good luck, kids! You can scream at the children and hit them anytime you are contradicted or anytime they say something that you don't like.
And then you can never apologize for it.
And if you are that kind of person, my brother feels towards you love and admiration.
Love and admiration.
Those abusers, those violent, evil, brutal, child-beating children...
Ah, do they not evoke in me the glow and the glory of love?
Without question, without comment, without criticism of any kind.
Nothing but a glorious sunlight of love bathing the planet of abusers in warm and radiant rays.
That is true love.
The high regard for the abusers is uncomplicated, pure, perfect, true, and wonderful love, respect, and devotion.
Now, of course, I have never beaten a child.
Never beaten anyone, right?
I don't scream at anyone but around you, but I'm not screaming at you.
I'm screaming near you.
I don't abuse people.
I haven't hurt the helpless.
So in this moral hierarchy, in this family, full of child abusers and violent, hostile, degrading, insane people, humiliating people, who is the one person, who is the one person who was singled out for abuse?
Why? It's the person who says, hey, you know what?
There's abuse in this family.
There's abuse in this family.
You know, we have a cycle of abuse going on here.
And unless we are committed as a family to solve this problem through therapy, through introspection, through honesty and with the parents as the primary people of responsibility then I'm going to not be part of this family.
Right? If you grow up in the mafia and you have any sense of ethics, at one point you say, you know what, we're going to go legit or I'm out of here.
and then among the murderers and rapists and people who, the enforcers and the thugs and the brutes, the only moral outrage that cries clamor to the very heavens is the person who says, not the person who abuses, but the person who says, hey, there's abuse.
Right?
He loves, without qualification, without criticism, without any reservation, he loves our abusive parents. ...
And then he says he loves me, but the criticisms that he has of me are savage.
Savage! This is the hierarchy that these sadists work with.
People who beat up children, you love them.
People who don't want to associate with unrepentant child abusers, those are the bad people on this planet.
Those are the people that you can never forgive.
Those are the people that you must attack, attack, attack!
Isn't that amazing?
And of course, he wants me to move forward with love in my heart.
Why? Because it's a whole lot easier to Deal with your guilt by bullying your victims into forgiving you than it is to actually look in the mirror and say, gee, I've done some bad things.
Really bad things. So, anyway, listen, we could spend more time on this, but I wanted to get to level two and I won't yell anymore.
Sorry. It's quite a stirring email and I'm certainly glad to have received it.
And let me move on to that part, right?
Why did I laugh? Why did I laugh?
Well, there is a couple of layers down in this email.
An incredibly kind thing that is occurring.
And this is probably about the kindest thing that my brother has ever done for me.
Ever done for me.
Of course, I've talked about closure and certainty, and I don't have any particular issues around closure with my brother, but it never hurts to get more evidence as to why you don't have people in your life.
But I'll tell you why I think it's so kind.
But let's look at the cruelty first.
Not the cruelty towards me, but the cruelty towards my father.
This all ties into the mom as well, so we won't bother with that.
You can just apply the same principles.
My father clearly is experiencing quite a lot of guilt.
And this tends to happen when you get old, right?
He's in his late 70s, so he's probably not got more than 5 or 10 more years, and on average probably closer to 5.
Although he's a healthy guy, and lots of my family live to be 90, so it could be longer.
But my father is getting older, and when you get older and you start to look at that grim wall which you can't get around, Which your body passes through, but which you do not, which is mortality, then you realize.
You say, oh, I've got a couple of years left.
It's what Dustin Hoffman said about turning 50.
He said, 40, you know, you can double the age, you're still alive.
50, not so much. 60, no way.
So you get that you're more than halfway done.
Late 70s, you're like 90% done.
So you realize that there's not an infinity of time in the future that you have.
Things aren't just going to write themselves somewhere down the road because you can see the dead end of the road.
So you don't have an infinity of choices and navigation to make.
So my father is looking at his life as a thing that has shape that is almost complete.
And, I mean, he's an intelligent man and given to...
I guess mildly obsessive bouts of introspection and not immune to guilt and so on.
And of course the religion is doing some work on him this way as well.
I'm not saying it's positive, but it's definitely there.
So he wants to make his peace.
He wants to make his peace, my father.
He wants to make his peace.
And he's feeling guilty and Of course, he wants to make his peace in particular, too, because of the religion, right?
Which means he wants to make his peace not with God.
Sorry, not with me, but with God, which is the cheat, right?
Fundamentally, he doesn't need my forgiveness, but God's forgiveness, which he can get through self-manipulation.
He doesn't have to deal with me.
So clearly my father is troubled by what has happened in his life and the decisions that he's made and the wrong, the evil that he's done.
And in so doing, by so feeling and by talking about it, he is trying to gain some sort of closure, some sort of peace with regards he is trying to gain some sort of closure, some sort of peace with regards to the *laughs*
And then along comes my brother, who says, Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, don't get sucked into Stefan's self-pity.
Come on. Don't fall for that.
Don't be ridiculous.
This is just Steph's nonsensical, bullshit, boring, pathetic, self-justifying nonsense about how hard done by he was.
Don't let him manipulate you that way.
Don't get sucked into his sorry-ass tale.
Well... Who is really the most angry at my father?
I have told him the truth, and I leave him alone.
He can do with the truth what he will.
And if he were to try to contact me to ask for forgiveness, I would say, it's not mine to give.
There's no possibility of any of that.
Because there's no possibility for restitution.
Right now, if he were to send me, I don't know, The price of therapy, you know, then I would say that is showing some responsibility and I can at least respect that.
Or if he were to do something tangible, maybe he set up a $50,000 foundation to help abuse children.
It doesn't have to be money to me, although whatever, it'd be nice, but I would be fine with that too.
You're taking some responsibility, acknowledging the past, you're doing something to try to ameliorate the wrong that you've done.
I can't forgive him because he can't undo the past.
Forgiveness involves restitution.
If somebody cuts my leg off, I can never forgive them because it can't make my leg grow back.
The best I can do is decide not to prosecute, which of course has been my choice with my family of origin.
But I would not say to him, Dad, you did nothing wrong.
Because that would be the cruelest thing that I could conceivably, conceivably, imaginarily do.
To say to my father, who was wracked with guilt about the wrongs that he has done, the irrevocable wrongs that he has done, who is facing the end of his life, wracked with guilt.
To say to my father, you did nothing wrong, would be cruel beyond anything I could imagine.
If Christina complained of a toothache and I kept putting painkillers into her coffee and then she said, you know, my toothache just went away, but the rot was running throughout her gums and into her jaw and into her bloodstream and into her marrow and killed her, I would be a murderer.
By injecting the heroin of forgiveness into the guilt-ridden infection of my father's soul, my brother is preventing salvation.
actively, consciously, preventing salvation.
Drugging the symptoms is not treating the cause.
Yes.
Morphine will not save you from a toothache.
it will merely ensure that the toothache will kill you.
What staggering cruelty is there?
there.
In saying to people who are wracked with guilt, you did no wrong.
What staggering cruelty is it to say to somebody who victimized a child?
Dad, you who victimized a child and brutalized a child.
Dad, the reality is that your child is victimizing you by making you feel guilty.
My brother is so full of rage towards our parents that he is willing to destroy himself to continue to harm them in the most subtle, corrosive, unpleasant, horrible, soul-destroying kind of manner.
He is willing to detonate all of his own values in order to cause my parents to continue without the pain of honest feedback.
He is willing to...
To use his own bone marrow to manufacture the morphine of forgiveness to drug them into inaction and despair.
Now that, my friends, is bottomless hatred.
He's even willing to join with them and continue to abuse me while calling them the victims to justify what they did so they won't change.
That's how much he hates them.
He is so full of rage that he is willing to be the rock that drags them underwater.
He throws himself in, sinks like a stone and hugs his parents tight.
And that is how much he hates them.
To justify and, quote, forgive an evil person is to cause them to die in that evil.
To never set them free.
But to reinforce all of their worst instincts.
Let me finish off by how this is kind to me.
About how this is such an unbelievable kindness to me.
It is actually quite touching. Let's say that you and I and a whole bunch of other people are really heavy drinkers.
Like alcoholics.
Like 8 drinks, 10 drinks, 12 drinks every night or two.
Serious alcoholics.
Wrecked our lives. Now, let's say somebody says, you know...
I don't know. I am really not feeling good about this drinking.
I really feel that I am destroying my life through my drinking.
And my kid looks at me when I come home stumbling drunk with such disappointment, with such fear, with such misery.
It just tears my heart in two.
Well, that's kind of an understatement, right?
And it's probably a fairly...
So, you come to me and you say this.
And I say to you, are you crazy?
Oh, come on!
There's nothing wrong with having a drink.
You don't have a problem.
You are, in fact, incredibly healthy and a fantastic father.
And your kid probably just wanted an increase in his allowance.
And he was just trying to bully you.
And he's just trying to manipulate you.
And don't fall for his bullshit.
You've got to be strong and be a dad that he can respect.
And don't let him manipulate you or turn into some pansy-ass bitch and spend the rest of his life trying to manipulate other people.
You've got to stand firm. And it's your absolute right.
You work hard. Have a drink.
Don't be such a pussy. Come on.
There's nothing wrong with what you're doing.
Is that not the cruelest thing that I could conceivably do to you?
That when you have the stirrings of a conscience, for me to crush it?
For me to attack you?
Through telling you there's nothing wrong, I love you to death, you're a wonderful father, and then to say that for you to look at the pain in your child's eyes and change your behavior would be wrong.
Would be wrong.
Am I not sealing you up in a tomb?
Am I not putting a stake right through the first stirrings of your true self?
Am I not lasering your forehead of your emerging soul and pulling the trigger 2,000 times?
That is real cruelty, my friends.
Saying that you love abusers, that they have done nothing wrong, that the only person who's bad in the family, who's manipulative and destructive, is the guy who doesn't want to have anything to do with unrepentant abusers.
And then when those abusers...
Start to feel any kind of repentance, any kind of remorse.
To nip that in the bud.
To squash and crush the emergence of a soul and a conscience in the face of mortality is wildly cruel.
Wildly cruel.
There's a true self in my parents and there's a true self even in my brother.
Shouldn't say even it. It's not worse then.
When that conscience and that true self and that humanity and that empathy begins to emerge, to attack it as weakness and as cowardice and as self-manipulation, and to join in hurling abuse at the truth-teller of the family, is exquisite sadism.
Exquisite. But...
In that sadism is also an incredible kindness to me.
Now, the kindness to me, which you may see on the surface of this letter, is, yes, Steph, I'm still this guy.
I'm still this guy. Of course there's a kindness in that.
Because it alleviates doubt.
It alleviates doubt that I might have about the rightness of my course of action, which you may or may not feel that I have, and I don't particularly, but this stuff never hurts, right?
I mean, as far as that goes. But I'll tell you, if you will indulge me for just a few more minutes, and I do appreciate you hanging on for this lengthy chat, but we are, I think, becoming wise enough as a collective for that.
We can see this stuff for what it is and process it without sentimentality.
If I am in your drinking circle, right?
So let's say you're the bad guy now.
I'm in your drinking circle.
You're all drinking yourself to death.
You're abandoning your families.
You beat up on your kids.
You're just like a bunch of bad seeds, bad dads.
And I leave the group.
Right?
There's one of two things that you can do.
If I decide to leave the group, then you can either try to woo me back...
And I've seen this happen.
I had a friend when I was working at Caribou who got involved with a group of people that sadly reminded him of his hometown...
And I write about them a little into Goa.
And I was sort of saying, you know, you're getting kind of old.
Like, you're in your mid-twenties, isn't it kind of old and lame to get drunk once or twice every weekend?
And why is it that you have to get together with these people and drink, right?
Right? And I was there with him on birthday.
They goaded him into drinking, mixed his drinks, until he ends up being sick.
So I was really, in a sense, fighting for his soul.
And the guy who was in charge of that group said it very openly.
He says, yeah, yeah, you and I are in a total battle for Jacques' soul.
Got it. Now, this guy's cruelty was such that he wooed this guy back in.
He never attacked him.
He was always kind. He was always generous.
Hey, come over for a barbecue. We'd love to feed you.
Bring your friends, blah, blah, blah.
They were generous. They were kind.
They sucked him into the social alcoholism scene.
And he vanished into that and from my life.
I haven't seen him in years.
But by all reports, it's still the same.
See, that's real cruelty.
Now, if I leave this group...
The tortured kindness, the greatest and fundamentally most tortured, but still great kindness that you can do for me, is to attack me.
Because what does attacking me do?
It drives me away.
It drives me away, and that probably is the best you can do in terms of kindness, and probably is the kindest thing that you're capable of.
Given the state of your soul.
So if I decide not to come to some drinking weekend, some bleary-eyed cottage bullshit, I just remembered we went to see comedians, a friend of mine, we went to see a comedian. And this comedian was saying something like, you know, you're up to the cottage for the long weekend.
You know, I have this guy around. You're up to the cottage for the long weekend.
And you're all sitting there. It's like 2 o'clock in the afternoon.
Sun's beating down. You're just listening to some tunes.
You're relaxing. You've got a couple of beers in you.
And you're just feeling relaxed and mellow and relaxed and all that.
And then some guy, some fucking guy, always comes up and says, hey, let's play Pictionary.
And you're like, fuck off.
We're relaxing here, right? And, of course, I'm that guy, right?
Hey, let's play Pictionary. So that was kind of a running joke for a while.
But back to the serious topic at hand.
If I leave the group...
Let's switch it just so it's a bit more visceral.
If you leave the group and you say, you know what, I don't...
You know, I'm tempted.
I really am. Because, you know, these things are fun and there's great stories that come out of them.
But I'm telling you, I'm run down from all this drinking.
And I don't really think it's where I want to go in my life is to just keep drinking like this.
I feel like I'm getting too old for it.
And it's not me anymore.
Right? Now, if you don't try and woo me back in, but instead you call me a selfish asshole...
You know, you said you were coming, now you're not coming.
You damn well better pay for it and we're never going to invite you up again and you're a total asshole for doing this.
What the hell do you mean you're too old?
Don't be such a pussy and fuck you and this and that and the other, right?
Aren't you doing me just the most enormous service?
By driving me away, by driving me away from a hellaciously dysfunctional and self-destructive group, by driving me away, are you not saving me?
Is there not a form of twisted tribute and twisted love in that?
This is the on-the-waterfront thing, if you've ever seen that movie.
Drive me away.
Get the fuck out of here.
Get out of here. Run and don't look back.
I can't be saved, but I can at least drive you away, and that is the only good that I may be able to achieve in my sorry-ass excuse for a life.
And I would submit to you that although this letter looks like kindness to my parents and cruelty to me, it is in fact the complete opposite.
It is in fact the complete opposite, the bottomless opposite, and that it is extraordinary cruelty to my parents and an extraordinary kindness to me.
by driving me away from this destructive clan that he has committed himself to destroying along with himself.
If you've ever seen the movie I didn't watch all the way through it.
It's a Gus Van Sant movie. He made, to his eternal credit, he made Good Will Hunting, but he's made some pretty execrable films after that.
But if you've ever seen the movie Elephant...
An unbelievably slow movie, and I wouldn't recommend watching the whole thing, or even any part of it, but there's one part of it, because it's about a school shooting.
And this guy who's the shooter, and this is also in 19, the recent book I talked about recently in the Your Children Do Not Love You, the book that I listened to on vacation.
This is also in that book where The people who have been a little bit kind to the shooter or who at least haven't abused him.
So he's walking into the school and these people are hanging out and they see him going in with his pockets bulging and all this and combat fatigues and so on.
And they say to him, what the hell's going on?
And he says, go home.
Go home, you don't want to be here.
Get the fuck out of here.
Go home! Run!
Well, that's kind of aggressive, right?
But it's also an incredible kindness in a weird kind of way.
Again, I'm not saying this is all obvious or anything like that.
But if I'm going to go in and blow up a mafia hole and myself in it, I'm going to tell the people that I even remotely care about to get away.
And if they just stand there stupidly, I'm going to scream at them.
And I'm going to abuse them and tell them to fuck off and go screw yourself and fuck your dog and get the hell out of here.
I may even fire some shots in the air.
And they'll sit there and go, this crazy son of a bitch, what the hell is he doing?
And then later, they're going to think back upon that with a relieved kind of creepy fondness.
He didn't want me to be hurt when he was going to blow up the Mafia Hall with the mafiosos in it.
And of course, to get into the Mafia Hall, he has to tell them that he's a Mafia guy and he loves them.
I'm not trying to portray my brother as any kind of hero, right?
I mean, this is rage, right?
I mean, this is the rage that is virtually bottomless, right?
But in that, right, on the surface this appears to be kind to my parents and cruel to me, but I would submit to you, and it's worth looking at things this kind of way, right?
So you get more clarity in your perception of the real undercurrents and realities of relationships that you can look at it this way And see the twisted tribute that is in there, and the desperate self-hating love that is in there, right? Because what he's really saying is, it's good you're gone, and I'm going down with them.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
Please remember to buy my book.
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