All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 7, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:52
860 Life from Death - A Listener Mourns...
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, this is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I have received a sad email, which I hope to turn into a not-quite-so-sad email.
This came in not through the Ask a Therapist, but directly through me.
And it goes a little something like this.
I'll change all the names and the locations.
Greetings, Stefan, the listener writes.
My name is Bob, and I have been a big fan of your podcasts and articles since I first found them via Free Talk Live last November.
I signed up for the boards and everything, but as often happens to me, I just end up lurking out.
Perhaps I will get better at this once I start donating, which I hope will be very soon.
My wife and I aren't exactly rolling in dough at the moment, mostly due to a recent move, but I very much desire to make some sort of monetary contribution to you for all your effort.
I decided to write this email to you for a few reasons.
One, I very much respect your opinion on just about everything.
The way that you fleshed out a rational philosophy by which humans can live peacefully is nothing short of amazing.
I hope one day you will be recognized for the philosophical giant you are.
I will now try to keep the butt-kissing to a minimum.
Aww, I was just getting to like it.
Actually, I'm perfectly content to fade into history.
What I care about is that the ideas are recognized as good.
Or true. And the second reason, he says, is you will be a totally objective third party.
Well, I hope so. So here we go.
My wife really wants to have a baby.
This is sort of a new thing for us since as recently as a few months ago we both said that we were not interested in having children at all.
However, her sister had a baby a few months ago and now my wife's entire outlook has changed.
Unfortunately for her, I'm not so easily swayed.
The truth is that we've both known that we wanted to have children together for a long time and our reluctance was born not out of a lack of desire but out of fear.
It may have some year recently.
My younger brother, Fred, not his real name, died.
He was only four at the time.
It was around 12.30 in the afternoon, and my mother woke me up asking if I knew where Sam was.
It took us a few minutes to find him sitting in his car seat.
My mom had fallen asleep, and he had gotten into the car in search of his favorite sunglasses.
The car door must have closed behind him, and on a hot summer day, he died of heat exhaustion.
It's really hard for me to describe just how much this devastated me.
Fred was the child of my mother and stepfather, a man who treated me much better than my own father ever did.
He took on the role of dad in my life as if it were his own.
I was lucky that my mother found a guy like this guy.
Even as a young kid, I could see that this guy and my mom really loved each other.
They always made each other laugh, and I never heard them raise a voice to one another.
When he died in some years past, my family was devastated.
Fred, the brother, was only about six months old then.
I can remember going into my aunt's hotel room the night that my dad died and seeing Fred sleeping there so peacefully, completely unaware that such a great person had just been removed from his life.
I remember saying to him in his sleep, I'm going to be the best big brother any kid's ever had.
I think what hurts the most is that I can't feel like I did that.
Everyone always says that I shouldn't blame myself for Fred's death, yet I can't help it.
He died on Mother's Day, and if I had taken my mom out to lunch, Fred wouldn't have died.
If I had just been awake, he wouldn't have died.
It kills me to think about it.
I know that logically it wasn't my fault, but I just can't believe that emotionally.
I can always picture him sitting in his car seat, waiting for someone to come get him, only I never came.
If I couldn't protect him, how could I protect my own child?
The mere thought of having a kid frightens me so much.
I just know that I'll be a basket case, constantly worried about the worst possible thing that could happen to my child.
Fred looked just like me as a baby, so much so that he would point at my baby pictures and say, That's me!
I don't know that if we have a son that...
I just know that if we have a son, that he would look just like Fred, and I don't know if I could handle that.
I already get so worried about my wife, if she doesn't call her, if I don't know where she is, constantly.
Sometimes I get so nervous that I just have to pace until I hear from her.
It's really not healthy. I'm scared that I would be constantly anxious to the point that I'd no longer be able to be happy.
The hardest part is that I want to have a child desperately.
I want so much to be able to teach a child about the world and all the amazing things that life has to offer.
I want to experience everything that I will learn from a child.
I want these experiences so much, but the thought of them just scares me to my core.
To be honest, I'm not really sure what advice you can offer me.
I know that I need to be in psychotherapy.
My wife went to a psychiatrist and we actually ended up having a quasi-joint session once a month.
The therapist was amazing and helped us tremendously with our communication.
Unfortunately, paying for a psychotherapist isn't really an option at the moment, which I'm sure you deduced from the beginning of the email.
I'm going to see if my new university offers some sort of free psychotherapy like my old university did.
I guess in the end, I'm writing this to you because I trust you.
As crazy as it is to trust someone you've never even met, I feel like I know you so well from the podcast.
I'm sure you get that all the time though.
I hope that regardless of what you have to say about this particular matter, you and I will continue to communicate.
If you've actually read through all this, thank you so much.
I hope to hear from you soon.
Thank you again for everything. Well, first of all, let me say, of course, that my heart goes out to you.
This is a completely heartbreaking story, and there's no one who has a soul who would not be devastated by this and whose heart would not reach out to you in the greatest sympathy and empathy for what you went through.
So let's take that for granted, that this was completely devastating, that it's perfectly natural, perfectly healthy, that it should be completely devastating for you.
And let's look at some other possible ways of dealing with your grief.
I'm going to put forward two general premises.
Premises? Premise I. Two.
One, two premises.
Which I hope will give you some...
Comfort and liberation from this tragedy, not by forgetting, not by pretending that nothing happened, but liberation from this tragedy going forward and will give you some more freedom to be able to choose, not despite or in the absence of or as if this tragedy did not exist, but with the full information of what this tragedy is.
I'm going to assume, and there's no reason to assume anything else, that I'm going to assume that nobody was negligent in the death Of Fred, of your brother.
If we assume that, and this is going to be, as I said, the constant assumption throughout this podcast, if we assume that, then what you were taught most brutally is that really bad things happen.
And I really apologize for this sounding in any way trivial or flipper.
I don't mean that in the slightest.
But really awful, terrible, wretched, agonizing things happen accidentally to good people for no reason.
For no reason. For no reason.
I wrote a poem, as I quoted once before, I wrote a poem many years ago, a very short poem, which went like this.
Two men in a wood, one bad, one good, are both eaten by wolves.
The bad man doesn't taste better or worse.
That's just flesh, that's just biology, that's just their body.
A good man gets struck down with cancer.
Bad men live to be a hundred.
Loved children are struck by lightning.
Good couples who would be great parents turn out to be infertile.
Highly destructive people have a child a year, right?
So there is biology that occurs, and there are accidents which occur that have nothing to do with virtue or control and cannot be prevented in any rational way or any reasonable way.
And this, of course, is an unbelievably brutal situation.
Introduction to this basic fact that love is not a shield for catastrophe.
No matter how much you love your wife, one day she's going to die.
No matter how much she loves you, one day you're going to die.
And one of you is going to be left alone.
That's the likelihood, unless you both die in a car crash or something.
So love and virtue are no shield to catastrophe, to tragedy, to the mere biological accidents.
And when this is driven into us in such a brutal manner, our natural and inevitable desire is to flinch.
And flinching is putting it as mildly as it could conceivably be put.
It is much worse than mere flinching.
It is much worse than mere flinching.
We recoil. Our soul goes into a knotted spasm.
And we recoil in horror almost from life itself.
With the mad insensibility of these kinds of accidents.
That there is nothing that we can do to shield ourselves from these kinds of occurrences.
You may have a child who turns out to have Down syndrome, although there is prenatal testing that can virtually eliminate that as a possibility.
Your child may be developmentally handicapped.
Your child may trip and fall off his bike.
And die. I mean, when I was a kid, my best friend, he was 12.
13, 12. I knew him from when I was 11.
Knew him for two years. Was my best friend.
We spent like after school time together.
It was great fun. Great guy.
Just had a heart attack and died.
Turned out he'd had a congenital heart failure.
Kara, my brother, was...
He was in the back seat with a friend of his.
This kid stepped out onto the street and was creamed by a car.
Died instantly. Terrifying, terrible, awful.
A guy in my boarding school jumped into a pool, tried to do a flip into a pool, banged his head.
His IQ dropped by like 50%.
He became retarded through this simple accident.
The whoopsies. And we have millions of these whoopsies.
We've all had these kinds of brushes, right?
I remember changing lanes on a bicycle.
Didn't see a car in my blind spot.
A guy skidded to a halt. We've all had these.
I was in a car with a friend of mine at a truck up north.
We flipped on a gravel road going 120 kilometers an hour passing someone and landed on the roof of the truck.
And walked away, he had a scratch on his arm, and I was completely unhurt.
These kinds of accidents, so many times, the bullets just graze us, or just miss us, or somebody wakes up in time, right?
As you say, if only I'd have taken them out for lunch, if I'd been awake, if I'd been a few minutes, if it had been five degrees cooler, if somebody had had a bad dream, if someone had come and knocked on the door, if the window had been left open just a crack when he closed the door, like, if he, Oh, oh, oh.
And when these kinds of things occur, when these mad, bad, gruesome accidents occur to us, I mean, it's virtually incomprehensible, I mean, it's virtually incomprehensible, right?
Right?
I would guess that you've been raised with some sort of spiritual belief, perhaps religious, but you can let me know about that.
But our natural desire...
Our almost habituated and inevitable desire is to begin to engage in what is colloquially called magical thinking.
Magical thinking.
And the magical thinking that we engage in is if I worry bad things won't happen.
If I'm afraid, I can control accidents.
When you talk about, you know, nobody blames you but you blame yourself and so on, it's not because you really blame yourself.
It's because it gives you some sense of control about the future.
If you blame yourself, then there's things that you can do to help avoid these kinds of catastrophes in the future.
But you can't.
You can't.
Again, assuming no negligence, but you can't.
You might give birth to a kid who gets leukemia at the age of eight.
Not because you did drugs in the 60s.
Not because you smoked.
Not because, like, just because Mother Nature's a total bitch at times.
And there's nothing you can do about that.
There's nothing because we're all going to die anyway.
When a tragedy hits you out of nowhere like this, our inevitable scar tissue, our inevitable response that we have to talk ourselves out of because it's primitive, it's magical, it's paganistic, it's irrational, It's natural, but it's unhealthy.
Our natural inclination is to pretend that there's a way to manage the inevitable messiness, chaos, and ultimate death of all that is alive.
Lightning can sometimes strike you out of a clear blue sky, let's say.
And that's just, right?
You can be in a car and somebody can just stop paying attention to something or other and you can get killed.
Lightning can strike you. No matter how careful the driver you are, this can happen.
Every day we leave the house, and even if we don't leave the house, Could get an aneurysm.
Could have an embolism. I'm not trying to make you paranoid.
I'm just saying that these tragedies are omnipresent in life.
Just read the paper. Just look online.
People get stung by a bee they don't even see.
Oh dear, I'm anaphylactic shock and I'm dead.
I was allergic. Who knew?
These tragedies are everywhere in life.
And life is fundamentally, in this sense, a kind of tragedy because we will all die.
And death is messy and unpleasant and, up until recently at least, very painful.
So what do we do with this mess, this chaos, this randomness, where lightning can just strike you out of the clear blue sky?
Well, what we try to do is engage in magical thinking that says, well, I can reduce these odds.
I mean, of course, there are things that we can do to reduce these odds, but I'm talking about where it becomes problematic or pathological or interferes with something like your desire to have a kid, which we'll get to in a sec.
Lightning can strike you out of the clear blue sky.
What do you do? We'll wear tinfoil on our heads.
We'll pray to God.
We'll try and stay indoors.
We'll try and stay underground. We'll wear a lucky necklace.
We'll not change our socks because we didn't get struck by lightning when I had these socks on.
We'll engage in all this magical thinking.
To try to reduce our anxiety in the face of a chaos and a physical tragedy, the tragedy of biology, of life, that we can't do anything about.
To pretend that you have control when you don't have control is the foundation of anxiety and depression and a host of things that you described.
So, all that having been said, in order to have a balance between risk and reward, the important thing is to recognize what you can control and recognize what you cannot control.
Now, a situation where a random bad thing has happened naturally and inevitably will lead us to look towards factors which may have led up to that, which we can avoid in the future.
Now, if factors have come up that we can see and we can avoid in the future, then that, of course, is going to help us to reduce our anxiety around this, right?
So, if I have an accident, I say, gee, what in my car?
I say, well, what led up to it? It's like, well, what led up to it was that I was blindfolded.
Okay, well, if I don't drive blindfolded, then I should be...
Better. It should be not perfect, but it'll be a heck of a lot better.
So then I work through that, and this is emotional fears and so on.
And then I say, okay, well, I'm not going to drive without blindfolds.
I'm not going to drive with blindfolds on anymore.
So that is a way of reducing our anxiety.
So one of two things can occur here, which is why you got stuck.
Either there is no causal factor, but you want to create one.
If there's no causal factor, I was driving carefully, I was checking my blind spot, but just some crazy guy came barreling out of a hidden driveway without checking, blah, blah, blah, blah, well then it's like, hey, you know what, just occasionally, very rarely, just bad things will happen when you drive.
You can stop driving, of course, and that will certainly reduce the risk, but there's no causality if you choose to drive that you can do to avoid that kind of problem, right?
Whereas if you don't get your car serviced and your brakes give out, then there's something you can, oh, I've got to remember to get my brakes serviced, right?
So in your situation, either there is no causality that led up to the death of your brother, in which case making up causality, like if I'd taken her for lunch or if I, you know.
But of course, if you'd taken her for lunch, if you'd taken your mom for lunch and you'd been in a car crash, you'd have said, if only we hadn't gone for lunch, right?
So that is making up causality.
If you make up causality where there is no causality, you will become paralyzed.
If you make up causality where there is no causality, you will become paralyzed.
Because if there's no cause and effect, but you make one up, then you just won't be able to prevent it.
Deep down you know you won't be able to prevent it in the future.
Now, if there is causality, but you pretend that there's not, you will also become paralyzed.
So, if there was any kind of negligence in the death of your brother, and again, not knowing the circumstances, I do know, having been a daycare teacher, that I would not leave a four-year-old unattended.
I would not. I mean...
If there was an accident, like who would have guessed I would have fallen asleep or something like that?
But if there is causality, if there is culpability in the death of your brother, but you pretend that there isn't, you will also become paralyzed.
And I'm not going to even talk about that because this is for you to examine within your own family and your own knowledge of it.
It's illegal here in Canada to leave your child at home alone or unattended up to 12.
So again, if there is no causality, if it was a random accident but you try to make up a causality like if I'd done this or if this hadn't happened or the other, then you will become paralyzed because you will never know what to do to avoid disaster.
Because frankly the reality is there's nothing you can do to avoid certain disasters.
They just happen. They're just accidents.
But if there is a causality or responsibility or any kind of culpability or negligence in the death of your brother and you pretend that there isn't, like nothing could have been done to prevent it, then you're also going to be paralyzed because there's a disconnect between the cause and effect.
So you can mull that over as you like, right?
But it's really important to accurately process the cause and effect.
The second premise that I'd like to talk to you about is a mystical one, which may sound surprising coming from a rationalist philosopher, but people live on in our minds.
The memories, the personas that they have, our interactions with them, and this is true of your brother.
He lives on in your mind. There is a part of your mind that is infused with his patterns, his essence, his being, for want of a better phrase.
You know, you can ask people to play, act, their mother is 30 years dead and they'll get them down to a T. We know.
We know the patterns of thinking even of young children, those around us.
So, I'm going to ask you to picture that you can talk to him and that he's older now.
This was a couple of years ago. Maybe he's a little older than that.
Maybe he's like 17 or 18 years old.
That your brother, that you can talk to him and he's older.
The brother who died. And he's going to say to you, how's it going?
And you're going to say something like, well, I must tell you, you know, I miss you so much.
I was so incredibly heartbroken by your death.
I was so heartbroken by your death that I have decided not to have children.
I really, really want children, but I was so heartbroken by your death That I have decided not to have children.
Now you know what the look on your brother's face would be if you could tell him that.
That because of his accidental death, you have decided not to have the children that you desperately want.
Do you think that he would feel honored?
By your sacrifice? Do you think that your sacrifice would make him feel better?
Or do you think that he would feel worse because his death robbed you of children that you want?
I know the answer to that, and I'm sure that you know the answer to that, that he would not be honored, and he would be very sad.
He would be very sad that you had given up And you and your wife had given up together your desire for children because of his death.
He would feel doubly robbed.
And he would feel worse about dying because his death has led to the non-existence of other children.
We do not honor the dead by refraining from living.
In fact, I believe that you should have one more child than you would have otherwise had because of the death of your brother.
The dead should spur us to live more richly, just as the knowledge of our own death should cause us to be more courageous.
The tragedies in life should cause us to reach even more aggressively for joy, for richness, for risk.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Because those who fall accidentally are not honored if other people become paralyzed.
The magical thinking of refrain from risk because there is tragedy Simply causes tragedy to triumph over life.
Just as the fact that we're going to die could make people paralyzed, which would be to invite death in ahead of time.
There's Seinfeld.
George Costanza is a friend or an aide or a help or something to an old man, and And Costanza's sitting there and he says, how can you stand it?
I mean, you're so close to the end.
How can you even get up and you're paralyzed with terror and fear?
And the old guy is like, hey, I'm grateful for every day that I have.
And he's worried. Oh, you're going to die?
The younger guy. He's right.
He's like, hey, you know, maybe your life is too short to spend with people like you.
The fact that we're going to die, the fact that tragedy strikes the most virtuous, the fact that life is full of random injury and death and maiming and destruction should be a spur to make us live more richly, live more deeply, live more, not riskily
like haphazardly, but to embrace the risk that is life.
The only alternative is to embrace the death or the destruction or the fear or the paranoia.
I mean, that's the only choice. You either say, yes, life comes with risk, and fuck the risk, I'm going to embrace life.
Not haphazardly, not chaotically, not I'm going to jump off a cliff because I don't care about risk, but that's the deal.
There's a movie Shadowlands about this.
And that's the deal. With the love comes the loss.
With the joy comes the pain. With the life comes the death.
And you embrace it.
You don't have to.
You can live in fear and pretend that you can control that which you cannot control.
But that is just surrendering.
That's two deaths for the price of one.
If you're going to have three children, that's four deaths for the price of one.
Four non-children for the price of one non-children.
That does not do your brother justice.
That does not do your brother honor the death.
What does your brother justice and honor, I believe, I strongly believe, is you have one extra kid and you love all of your children fiercely.
And carefully, and you learn from the past.
But you pour all of your heart into them and you teach those children how to live voraciously.
How to live hungrily.
How to embrace all the chaos and the ultimate destruction of life.
Because the alternative is what?
You don't want to die.
Think of it like money.
You don't want to be the Howard Hughes guy who spends no money and dies with millions and millions of dollars unspent in the bank.
You want to blow it all!
Not madly, but you want to spend for joy and for pleasure.
Because you can't take it with you.
You can't take your life with you.
So spend! Risk!
Get hurt, as you did, which I sympathize with enormously with your brother.
Get hurt. And rise up and embrace life even more fully after that.
That's how we honor the dead.
It's by living more fully.
By embracing the risk that is life.
By embracing the risks that are in life.
And not letting those risks rob us of life.
Because when we give up life, we don't get a cessation of risk.
We just get a certainty of paralysis followed by death.
There is no such thing as not having risk in life.
If you withdraw from risk in life, you simply create the certainty of loss.
So, embrace it.
Have your children. Love your children.
Name one of your children after your brother and take care of them.
I look forward to your donations.
▲
Export Selection