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Oct. 17, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
58:50
885 Hope for the future...

A speech to raise your hopes

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Time Text
Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. Just taking an hour or so off from the reading of the audiobook of universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, which I am most pleased with.
And it's hard to read, though.
It's hard to get the cadence right.
In these very dense and somewhat technical, on occasion, philosophical paragraphs.
So it's quite an exciting challenge from that standpoint.
It takes forever sometimes to record a page.
Put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, and it's all over.
Start again. But I'm quite pleased with the recording quality of this new mic, so I hope that you will like it if you grab the audiobook, which should be out in a day or two.
So, I wanted to talk today.
There has been a minor ripple in the FDR ecosphere of people who feel a certain amount of despair or despondency about the future of the world.
And I sort of wanted to do my best to give you a lift in that regard.
Now, I mean, everybody knows that who's listened this far...
That I try to focus on helping you to spend your energies on things that you can control, not on things that you cannot control.
Because trying to control that which you cannot control is not only a form of adult enslavement, but sadly is all too often an echo of our childhoods if we had parents who weren't the best, let's say.
Wherein we would try to control their behavior and feel overwhelmed by the power that they had over us.
As I've talked about before, the power disparity that we had as children between ourselves and our parents is far greater than the power disparity that occurs between us as citizens and our friendly neighborhood state as adults.
So, The interesting thing is that if you feel overwhelmed by the power of the state and of religion and of the corruption of those in power and so on, if you feel overwhelmed by that, maybe it's accurate, maybe it's valid, maybe it's true, but I would take as my approach, the first thing that I would do is make sure that I'm not mistaking the world for myself.
I've talked about this before.
It's a fundamental problem that thinkers have, particularly Sensitive thinkers, which most of us in this conversation are, that we can think, of course, but we also have a good deal of emotional sensitivity or empathy, which is good and I think necessary to be a competent and effective ethicist.
But we have this problem, or we all have this problem, Which is trying to figure out whether or not we are thinking about the world or thinking about ourselves.
The fundamental projection that I've always talked about is that people take the power disparity and supposed virtue, though really corruption, terrible sentence, let me start that again, sorry.
People take the supposed virtue but actual corruption of the parents, and to some degree, as an echo of that, the teachers, That they experience when they're children.
And they then project that onto the state and onto God.
Psychologically, this is called splitting.
So, you can see this and take the Italian stereotype.
Apologies to my fine Italian listeners, but don't worry.
We have other stereotypes.
We bash from time to time. To take the Italian stereotype...
The Italian man has this sometimes called the Madonna Whore complex.
Ooh, we have some low-flying planes today.
Sorry about that. And in this Madonna Whore complex, what happens is he's raised by his mother who is outwardly pious but secretly angry.
All conformity breeds anger.
And once you're conscious of that anger, then you can change your level of conformity based on that anger.
That which does not hurt us, we do not change, which is why people who don't want to change studiously avoid genuine feelings, you know, through drugs or through whatever.
I mean, lots of difference in conformity, through cults, through whatever.
So the mom is outwardly pious and compliant, but secretly angry.
Why?
Because she's oppressed by her ideologies.
The cult of culture, the cult of the family, the cult of...
The nation-state, the cult of religion in particular.
And what happens is, if the son expresses any criticism of the mother, she becomes haughty and withdraws and tortures him through the threat of neglect, which to a child is equivalent to the threat of murder to an adult.
I mean, people say, oh, there are abandonment issues, or I have abandonment issues, as if that's Not totally and genuinely valid, as far as the original relationship goes.
I mean, if I was being hunted down by the mafia, I wouldn't go to a therapist and say, I have being murdered issues.
It's like, no, I don't have being murdered issues.
I'm afraid of being murdered.
And it's the same thing with abandonment.
Abandonment to a child is a death sentence, and the threat of it is the equivalent of taking a knife to the throat of an adult, but actually closer to imprisonment, plus doing that, because the child can't leave.
So, in this way, we can understand that the son criticizes the mother, the mother threatens him because of her own murderous anger, which is a result of her own conformity and lack of authenticity, her enslavement.
We either feel the pain of enslavement and free ourselves, or we fight the pain of enslavement by attacking and enslaving others.
That's on the board, that's on my inbox, that's in the world, that's everywhere.
And so what happens is, the child grows up with a hatred of his mother, but with the need for outward compliance, which is based on fear of attack.
I mean, nobody just wakes up and says, hey, I'm going to give up all my genuine thoughts and feelings and comply with others.
You know, because it's fun.
I mean, nobody says that. Nobody gives up their true self voluntarily and happily.
So the son conforms to the mother.
And then as he grows up, what happens to his hostility towards the woman who bullied him into empty conformity to her own narcissistic fantasies?
Well, it doesn't go away.
It doesn't go away.
As I've mentioned before, taking heroin for toothache does not eliminate the rot.
It just eliminates the symptom, which makes the rot worse.
Well, then you get this thing called the splitting.
And the splitting engenders perfectionism or high standards or irrational standards which can't be met properly.
That's the idealization of corruption is the impossibility of perfection.
So, if I'm really mad at the world, but I'm a chicken shit, basically about expressing it and being honest and open with it about myself, if I really hate people, but I'm never allowed to express it, and I have this template of, quote, high standards that are really abusive, what I do, if I hate the world, if I hate the people in the world...
Is I set up a standard that becomes impossible for people to meet, and then I attack them legitimately with disappointment or with anger or with some other aggressive or passive-aggressive mechanism.
So, you see this stuff, again, to take a silly and exaggerated, perhaps, example, you have the mafia guys who say...
You know, my mother is a saint.
And they get totally touchy and prickly and angry about anybody who may criticize their mother.
And then they treat their wives like shit.
I mean, this is the idealization.
Idealization is always the drawing back of the bowstring before the attack.
It's the undoing the safety of the revolver.
That's idealization. And so all of the hostility they feel towards their own mothers is then displaced upon other women that they treat like shit.
And they say, I am justified in treating you like shit because you don't rise to the standard of perfection that my mother has, right?
And of course, this is all very complicated, but the mother's anger is thus played out through the son against other women, because women are, to a large degree, if not to the majority, enslaved not by men, but by other women.
And just ask a woman in your life to speak honestly about whose negative opinion she fears more, men and women, and it will be women's.
So the son and his rage against other women becomes part of the mother's This executionary mechanism, part of her attack, or core part of her attack on the world.
So she just becomes sweet and passive-aggressive.
The son gets charged with all this hostility towards women, which can't be directed against his manipulative mother, and so gets directed against everyone else, particularly women.
And in the same way, of course, we can see how this corrupt, reproducing kind of meme or mechanism shows up in the realm of Governments and gods in particular.
The invention of imaginary enemies to play out the rage of humiliation of being enslaved is a continual process, and it's a way of drugging yourself.
Unfortunately, by drugging yourself, you ensure that the slavery is going to continue.
This is why, as I've talked about in various articles and podcasts and videos, People feel that somehow Al-Qaeda is responsible for their oppression or is putting them in danger, when of course it is their government that is doing so.
And in the same way, of course, the priests, and we'll just talk about the Catholic Church to continue the Italian theme, The priests tell the parents and the children that the great danger of oppression and violation and temptation comes from Satan and, of course, other religions, when, of course, it is the priests who are pretty much lining up to gangbang the altar boys in the most hellish displays of pedophilia.
And, of course, that's just one particular.
They say that the devil will harm your soul, your true self, your pure being, and then they inflict threats of hell and social exclusion, and they make children paranoid, that God can always watch you, don't masturbate, blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, it's all the harm that we're doing we project under others so that we can continue to do the harm, so that we can blind ourselves to our own sadism, and so continue and escalate this.
And in the parent-child relationship, all the hostility, all the negativity, is projected onto the children.
Always projected on the children.
Why did I hit you?
Because you were bad.
You know, the fact that the world is round does not make me believe that the world is round.
I simply believe that the world is round because the world is round.
I did not choose to hit you, saith the parents.
I am simply going, I have to hit you, I have to accept that I have to hit you, because you are bad.
The responsibility for my actions lies in your behavior.
Or the best you'll get from certain parents is, well, it's possible that I overreacted, but really, you wait till you have kids, oh my god.
And so on and so on.
And the reason that I wanted to bring this stuff up is because when we feel despair about the world...
And despair about the world is always despair about the future.
If we feel despair about the future of the world, it's very, very important...
That we figure out whether or not this despair that we feel is really about the past.
And I'll give some reasons why, some empirical reasons.
This is one that I'm going to put forward as a more validated theory than some of my psychological approaches because I have some good evidence for this.
So I'm not just going to ask you to believe it because you should believe it, not that I ever do, but But just go with me for a minute or two and I think you'll find this helpful.
We really want to make sure that we are not infecting the future in order to shield the past.
That we have not crawled out of a night hole and in response, because our eyes hurt, we blacken the skies of noon.
That's pretty metaphorical.
That's alright. I've been doing some non...
Non-fiction technical writing, so it's okay to be florid a little bit.
Not that I could stop myself particularly.
Now, the reason that we feel despair about the world, if it's based on our own histories, is that If you feel that our situation is hopeless and it's overwhelming, or it's mostly hopeless, or, God, what do I do?
Blah, blah, blah. It's too big.
The state has too much power.
It's too much. We're doomed.
Why did I ever learn the truth?
I mean, now I'm fucked.
Well, if you feel that, it's important to look into your history, as it is for all strong feelings.
It's important to look at your history, to check yourself.
There was a book by Stephen Donaldson, which I read when I was a teenager and quite enjoyed, the Thomas Covenant series.
And he was a leper, and he did a visual search of extremities, called a VSE. And what that meant was, because he was a leper at nerve damage, he couldn't figure out whether he was hurt or not.
So he would do a visual search of extremities to make sure he hadn't cut his hand or his foot or something like that.
Because if he had, I think that Sort of similar to diabetes.
It wouldn't heal and it might not coagulate.
The blood might not coagulate. So this VSE, this visual search of extremities, is I think a good metaphor for double-checking your own emotional state.
Because you don't want to...
That which we reject, we recreate.
That which we suppress, we spread.
And you don't want to infect others with a hopelessness that is not rational.
In order to escape the pain of your childhood, right?
That would be bad, right?
And then, of course, if you are doing that, I'll give you some tips on how to figure that out.
If you are doing that, then the reason that you feel that the disease cannot be cured is that you are a part of the disease.
If I go around punching people, I have every quote right to feel despair that people will ever stop punching others.
Because not only am I punching them, but I am creating situations of animosity that are going to make them more likely to punch me or others.
And it's kind of hard, I think, for me to print textbooks with misleading information and then complain that the education of the poor or the young is substandard.
I mean, logically, where we have true despair, we do not act.
We do not act. Despair is futility.
Despair is it cannot be achieved.
It is impossible. Where things are impossible, we do not act.
I'm not going to sit here and try to live to 500 years old.
Except in these podcasts.
5,000! Where there is genuine despair, we do not act.
Where there is unjust or projected despair, a split between our past and our future, our childhood, and the world, well then we do act, and we act to spread it.
Because we need reinforcement that despair is a valid state of mind.
Because we wish to avoid the despair that we had as children when we faced the overwhelming and often unjust power that our parents exercised over us.
And I say teachers as a periphery because you're given to your teachers by your parents.
It's not a separate sphere.
It's one of the main reasons why people have such a problem with privatized education, because if we understand that public education is a moral crime, then we have to face the fact that our parents handed us over to a bunch of sophisticated thugs.
For hours a day and told us it was right.
That's a hard pill to swallow, right?
There's some things where people are just incredibly emotionally volatile around, you know, in Kapistan.
Of course, around a monopoly of power, people get really volatile.
That's because it reminds them of their parents, right?
It's a split, right? You love your parents, and the anger you feel towards your parents goes into this theoretical predatory monopoly system that would result from free market.
Or, as somebody's been talking about recently on the board, it's not that I don't remember names, I just, you know, where I can avoid them, it's fine.
I say, oh, I'm having these arguments with these people, oh, man.
And they are certain of God, or they are certain of the virtue of the state, and whenever I ask them questions, they just keep twisting and changing the answers.
Well, as I have repeated and will repeat, you're not dealing with philosophy here, you're dealing with the family.
When somebody says that virtue is synonymous with power, is synonymous with incomprehensibility, do you think that they're talking about God?
No. No, no one has experienced God because God does not exist.
If you have passionate feelings about that which does not exist and you have not experienced, you're either totally insane or And psychotic and cannot differentiate reality from fantasy, which is usually not the case when you're debating politics with someone.
If you have passionate certainty about that which does not exist, it means that you have experienced it.
Now, you can't have experienced it in the realm of God, if God doesn't exist.
If you equate, as religious people inevitably do, virtue with power, With authority, with incomprehensibility, where would you get this idea from?
Well, of course, you can only get it from your parents.
These people who are religious, who are passionate about equating virtue and power and authority and incomprehensibility, are just saying, my parents bullied me with virtue.
My parents bullied me with virtue, and by God, it's far too painful for me to examine that.
So I'm going to project all of that nonsense onto the realm of God.
And when you ask me about God, we're going to switch places.
When you ask me about God, what's going to happen is, I'm going to become...
Sorry.
When you ask me about God...
You are going to become me asking my parents about virtue and honesty and integrity and proof and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But you've got to get the stuff.
It's not about God.
It's not about the state.
Those are just mechanisms which exploit the original corruption and destruction, which is parent to child.
Because otherwise, you're going to just keep...
Running around like a chicken with your head cut off and feel bewildered and attacked and upset and frustrated.
Until you get that it's not about God and it's not about the state.
These are just convenient metaphors of projection.
These are just convenient metaphors of projection.
They are just big buckets of exploitation that cash in on the brutality of parenting and of education.
When you... Attempt to disprove God with people.
What they experience you as doing is calling their parents evil or corrupt or that the authority of their parents is unjust and non-existent, which it is.
It's certainly non-existent in the real world.
And all the stuff that's in on truth, which I won't go into here, begins to rise within their minds.
All the stuff that they know to be true.
That they have become what they despised, that their parents used their desire for virtue to corrupt, control, enslave and destroy them, which is incredibly corrupt, which means that they have to think clearly about these things.
And once they think clearly, I mean, the reason people avoid thinking clearly is once you think clearly, you've got to do stuff, right?
So if they get that authority and virtue and power and incomprehensibility is an unjust conflation then they have to go and have those conversations with their parents.
As long as they can sit in this fantasy sandbox of God and talk about that then they can project all of their doubts onto you.
And don't play that role for them.
Don't play that role for them.
That's your aggression. I mean, it's always the same story, right?
And it was for me. This is no criticism.
It was for me for many years. But it's always the same story.
I sat down with a bunch of Christians, or statists, and we began talking about Virtue or justice or whatever.
And they spewed the most insane nonsense.
And I ran around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to make some point.
And they kept putting me down and they kept...
And then eventually things just got silent and they stopped talking and blah, blah, blah.
They jerked me around. They changed their story.
They changed their definitions. Well, of course they did.
Just as their parents did to them and their teachers.
I'll just say parents, but the teachers are the echo of that.
So what are you doing?
Well, you're playing a role.
And you're playing a role that is very destructive to you both.
This is not a good thing to do.
If you're not ready, don't do it.
And if you're in your first year of med school, don't diagnose the most difficult cases.
I've been doing it for 20 years and I still make mistakes.
If you're in your first year of med school, don't try and diagnose the most difficult cases.
If you've never cut open a cadaver, don't try to do a heart transplant.
Seriously, it's not good.
You have to recognize the hump of knowledge and self-knowledge.
It's not about reading Rothbard, it's about a VSE of your own emotions.
It's about double-checking, making sure that you're not projecting.
Because that's all we're taught. All we're taught is to manipulate others to relieve temporary anxieties.
So if you run into a bunch of anarchists and a bunch of statists and you say, rationality, free market, blah, blah, blah.
And they just shoot you down and they don't even have to get up off the couch.
And you start stuttering and you get confused and you get frustrated.
All you're doing is reinforcing that The truth is ineffectual.
And if you haven't developed your jiu-jitsu to the point where you can even thunder with righteous anger about the fact that they're lying to themselves or patiently and slowly unravel their defenses until they're the ones who are upset, then you're just playing a game with philosophy.
You know, with all due respect, I mean, I hugely do respect your desire to achieve these things.
But... You know, listening to some podcasts isn't going to do it, right?
It's like me saying, oh, I read a book on boxing, now I can jump in the ring with Mike Tyson.
Well, I'm going to get pounded, right?
And then I'm going to feel like, wow, these books on boxing really led me astray.
They must be totally wrong. And of course, this happens with people, right?
And this happens with fair regularity, and it's going to continue happening until the day we all kick up the daisies.
When people listen to some podcasts...
They try some things on, they receive a lot of hostility, and then they face that crossroads.
And the crossroads is, well, this philosophy predicts the hostility that comes from asking people to justify their moral positions.
And it's not just me.
It's all back to Socrates and beyond.
This is not a new idea of mine, that people hate the truth-tellers, hate and fear and attack the truth-tellers.
God, that's as old as the species.
And... But they jump in, right?
And they jump in to try and fight the Mike Tysons when they've read a book or two on boxing, and they get pounded into the ground, right?
And they say, wow, that was just abusive on the part of the guy who wrote the book on boxing.
Because they probably skipped over the 9 out of 10 chapters which said, this is a book about boxing.
This does not give you the ability to get into the ring and bring down the beasts.
This is a book on horse riding, lance holding, and general knightery.
It does not give you the ability to actually bring down the dragon.
That is something you need to practice.
And that's why I say, practice in your personal life.
Practice with those around you.
You don't jump straight into the Olympics.
Hey, I read a book on skiing.
Give me those skis. I'm going down the jump.
Well, of course you're going to get creamed.
Of course you're going to get creamed.
And if the coach says, look, practice on smaller hills for a while, months, years.
Build up your strength. Build up your skills.
Build up your knowledge. Build up your expertise.
Don't go charging into the ring.
Don't go charging down the ski hill.
If your coach tells you that over and over again, and you don't listen, and you just go out and do your own thing, then when you smash up, of course you can get mad at the coach.
And you can say, oh, this stuff's just bullshit.
The coach is full of shit. Pompers went back.
He's abusive. And of course you see this, right?
You see this over and over in this conversation.
But of course, a lot of people pick up philosophy as a continuation of the destruction of their parents, right?
A lot of people pick up philosophy or listen to the podcast or join the conversation because they want to attack the truth just as their parents did, right?
So again, in the splitting, right?
When people are full of the false self, they conflict between body to body to body, you know, like one of those demons that goes, that jumps and possesses people, right?
That metaphor works because it's what happens to a hell of a lot of people a hell of a lot of the time.
Most people most of the time. So, if you're somebody who is experiencing anxiety because you have doubts about the virtue of your parents or the virtue of your society or the virtue of your culture or the virtue of your friends or the virtue of your lovers or the virtue of your children or the virtue of yourself...
In particular, right? Which would predate the virtue or absence thereof with regards to your children.
If you're feeling anxiety about this, then you can take one of two courses, right?
You can honestly examine and exhume and figure out that anxiety and work to become more consistent and work to confront the terrors that await all of us who try to figure out the truth.
Or, you can say, well, I really need to crush this growing truth within me.
So, I'm going to come on the board, I'm going to send stuff, 50 emails, do all of this stuff, right?
And I'm going to do all of that to provoke a bad reaction, either in myself or in others.
And... Then I get to storm off and I get to not feel bad about being hypocritical because the truth and virtue is impossible anyway.
That's a complicated topic.
Let's simplify it a little. So, if I genuinely do have the desire to become a dancer...
With me, it would be, of course, a combination of ballet, hip-hop, and the Macarena.
But if I have this amazing desire to become a dancer...
I can either, and of course there's always fear of failure, there's always fear of humiliation, there's always fear of negative things happening, of not getting one.
All desire involves fear, right?
Because we only desire that which is not easy for us to achieve.
I don't have a massive desire for my next breath, although I'm sure I will at the end, but...
Desire is related to want plus uncertainty, right?
So all desire has anxiety built into it, right?
The Buddhist solution won't work getting rid of all desire because it's logically impossible to have a desire to eliminate desire.
But all desire comes with anxiety.
That's life, right?
And so I can either say, well, I want this thing, and so I'm going to manage my anxiety, figure out how to get it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Or, and so I enroll in dance classes, I work hard, I get my injuries, I have all these problems and doubts and fears, and maybe I become a dancer, maybe I won't, but I'll have closure about the question.
Because I'll have thrown myself into it, heart, body, and soul, and figured out whether I like it, whether I'm good at it, whether I can do it, whether other people think I'm good enough to pay me for it, and so on.
And I know all of this, because I did this in theater school, right?
So, even the dance part.
And so... That's one way to deal with, I want to be a dancer.
Now, another way to deal with the question or the desire of wanting to dance is to be run by your fears and to fool yourself.
So what that means is you sign up for dance, not in order to become a dancer, but in order to kill your desire to become a dancer.
Because you have not confronted your fear or your fear is too great or whatever.
And so what happens is you sign up for dance and you don't practice or you practice too much and you hurt yourself.
Right? So you sign up for dance and let's say you don't practice that much.
You don't really listen to your instructor.
You think that your instructor who...
He's a famous dancer, let's say.
You don't listen to your instructor, and you just don't really practice, and you say, you know, I'm just going to go out there, and I'm going to do my thing.
I'm just going to let the rhythm take me.
I'm going to just go out and be the dancer.
I don't have to learn the dance. I am the dance!
So then, you go for an audition, and you crash and burn.
You've got no technique. I don't know what you're doing.
You clearly don't practice. I don't know who's teaching you.
It's like, hey, I've got a really good teacher.
I mean, my teacher is a 20-year dancer with, like, blah, blah, blah.
So, you know, there's something wrong with you guys.
I don't know where you're getting this from.
But, you see, you're not doing that because you want to be a dancer.
You're doing that because you want to not be a dancer.
I mean, I know this sounds kind of complicated and weird, but you can see this all the time.
People who self-destruct in varieties of ways.
They have a desire, they get close, and then they just screw it up.
My mom has had a 20-year, God, maybe even longer now, court case, because she's on government legal aid, so she just gets raped and pillaged by all these terrible lawyers who, you know, build up her hopes and don't do any work but cash in for a hell of a lot of money from the state system, just as you'd expect. And I remember, gosh, this must have been...
14 years ago, she had a court date, finally.
She had a court date where she was supposed to bring her evidence and so on.
Now, I didn't know any of this.
I was actually living at her place after my undergraduate and before I went off, moved out to do my master's.
So, she just sort of up and one day says, well, I'm going to Ottawa.
I'm going to need to do some research.
I'm going to go to Ottawa. So off she goes to Ottawa.
She says she's going for the weekend. She doesn't come back for months.
She stayed in a shelter. And I get a phone call.
And the phone call is, where's your mom?
I say, I'm in Ottawa somewhere.
I don't know. And the guy at the other end says, well, but it's her court date.
She's supposed to be in court today.
Of course, she left for Ottawa the day before.
I try not to theorize too much out of a vacuum, though sometimes I'm accused of doing that.
And of course you need to understand that.
So somebody says, well, I've been running this court case for 10 years, all I want is a court date, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And then when that court date comes along, or when that court date gets closed, they vanish.
Well, clearly they don't actually want the court date, serving some other purpose, right?
So, if I want to become an athlete and the guy says, don't train more than an hour a day, my coach, and I say, to hell with him, I'm going to get twice as good, I'm going to train two hours a day, and I end up with shin splints or some sort of problematic injury.
Then I'm going to say, well, I guess I'm just not cut out to being a runner.
I mean, I tried. I tried.
I gave it my best shot. I had a great coach.
I worked hard. I guess it's just not meant to be.
Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out that you did that not to become a runner, but to justify not becoming a runner.
And the same thing is true of the realm of philosophy.
So when people... Feel anxiety, right?
Their true self is saying, we're living a lie, we're living a lie, we're living a lie, we're living a lie, we're living a lie!
Stop! And they feel this anxiety, then they will turn to philosophy.
Not because they want to stop living a lie, but because they want to eliminate the concept of truth.
And again, we've seen this a large number of times.
They wish to get rid of their anxiety about corruption by saying that corruption is impossible, so...
So they find the most virtuous person around them, and then they try to provoke that person into getting angry or getting dismissive.
And this happens with people, of course, that I end up banning or whatever.
And then they say, well, you know, here's a guy who thinks he's so great, so virtuous.
And boy, the moment I started questioning him, huh, he just banned me.
Wow, he's so hypersensitive, can't take any criticism, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right?
And it's all just a nonsense and corrupt shadow puppet of self-deception.
Yeah.
Well, it's got nothing to do with me.
It's all just about their parts, right?
Because philosophy, as we've seen, can be a fun and mutually supportive and enjoyable and challenging and great thing, or it can devolve into this bullshit, hostility, antagonism, cries of hypocrisy, and all the stuff that floats around the board, most of which is directed at me, but sometimes at other people. And of course, these people are not interested in achieving the truth, but in destroying their anxiety that the truth is achievable.
So they nitpick, and they pick fights, and they misinterpret, and they get mad, and they...
Right? But that's not because...
I mean, if you fight with your coach, and you don't do what he or she says, then you're not interested in achieving the goal.
I mean, if you are, I mean, let's say that I'm the coach, and if I'm not working for you, go find somebody who is.
Right? Or figure it out yourself.
It's not impossible. Right?
And the reason I'm sort of going into all of this is to help you understand that despair, especially when you're young, especially when you're still close to your childhood, is not about the future.
It's not about the future, it's about the past.
And I'll spend just a few more minutes with your kind indulgence just going over some of the proofs that I have in this area.
So, as I've said before, the power disparity between you as a citizen with your government in the West, I would say, Is far, far, far, far almost infinitely less than the power disparity you had at the age of 5 with your parents, or 10,
or even 15. And so, if your primary emotional concern is with the state of the, quote, world, then that's just not true.
I mean, if a guy's just spent 20 years in prison, dying to get out, and then he gets out into the world, and yeah, he's got to pay some taxes, and he's got to do this, and he's got to do that, but my God, compared to being in prison, it's incredibly free.
And if he says, I have to spare about my degree of enslavement, well, the first thing you'd say is, but it's better than being in prison, right?
And if he said, well, no, it's that the world is a prison, and I'm not anymore free now, Then you just know he's broken.
He's been broken and he's now become his own slave master.
He's now become his own prison guard and he's inflicting it on himself when he's no longer in prison, the environment of prison.
It's got nothing to do with the rational judgment of the world.
He's just not willing to confront the pain of having been a prisoner for 20 years.
So he turns the whole world into a prison so that it feels familiar and he doesn't have to confront the truth of his own experience.
The agony, the humiliation, the pain.
And that's his own business, right?
It's when he starts talking to everyone else and trying to convince them that the world is a prison that he goes from self-abusive to abusive towards others, to corrupt.
And I say this not in any sense of condemnation.
I mean, if you don't know it, you don't know it, right?
But clearly we're far more enslaved by our parents than we are by the state.
And so if you emerge from the prison of your childhood and you say, oh, the world is a prison, we're doomed, there's no hope, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you're not talking about the world.
And then, of course, the inevitable corollary that occurs when you ask people about their childhoods, they say, well, has that got to do with anything?
Why are you trying to psychoanalyze me?
How weird. I'm talking about the philosophy.
No, you're not. You're talking about your childhood.
And if you don't get that, you're just going to be...
You're going to be just in your despair about the world because you are the oppressor.
You are the oppressor. You are an oppressor, I should be saying.
I mean, if you say, I have despair because the world will never be free and people don't seem to have any hope, and then you go around infecting everyone with despair and hopelessness, you can't exactly be said to be working empirically, if you don't mind me saying so, right?
Now, here's another way of looking at this question of hope, right?
Let's tootle back a couple of centuries to the scientific revolution.
Now, if you spoke the truth, even a mild form of the truth, to a religious society, the religious society of Christendom, well, you faced economic, social, legal, and moral catastrophes.
Catastrophes! I mean, imagine you're some villager.
In Montailloux, in France, in the 14th century.
And you say, as one villager actually did, there's a book on Montailloux, he said, the world was not born from God, the world was born by the sky and the earth fucking, or something like that.
I mean, even if it's not rational, it's not dogma.
Well, what happens to you? Well, you're shunned.
You're abused. Your livelihood is crippled.
Nobody will come to your shop.
Nobody will help you in your fields.
You live a life of complete isolation and that's the best you can hope for.
The very best you can hope for.
Now, I would say that that person would have some right to feel despair about the world and his future and the world and the future of truth and so on.
That would seem to be reasonable to me.
And this, of course, is assuming that his local priest does not turn him into the Inquisition or any of the other brutal mechanisms of torture and destruction that occur in a theological society.
He can't write.
He sure as heck can't get published.
If he learns to write and writes everything down, everything's going to be burned after he dies and people will spit on his children as heretics and he won't have achieved the propagation of the truth in any way, shape or form, but merely brought disaster upon his lineage.
And yet, and yet, such people did write and did find hope and did build the foundation of the skyscraper we're putting up.
People did defy torture being broken on the wheel in order to propagate as innocuous an idea to our standards as the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth is round and it moves. Right?
They published in secret. People, 50 years into the Soviet Empire, published and wrote, smuggled Samistat manuscripts from place to place, read, learned, communicated.
They had hope! And look at us.
Look at us. We have each other.
We have the internet.
We have self-publishing.
We have websites, Strike the Root, Lou Rockwell, others, that will bring our words out.
We face no imprisonment, no torture, some social ostracism to be sure.
But we do not fear for our lives.
And what we write and what we speak will be available Instantly, for 10,000 years or more.
Or more!
People manage to write knowing, with most likelihood, that their writings would be burnt with them upon their deathbed.
We get to sky write for 10,000 years.
And we feel despair.
My podcasts, our podcasts, these podcasts are downloaded hundreds of thousands of times a month.
Thanks.
What conceivable right with the voice that is possible for this conversation, what conceivable right would I have to feel despair?
Imagine, I could go back To the ghosts of the martyrs for science and reason.
To Galileo.
To all the people who were tortured and killed under the brutal and bloody spurs of the Catholic Church or any of the other tyrannies.
And say, oh, my dead brethren, I feel such despair for the world.
Oh, my God, it's just never going to work.
And they say, oh, my God, is it still so bad?
What's going on? I say, well...
You know, some people, they don't like me for my beliefs.
And they say, yeah, yeah, okay, but what's really going on?
Like, what is so terrible that the future cannot be saved?
Did we all die in vain?
Did our deaths not bring any relief to philosophy?
Socrates may be among this number, too.
And they'd say, how many of you are getting killed?
We'd say, none.
None? Well, how many of you are getting tortured?
None? Okay, so it sounds like there's some progress.
How many of you can't get your word out at all?
I'd say, oh no, there's this medium.
You can post something and anybody in the world can come and read it and it'll be there forever in one form or another.
I'd say, huh...
Well, is it that you get shunned economically and cannot make a living if you are a philosopher?
And we say, no, we're not bound to a local economy.
We can easily have a job and keep silent about our beliefs and we can live fine.
It's like, oh, well, are you not allowed to have children?
No, we can have children. And can we understand the bewilderment at our near-infinite pussy-dom?
And they say, well, we acted in the jaws of torture and murder.
And we were broken on the wheel, and we were speared, and we were burned alive.
And we acted with hope.
And you, who face no murder, torture, imprisonment, death, who can have a job, who can have children, who can get married, who have this incredible medium for the exchange of ideas, You feel despair?
It's like, yeah, but things are getting worse.
Well, sure.
But we're still 50 lifetimes or maybe 5 lifetimes away from torture for thought.
And we have by far the greatest chance of any who have come before.
We have the most amazing tools.
We have message boards.
We have podcasts. We have articles.
We have outlets. There's self-publishing.
How long do you think it would have taken for me to get On Truth published?
Or The God of Atheists, or Almost, or Just Poor, or The Island, or Revolutions?
I mean, Revolutions was published by Publish America, which is not a publisher-publisher.
How long would it have...
Well, I tell you, never. Never would have happened.
Never would have happened. Now I've sold hundreds of copies of Untruth.
I'm working on the UPB because I have an outlet!
You can pay me a couple of clicks.
You can get the audiobook a couple of clicks.
Start listening to it right away.
It's going to be there for eternity. It never degrades in quality.
When philosophers stood before the burning of the library at Alexandria, when the great works of antiquity and philosophy were going up in smoke, When the Roman Empire collapsed and the Goths...
The Gauls?
Took over. Not the Goths, I think.
That's in Transylvania. By then, I think, despair would have been an appropriate emotion.
But... But us?
Despair? Really?
I mean, in the context of history and in the context of all that came before and all the martyrs of the cause?
Murray Rothbard wrote and spoke without the internet in the 50s and 60s.
Where he'd give a speech to 50 people, 100 people.
He'd teach a course of 30 people a year.
He'd get published in magazines that a few hundred or a few thousand people read that then became fish wrapping to vanish forever.
He didn't know they'd be resurrected in the internet.
He didn't know. He got up and went to work every day pushing forward the course.
He got it. He got his ass in gear.
He got moving. Von Mises.
Bastiat. Smith, Socrates, they faced challenges that we can't even conceive.
We can't even conceive of them.
They would give anything to be in our position to be able to speak the truth.
Anything! Anything! They could not have dreamed in their wildest dreams of the opportunities that we have now For this conversation, never could they have imagined the capacities that we have.
And we all know this.
I mean, we all know this.
And so if we succumb to despair, we unbelievably dishonor the ghosts of those who We gave their fingers, their eyes, their balls, their teeth, their lives, their families, their futures, their careers, their incomes.
We unbelievably dishonor those who came before.
If we succumb to despair, being handed the gifts that we have been handed to advance this conversation, this essential conversation, if we fall prey to despair, they truly have died in vain.
And it's, you know, if you don't mind me saying it, it's kind of selfish.
It's kind of selfish. Because it's not objective.
It's not objective. Yeah, of course the task is huge.
It's a multi-generational project.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But my God, we've got some traction now.
My God, we've got some traction now.
I've got podcasts out there, two to three years of full-time university That's the volume.
Which you can get for free.
Listen to at your own leisure.
Participate in questions and in a board.
All for free! Most people have more interaction with me through the board than anybody ever did through university with their professors.
You don't have to give up your income.
You don't have to pay any tuition.
None of that. It's free!
It's free! And the only way to fight despair is to recognize its true source, which is not this conversation, and it's not the future.
It's not the future. The overwhelmingness in the face of terrible and unjust power is about the past.
It's about the past. You get to work through all that stuff.
You got to work through all that stuff.
You got to talk honestly with your family.
Buy on truth and do what it says.
That's my instruction for you.
Because what it says is, be honest and curious with your family about their instructions to you.
Is that such a terrible idea?
No. Is that something that your family would disagree with on principle?
No, of course not. And once you penetrate the despair of your childhood and work through it, you will look on the state as a little shadow on a sunny day.
And when we have conceptually outgrown the state, and we'll talk about this when I get back to podcasting more regularly after the UPP book is done, I'm just finishing up the audiobook.
When you have worked through the prison of your past, and that's the prison we need to break out of.
The prisons are not to come.
The prisoners, the prisons are what was.
But once you have worked through that fear and pain and humiliation and anger of your existing prisons, you will not fear future prisons.
And it is our lack of fear about the future prisons that blows the future wide open.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
Been a tad dry lately.
I just wanted to mention buying a book.
I mean, I hate to say it because it's just a little thing here, but buying a book is not a donation.
People say, well, you know, I did buy a book.
It's like, yeah, and I make like a couple of bucks from a book.
Right? I mean, don't think you'd send me a donation of a couple of bucks and say, well, that's worth 300 hours or 500 hours, 800 hours of podcasts.
I feel that a penny a podcast is a little too high.
I mean, you wouldn't, right?
So I know that it may be something to solve your conscience, but buying a book is not a donation.
I mean, you want to donate for the podcast.
Buying the book is paying me for the labor it took to put the book together, not for all the podcasts that you've listened to.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that as the sort of basic reality that I wanted to tweak you about.
So it has been a little bit dry lately, and I do have some concern that people are saying, well, I've bought this book or, you know, the barbecue audio downloads or...
Whatever. And therefore, you know, that's my contribution.
Ah, no. Not really.
So if you get donated, really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, as always, for listening.
And let us move forward with joy and passion and virtue into the future, which we can own if we do not fear it.
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