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Nov. 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:17:56

908 Sunday Call In Show Nov 11 2007

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	Well, good afternoon, everybody.
	Thank you so much for joining the Free Domain Radio Sunday Chat, November the 11th, 2007, just after 4 p.m.
	New York time, and it is Remembrance Day.
	I did a video this morning, which you can find on YouTube.
	It's also FDR 907, which is on Remembrance Day issues and so on.
	There's two other little things that I'd like to mention, one of which I've mentioned on the board before.
	Let me start with this first one, which is around veterans and the homelessness.
	So this is from newsyahoo.com and was published on the 8th of November 2007.
	It says here, Washington, veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11% of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.
	And homelessness is not just a problem among Middle Asian elderly veterans.
	Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment, or help with finding a job.
	The Veterans Affairs Department has identified 1,500 homeless veterans from the current wars and say 400 of them have participated in its programs specifically targeting homelessness.
	Although we could say that the military itself is a program specifically targeting homelessness insofar as the creation thereof.
	The National Alliance to End Homelessness, a public education nonprofit, based the findings of its report on numbers from Veterans Affairs and the Census Bureau.
	2005 data estimated that 194,254 homeless people out of the 744,313 on any given night were veterans.
	In comparison, the VA says that 20 years ago, the estimated number of veterans who were homeless on any given night was 250,000 versus 194,254.
	Some advocates say the early presence of veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan at shelters does not bode well for the future.
	It took roughly a decade for the lives of Vietnam veterans to unravel to the point that they started showing up among the homeless.
	Advocates worry that intense and repeated deployments leave newer veterans particularly vulnerable.
	We're going to be having a tsunami of them eventually because the mental health toll from this war is enormous, said Daniel Tooth, Director of Veterans Affairs for Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.
	While services to homeless veterans have improved in the past 20 years, advocates say more financial resources still are needed with the spotlight on the plight of Iraq veterans.
	They hope more will be done to prevent homelessness and provide affordable housing to the younger veterans while there's still a window of opportunity.
	So this is available on Free Domain Radio.
	You can look at it at freedomainradio.com forward slash board forward slash forums thread 100261.aspx And I just wanted to mention a little bit about this because the whole concept of war is around the destruction either of the bodies or of the souls of human beings.
	And What is never talked about, as I have repeatedly mentioned over and over, is the fact that these people are murderers.
	And they're paid murderers.
	And that is the real horror of war.
	The real horror of war is that people are paid to be murderers.
	And when you are paid to be a murderer and you cheer about it and you feel that it is a wonderful, gorgeous and positive thing to do so, then your soul is going to die and you will be unable to love and you will be unable to find peace and you will be unable to find happiness.
	And the very kindest thing that we can do for veterans is the one thing that people just won't do.
	The one thing that we need to do for our veterans is to help them by identifying the truth of their condition.
	I'll say it again.
	The one thing that we need to do for veterans It's to help them understand the nature of their condition or their affliction by telling them the truth.
	And it may not be telling them the truth.
	It just may be telling people who cheer them on the truth.
	I saw a Dr.
	Phil once where Dr.
	Phil was praising an Iraqi, a 20-year-old, a 19- or 20-year-old Iraqi soldier, a U.S. soldier who'd been to Iraq.
	You know, we're all so proud of you over there, going over there, defending our freedom and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	And this guy just looks so depressed.
	Every time we praise these soldiers, we sink them further into an ungodly and unbelievable kind of depression.
	A sinkhole of nihilism.
	Every time we praise murderers, and when I say murderers, I don't mean that these guys woke up and said, I want to be a serial killer.
	They woke up and wanted to serve their country because lies were told to them before they went, and then they went and experienced the horror of being a paid killer, a hitman, a murderer, a slaughterer, a butcher, a criminal.
	And then we continue to sink them in the fantasy of praise until they are no longer visible even to themselves and their histories are incomprehensible because nobody is telling them the truth.
	That they were fooled into being killers and that they are killing to defend a society that praises murderers.
	That they are killing to defend a society, a ruling class, an educational system that praises murderers.
	There is an article in the Globe and Mail called Every Soldier's Very Finest Remembrancer.
	And in it, the writer, Rex Murphy, talks about Wilfred Owen, who is a British poet.
	And I read a good number of the Siegfried Sassoon and these people.
	During the time I was doing research for the book that I read today, the book that I read part of today in FDR 907.
	And he is considered to be, along with Siegfried Sassoon, one of the finest First World War poets.
	I'm going to read to you a couple of lines that are considered to be the most famous from his poems, and again, see if you can figure out what is missing.
	What passing bells for these who die as cattle!
	Only the monstrous anger of the guns, only the stuttering rifles of rapid rattles.
	These are the first lines of the Anthem for Doomed Youth.
	Anthem for Doomed Youth.
	That's the title of his poem.
	Another part of this poem is he says this.
	No mockeries now for them, no prayers, nor bells.
	Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, the shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells and bugles calling for them from sad shires.
	And here he goes and works his metaphorical pen to near Bleeding Point in order to make this...
	This point about the suffering of the soldiers, and he says, Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, and towards our distant rest began to trudge.
	Men marched asleep.
	Many had lost their boots, but limped on, bloodshod.
	All went lame, all blind, drunk with fatigue.
	And the last thing here, he says, the writer says, he is the very finest remembrancer of every soldier who has been in battle.
	And as we approach November the 11th, there is no voice more kindly tuned to the memory of all who have fallen in any war than the man who wrote that.
	This is another quote from Wilfred Owen.
	The pallor of girls' brows shall be their paw, their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
	Now, it could be because it's hard to rhyme the word bayonet.
	It could be because it's hard to rhyme the word murder.
	Or slaughter or genocide or serial killer or hitman.
	But all you ever read about is how these people suffered.
	The fallen, those who nobly gave their lives to protect our freedoms.
	I have never read a single war poem That is not rank and dripping with self-pity.
	It is an entire manufactured, manipulative charade from hell.
	I have never read a war poem which describes what it's like to bayonet a boy in the belly.
	I have never read a war poem that describes what it's like to walk through a village where body parts are raining down from shells that you have fired.
	Or grenades that you have thrown.
	Thank you.
	I have never read a war poem that describes the unholy glee of shooting another man through the head or bayoneting women and children Or driving tanks over people.
	And until we get that horror, until we stop focusing on the suffering and start focusing on the slaughter, it's never going to end.
	As long as we can think of the rank mutual self-slaughter of 10 million people, And say that a line like, and each slow dusk a drawing down of blinds.
	What does that have to do with?
	Fuck all to do with war.
	They were marching in their sleep.
	To what? To kill!
	To murder!
	To break bones!
	To rip out intestines!
	To sever limbs!
	To decapitate!
	To inflame, to gas, to poison, to kill.
	To kill! And the reason that the veterans are homeless is because they are mass murderers.
	And until and unless we are willing to identify that cancer and that plague in our midst, they will continue to be homeless.
	And everyone says, oh, with the veterans, we care so much about the veterans.
	Then stop pretending they're anything other than what they are.
	In the Globe that I held up earlier, the title of the article was a family of fighters.
	Family of fighters. You know, like there are pugilists or maybe people who fight cancer.
	A family of killers.
	A family of slaughterers.
	A family of murderers for hire.
	Can you imagine if we actually put that truth in front of people?
	And it is true. Paid to kill.
	There was an article about the noble war, the second world war.
	In it, the woman was talking about her father who was in the second world war.
	She quoted him as saying, I'm totally against this war in Iraq.
	What the hell did the Iraqis ever do to me?
	Totally against the war in Afghanistan.
	What did the Afghanis ever do to me?
	Well, what the fuck did the Germans ever do to him?
	It's just blood-soaked stories This is the mythology of murder.
	And as long as that mythology, that bloody rag fog, continues to coat the endless mountains of human flesh, carved, split, broken and bloody, As long as the fog of words and cowardly intellectuals continues to cover these mountains of the dead,
	they will continue to grow, they will continue to be piled on, until we can peel back this befuddling and befogging layer of words from the endless faces of the slaughtered, from the cold and dead eyes who stare upwards for any kind of justice after their life,
	Until we can imagine what it's like to do honor to the dead by telling the truth, we simply will continue to pile more and more corpses upon these mountains of the dead.
	And you can't find a syllable of truth anywhere, even from the veterans, Even from the poets.
	Fuck the intellectuals. They're never going to tell the truth about anything.
	But even those who've experienced it.
	Nobody talks about what it's like to murder.
	And nobody can talk about it.
	Because as soon as you do talk about it, the whole shitty cathedral of blood comes pouring down around you.
	Sluicing down from the skies.
	The blood that is held aloft through fantasy It collapses.
	And we see it for what it is, a lake of loss, of slaughter, of death, of murder, of bowels opening up, of shitting yourself, of screaming for your mother and running in slippery circles in the mud as you die like a pig.
	The soldiers are not fallen.
	The soldiers are killers.
	War is murder.
	And war is only possible because of the gun in the room.
	At home, that pays for the war, that makes it profitable.
	I wrote an article, I guess it was coming on for two years ago now, about the gun in the room.
	You know, fuck the gun in the room.
	Can we even see the gun overseas?
	Can we even see the gun 3,000 miles away?
	Can we even see the gun 50 years ago?
	go?
	We are so far from being able to grapple this reality that is undermining our perceptions of ethics, that even to say something as radical as the truth is revolutionary.
	To call a spade a spade and a bullet-wielding, bayonet-stabbing hitman a murderer is shocking beyond words.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	And so we live in our mythologies.
	We live in our fantasies. The virtue and bugles and flags and fallen for freedom.
	And because we do that, we simply get more of the same.
	Every generation is more of the same.
	And that's the price you pay for fantasy.
	The price you pay for fantasy in one form or another is simply, merely, and completely death.
	The price that you pay for fantasy is death in one form or another.
	And until we can give up that fantasy, all we're going to keep getting is more death, and that's the price that we're paying.
	That's the price that we're paying.
	So that's my little intro to Remembrance Day.
	We don't certainly have to talk about war all afternoon, but that was the stuff that was kicking around in my mind.
	I hope that it's of some help and some use to you.
	So I turned the floor...
	Oh, a little bit of FDR business.
	Sorry to switch gears so quickly, but thanks again to all of the book purchases and donators.
	And I just wanted to mention that the FDR media empire has now doubled in size insofar as the inimitable Gregory Von Gauthier has joined the Freedom Aid Radio team on a part-time basis.
	And... He will be responsible for general cult operations, for helping to separate people from anyone who might be able to give them any help, for ensuring that guild manipulation and isolation help increase donations.
	So as Head Cult Minion, I just wanted to thank Greg for taking on this opportunity slash mess, and he is going to be taking over some of the more day-to-day technical activities that are pressing and required and consuming all of my time.
	And allowing me to yell into a microphone a little bit more often, which would be great, at least for me, and also, of course, particularly to start working on the book, are real-time relationships.
	So that's something that Christina has kindly agreed to give me a hand on, because she feels that it will help me have a real-time relationship with reality, which she considers to be a prerequisite, and I can't help but agree with her.
	So that's good news, and please help keep donating, because Greg is very, very expensive.
	Thank you again for donating.
	The books are all out. The God of Atheists, Untruth, The Tyrion, Evolution, Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, audiobook, PDF, regular copy if you want to order all three.
	Get in touch with me. I'll give you a good deal, my friend.
	I'll give you a special prize. Thanks again for the donators who allow me to continue to do this.
	I hope that I'm doing you proud, and if I'm not, just let me know.
	Whatever I can do to make it more satisfying for you, I will absolutely do it.
	You are the boss.
	So again, thank you so much for everyone's attention.
	We had a magnificent month last month, and things are looking pretty good this month too.
	I've been spending a little bit more money on advertising, and So that's it for me as far as the intro goes.
	If you would like to pop in now with a question or a comment, I would be more than happy to hear it.
	I have both a question and a comment.
	Why, sure. I was on the chat two Sundays ago about late-life de-thooing.
	Yes, our people. Right.
	I was on the phone for eight hours yesterday talking to both my sister and one of my brothers.
	And they called me basically because it was my birthday about a week ago, so it was the obligatory birthday get in touch thing.
	So anyway, I kind of ignored my brother's messages and then he called back and I felt like talking to him and wound up on the phone with him for four and a half hours explaining my decision to not be in touch with my parents.
	He asked me directly why I chose to take a tropical vacation instead of doing what I normally do and that's go visit family at Christmas.
	And it was interesting because I really got a first-hand rich experience in talking to my brother of just how intense and deep someone can be, or my brother was, bought into the whole family mythology.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you. Just before you, do you mean the mythology of your particular family or the mythology of family as a general concept?
	As a general concept and also with my family, but mostly in general.
	And to the degree where he defended my father, who to him especially was just an immense tyrant.
	Hit him and screamed and yelled at him and, oh my god.
	It was just amazing.
	I mean, we actually, part of the four and a half hour talk was him describing in great detail how much of a just complete, absolute asshole my father was the whole time during our childhoods.
	And he just would not get it.
	But, you know, I also don't... I give him credit for being very curious and asking me a lot of questions instead of just telling me off and saying, you know, you're just a jerk, whatever.
	I'm sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to make sure I understood.
	You said you don't blame him. Don't blame him for what?
	For buying into the family mythology.
	I say that because I spent most of my life buying into it 100%.
	Sorry to interrupt you again, but when you got better information, you responded.
	I mean, I know it took you some time, but you did respond and mull the ideas over and so on.
	Sure. I'm really, really sorry to interrupt you, but the question of blame is very important because there is such a thing as assigning responsibility to somebody without blaming them, right?
	So if you say to your brother, now that you have this information, you're responsible for disproving it or believing it.
	And if you believe in it, then you have to act on it.
	And so you can give responsibility to your brother while recognizing that it may take him weeks or months to process the conversation, but that's not the same as blaming him.
	I just wanted to give you another option.
	Right. I appreciate that.
	That sounds more accurate.
	Basically, I have already deleted my parents' email addresses that go straight to the trash.
	I'm completely I had done with my parents.
	Again, he's the most annoying interrupting guy in the world, but I know that you can have the messages deleted from the server so you don't even see the titles, right?
	I'll have to look into that.
	I think Gmail should probably do that.
	But yeah, it sounds like a better idea.
	And I've been mulling over since the last two weeks about the letter.
	And I appreciate the value of sending a letter that says, in the effect of, you know, for personal reasons, I'm going to take a break from the family and I'll get back in touch with you when it's right for me.
	But I didn't feel from my gut that it was appropriate to send that to everyone in my family, you know, my siblings.
	Because I don't have the same...
	Feelings of obligation with them as I do with my parents.
	It's so much stronger with my parents than with...
	I don't call my siblings anyway.
	And I don't feel obligated to go visit them once a year or call them regularly like I did with my parents.
	So now, the situation is that I've talked to my brother in length and told him, he asked me directly, are you going to go to visit them next year?
	I said, no. Are you going to ever talk to them again?
	I said, no. Are you going to go to their funerals?
	I said, no. I said, I'm totally done.
	So the cat's out of the bag with him.
	Also, I talked with my sister yesterday, too, for a great length.
	The cat's out of the bag with them.
	I don't feel I need to send them a DFU letter, but my question is how to tell my parents that I want to take a break from the family and not include my siblings.
	Because I kind of talked with this briefly with my brother.
	I said, well, I'm going to tell my parents that.
	I'm going to tell them that I'm not going to be in touch with them.
	And I kind of told them I wasn't clear on exactly how.
	I was going to say, maybe I'll take a break or something like that and get back in touch with them.
	Or I'll just tell them.
	But that's not quite really the truth.
	Or I could Be more blunt, hit him over the head by just saying, you know, I'm just not going to communicate with you directly.
	So, I don't know.
	I was wondering if there were any ideas or advice for my situation in terms of notifying my parents that, you know, I'm going to not be in touch with them.
	Well, if I were you, I would notify my siblings.
	And the reason that I would do that is so that my parents couldn't use my siblings to get messages through to me or to communicate with me.
	I mean, they could still try, but at least your siblings wouldn't be confused.
	It also might be useful to get the information to your siblings so that your parents don't dictate the mythology that results from your decision, right?
	So you can sort of give them some basic reasons.
	I want to get my head straight. We've had an abusive history.
	I need to sort all of that sort of stuff out.
	And so I'm going to take an indefinite period of time away to sort all of that out.
	Mention there's this guy on the internet who wants your money, who wants to bring you to not stop seeing everyone who's in your family.
	And that should help calm them down.
	But I would definitely inform your siblings.
	Of course, there is a number of possibilities when it comes to sibling relationships in a DFU. Of course, the most likely one, and I'm sorry to say this, but just statistically this does seem to be the case, the most likely one is that they will work their darndest to try and get you into a refu situation.
	And they will do that not because of any intrinsic value that your parents have, but because your decision or your choice to act in a consistent and virtuous and self-interested manner will cause them anxiety.
	You're opening up a possibility that for them, is not even really a possibility at the moment.
	So if you continue on that path and you end up, as you will, you know, happier and more secure and more confident and so on, then they will feel anxiety because you're putting a decision in their faces that they would rather, in a sense, not have put in their faces.
	So with siblings, you're either going to get people who are going to try and get you back into the In which case, it doesn't go well.
	I mean, there's no positive way out of that.
	People don't tend to recant, but that's sort of one situation.
	The other is that you get the blank one, right?
	The blank siblings.
	And those are the siblings who are like, you know, well, you know, whatever you need to do, I guess I support you.
	But they won't make any decision about whether you're doing the right or the wrong thing or have any understanding of ethics or integrity behind your reasoning.
	Behind the reasons for your decision.
	So they'll just be like, well, you know, if that's what you have to do, I guess that's what you have to do.
	And, you know, I'm sorry that it's come to this for you.
	And you'll get all this mealy-mouthed, fence-sitting blankness.
	And that is usually a harbinger of things to come which are pretty deleterious, such as as you continue to not be part of the family, their anxiety will increase and they will be more susceptible to parental pressure.
	And that parental pressure shifts because initially it's to refoo, but after that it just becomes a kind of petulant and destructive rage, and those people will then start to find ways to put you down and to make you pay for the crime of leaving the family in the mafia sense.
	So there is also the third possibility is somebody who...
	As you say, curious, you can have long conversations and so on and want to know the reasons behind your decision and have some respect for the ethics and the integrity that is driving your decision.
	And that person will either turn into a blank sibling or they will turn into somebody who can also get on the raft and get to freedom.
	So you just have to follow your own instincts, but I would absolutely suggest That you let your siblings know, because otherwise what you're doing is you're leaving a wide open space for your parents to cause you more trouble through your siblings.
	Right, so how would I kind of word a letter to my parents that's just to them, where I can't just say, well, I'm taking a break from the family if I'm not going to include my siblings.
	I would contact them more individually, I think.
	Well, I would just say, I mean, it's the standard thing, right, that I suggest.
	Of course, it's up to you, naturally, but my suggestion is, you know, I've decided to take a break from seeing you guys because I have some issues to work on, and if and when I've sorted them out and want to reconnect, I will absolutely be in touch.
	Yeah, I guess that sounds good.
	Yeah, but it was interesting talking with my brother.
	He was curious in one sense, but every time I said something that explained my position, he came back with something to kind of refute it, and it became real clear that he was anxious about this.
	It was about him and his anxiety.
	Although he tried to make it sound like he was concerned about me, but it really wasn't.
	What I'm doing and telling him that my parents don't care about me and giving him concrete evidence that they actually don't and hearing back the absolute weakest attempts Trying to convince me that they actually do care about me.
	It was just an interesting conversation.
	They came from a different time.
	They did the best they could.
	Dad was never taught to express himself.
	Mom doesn't know how to do that.
	Oh, absolutely. You're going to get a whole mass of fogging which has got nothing to do with you and is entirely designed to keep that question obscured for your brother.
	It was just my first real face-to-face with someone, a direct confrontation or discussion about this.
	I've listened to a lot of your podcasts and heard all the same things that my brother was saying that you predicted.
	I trusted that what you said is what you experienced, but it's different hearing you talk about your experience.
	But when I actually experienced it myself for the first time with someone real-time, it was like, wow.
	It made it that much more real, more personal.
	Well, I agree with you, and I just wanted to mention something for both you and for the people who are going through this kind of stuff, which is that the amazing thing when you start to think for yourself What happens is that you realize how unbelievably robotic other people are.
	When you start to think for yourself and you start to evaluate both your personal reality and objective reality and your relationships, when you start to evaluate them according to rational principles, you're thinking for yourself, you realize that humanity is pretty much composed of mythology robots.
	And that the world is actually incredibly empty.
	And that most of the people, if not the vast majority of the people that you will ever interact with, are pretty much identical to those little goddamn Barbies where you pull the string on the back and they say, I don't like math!
	But when you get the defenses that human beings have against reality are mind-numbingly repetitive.
	They are mind-numbingly repetitive, and there's only like six of them anyway.
	And so the amazing thing is, and this is why people don't like to detach from the herd and think for themselves, is then you look back, or you interact with these people, and everything that comes out of their mouth is mind-numbingly predictable.
	And you realize, at least for me, and I think it will be the case for you, maybe it won't be, but you realize with a terrible, painful ache The amount of years you wasted being unbelievably bored and how little you want to do that in the future.
	There is a kind of nihilism that goes along with this where you realize Just how soulless and robotic the people around you are insofar as because all they do is manage their own anxieties, they have no soul in a sense, right?
	All they're doing is defending against reality and that is unbelievably repetitive and unbelievably repeated over and over again and the defenses and the distractions and the fogging and the minimizing and all of the defenses that people have to avoid simply judging reality.
	All of that is just amazing, and you've just got to keep your eyes peeled for that, because you will get a kind of world weariness when you think for yourself and you start to interact with other people who haven't crossed over and who are actively fighting against crossing over to some sort of rational enlightenment.
	There's this weariness and this sameness, and this is perfectly predicted by a reasonable philosophy, but it's just something to keep your eye on.
	Yeah, I certainly experienced that with my brother.
	It's like you got your hand up their ass and you're making their mouth move.
	You know what's coming next and it's unbelievable just how repetitive it all is.
	Yeah, we went round and round for four and a half hours.
	Not the entire time, but for quite a bit of time.
	Round and round and round.
	But thanks, I think that was helpful.
	Thanks so much. Really do appreciate the update.
	And keep us posted, of course.
	Thanks. Alright.
	Who's up next? On the good ship.
	FDR. Well, since nobody's talking, quick announcement.
	Greg G is going to be on the radio with me on Tuesday at 11 a.m.
	So you guys can catch the stream at the link I posted on the forums.
	Oh, fantastic. Thanks so much.
	Do you want to just read out the URL in case people don't know whether these things are on the forum?
	Yeah, sure. wrgp.fiu.edu.
	In the top right corner, there's a link to the stream, all the bit rates you'd like, and yeah, you can listen there.
	And hopefully we'll get a recording of that, and I don't know.
	We don't really know what we're going to talk about.
	I'm going to be kind of alone on the show, so Greg's just going to call in, and we're going to have a little chat about current events, or cats and dogs, or whatever.
	No, I think that Greg, now that he's moved into the inner circle completely and as a paid employee, the next thing that I'm pretty much anticipating is a backstabbing breakaway, sort of a splinter faction.
	I think I've already seen memos floating around for GDR, Greg Domain Radio.
	So this step that Greg is taking with you on the show seems to be entirely consistent.
	With my mad paranoia about pretty much everything.
	So, that's good.
	Let me just check this off. Yeah, he is the new Nathaniel Brandon.
	Sadly, though the affair has not occurred yet.
	But, you know, a boy can always help.
	Next! Who wants to follow that rant?
	I was wondering if the date for the symposium in Miami is already set, or if you're thinking about maybe moving it.
	No, I'm not thinking of moving it.
	Why is that? That's not a date that you can make.
	Miami Symposium, January 18th to 19th, 2008 in, where was it again?
	Miami, that's right.
	And so, yes, we've already sort of pre-booked some of the hotel aspects.
	I mean, if everybody says I can't make it that week, then naturally we will have to move it.
	But so far we've had enough sign-ups that it would be tough to move.
	Oh, that's fine. I could probably make it.
	It's just kind of when school started already.
	So you're saying it's probably inconvenient to you, so we should change it all.
	Well, naturally. No, I mean, if there's people that are going to school, I don't know how many there are, but it might be better for them.
	I don't know if you've polled or anything.
	No, but this is the date we sort of set on, and the reason is, of course, Christina and I have already booked her flights.
	So, well, Christina's booked her flight.
	I have to hitchhike.
	I don't know what's going on with that, but apparently I don't have the air miles or the marital cachet to rate a seat.
	Anyway, well, no, because we could have flown together or Christina could have got first class, so clearly it was a decision that she was keen to make.
	In her favor.
	Anyway, the other thing I wanted to mention is we have the Free Domain Radio Salons, which is a Saturday night dick get-togethers at my place.
	We will also allow for people to call in if they want, and to sort of listen and chat if you have to do so remotely, but people are welcome to drop by.
	There's information on the website, which you can get more information about.
	It's going to be a post-dinner thing, because we are cheap, and we're not going to feed you.
	But... Yeah, cocktails and so on.
	And hopefully Christina will keep her head out of the punch bowl this time.
	So that's going to be just...
	We're going to sit around and shoot the shit about philosophy, basically, or whatever's on your mind.
	So it's just more of a social get-together, which we're going to run every couple of weeks.
	So that's going to be available.
	Post more about that on the boards.
	So it's a drop-in or a call-in and chat.
	People are having a problem with the word salon.
	Colonists find it, what, a little too gay?
	They think it's a hair joke, yeah, because Lord knows we have no shortage of those on Free Domain Radio.
	No, the salon, I could have called it a round table, but the salon is a French thing from the 19th century that they would get together, literary societies or philosophers would get together for a salon.
	And this, of course, in the Wild West, they'd do it called a saloon, but there was much more shooting than there probably will be at ours.
	So that's where the name comes from.
	Okay, well, I had an interesting question come up actually just today while I was listening to another podcast.
	What do you mean another podcast?
	There's another podcast? What are you talking about?
	I knew it! I knew it, Brutus!
	Sorry, come on. No, I'm pillaging, dude.
	But, anyway...
	They were talking about this movie in which one friend asked another to lie to her husband so that she wouldn't get in trouble with her husband for going out to a club or something like that.
	They tried to turn it into a philosophical debate over Friendship versus honesty.
	And it occurred to me that juxtaposing those two things in that way sounds to me very much like a false dichotomy.
	Because You can't really have a friendship with someone in which you're not honest, right?
	Well, I mean, I certainly agree with that.
	And there is the old dramatic thing of, like, I know that my friend's husband is sleeping around on her.
	Should I tell her? Should I not?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And, I mean, that's a pretty common...
	Ethical dilemma that people imagine or make up for themselves, which obviously is, you know, relative to ethical dilemmas in the world, like the aforementioned rant on war, relatively inconsequential, and only rich white people would really care about that as a real moral dilemma.
	But of course, the question is, what are you doing with friends whose husbands sleep around on them, right?
	That obviously is a bad marriage.
	Her husband is lying to her.
	It says, I would be more concerned about myself than I would be about my friend.
	Like, What kind of company am I running with here where this comes up as an issue?
	Right, and that's sort of where I was going with this was the fact that it's made into a dilemma Is because, essentially, they're trying to turn a vice into a virtue,
	right? So, the idea of helping your friend hide things from her husband is presented as a good thing to do, right? And on the other side, being honest with your friend is supposed to be a good thing to do.
	So just the fact that it's posed in that way, and it kind of ties into what you were saying earlier about Remembrance Day and and it kind of ties into what you were saying earlier about Remembrance Day You need the sentimentality in that case.
	You need the sentimentality in order to turn the idea of turning our children into murderers into a virtue, right?
	Right, right. In order to avoid looking at the horror of a society that does what it does, we have to make up all these stories, which simply means that we have to reproduce it.
	If you avoid, and we all know this from personal experience, those who've taken a little tootleton down to their own personal room 101, whatever that may be, We know that if you refuse to accept something horrible about yourself, then you simply will continue to repeat it, because you'll just make up a story about it instead, which means that you can't turn a vice into something neutral.
	It has to be turned into a virtue, because you need something that's...
	The opposite end of the teeter-totter or the seesaw.
	So you can't turn a vice into a neutral.
	You have to turn it into a virtue, right?
	So what you have in this situation that you're talking about is people say, well, here I have two competing virtues.
	I have a friendship and I have the truth.
	And they are both valuable and they are contradicting each other.
	And, of course, what they're trying to do is paralyze themselves by overcomplicating some things that are pretty basic, which is The solution does not usually involve telling the truth to your friend, but not having that friend around.
	I was reminded of somebody that Christina and I knew some years ago.
	She had a volatile relationship with a fellow and she called Christina one day and she was pretty hysterical.
	I mean, even by my standards, she was pretty hysterical.
	And she said to Christina, she said, I need you to tell my boyfriend that you saw him at the mall with another woman.
	And Christina was like, what are you talking about?
	And as it turns out, this woman had received a phone call on a cell phone that was her There were boyfriends that he'd left behind, and it was a woman who hung up, and so she became immediately frantic that her boyfriend was having an affair, right? Because some woman called, and it was a wrong number, and then hung up.
	So she immediately went to, of course, a fantasy affair, right?
	And so she said that, I know you're involved with some other woman, because you were at the mall with another woman, and Stefan and Christina saw you and told me.
	When, of course, we've done nothing of the kind, right?
	And, you know, what is the solution?
	Am I torn between the truth and friendship?
	Hell no, I'm torn between hitting the eject button in one second or two.
	Right, right. Acting on what you know to be...
	Yeah, there's no contradiction there.
	So you're asking us to lie to cover your ass because you falsely accused your boyfriend of something he didn't do based on a paranoid reaction?
	I mean, when you have that, you know that phrase that scrolls across your brain from time to time with people?
	This is a good exit phrase for me in a relationship.
	When I see the phrase, where do I even begin?
	That's usually a good time to not be a friend with that person.
	Right, so I was thinking about that and how if you are living consistently with right values, in accordance with the truth, there can be no conflict of virtues.
	All the virtues point toward the truth, right?
	And so where there is a conflict, where you perceive a conflict, then you know that there's something not quite, in your own thinking, there's something that's not quite right.
	The only way a dichotomy can occur between virtues is if there's a misunderstanding of one virtue or the other.
	Right.
	And, you know, what we generally have to work with is a form of possession that we are inhabited by somebody else's preferences.
	So there are all these people, you know, their parents treated them badly and they say, well, I don't want to talk about it with my mom because it's, you know, I don't want to cause her pain and it's bad to cause people pain.
	But it's like nobody comes up with that on their own.
	That's just your mom's preference.
	She doesn't want you to talk to her about it.
	So she's communicated in various different ways over the years.
	That causing people pain is a bad thing, it's rude, and if you talk to this with me, I'm going to display pain, and that automatic programming is going to kick in and keep you away from the subject.
	So when we have contradictions in our values, it's almost always because we're allowing somebody else's corrupt or irrational or selfish preference to take precedence over what we know to be the right thing.
	So if you've got a friend whose husband is having an affair, Well, the only reason you're going to feel hesitation is because she doesn't want to know.
	And that's her hesitation.
	So that's what I mean, mistaking the world or mistaking other people for ourselves.
	We're programmed to respond so automatically to the needs of corrupt people and exploitive people when we're kids that we don't process things.
	We don't know if it's us or somebody else whose interests we're going to be harming.
	It all gets very mucky and confused, and that's part of how, of course, we're supposed to get paralyzed.
	Right. So, in a...
	I'm trying to fit that into what...
	No, don't worry about my tangents.
	Just go with your...
	Don't even cry.
	I can't even do it half the time.
	Well, it's not necessarily that...
	It's that we turn obedience into a virtue, right?
	In that case, where whatever makes somebody else feel bad, we can't do.
	Well, we turn pain avoidance of others.
	into a virtue, right?
	That's the key. We turn avoidance into a virtue.
	Because, of course, if you have something bad that happened in your childhood, it sure as hell hurts you to not be able to talk about it with your mom, right?
	But your pain and the avoidance of your pain, which would involve that conversation, suddenly doesn't matter, right?
	The only important thing is that your mom will be hurt, and that's bad, right?
	So we turn avoiding causing pain in others into a virtue, but it's never...
	A UPB blows that right out of the water, right?
	Because then it should be mutual, and she should want to have the conversation, because it will alleviate your pain.
	Right, because if causing people pain is a vice, then she should want to have that conversation with you.
	And of course, originally, she should be wrong for having caused you pain as a kid.
	Right. She should want to remediate the error or the harm she caused, right?
	Right. And so the conversation in that case would not be one of motivated and Revenge or retaliation, but in remediation, in correcting a wrong.
	Restitution, right. You know, that's right.
	And, of course, the fundamental aspect of corrupt ethics is this is a universal principle that does not apply to you.
	Right, right, right.
	Everything turns into a conflict.
	Everything turns into a kind of forced dichotomy.
	Right, and you get a whole bunch of sentimental and saccharine phrases which cloak the gun in the room, right?
	The virtue of the soldier, helping the poor, keeping drugs off the street, educating the children, helping the sick.
	You just get an enormous amount of syrupy and glucose-y, fructose-gluctose kind of words that are all designed to obscure the central fact that a gun is being pointed at someone's head and will be pulled if they don't obey.
	Right, right.
	And so I was just thinking about it.
	I couldn't think of a single virtue that when held up against any other virtue resulted in any kind of dichotomy, right?
	But the dichotomy is pleasure, right?
	The dichotomy that people talk about is pleasure, right?
	I like this couple because I can go and shoot the shit with them and have fun and they're funny and whatever, right?
	And now, unfortunately, I'm in the possession of the knowledge that her husband is having an affair.
	So, I don't want to give up this friendship, but I do want to tell the truth.
	So people take the hedonistic, I don't want to give up the friendship, and turn that into a virtue.
	Friendship is a virtue! Right?
	And so they turn their own pain avoidance into a virtue.
	And then they say, look, there's this conflict between virtues.
	But, of course, it's not true at all.
	And it's funny, too, that you say that, because that's exactly what they did on this show, is they called friendship a virtue.
	Sure. Explicitly called it a virtue.
	That raised an eyebrow immediately because virtues are something that are individually expressed.
	You can't obligate somebody else to be your friend because friendship is a virtue.
	Calling a friendship a virtue is like calling gravity an object.
	Right, exactly. And so they were setting up this conflict where none really existed.
	For the sake of...
	It's almost as if they were looking to...
	I don't know, just kind of wallow in the confusion, I guess.
	Well, they want to say that...
	This is how ethics gets crucified.
	They want to say, look, even in this simple situation, ethics can't work.
	So if ethics can't work in a simple situation, how the hell are you supposed to apply it to foreign policy or foreign aid?
	All they're saying is that ethics doesn't work.
	And they like it at a very personal level so that people say, oh, well, I guess there's this thing called ethics, which is really complicated and confusing.
	So I don't get it. I'm just going to leave it to the experts.
	I'm sure George Bush gets it.
	Let's just have him do it all.
	Right. And so it becomes not just a question of, you know, what do you do with a friend who asks you to lie for him?
	To what do you do when the president asks you to murder for him, right?
	You say, yeah, I mean, this is complicated shit.
	And of course, this is exactly what happens in the realm of religion as well, right?
	That nobody can figure out what the hell the Bible's all about, because it's just a psychotically deranged and contradictory book.
	And so we say, well, I don't know, kill the guy eye for an eye, turn the other cheek, who knows?
	And I just turn it over to the goddamn experts, the guy with the funny hats and the big rings, because I don't have a clue what's going on.
	It's all just supposed to baffle you to the point where you throw your hands up and say, I'm leaving this arena because I don't know what the hell's going on, and then all the bad people in the world move in and inhabit the realm of ethics.
	Yep. Yeah, so that was just, that was one thing.
	Then there was a...
	Just to move on to the next one, in case anyone had a yearning burning who maybe has just joined us.
	Was there anyone else who... Sure, certainly.
	I don't mean to interrupt you, but just in case there was somebody else who joined who wanted to...
	had anything spilling over their cup of conversation doth run it.
	Over?
	Anybody?
	Okay, go ahead.
	So the second thing I had on my list of interesting topics was a little heated conversation I had with my therapist last week.
	If you're interested in talking about the idea of misdirected anger...
	I'm more interested in experiencing misdirected anger, so go ahead.
	Well, she tasked me with a...
	Oh, I'm so sorry to interrupt.
	This is the one where she said, write down everything good about your parents?
	About your parents' relationship, is that right?
	Yeah, exactly.
	And the best I could come up with was a list of secondary gains, as you described it, which is just about as accurate as it can get between the two of them.
	But what really upset me was the fact that I felt like I was being made to make excuses for them, right?
	For their relationship.
	I'm so sorry, but what were the words that your therapist used when she asked for this assignment or when she gave you this assignment?
	Did she make up excuses for your parents?
	What did she actually say?
	What did she actually say?
	And yeah, exactly.
	She didn't say make up excuses, obviously.
	She said, list all the good things about their relationship.
	Even if it's something small.
	And an example she gave was like, you know, he put the toothpaste on her toothbrush for her.
	Right? That was her example.
	Right. Right.
	And so...
	But why did that make you so angry, though?
	Because that... I mean, if somebody said to me, write everything that's positive about your mom, I'd come up with one or two things.
	She never strangled a pigeon.
	She could beat a carpet with great ferocity due to her advanced child-beating muscles.
	I mean, I don't know. We could come up with one or two good things.
	I mean, she was kind to me when I was sick.
	When I was helpless, when I didn't have an ego, she was kind.
	There were some positives around that, right?
	They say, what is positive about my mom and dad's relationship?
	Well, me, of course. I mean, there's things that you could say that are positive, but you came up with something quite different from what she said, right?
	Well, I came up with...
	Let's see, I came up with...
	There were three or four things that I came up with.
	Like, you know, my mom always had dinner on the table and always had his breakfast ready in the morning for him, and my dad never forgot her birthday, right?
	But these are things that, when I was thinking about this, too, after that session, which was the second one, these were all things that they would tell me When I would ask the same questions, right? Like, why do you love him?
	Or why do you love her?
	Or how do you know you love each other, right?
	And the answer would always be, well, I do these things and that's why.
	Or the famous, she's just always been there for me.
	You know, like a potted plant or oxygen.
	Right. And so it occurred to me that this week, it occurred to me that what I was upset about was not so much...
	What made me angry was the fact that the list of things I could come up with was exactly the same list of things that they would come up with.
	So in that it was very useful, right?
	I think so because...
	It gave you a map of the peninsula of intrusion.
	As we talked about earlier, it's other people's opinions that mess us up, right?
	That we don't know are their opinions.
	So this gave you a map of an area where your parents' opinions had intruded into the real world, right?
	Sure, sure. Because beyond that list of things, I couldn't really think of any reason why I should believe that the two of them loved each other, and yet that they would argue vociferously that they did, right? But why did you get so mad at the therapist?
	Well, Well, I think because I was being asked to defend what I knew was screwed up in the first place.
	I don't believe that that was the case.
	That's why I asked you what she said.
	What she said was, write down good things about your parents' relationships, even if they're small.
	She didn't say, defend corruption.
	Because there's what people say, and then there's an interpretation of what they say.
	I recognize that as an interpretation, but I guess I can't think of it in any other way.
	Well, but you can think of it as it is.
	She has asked you to list positive things about your parents' relationships.
	And if you come back with none, then you come back with none.
	Yeah, that's true. Or you can say, I don't want to do this exercise.
	Give another one, right?
	Right. I mean, there are things that, I mean, I think anger is just, right?
	Like if somebody calls me a cult leader or whatever, then I'm going to get angry, right?
	But if somebody says, I want you to do this thing, then you can make that decision, you can do that thing, and I think that actually was quite helpful to do it for you.
	But getting angry and saying, well, she's now wanting me to do this, that, and the other, and she's got this hidden agenda of X, Y, and Z, and so on.
	You want to try not to do that.
	You know, to put it bluntly.
	I mean, we all have this habit, right?
	Because it really bothered you emotionally, and then you made up these reasons as to why being bothered emotionally was valid.
	Hmm. Well, I mean, it wasn't like I was...
	Sorry, that's what happened, which provokes no emotion, right?
	Unless somebody's just directly insulting you or something.
	She said, list positive things, which would provoke no emotion, right?
	You may feel like, I don't think that's a useful exercise or whatever, right?
	But then if you feel really angry about that, then what's happening is you have been asked to defend the undefendable in the past, right?
	Well, that's how I interpret it, for sure.
	In the past, right?
	So, you have been asked to defend the undefendable, your family, God, the military, whatever, right?
	In the past, that has been a constant requirement of yours, that's been imposed upon you, right?
	That's true.
	And even your own lifestyle has been subject to attack, right?
	Well, it's actually more defendable, but I'm just talking about like really corrupt things in your life, really corrupt people in your life, right?
	You have been asked to defend them and to act as if they're not corrupt, to counteract against any rational values, to defend or protect or break bread with people who are corrupt, right?
	That is true, yes.
	So the reason you have an emotional trigger there is because of the past, not because of the present, not because of what your therapist said, right?
	Okay. So when you have a strong emotional reaction to something which is not insulting, she didn't say, well, you're just a bad kid and I think your parents are great and you should go and love them up, right?
	Because that would be an attack upon whatever.
	She just said, do this, right?
	Which turned out to be a useful thing.
	When you have a very strong emotional reaction, and this is for all of us and this is something I have to remind myself of as well, when we have a very strong emotional reaction to something, it's because it's similar to everything, to bad things that have happened to us in the past.
	And what we need to do is get real and get honest about what happened in the past.
	What we don't want to do is to make up justifications for getting angry in the present, rather than recognize where it's actually coming from.
	So how is this a justification, though?
	Well, you said that she's trying to get me to defend my parents.
	Oh, I see. Like, that's a story about her motivations, and you were concerned about her corruption and this and that and the other, right?
	And her, you know, why would she want me to do this, and what's her agenda, and so on, right?
	The story is the roadmap backwards.
	Well, it's just not what she did, right?
	What she did, what she said, write down these positive things about your parents.
	And if you come back with none, that's very useful, right?
	And if you come back with two that turn out to be bad, that also is very useful.
	And the list of things I did come back with actually was very useful.
	It was very useful, right? So you had a strong emotional reaction, and the thing we need to do is to say, it can't be this person who just asked me to do this little exercise.
	Clearly, did not insult me, did not tell me I was wrong, did not invalidate my past, did not attack me, did not put me down, did not insult me, did not ask me to act in an unethical manner, did not betray me, did not steal from me, did not beat me up, did not rape me, did not send me to war.
	Just ask, can you do this?
	Right. So when we have a very strong emotional reaction, we need to unpin it from the immediate trigger, which is an injustice, right?
	To get mad at somebody who just asked you to do something.
	And we need to get, the whole point of psychology, get mad at the right people.
	Right, right. And that's sort of what I was thinking about this week about that whole thing, was that the anger really belonged directed at them, not me, or not her.
	Right, and that's the real-time relationship challenge that we all still have to master, right?
	Which is on the board, you say, I'm really angry, and this was the trigger.
	I'm really angry, this was the trigger, and here's the hidden agenda that justifies my anger on the part of the person who initiated the action.
	Don't you all agree with me? Well, I didn't exactly present it that way either.
	I mean, I recognized it as an interpretation of what she was asking me to do, but I still couldn't really see past the interpretation.
	Right, right. And that, of course, is to avoid the pain, the helplessness in the past.
	When we make up mythology in the present to justify our feelings, we avoid the vulnerability of the past.
	And we have control over the mythology.
	We can make that, we can create that, we can control it, we can change it.
	But the real feelings that came up for you were in the past when you were helpless, and it's the helplessness.
	Mythology is an illegitimate way to avoid helplessness, to avoid feelings of vulnerability.
	We have control over our stories.
	Christians do this all the time.
	If something bad happens, they just make up a reason why.
	There was a lesbian comic in New Orleans, and that's why everybody had to drown.
	I just make shit up all the time, unless I'm not putting you in that category.
	But then if a good thing happens, they can just say, well, it's because I went to church last week.
	They can just make up anything that they want to avoid the helplessness that we all need to process as victims of, to some degree, arbitrary reality.
	And we have power over stories, and they give us an immediate way to avoid the vulnerability and helplessness of the past.
	But, of course, it's an illusory control, right?
	Because we just end up producing it.
	Right, and recognizing it as a story wasn't enough, though.
	Trying to map that story to an injustice in the past is where I keep getting stuck.
	Well, but it's easy to do.
	And I'm not saying it's always easy to do When you're looking in the mirror or sitting alone, but, you know, when I asked you or mentioned, well, you've been asked to defend the indefensible in the past, it took you about five seconds, right?
	Oh, yeah.
	Yeah, that's true.
	So it's not like a teaching command, which will take years, right?
	This is just, well, this is obviously too strong a reaction to somebody who didn't offend me or attack me or put me down or whatever, right?
	Distilling it down to a principle then, right?
	And the story, the story that we make up to get mad in the present is the reality of what happened in the past, right?
	Okay, so the...
	Alright, so the distilling down what she's asking into a principle...
	Well, wait a minute, no, because that isn't at all what she was asking me to do.
	That principle was what I was applying as the interpretation.
	Right, she has the mechanical task of writing down a list.
	A shopping list, positive aspects of your family, my favorite movies.
	It's just a mechanical task of writing down a list.
	That's all she asked you to do. Everything else was your interpretation.
	And that interpretation was real, but only in the past.
	That's why the interpretation fit.
	Because your parents absolutely did what your story about your therapist was all about.
	Your parents absolutely did have all these creepy little hidden agendas and were manipulative and were asking you to defend the indefendable at all times.
	To be loyal to corrupt people, to defend the family that was evil, To love your abusers, to worship God, to worship your country, to worship the military.
	You were continually, with all of these manipulative tricks that may not have been totally evident at the surface, continually being ordered to defend the indefensible, to love the corrupt, to attach to the evil.
	So it was true that in the past this all occurred, but that's not what your therapist was doing, right?
	Or if it was, there was no evidence of it as yet.
	Right, right. I recognize that it wasn't right that it should be directed at her.
	But then you just say, well, what happened that's similar?
	But I think I see what the problem is, though, now, because without any direct evidence, well, not direct evidence isn't the right word, but without any memory...
	of the past or without sufficient memory of the past.
	It's difficult to take the explanation as fact.
	It just sounds to me I'm afraid I'm just making up a different story, right?
	So that now instead of the therapist with a hidden agenda, I'm just taking that whole story and pinning it to my parents in the past because they can't defend themselves, right?
	So you're saying that you might be unjustly angry at the people who beat you with a belt?
	Rather than the woman who asked you to write a list?
	That's a good point. I mean, please.
	Look, there's no amount of anger that you can have towards your parents that is not justified.
	They were brutal, vicious, manipulative people who used you like it would be illegal to use a dray horse physically the way they used you emotionally and physically.
	Your father with his endless busy work little bullshit tasks and your mother with her complaining and hypochondria and You know, we don't do it the right way.
	We don't do it the wrong way.
	We do it the gothier way.
	You know, like that bizarre, otherworldly narcissism.
	And I mean, it was a really creepy, horrifying, destructive environment with physical violence, emotional violence, verbal abuse, and, you know, pinning it to your parents, being angry.
	I don't know. I mean, that's where I'd go first, right?
	I mean, that's, you know, whenever Christina and I have problems, if it's coming from her side, the first place we go is mom and dad, right?
	It's not because, you know, that's just easy.
	It's actually very hard. But, you know, the first place that you go, like if you were being tortured for 20 years and had all your toes broken, then when you stub your toe, the first place you'd go if you got really angry is to the place where you were tortured for 20 years.
	Now, if it turns out not to be that, the 0.1% of times it might be something else, great, but at least you go to the most obvious place first.
	Yeah, that's a good point.
	That's a very good point. There's enough of a memory there that I don't really need to go scrounging for every incident.
	That just makes it obvious.
	No, you're like a guy neck deep in peanuts reaching around trying to find a peanut.
	There's gotta be peanuts in here somewhere.
	I just gotta keep looking.
	That's a good point.
	I guess it's just a question of making sure that it's not just a reflex and that it's actually a thought-out process.
	No, no, no. The reflex is good.
	God knows I'm never going to give you a thought-out process.
	Oh, God. Oh, God, no.
	Am I never, ever, ever going to give you a thought-out process?
	Because you can't turn Sparrow's Flight into a thought-out process.
	So, no, no.
	Your instinct is right.
	Your instinct was completely and totally right.
	The defensive story you made up was wrong.
	Your instinct was completely and totally right.
	That I have many, many times been asked to be loyal to corruption.
	And now this person is asking me to list good things about corrupt people.
	So your instinct was bang on.
	And all you had to say was, I can't believe how angry and upset this made me feel.
	That's exactly what I did at the beginning of the third session.
	It's just then the pull is to say that the stimulus causes the response.
	You know there are people whose bones ache when it's going to rain because they have arthritis or something?
	Well, it's the arthritis that causes the ache, not the rain, because lots of people get the rain without the ache, right?
	Right, right, right, right.
	And it was, I mean, it was...
	You know, it's funny, once I did that, once I just admitted I was mad at her, it was easy for me to see that the anger...
	The anger needed to be directed elsewhere.
	But it was hard for me to see why.
	The anger needed to be redirected elsewhere.
	Right. It didn't belong...
	Let me rephrase it.
	It didn't belong directed at her, right?
	It belonged directed at my parents for what...
	But the anger was caused by your parents' behavior.
	It was not caused by your therapist's list.
	Say again? The anger was caused by the historical behavior of your parents when you were a kid.
	Right, right, right.
	And your siblings, with one exception, in the present.
	Right. Right, exactly.
	But until I was willing to admit it, that I was angry at all, it was very difficult to recognize that fact.
	But then even once I recognized that fact, that the anger really belonged directed elsewhere, then it was still a struggle to explain why.
	Because... Well, I'm not sure.
	Well, but you had the answer, right?
	You said, she's asking me to defend the indefensible.
	That was very early on in your post, right?
	So then you say, when have I faced a repetitive situation that caused me great pain where I was asked to defend the indefensible?
	I've got to tell you, I mean, that part's not hard.
	Well, it's funny that I can write that and not realize what I'm saying to myself.
	It's kind of strange.
	Well, the reason that it's hard is we're trained not to do it.
	Right? Like, you know, whenever I have these listener conversations, there's always at some point where, you know, the great god of blankness descends upon the brain of everyone, right?
	Right. But that's just, this is where we get to the gates of propaganda.
	We're not allowed to go through and get to reality, right?
	So, in this situation, right, I mean, if you feel that you're being asked to defend the indefensible and you're irrationally angry based on the provocations, quote, provocations of the present, then you just have to say, well, First of all, I know that I'm angry.
	That's good, right? A lot of people don't even get that far.
	And then you say, I know what I'm angry about.
	I'm being asked to defend the indefensible.
	That's fantastic. That's like most people never get there.
	And then all you have to do is say, well, why is this anger so big and so deep?
	It must be because throughout my life I have been bullied into defending the indefensible.
	And that last part is not hard to just say, well, this is an old ache from the past.
	Yeah, I guess that is true.
	I guess that's true.
	But also in recognizing that that's not what she was asking me to do either.
	That's how you know it doesn't belong in the present.
	Right. I mean, she doesn't say, your parents beat you and I think they're good people and I think you should praise them.
	Then you'd be entirely justified in saying, you know, you're a crazy witch.
	I'm not even paying you for this session.
	I'm leaving right now. And then you go back and say, okay, well, how is it that I missed that little gem of her approach, right?
	But no, I mean, you're nine-tenths of the way there, right?
	You just go to the past, go to the past, right, in order to figure this stuff out.
	And then you can go back and thank her for inadvertently giving you such an amazingly great exercise that you learned so much.
	Yeah, it was very helpful.
	I just wanted to air that out because I know I've been somewhat negative of therapy in the past and it's actually working.
	Yeah, therapy is supposed to upset you.
	It is. It's supposed to upset you.
	If you go to physiotherapy and it doesn't hurt, you're not getting physiotherapy.
	You're getting a hammock or something.
	It's supposed to be annoying.
	It's supposed to be frustrating. It's supposed to be frightening.
	Because that's where we need to go.
	If you're a dancer, you've got to stretch where it hurts.
	You don't bend over and touch your knees and say, that's great.
	That doesn't hurt at all.
	You stretch past what you're comfortable with.
	That's the point. Right, right, right.
	That makes perfect sense.
	Let me just throw the net out in case anybody came up with a topic while we were chatting and rambling away.
	Is there anyone out there with a yearning burning?
	Speak, my brethren, speak.
	Okay. I was just wondering about your views on violence.
	I guess you didn't join at the beginning of this chat, huh?
	I didn't, no. Oh, okay.
	Well, what's the question, if you could be a little bit more specific?
	Well, recently I've came across the kind of ideals that violence can be correct in some situations.
	Okay, and now, of course, there are two forms of violence, right, in the same way that there are two forms of stabbing, right?
	I mean, if I stab you, that's bad.
	If after I stab you, you go to a surgeon who also stabs you, but in order to cut away the bad flesh and stitch you up or whatever, or cut away the ragged flesh.
	Then that's good, right?
	So, you know, hitting someone, stabbing someone can be both good and bad depending on consent, circumstances, intent, and also whether or not it is retaliatory.
	In other words, if I come at you with a knife, then you can pull an Indiana Jones and shoot me, I guess, right?
	So I just sort of wanted to understand what you meant about violence, whether you're talking about initiated violence or retaliatory violence.
	Well, if I give you an example of something that happened recently.
	I had entered into a shop, and there were a couple of people having a bit of an argument.
	I obviously walked past not paying any attention at the time.
	And a security guard...
	And then a fight broke out between the security guard and one of the guys who was arguing.
	And I stepped in to stop the fight.
	And I was just wondering, what were your views on whether this was the right action to take or not?
	Well, I think if you were able to stop the violence without putting yourself in any particularly dangerous risk, then I think it was a great thing to do.
	I think you should be very proud of that.
	Okay, because I was made aware of your views against altruism and things like that.
	Well, it could be, but tell me what you mean by altruism, because that's a word that is defined in really, really different ways by people.
	I see, right. Well, I mean in the way of giving your life to save another.
	Well, if you are a parent, let's say that you're a parent who is 90 years old, and because you're Anthony Quinn, you have a 20-year-old kid, and...
	That 20-year-old kid needs a new liver, you may very well say, look, I'm 90.
	I'm probably not going to live for more than another six months or a year, so I'm going to give my liver to my kid and I'm going to die.
	I don't know, maybe you give half the liver or whatever, but let's just say it's certainly possible and would be quite understandable for a parent to wish to provide their child life at their own expense.
	I wouldn't necessarily say that's a bad thing to do.
	I mean, that's everybody's individual choice.
	You wouldn't want to I'm sorry to interrupt, but perhaps you can tell me why it is that you intervened in this fight.
	Well, just through my own models, really.
	I noticed that the security guard was trying to get away from the fight.
	I mean, the security guard was not in the wrong.
	He was merely trying to usher the person out of the shop, and the person responded by punching him.
	Wow. I mean, I think I would have done the same thing in your situation.
	Again, if somebody pulls out a gun, I'm the first one to dive to safety.
	But if it's something that I feel I can reasonably get away with, for instance, if the attacker is maybe no more than five or six years old...
	Then I could probably get away with it if they weren't too tough.
	But I could certainly understand that if somebody's being attacked, then yes, I mean, that to me is just reciprocity in a sense.
	I mean, that's a little bit like the categorical imperative.
	Like, if somebody was beating me up and somebody just walked away, I'd rather they helped, you know, if I was being beaten unjustly.
	So I could certainly see stepping in in that situation and feeling pretty damn good about it.
	Well, I mean, I try to kind of preach that to my friends and people that I meet, just that, you know, I think it was in a movie somewhere that they said, you know, you can fear evil men, but there's a greater evil, and that is the indifference of good men.
	Yeah, the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.
	Well, I think that's right.
	I think that's right. I think that I know that for myself, I mean, since I was a kid, I don't think I've ever been around.
	Oh, no, we saw him. Christine and I saw one in Ottawa, a fistfight, where drivers had hit each other and they were fistfighting and so on.
	But they were both going at it pretty evenly, and if they're such idiots, I think that's a viable solution.
	I just hope they punch each other in the nuts and can't reproduce.
	But where there is an attack, absolutely.
	If a woman is being attacked, or if a child is being attacked, then I think that we absolutely need to stand up.
	But of course, those are rare situations in life.
	At least I hope that you're not in situations where you're constantly pulling bruisers off each other.
	But for me, I think the more challenging ethics, in the long run at least for me, is the ethics of speaking the truth and talking about violence where it occurs, where people aren't as aware of it in the realm of taxation and warfare and things like that.
	So I think that's a real challenge, and that's something that can be done in the everyday, whereas you can wait your whole life for a situation like you were in.
	I certainly think that what you did was a great thing, and I think you should be very proud.
	But I focus, just as a philosopher, a little bit less on the jiu-jitsu and a little bit more on the everyday ethics of standing up for the truth despite unpopularity and sometimes hostility, if that makes sense.
	Yes. Well, I see what you mean, but I think these situations do tend to happen a lot more than people think they do.
	I mean, it's all very well kind of...
	I don't really know how to phrase it.
	It's all very well thinking that these kind of things are an occasional occurrence.
	Sorry to interrupt you, but what I meant by that was they are an occasional occurrence in the life of most individuals.
	It doesn't happen to you every week that you've got to pull apart a punch-up, right?
	Of course. I agree with you.
	This level of violence is particularly strong throughout the world.
	And of course, the people who suffer from it the most are children, the children who are aggressed against by far the most in the world because they're so helpless and dependent.
	But certainly, I think that you did a great thing, and I'm sure that the security guard was very grateful.
	I'm not sure that he was so grateful.
	I think he was more kind of ashamed, to be honest.
	Right. No, I can see that.
	I can see that.
	We all have this fantasy that even if we've never taken self-defense and don't work out, that somehow our inner Schwarzenegger is going to come out and we're going to be these amazing fighters, which of course, it's sort of like if somebody were to want a real fistfight with me, my level of skill would be equivalent to pretty much the same as if somebody put a cello in my hand and said, play something beautiful.
	I could make a noise.
	It wouldn't be any good. Well, I mean, it's all different on different people, I suppose.
	I mean, I've grown up in very dodgy areas, I mean, you know, very kind of poor areas or places where crime is quite high, I'd say.
	And, you know, I've had experience with that.
	I've had a lot of experience with that, I'd say, and also with martial arts and things.
	But I think... A normal person, I think everybody should be inclined to help anybody they come across.
	I think that's true, though I think that, I mean, certainly if the security guard had to choose between yourself, myself, and my wife, he would choose you, then my wife, and then maybe me in that order.
	Simply because if you have experience in that kind of area, then that, of course, makes you much more valuable in that kind of stuff, right?
	I mean, if somebody doesn't have experience and they're up against somebody who's a criminal who does have a lot of experience, then it's usually not that good an idea.
	Yeah, that's true.
	I still kind of hold the belief that it's every person's duty to do that for their fellow person.
	Well, but see, here's the challenge, right?
	I mean, if you're going to put that forward as a moral principle, then you have to counsel your fellow citizens to not pay their taxes and then stand up against the police when they come to arrest them.
	I think that's fair enough.
	Well, but I don't think that's a good idea.
	I mean, do you know what I mean?
	No, of course not. I think if you're in a situation and you're not facing a representative of the state and you can do it with a reasonable assurance of success because evil is not fought if it's given two victims instead of one, then I think it's a good thing to do.
	But I think as a principle saying we must stand up against all violence, we basically would never sleep and would be in jail very quickly where we would then get killed by the guards.
	Very true, yeah. Because, you know, I suppose you can't transfer this to things like seeing videos on YouTube of police abusing citizens.
	You can't really transfer the same ideology over because it just doesn't work with them.
	No, absolutely. Any more than shaking your fist at a B-52 is going to end a war.
	So, absolutely.
	And that's the kind of courage I was talking about earlier, where you're standing firm in the realm of ideas, which hopefully will help people wake up to the violence which we take for granted.
	There's an old phrase about Rome, which I've always thought is very powerful.
	And this was spoken, I think, by an embittered, conquered poet.
	And he said, they made a desert and called it peace.
	And it's a wonderful, wonderful phrase.
	And what it means is that an excessive amount of violence and threat will produce the kind of conformity that can be called peace.
	And, of course, that's the situation that we live in relative to the state and relative to the police and relative to the military that they possess.
	Such an overwhelming amount of force that the society looks peaceful.
	There's not a lot of fight back in concentration camps, right?
	They're just trying to survive. And to a much smaller degree, that's similar to where we are.
	And that's the kind of intellectual courage that we need to keep highlighting that stuff.
	Because people won't oppose an evil until they can see it.
	and most people can't even see this evil that we live under.
	I see.
	Was there anything else that you wanted to comment and mention about that?
	I mean, listen, good stuff.
	I mean, good for you. I think that's a great thing that you did.
	And certainly, if you have to see a bald guy going down under a five or six-year-old's flurry of fists, be sure to come and help me.
	Well, I don't mean to...
	I was just using it as an example.
	I mean, I was just trying to find your position on this kind of thing.
	Yeah, I would never put it as an obligation, a moral obligation for someone, but I certainly think that it's applaudable.
	To me, it's a virtue like honesty.
	I'd never shoot someone for being dishonest, and I would never shoot someone for failing to intervene in a crime, but I certainly do think better of people who are honest, and I certainly do think better of people who help out a victim of violence.
	Well, thank you so much. I do appreciate that.
	Very, very interesting. I think that's one of the first pugilists we've had on the show.
	I certainly do appreciate that.
	And, you know, there is strength in dodgy neighborhoods, in growing up in dodgy neighborhoods as well.
	So that's great.
	Thank you so much. Was there anything else that you wanted to mention or talk about?
	No, I think that was it. All right.
	Well, listen, don your cape and go fight evil.
	Thank you so much. That was great.
	Was there anybody else who had questions or comments?
	What time was it? Ten to six?
	10 to 6.
	Okay, I'm certainly happy to take another question or two if they're around.
	Well, you can tell by the way I use my walk.
	I'm a Chinese cook. No time to talk.
	Anybody? I'm not a girl, not yet a woman.
	Alright, on that musical outro, we shall thank everybody.
	Sorry? Greg's new job?
	Yeah, I mentioned that at the beginning.
	If anybody has any additional questions about it, that would be...
	Yes, go ahead.
	Just a closing thank you for the opportunity.
	Oh, listen, my pleasure. I mean, thank you for taking the job.
	I mean, there's not many people who are willing to get paid in porn.
	Yeah, it's just too bad all I'm using it for is to hold up the legs of my rickety table.
	Right, right. No, I think it's going to be great.
	I mean, there are some questions as to, we can just touch on this briefly, there are some questions that some people were like, will Greg be doing the podcast?
	And I said, no, Greg will be doing the pauses in the podcast.
	Yeah. But there's just so much stuff that needs to be done that is high priority that I just can't get to.
	I can either go and blow another $5,000 or $6,000 in advertising like I did over the summer, which is good and has paid off, or I can pay Greg some money to go and do targeted Advertising, which is to go and cull emails and websites of people who may be interested in this conversation.
	And then we send out an invitation to them.
	I'm interested in upping the value for subscribers to Free Domain Radio.
	And so Greg will be flying around the country giving back rubs to subscribers.
	And for extra money you get the dual fur gloves, which are currently on order.
	Mink. I think, which is important.
	But no, I'd like to send out a newsletter to subscribers with some more current events stuff.
	And that's something, again, the technology, the looking it up, the finding the best one, and all that.
	Greg's kindly agreed to do that.
	So there's lots of forums out there, and we won't spam people, but we'd like to go to forums that are relevant to this conversation and post links and so on.
	The books need to get UPC codes and need to get into the stream to be sold through Amazon and Barnes& Noble and also you can send them off to be I think over the long run,
	given that bandwidth is so much cheaper now, I've got about the first 140 podcasts recompiled to about four times the quality bitrate.
	Only twice the file size have added some base to the ones which were pretty tinny earlier on.
	So there's that process which can continue.
	There is the submission of podcasts and books to the dig sites.
	There's like all of this stuff that I've just been doing for the last year and a half which is incredibly time consuming and laborious.
	There's also been some stuff which has been talked about which is I think interesting and I think would be pretty cool which is people have said look we've got all these people who are on the board it would be really great If we could chat with them, so if I'm on the board and I see that Greg is on the board, then I can send him a message saying, get back to work.
	No, I can send him a message with a question or a comment.
	Because it's very, very important to decouple me from this conversation.
	To some degree, this conversation is a many-to-one.
	I'm sort of the hub of this conversation and so on.
	And what I really want to do is enable people to meet each other.
	And stop bothering me.
	No, to meet each other and open up that conversation to be many-to-many and to get myself out of the hub or the middle of the conversation, right?
	Because the conversation needs to be many-to-many for it to really grow and thrive.
	And so one of the ways we could do that is to get some software, plug it into a community server so that people could have real-time chats if they allow it in their profile with other people, right?
	So that any time a woman joins, she can get 900 messages pretty much the moment she can.
	So... But that's a couple of hundred bucks.
	You've got to research it.
	You've got to buy it.
	You've got to wire it up. You've got to test it.
	And that's all stuff that I've been handling and managing all of this stuff for the last two years.
	And it gets kind of exhausting.
	And, of course, it's getting a bit unwieldy.
	And the major reason, of course, is so I can hand all of this stuff over, or at least a good chunk of it, to Greg.
	What that means is I can start working on the real-time relationship book rather than what will happen otherwise, which will be – I won't get to start on it until after the conference, which will be mid – well, I guess late January, so I lose a couple of months of revenue on the book, which hopefully will pay for Greg's salary even if he has to buy them all.
	So – So that's the kind of stuff that Greg has very kindly agreed to do, and it is really going to allow me to focus on the stuff that I can do that I think is even more value-added than this stuff, which is to continue to crank out a dizzying amount of content.
	Were there any other questions about that, or Greg, is there anything you wanted to add to that?
	No, just sort of wanted to thank you publicly for the opportunity and why not.
	I'm happy to be the FDR mule.
	Yeah, absolutely. Double the empire, baby.
	World domination. At this rate, we will actually rule the world in about 27 years.
	So let's just keep mitosis is the plan.
	Was there anything else coming in, Christina, from the chat window?
	Oh, Greg asked if we're going to do videos of the real-time relationship stuff.
	We will for the sections on role-playing, particularly since I got the Swedish nurse outfit.
	So, no, that's not...
	Okay, sorry, that's more for private consumption.
	And by that I mean donators and Philosopher Kings in particular.
	So, donators, subscribers maybe too.
	But we will be recording for sure.
	We've confirmed audio.
	We have not confirmed video.
	So it will come with...
	With audio content, but we have not decided on the video content or not.
	Hello, Seth. Hello.
	I have a question.
	I wonder if you could get into a little bit of detail about the Miami conference, about what the content is going to be there.
	Well, this is another reason why I wanted to lure Greg into the pit, which was I've got a lot of ideas for the Real-Time Relationship book, and originally the conference was going to be centered on UPB, but fortunately the UPB book, and thank you so much to those who are buying it, and of course those who are praising it extravagantly, I think it's well worthy of that praise if I do say so myself.
	But it was originally going to be on UPB, but I think that the book has cleared up enough issues at least that we don't need to have a half-day conversation about UPB. But I think that the real-time relationship stuff is going to...
	I'm going to be talking about that in a more structured way because I will definitely have the structure, if not the first couple of chapters, done by the time the conference rolls around.
	So we will be talking about the real-time relationship idea, which of course is great for...
	The most immediate aspect of people's lives, which is their relationships, not even their relationship with their family or their parents, which is what Untruth is about, or with ethics and reality, which is what UPB is about, but with the other relationships that they have, adult to adult particularly, and to some degree adult to child.
	So, there's going to be that aspect of it and Christina has kindly offered and is going to be doing an introduction to the cognitive therapy model, which is where I get a lot of the stuff that I claim as my own.
	So, there's going to be that aspect and I think that the cognitive therapy model combined with the real-time relationship stuff I think it's going to be a pretty action-packed day.
	And, of course, we'll be meeting the night before for conversations about whatever, and then we can continue the conversation the Saturday night as well, followed by a Greco-Roman orgy.
	I think we've got the ballroom booked for that.
	So, yeah, it's, I think, going to be a pretty action-packed and enjoyable a couple of days.
	Sorry, we had a comment? Togas?
	Optional baby. Toga!
	Does that answer your question?
	Yeah, thanks.
	Alright. And to sign up, there's information at freedomainradio.com forward slash miami.html The link is also on the main page.
	We have a number of people signed up.
	The room is limited. So please don't leave it to the last minute.
	But try and, you know, if you're going to come, then do it now.
	Right? That's the thing that, you know, when you're organizing something like this, the more information you have, the earlier.
	That's the better. So, I mean, if you don't know, and if you don't know, then great.
	Just send me an email saying, I don't know.
	Right? Or use the form at freedomadradio.com.
	Miami.html. Use that form and send me stuff in the comments saying this is contingent.
	I mean, I'll build your PayPal anyway.
	No, I'm just kidding. But just send me a form saying I'd like to come.
	If you're at all interested in coming, if you know you're going to come, when you hear this, go to your computer, punch up freedomainradio.com, fill out the form so that we know.
	Because if we book X and then we end up with three times X, it's a pain in the neck.
	And if we book 3x and we end up with 1x, that's also a pain in the neck.
	So if you're going to come, don't even stop listening to this and go to the website and send the info in so that we can get the numbers squared away.
	If you're thinking of coming, then give me just a percentage probability.
	And so on. And one gentleman said, well, I may be starting a new job and so on.
	I would say book now, because if you go, I mean, if you if you if you if you go into a wedding and then you get a job, you just say when you're taking the job, by the way, before I got this job, I had committed to X.
	And if you say you're going to a conference on.
	Psychology, something, a conference, an intellectual conference, I don't think that looks too bad.
	Right.
	So just just, you know, book it.
	And then when you accept the job, just say, by the way, I have this this thing that I'm going to that I booked, you know, back in November.
	And and thanks again, of course, to the fabulous Miss Laura, who is who has taken over the lion's share of the organization, which means that a little something extra is going to be added to the symposium.
	And that little something extra is actually organization.
	So this is a real treat.
	And I really, really thank you so, so much for taking that on.
	And I offered her a free pass to the conference, but she has declined, so all kudos and nobility to the fabulous Laura, who is an incredible negotiator and is just getting us some staggeringly great rates.
	She got $70 off the hotel room, and so you can get a hotel room if you double up with someone for like $100.
	So anyway, I hope that we're going to see lots of you there.
	I think it's going to be a great deal of fun.
	Really memorable. And of course, we will be videoing it and taping it for those who are overseas.
	And over many seas.
	One sea, you should be there.
	But many seas will give you a break.
	So that's the story on Miami.
	Was there any other questions or comments?
	Rod. Hey, what's up?
	No, I was just talking to myself. Just kidding.
	Go on. I bet you never get any penis jokes with your name.
	So anyway, go on. Yeah.
	Okay. Have a theme, ladies and gentlemen.
	It's just not a very elevated one.
	A tasteful one.
	It says Christina. Probably quite true.
	Gutter theme. So, this is probably a request for a podcast or something.
	I don't know how quickly you can take care of it.
	I don't want to stretch out the show too long here.
	But I have this very odd habit of blissfully...
	I'm just wandering into conversations with people just talking about how I'm an anarchist and an atheist and isn't this great and blah, blah, blah.
	And I get into these conversations where I just, you know, I get this initial like, oh, that's kind of interesting and different.
	What do you mean by that?
	And then I explain, well, this, this, and this.
	And I end up just turning it into a five-minute sales pitch for anarchy.
	And I always get this feeling like I'm just rolling a bowling ball at people sometimes and kind of turning them off.
	This occurred last night.
	There were a bunch of German engineers in town working on this project that I'm doing.
	And we went out to dinner and I talked a little bit just briefly about, because we were talking about politics and George Bush and all that crap.
	I just said that, well, I think George Bush is a crook and a liar and all that stuff, but of course I think everyone is.
	That's a politician and yada yada.
	And by the end of my five minutes talking about how I believe that all force is wrong and taxation is theft and all that stuff, it was just like a couple of crickets chirping and they're like, okay, well, let's go.
	Let's leave Mr. Molotov to his radicalism.
	Yeah, exactly.
	And so I'm wondering, like, what...
	What impulse do you think...
	It's like I know what's going to happen with these conversations, but I find myself drawn to them like a moth to flame.
	Or it's not even like a conversation.
	It's a five-minute monologue followed by awkwardness, and then things just kind of...
	It's like a wet blanket on conversations sometimes.
	And it's not what you want, right?
	This is not the outcome that you're looking for.
	Right. I mean, if my point is to spread the ideas, it's not working.
	Right. And if my desire is to create a comfortable atmosphere with people who are maybe colleagues or maybe not such close friends but at least acquaintances, that's obviously not working either.
	So, yeah, Greg's saying I need to be more negative and it works great, so maybe I'll give that a no.
	Yeah. Resist the dark side.
	Yeah. Come over.
	Well, I mean, you heard the conversation that I had with Greg, right?
	Because you were at it about an hour and a half ago or an hour and a quarter ago.
	So the first place that you need to go, I would suggest, is if you're in a situation where you are repetitively initiating action that is getting you the opposite of what you want, Is to look at the past, right?
	And to say, okay, how many times have I heard this?
	Now, what you think of as crickets, that might actually be just the sound of sphincters tightening, because they're both frightened and German.
	So that means that they're basically turning shit into diamonds.
	So the thing that you need to do is you need to figure out, as a possibility, it may not be the answer, but it's a possibility, When have I spoken and freaked people out before in the past?
	What do you have in that dusty attic of history?
	A couple of examples come really easily to mind.
	I remember living in Minnesota, my family used to heat our home with a wood furnace.
	We used to go out once a year and buy and then load a humongous A truckload of wood, and it would be a family day out, and it would usually be kind of happy, kind of stressful, and then sometimes just exhausting.
	And anyway, we would spend all day just throwing wood up on this truck and stacking it.
	And I remember during the middle of one of these marathon wood stacking sessions that I was just kind of, and I was a little kid at the time, maybe nine years old tops.
	No, I was probably younger than that.
	But anyway, I remember Having this this grand idea you know this is back when they were taking me to church all the time and I had this grand idea of how maybe God was a bunch of aliens or something like that and they were similar enough in shape to humans that they thought that they you know that humans were made in the image of God and at the time that the aliens were around that That they were so advanced that they seemed like God to humans and all that stuff like that.
	And I was having just a fun time, you know, just going through this what-if scenario.
	And I just remember the absolutely just thousand-yard stares on my parents' faces.
	You know, I'm glad that they weren't the type of parents that would have whooped me for such blasphemy.
	It's really hard for parents to watch their kids making a sudden beeline to hell, straight to hell.
	Yeah, but there have been many instances in...
	I mean, actually, even recently when I started getting turned on to libertarianism and things like that, and I realized that all of our paper money was a scam and everything, and I would try to initiate these conversations with my mom about how the Federal Reserve is inflating the money supply and this and that and everything else, and it was always...
	I just felt like I was giving these long-winded lectures or seminars on economics and the history of money, and I got the feeling that she was trying to understand me but just couldn't keep up or something, or maybe she was just fogging me and pretending like she didn't understand.
	Oh, sorry to interrupt.
	I just feel like you're going on a bit too long.
	I'm just kidding. But I would say let's go back to the wood thing, but let's go further back than that.
	Because I think with the wood thing, you're already in a situation where, like, I guarantee you that you know that you're going to get the crickets, right?
	Because it sounds like to me you live pretty much on the planet of crickets, right?
	So, you know, it's like shouting into the big vacuum of cricket noises.
	So, I guarantee you that.
	How old were you when you were doing the space alien god story?
	I think I was probably in the neighborhood of Somewhere between seven and nine years old, perhaps.
	By the time you're six months old, you know everything about your parents, right?
	So we knew for sure what the reaction was going to be there.
	So we have to go back further to a time which, and my guess is that there was a time when you were emotionally charged as a child in some manner.
	That you were angry, you were hurt, you were upset, you were embarrassed, you were ashamed, something.
	And you got the thousand-yard stare, not through stories about gods or anarchists or the Fed, but you got that reaction to something that was really precious and important to you.
	Yeah. Well, I think I recently spoke about the fact that when my brother used to torment me so much and I would just beg for...
	Or arbitration or something from my parents and they would just kind of blow it off and tell me that it was my fault for reacting to them and things like that.
	But that's not the crickets, right?
	Oh, it was that.
	It wasn't a crickets. It definitely was an active...
	Yeah, so it's got to be something that's even because that was something where...
	This is my guess, right?
	But that was a situation where you were reacting to provocation and asking for arbitration.
	What I'm thinking about that may be more fruitful to look at is a situation where you are feeling something very strongly...
	And you are trying to communicate it with your parents.
	Like maybe you saw your first dead something, right?
	And it upset you, and you were trying to talk about it with your parents.
	And you got the thousand-yard stare from something you initiated that was personal and vulnerable for you.
	Oh, this is interesting.
	When you said, I saw my first dead something, I remember our neighbor...
	Oh, this is a long time ago.
	I was probably... Four or five at the time.
	Our neighbor across the road, we lived out in the country on farms, and the neighbor across the road is a very old man who, I remember he had a nice big John Deere tractor, and he would come over sometimes and help us with field work and things.
	And I remember he died when I was very young.
	And I remember being just very, very deeply affected by it.
	I remember Gosh, this has got to be one of my earliest memories.
	I remember just saying over and over again, poor John, poor John, poor John, poor John.
	I mean, out loud and around my parents.
	And, like, I was just stuck in this skipping record thing.
	And that's, I mean, that's what my mind felt like.
	I had no way to know.
	I couldn't figure out what I was feeling.
	I couldn't figure out what it meant to be dead, you know?
	And it was... I remember just, like, now that I look back at it, I remember, or I don't remember, but I feel that I didn't get any kind of support or answer for the questions that I had.
	No, you've got to go further than that, and I think this is bang on.
	I mean, I think this is it. But you have to go further than that.
	It's not that you didn't get answers.
	You were actively rejected.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. Right, because when you say something and you don't get a response, the not getting a response is an active rejection.
	Yeah, especially from parents.
	Especially from parents, right? Of course, right?
	Because there's nowhere else for you to go. You obviously, I mean, you have a very deep and rich soul, and what happened was the knowledge of death, of your own personal mortality, and of death itself...
	Impacted on your consciousness.
	We're born with the knowledge to die.
	We go through puberty.
	Our bodies know how to handle all of this.
	We know what it is to be dead.
	If we get out of mythology, we know what this experience is.
	It's exactly the same as it was before we were born.
	My experience of the 22nd century is going to be exactly the same as my experience of the 18th century.
	Nothing. Not at all.
	Not missing. Not gone.
	Not asleep. Without dreaming.
	Just nothing. We know all of that, and particularly when we're young, because we've just come out of non-existence when we're young.
	It's more comprehensible to us when we're young than when we're middle-aged, right?
	Not that I'm putting you in the middle-aged category.
	Oh, young and vital listener. Yeah, my pants aren't up to my ribs yet.
	Yeah, yeah. Mine are creeping up as we speak.
	Or my ribs are creeping down. I can figure it out.
	But you grasped the enormity of this.
	Oh, it's huge. It's huge.
	It was the universe then.
	And you also grasped that people who didn't grasp this were dangerous.
	Yeah. I'm going to repeat that.
	Yeah, rephrase that because that didn't quite stick.
	People who don't grasp death are dangerous because they have nothing with which to overcome their defenses.
	Oh, look, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but something just smacked me.
	Why was it that my parents...
	I was the youngest in the family.
	My brother is two years older than me.
	And my parents had lived across the road from this John guy for, you know, who knows how long, a long time.
	My dad grew up on this farm.
	So they knew him a long, long time.
	Why did it seem to me that I was so much more deeply affected by this guy's death than the people who obviously knew him better than me?
	Your parents were religious, right?
	Yeah. Well, that's why.
	When those around us don't feel, we feel more.
	Yeah. Like, sorry, when they do feel, but they repress it, we end up feeling more, right?
	So if you ever want to see an angry kid, you look for a passive-aggressive parent.
	You look for a mother in particular who's really angry but never admits it, and then all of her anger gets acted out by the kid, right?
	Oh, yeah. Now, in the religious mindset, you can't mourn death fundamentally.
	Being sad about death is an affront to God, right?
	Yeah, right. He's in a better place, he's with Jesus, he's happier, he was old, he was suffering, blah, blah, blah.
	He's been issued his wings and harp.
	Yeah, whatever nonsense they make up about the grim fact of a life ending.
	And so they couldn't grieve because that would be immoral.
	It would be wrong. It's a lack of faith to grieve about somebody who is dead, right?
	And there is something in Christianity that an excess of grief is indecent.
	Because it is a lack of piety.
	It is a lack of, you know, acceptance.
	It's like being angry at someone for going on vacation, right?
	Because they're in a better place, right?
	So your parents, obviously your dad, if he knew this guy for decades, felt grief.
	They also, everybody knows the truth deep down, right?
	That you're dead, you become inert, they throw dirt in your face, and you're done, right?
	But when they come up with these winged Ascending to Heaven nonsense, right?
	They cut off their own natural process of grieving.
	And through that, they cut off their own perception of death.
	The Christian means it when he says, I cannot die.
	He does not believe that he will ever die.
	He believes that this life, they believe that this life is a stroll through a veil of tears on our way to a better place.
	And that's why they're so dangerous.
	Because they can't ever confront themselves, and they can't ever overcome their deficiencies, right?
	So, I mean, I'm aware at 41 that Of the fact that life is short.
	And one of the reasons that I wanted Greg to take over this stuff is there's a fixed amount of stuff that I can produce, a fixed number of books, a fixed number of podcasts that I can produce before I'm dead.
	And so I have to sort of manage that number, right?
	And if I do all this other stuff that is not producing books and podcasts and videos and articles and the stuff that I think I can add real value to, that number just goes down.
	I don't get to Talk to the angels in heaven about all my ideas later.
	When I'm dead, they're gone.
	And so that's one of the reasons that I overcome my resistances and my defenses, right?
	If I don't have a happy day with my wife, I don't get that day back later in heaven.
	We don't get to have these glorious times forever in heaven.
	One of us is going to die, and I'm just going to regret not having a great day with my wife.
	So if I have to overcome something in myself to do that, I will do that, because I'm going to be dead.
	Yeah. So people who believe this fantasy that they're going to live forever inevitably go towards a better place and blah blah blah, they never overcome themselves.
	There is such a fundamental vanity and egotism in Christians and also in postmodernists, as I talk about it, the god of atheists.
	They are reality.
	They define whatever rules they want.
	And when you live in a world of fantasy, you never overcome your defenses, because fantasy is a defense against reality.
	So I'm guessing, I know I'll turn the mic back to you, but I just wanted to mention that you grasped an enormous amount, not just because somebody died.
	Children can process death.
	Children can handle death, often better than adults can.
	But you got an enormity of the fantasy in your family and the loneliness that comes from the fantasy that they had but you hadn't been infected with.
	Yeah, yeah. You know, there's something else that just popped into my head is why do you suppose that I was choosing the words poor John?
	I mean, if he's dead, he's not suffering, obviously.
	He doesn't exist.
	He can't be pitied.
	He's just not there.
	Was John... I have no idea.
	But likely he was, right?
	Yeah, I mean, the area I grew up in, it's very odd not to be religious.
	Right. So I'm just wondering...
	Sorry, did you feel that John was a happy person?
	I guess I seemed to have liked the guy, so if he hadn't been happy, I'm not sure that I would have missed him, you know?
	Was poor John because John was dead, or because John didn't live a happy life?
	That's a darn good question. I don't think I ever knew enough about him to know.
	Sorry, and did you understand that at that age, did you understand that he wasn't lying in the ground with worms eating him while he was vaguely alive, but he was dead and gone?
	No, that doesn't seem to ring any bells at all.
	It was just that he was no longer, you know?
	But what state did you imagine him in?
	This is yeah, it's interesting.
	I think I was just imagining him Completely ceasing to exist as if there was no body left behind or anything It was just that he had blinked out of existence, I think.
	Well, but that's interesting, because as you say, poor John would not be referable to somebody who had ceased to exist.
	It must have been something about his life that you were sad about.
	Yeah, that's interesting.
	I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that he was still actively farming all the way up into his late 80s or something, as if he was...
	I don't know.
	Was he married?
	Did he have kids? What was his life like?
	He was married. His wife...
	I remember I was kind of scared of his wife because she had...
	This is awful.
	She was arthritic and she had these really large elbows, you know, the way that...
	And knuckles on her joints.
	Her joints were very highly inflamed, so I used to think that they were scary.
	What was she like as a person?
	Typical Midwest or Minnesotan farm wife, just completely blank.
	Alright. I mean, this is good because, I mean, we get all of this stuff very early on.
	The human brain, especially the brain of children, is like an incredible dead-on radar.
	It's amazing that I'm recalling this stuff because I think she moved away very soon after this John guy died, so that I have that kind of...
	I mean, I feel certain of this kind of understanding of her, even though I only...
	Newer as a very, very small child.
	I was struck by something that you said, Rod, about that he would come over to do farm chores with you.
	Yeah, I think when...
	Oh, gosh.
	Hey, check this out. Okay, so my dad used to be a farmer when I was young.
	Before that, he was a trucker.
	Well, he was a dairy farmer before that.
	But anyway, we used to have, like, wheat fields and things like that.
	We would pick rocks all the time, all these chores.
	And I remember that my dad used to just completely fly off the handle very often whenever he was doing farm work.
	If any machinery would break down, he would just...
	This dude could swear like no one's business.
	I mean, he could string together more curse words into one sentence than you could ever imagine.
	And it seemed as though...
	Oh, wow, isn't this great?
	Okay, so my mom was the type of person that would run around trying to...
	Make everything straight and tidy so that my dad wouldn't freak out and have any excuse to yell.
	And I wonder if John maybe was doing that same function with the farm work that he saw my dad stressing out so much about it and he would come over to lend a hand.
	This old man who was very, very...
	I mean, really old.
	He died of just old age, you know?
	And here was this old guy doing farm work to help a man and his...
	Early 40s, who was freaking out all the time about breaking down machinery and swearing and just, you know, tearing his hair out.
	Sorry to interrupt. Doesn't that tell you everything that you need to know about John's father?
	Uh-huh. Yeah, it does.
	So, poor John is, it is absolutely possible to do exactly the same thing when you're 80 as when you're 8.
	Wow, so poor old John was poor me.
	Well, by saying poor John and accepting that this guy was both avoiding his blank wife and being, in a sense, enslaved at an unbelievably advanced age to the bad temper of somebody, that they were both empty and both just acting out the past.
	And the poor John is, he died without growth.
	He died without knowledge.
	He died without living.
	This is absolutely incredible.
	I can't believe it, but it's just astonishing that a little child saw that.
	But that's why we have to be educated so badly.
	We see all of this stuff like a supernova when we're children.
	That's why we have to be put in public school.
	That's why we have to be put in church, because we see this stuff with original star-bright eyes.
	And you saw that you could go that route, that that was a possible route, that you could be frightened and bullied at 80 exactly the same as you were at that time.
	Wow. This is one of those goose bump moments.
	This is really amazing.
	That's why I say everybody's a genius and everybody's a philosopher, even a child of four.
	Yeah. We get it.
	We get it all the way down to our spines.
	That's why people have to work so hard to avoid getting it as adults.
	Yeah. Man, if they ever invent a time machine, I'm going back to give my little kid self a high five.
	No kidding, eh? We're fucking geniuses.
	All of us. All of us.
	And even the people who never listen to this conversation are still incredible geniuses.
	You know, some people say, oh, you know, Steph, the stuff you do is really...
	The stuff I do at the age of 41 is like 5% of what you could do at the age of 4.
	So... So what...
	What's up with my monologues with the Germans then?
	How is this going to...
	Let's see.
	I mean, it's really cool how this traced back to where it led, but now I'm not really sure where that leaves me on understanding the present.
	Well, it's because you reject the rejection.
	It's because you won't accept the rejection of your parents.
	Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	Okay. So because you won't accept the rejection of your parents, you have to keep reproducing it.
	I want to keep feeling rejection, yeah.
	Yeah. Well, it's great because if I hadn't felt that rejection last night at dinner, I wouldn't have asked this question.
	I wouldn't have trailed down this path with you to find it.
	Right, so you reached to your parents and fundamentally you identified with John because you were terrified of your dad and so was John, right?
	Yeah.
	And he was still terrified of your dad.
	Yeah.
	At 80.
	And you're thinking like, oh my fucking God, I could live for another 74 years or 76 years on this planet and die exactly the same as I am now.
	Yeah.
	Thank you.
	You know, it's amazing. Sorry, you tried to reach.
	You knew that the solution was to connect with your parents.
	Right? Because deep down we know that we can only be abused if people don't connect with us as human beings.
	Yeah. So you tried to connect to your parents.
	And you got the crickets.
	Yeah. Right?
	And this pattern has continued.
	That you tried to connect with people about what is the most important thing for you.
	Yeah. Right?
	And you get the crickets. Right?
	Now, that's in how you approach that.
	And once you don't need the crickets anymore, you won't get the crickets.
	Yeah. Boy, there's a sentence stand up in a Chinese cookie somewhere, right?
	A fortune cookie. When you no longer need the crickets, you will not get the crickets.
	But it's true, right?
	Once you accept that you reached out for your family and you fell off a cliff, that they...
	And once you recognize that, that you were completely rejected because of your depth and exactly because of your value and your perceptivity, and that you were this incredible resource that could have freed your family even at the age of five, but that they had to just stare at you in horror and in wonder and in fear almost,
	actually not even almost, in fear, because of your perceptivity, And it's true that you were lucky to be in a family that did not beat you for your perceptivity, but merely withdrew from you and rejected you every time you were perceptive.
	And if you had accepted that, it would have been overwhelming to you.
	It would have been far too much, because when we can't connect with people, Then we know they're going to abuse us.
	And if at the age of four, when basically adulthood seems like five lifetimes away, if you'd have said, okay, for the next 15 years, I'm going to be in a prison where people are going to hurt me, you would never have gotten out of bed the next morning.
	You just would have lost the will to live.
	So you have to reject that lack of connection with people.
	And so you have to keep trying to connect with people knowing that you're going to get rejected.
	And that is something, obviously, that shows up probably in lots of different ways in lots of different types of relationships.
	But if you can accept that rejection, if you don't reject that rejection, then you will be able to reach out.
	Because in a way, you're kind of doing to these Germans what your parents did to you.
	Oh, yeah. You're kind of pushing them away.
	Yeah. Because there's ways to talk about, and I've had some requests for doing intros to this conversation, which I'm sort of putting together, but there's ways to talk about things with people that are startling to them, but you have to do it with empathy.
	And what happens right now, as you say, it's a five-minute monologue where your sort of self-consciousness clears and everyone's staring at you like you've become a unicorn, and not even a fun kind of rideable unicorn.
	So you're not doing it with empathy, right?
	So this interaction where you're trying to connect with people, you can't connect with people without empathy.
	And because you were rejected consistently whenever you tried to connect with your family, for you, intimacy equals a lack of empathy, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah. It does.
	So you need to put yourself in the shoes, or the lederhosen, of the people that you're talking to, right?
	So if somebody came up to me when I was 20 and said, I'm an anarchist, and I think that all governments are evil, how would I have reacted?
	Before I knew any of this, right?
	We have to be in touch with that part of herself that never knew this stuff to begin with except instinctually, and we have to figure out how to bridge that gap, right?
	And the first thing to do is to acknowledge that the ideas sound crazy.
	Well, it's interesting because I do feel that I often have a pretty good sense of empathy that I can get, read vibes or whatever you want to call it, but it seems like during these five-minute monologues, that just switches off completely.
	And then I kind of snap out of it all of a sudden and look around and then hear the crickets and I'm like, oh crap, I did it again, you know?
	Right. And...
	And then, of course, I kind of do this nervous backpedaling and, oh, you know, that's just my opinion and blah, blah, blah.
	You know, I'm kind of unusual, you know, and then everyone just has this nervous laugh and then that conversation dies.
	Right. And you have to love the truth enough to stop doing that, right?
	Because you know that you're detonating the conversation for these people, right?
	Yeah, absolutely. You're driving them.
	There's a hostility in what you're doing.
	You're angry, right?
	Because you're driving people away from the truth.
	Oh yeah, absolutely. Because then the next time they hear about anarchism and pacifism, they're going to flash back to that crazy guy who was talking like he was spitting dead birds out of his mouth or something, right?
	But what you're doing is you're angry at your parents for having rejected your soul, your being, your depth, your perception.
	And you're taking it out on other people, right, by alienating them from a conversation that could save them.
	Yeah. Very good.
	This is the next step.
	Alright, well listen, what we're going to do is I'm going to mail you a box of crickets and you can practice at home.
	If you can call your interest off the crickets, you'll be ready to go out and scare the Germans again.
	I can practice all the time because I have tinnitus, which is a constant ringing of the ears, so if the room is silent, it sounds like crickets anyway, so I'll just keep doing role-playing with my ears.
	That's excellent. I know that you are hoping to replace that with Steffitis, which is the constant hearing of vaguely gay podcasts, but until the radio station is up, that's going to be tougher.
	Okay. Thanks again.
	This was really, really fun.
	Thanks a lot. That was a great story, and thank you so much for sharing that.
	All right. I'm not even going to imagine or pretend to take any other questions, because it's 6.30 and the philosopher must eat.
	So, thank you so much, everyone.
	It was a great, great show. I appreciate everybody's participation and attention on these wonderful Sunday chats.
	And just remember, it's less than a week to the first salon, and...
	Less than two months. It's slightly over two months to the symposium.
	So go to the computer, freedomainradio.com forward slash miami.html.
	Thanks, Charlie. And I will talk to you guys next week.
	Have yourselves an absolutely wonderful, wonderful week.

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