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Nov. 18, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:06:32
914 Sunday Call In Show 18 Nov 2007

News from the salon, Germanic showdowns, the nature of intelligence, sibling tensions - and UTOPIA!

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Time Text
Well, thank you everybody so much for joining us.
It is just after 4 o'clock on the 18th of November, 2007.
Stefan Molyneux dog-tired from the very first FDR salon where we finally got to bed around 3 o'clock in the morning after several of the participants tied me down and gagged me, thus signaling pretty much a resolute end to the social evening.
So thanks everybody who dropped by and to those who came in through Skype.
It was a great deal of fun and I hope that we will do it again soon.
So, this is a show where I am talked out, so I leave it to the listeners to provide me with the necessary stimuli.
And I also wanted to mention, just before we start, that there's a video that I did late this last week called Standing in Blood, which is available on YouTube, and you might want to have a look at it.
It's also available on Stage 6, and a site called Viddler on the roof.
So, I hope that you will get a chance to check that out.
It is quite a strong Sorry, I thought we'd gotten ditched.
So, yeah, have a look at that video.
I think it's quite a good video.
It's a reading of an article by a British journalist about some of the tragedies that are going on in Iraq.
It's a little heartbreaking, but I think well worth having a look.
And it's number one in Canadian politics YouTube ratings.
So that's good.
It could be a bit of a breakout video for us insofar as I only mention anarchism at the end after weeping.
So hopefully that will get some more people to our site.
And that's it for me as far as the introduction goes by my books, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, The God of Atheists, a novel on truth, the tyranny of illusion.
And they're available at stores.lulu.com forward slash freedomainradio or they are available at freedomainradio.com forward slash books dot html.
So that's it for my plugs.
Take it away, Mr.
R. Alright, so this week is Rod vs.
the Germans, part Zweig.
That's right. So, yeah, I guess it was the day after I had that last chat with you about how I ran off on the loggeria about my beliefs in front of a bunch of these German pals of mine.
And got the crickets. I was talking to them about all that again and just asked them what their experience about it was like when I just went on and on and on like that.
And they said that they were surprised because it wasn't a very American thing for me to be saying.
Sorry, I just lost that last bit of yours.
It was a very what of you to be saying?
They said it was not a very American thing of me to be saying.
Oh, I see. Go ahead. So they said I sounded very European in my opinions, which was interesting.
So I pretty much just stretched out my monologue into a much longer conversation with them and let them know how I got around to my beliefs and my experiences over the last couple of years, especially with respect to my family and everything.
And I was really amazed at how open they were to everything I was saying.
It was really, really cool.
We had a nice long discussion about this stuff and since then, over the course of the week, we've had several long conversations about these.
The two Germans that I'm talking about right now are two young engineers.
They're a few years younger than me.
I've been showing them how to use SOLIDWORKS and stuff.
We've been working together on a project.
It's been really cool.
One of the older engineers, who is the project leader on this project we're all working on, I was talking with him the other night during a barbecue that we were having, and I asked him how he perceived the German opinion of the US military being based in Germany.
And he said that prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall, of course, the West Germans felt as if the U.S. was an ally, helping protect them from the evil commies in the East.
But since the fall of the wall, the U.S. has been increasingly looking like an occupier.
And so, especially with respect to this new war in the Middle East and stuff, they're starting to feel a bit used about being the basis of operations for a lot of things for this new war of aggression in the Middle East.
So, it appears that perhaps my monologue was just startling in its kind of suddenness in the middle of dinner, but I think that for the most part, I think they agreed with me about a lot of these things.
So it's just been an interesting experience to expand on these conversations over the last week and realize how open to these ideas they really are.
Well, I mean, I think that's great.
I have a couple of questions, but can you sort of synthesize what you feel the difference was between these two approaches?
The difference was, this time I started out by asking them How they felt when I was talking about this stuff.
It turned a lot more into a conversation versus me just giving the five-minute anarchy speech.
Right, right. And certainly, trying to engage people in a conversation is, in a sense, I mean, this is something to say for a guy who does a lot of podcasts, but when you're talking with people, then it is very, very important to try and engage them into a conversation.
Was it that it was an interaction, or was it that there was a different emotional aspect of it for you?
Uh, let's see.
I think one of the aspects of it that was different this time around was that it was just myself and the two younger people that I was speaking with.
And I think that, again, this may be just part of this new generation thing, but It seems as if they were much more receptive to what I was saying.
There's one of them is a guy and one's a girl.
The guy was raised in East Berlin before the fall of the Wall.
The girl is from West Germany.
She's very... Of course, she's been raised with the whole communism is completely evil thing and there must be free markets, and he was definitely more receptive to government services, but they were both very open to what I was saying.
Especially on the personal family stuff as well.
They were extremely open to that.
Versus, normally when I speak with Americans, they can get along with the whole, yeah, government kind of sucks and religion's sort of bad, but don't you touch my family.
And with... With the Germans, they're actually surprised that we have so much religion in this country because it's very atrophied over there.
But I was pretty surprised at how open they were to the talk about the family.
And what do you think the difference was, just in that part of the conversation?
Between... Between before, where you'd get the crickets, and when you got people to be engaged.
I mean, this wasn't just the cricket speech with a couple of what-do-you-thinks thrown in, right?
Right, right. Yeah, it was definitely...
They were asking me questions about...
I guess, you know, the part of the conversation where they just mentioned that I was not the stereotypical American, and I just kind of went through the history of how I got to where I... I am in my philosophy, and it just seemed to be very interesting to them, I guess.
I don't know. It still was a lot of me talking and then listening, but there was a lot more participation of them asking me questions and asking me to clarify certain points and things, but it was much more focused this time on the personal and not on the lofty theoretical.
So I think that by making it personal and by showing them You know, the whole time I've been interacting with them, it's been a really positive experience.
They've been saying that I'm a very upbeat and happy person and they were surprised at how, again, how European in my thinking I was, apparently.
Well, that's wonderful.
And your emotional experience of the conversation was quite different, right?
Yeah. Compared to the crickets, right?
Yeah, what was really kind of interesting is this time, you know, at the crickets, I was mentioning last week that my empathy switch kind of turns off during those five-minute rants like that, and I'm just completely unselfconscious.
And this time, I was very aware of, like, my face was flushed and everything, and in speaking about these deeply personal things, I was feeling a lot more self-conscious, but they were still very accepting of what I was saying.
Right, right. Well, I think that's wonderful, and this is something that's hard for people who haven't gone through this part of the conversation.
It's hard for them to understand just how close to breakthroughs we really are.
Right?
If that makes sense.
Like we are so close to having these kinds of changes in our lives.
So close, like, it's one revelation away from having some absolutely enormously beneficial stuff happen in our life, if that makes sense.
Yeah, yeah. And one of the things that was really great is I tried the invisible apple analogy with them, and they seemed pretty receptive to that.
And also the one about if you make a loud noise around a cat, eventually the cat literally loses the neural transmitters between the ears and the brain.
That makes it freak out about the loud noises and stuff.
So they're really getting it.
I mean, they're really jiving with this stuff.
And I think you may soon have a couple of German listeners.
I don't know. I told them all about the podcast and stuff, and they're really interested about this philosopher I listen to.
Yeah. Well, that's great.
I think that's absolutely fantastic.
I think you should be, you know, fanatically proud of what it is that you've done.
And that's, you know, there's a lot of time in this conversation where it feels like progress is painful.
Sorry, it's painful in increment.
I just stepped on my microphone, Claude.
Where we feel like this conversation is slow and painful.
But as you get more into the conversation...
The progress becomes more and more rapid, right?
So here, like in the space of one phone call where we got through to something very early and very powerful, which took about 40 minutes, you had a complete reversal in your experience and your effectiveness in communicating with people, right?
Absolutely. And I think another thing that very heavily weighs toward my success in this case was, again, the I've had a chance to work with them for the last week just steady.
We've been eating just about every meal together.
We've been working together. It's been really just a crash course week.
Their experience of me has been I've had very positive energy this entire time and I'm a happy person overall.
They really seem to be disarmed, I think, by just my positive energy and my attitude, which, again, just speaks to the need for us to find joy in our philosophy, and then other people will want to share it.
Oh, shoot, my phone's ringing.
Sorry. I'll step on it.
It sounds like the Loch Ness Monster is eaten, right?
And not many people have Satan at the ringtone, so that's interesting.
That's like an oriental gong or something like that.
Sorry, and the other thing I was going to say was, how did you feel after this conversation?
Well, it's actually...
It's been...
The first conversation, which was so...
Like I said, it was me with a flushed face and just being very self-conscious of what I was saying.
After I was done, I was looking at them and they were smiling at me and still asking me questions.
I was like, wow, this is really great.
I just kind of laid out a lot of really heavy stuff.
I'm sure it was a combination of the way I delivered it and also just their own intelligence and ability to I think that's fantastic.
And I think that also, to use a metaphor, the ghost of the 84-year-old man that you knew when you were four can now rest in peace because, you know, in a sense, he's told you what he needed to tell you, right?
Yeah. The memories that we have about things that happened to us when we were younger that are charged are always charged for a good reason.
And it's a lot to do with what people wanted to tell us but couldn't.
And now that you finally got that lesson that you first saw and understood at some level when you were four, in a sense, there is that metaphor, right?
That when we learn the secrets of the dead, they can rest in peace.
And what that means is that we can let go of charged memories when we understand their purpose.
Right, right. No, I think that that...
I know that last week's conversation with you had a lot to do with this success and my confidence in bringing it back up again with them.
I brought with me more curiosity this time and it definitely paid off.
Well, congratulations. I think that's absolutely magnificent.
And I guess the only other question that I had was, did they get, you know, because, I mean, bashing American occupations in Europe is not a radical step for someone to take as a philosopher, but you felt that you got further in terms of getting them to understand sort of the gun in the room or, you know, that it's not just about American occupation and so on.
Yeah, and I think that, I'm not sure that the whole, like, You know, me as an anarchist is really completely sold on them yet.
I mean, I'm sure that there's still a little bit of, well, we should probably have some government, but not much.
Well, one conversation, like anybody you convert in one conversation will just be converted by the next person who comes along to something else.
Exactly. Yeah, sure. But what was really, really satisfying to me, even more than just the talk of anarchy and religion, was just the fact that they were so receptive, or so receptive to...
What I was saying about my defooing and my positive experiences since then.
And that was really, really exciting to me.
I think that's fantastic.
And it also only goes to show you that there's so much that we can do in terms of being communicators with regards to philosophy.
There's so much that we can do that even if we've had a lifetime of crickets, you know, we can in the space of one week turn it around.
And that's the kind of ownership that we can take as communicators that gives us real power.
And the people who just get the crickets and don't understand why, what happens is they end up just being frustrated by the world and they end up in a sort of nihilistic Everybody's stupid, nobody's going to understand, I hate the world kind of thing, because they don't understand that it has so much to do with how they approach the question and the conversations.
The last detail was this morning I had some breakfast with them, and the young lady asked me how it was that I had managed to turn my life around from being a kind of angry and depressed person into the happy person I am now,
and I said, well, I have to give a lot of credit to this guy I appreciate that.
That's fantastic. Massive bow, kudos, wonderful, fantastic.
Giddy up.
All right.
Is there anything else that you wanted to mention at the moment?
Nope.
I'm all right.
All right.
Well, just as a reminder to those who may be listening, go to the FDR chat window.
We are using that instead of Skype.
And I guess we're getting some people in.
The fabulous and talented Greg is bringing people in like a hoover.
So thanks so much for joining.
And I'm more than happy to hear anybody else's topics at the moment.
Or I guess we can say one.
I'm sorry.
Go ahead. - Could you explain crickets, please?
Sure. It's a reference to the conversation that Rod and I had last week on the Sunday Call-In Show, wherein he was saying that he would talk passionately about philosophy as he saw it, and what would happen is he'd get the sound of crickets afterwards, and people would give him that thousand-yard stare, and there would be no connection, and people would seem vaguely embarrassed and disconnected, so that's the reference.
And we talked quite a bit, and it's well worth listening to that part of the show, if not the whole show.
From the call-in show last week, we talked quite a bit about why that happens for him and ways to change it.
And it happened an amazingly rapid turnaround.
When you get to the truth, it's always possible.
So that's what we meant. Thanks.
All right, so topics.
If you have a mic and a question, a comment issue, praise, rank praise, wild praise, mad praise, any kind of praise is welcome.
So, speak.
All right.
Well, while you're gathering your thoughts, I just wanted to mention something that we talked about last night in the FDR Salon.
Greg was bringing up the question of why in the late 90s there seemed to be such an upsurgeance.
Of religiosity in his family.
And I said that that probably was a reaction because that was the major time when Satan claimed his soul.
And so as his family felt the smell of sulfur rolling in from the black moor of Greg's nihilism, they felt they needed to reach to Jesus for the light.
And funnily enough, that was not a satisfying explanation to him because he's so fussy.
But we talked about how When you look at patriotism, because they were patriots before they became born-again Christians, when you look at the resurgence in the late 80s to early 90s of the born-again movement, one of the theories that we talked about,
which I think may be reasonably valid, is That the Americans love their country because their country is protecting them from the Russians and they have to give up their taxes and a good chunk of their rights and freedoms because of those dastardly Russians and how bad it all is.
And by God, it's a great and wonderful thing that we have this government to protect us.
And then what happened, of course, was the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of communism throughout the late 80s and early 90s.
What happened then was we would say, well, if we gave up our rights and our taxes and surrendered ourselves to the power of the state in order to have the state protect us from an external enemy, then logically what should occur, of course, is that when that external enemy falls down, goes boom, vanishes from the planet, Then your money, your rights, and your individuality should be restored to you, right?
But of course, this is not what happened.
There was no particular peace dividend.
There was no major collapse in government spending with regards to the economy.
military-industrial complex continued unabated.
And what this meant was that there was no great enemy that the government was protecting you from, because the government continued to take your money at an ever-increasing rate, despite the collapse of the external enemy.
And so what happened was, people began to suspect in their heart of hearts, and sometimes not that deep, that the government was using power to control them and inventing enemies.
And so they had to create another entity that they could love passionately and madly.
And so that's why, when they began to be suspicious about the motives of their much-beloved patriotic state, government, masters and rulers, that they began to increase their religiosity to make up for that.
And then we became not a practical and pragmatic fight against communism, but a holy crusade to bring peace very virtue and democracy to the whole world So, when...
And we all go through this phase at one time or another, right?
I went through it with Ayn Rand, where you go like, wow, you know, the rational goddess of all time, and then you read about her life, and it's like, ooh, not so much, right?
Then there's this process of desolation that you go through, right?
And you can either go through and say, well, that which I loved was not as virtuous as I thought, and I'd better figure out why, and learn how to love better and more sensibly.
You can either do that... Or you can make up some damn story, some piece of mythology to explain the negative stimuli, right?
So some of the objectivists, they worship Ayn Rand, and then when the significant flaws of Ayn Rand's personal life are revealed, they say, well, that's just stuff that's made up by her enemies.
They just make up a story so that they can continue their attachment to something which isn't, you know, far from perfect.
And the same thing occurs, of course, when we catch sight of the evil and corruption of our own government, that we just make up a reason.
Well, of course they have to take away our rights to the Patriot Acts 1 and 2 because of Islamofascism and blah blah blah.
But to those who have the strength to endure the desolation or the disappointment that comes when the idols fall from grace, there is great wisdom on the other side.
to those who make up mythology to justify their own subjugation.
There is nothing but a repetition of enslavement.
So that's something that we were talking about last night.
We, of course, have recorded a good chunk of it, and we will release it similar to the way that we did with the FDR on barbecue, which is still available at stores.lulu.com forward slash free domain radio.
But it was a great, great chat.
3 a.m. came far too soon.
Anyway, that's something I wanted to mention from yesterday.
Again, we have lots of listeners in.
Grab a mic. If you're a first-time listener, fantastic.
Grab a mic and say hi.
Comments, questions, issues, problems, more than welcome.
I turn the mic over to you, the fabulous listeners.
Well I have something, Steph.
Go ahead. I was listening to...
I was in on the salon last night, and there was a part where you all were discussing...
I think Greg asked the question, everyone else around me seemed to buy into this religion thing, but I didn't.
And why didn't I? And I think you said...
Well, because you're smart.
And I wanted to chime in on that part of the conversation, but Skype got real noisy and then finally dropped me.
But the question I had was, if the premise is that smart people are less likely to buy into mythology in general, was that the premise that was kind of bandied about last night?
Not exactly, and I'll just touch on this briefly because we did have a long chat about it, which will be available, but the question of intelligence, right?
So one of the other gentlemen at the salon was bringing up the question of, like, I know some very smart people who are religious and they're doctors or they're lawyers or whatever, and they're very, very smart and they're religious, so I can't say that mythology is the opposite of intelligence, but to me...
There is a difference between developing a practical skill and being able to evaluate and process reality according to rational principles.
There are people who are polyglots who can learn an enormous number of languages, and of course that takes a certain amount of linguistic intelligence.
But it is sort of an ability or a skill, and it's not exactly the same as being able to think for yourself, right?
There are people who are great at memorizing stuff.
There are people who have enormous manual dexterity and can juggle 12 flaming chipmunks or something.
And those people do have enormous and very strong abilities in particular areas.
But to me, that's not the same as a good degree of conceptual intelligence.
There are people, and there is lots of them in the libertarian movement, Who know every argument for everything under the sun, you know, and read this guy's book and this guy says that and the other, and they have a great ability to synthesize other people's work and to memorize it.
But that's still not exactly the same as being able to reason for yourself based on, you know, first principles and evidence and so on.
So from all of that, we were sort of working with the idea that...
There is a particular kind of intelligence, which is the ability to work from first principles and not to engage in what Ayn Rand called social metaphysics, which is the definition of truth in a social manner.
Not what is true, but what do people believe is true.
Well, I guess I'm just going to accept that.
There is a great deal of intelligence that comes from skepticism, but skepticism that does not fall into nihilism, where you end up just believing nothing at all.
So, we were talking about intelligence as that ability to simply trust your own judgment, reason for yourself based on evidence and rationality, and that is very rare.
So does it follow then that someone who has a higher than average level of conceptual intelligence would be less likely to be trapped in mythologies or be more likely to escape from them or would have an easier time escaping from being trapped in mythology?
I think that would be to some degree the case and I'll give you sort of a very brief example of what it is that I mean if that's helpful.
If you imagine that instead of trying to be a philosopher, I tried to, you know, pull a Dianetics religion Scientology thing, and, you know, imagine there was no such thing as Christianity, and I said that, you know, the world was created in six days, and the woman was created from the rib of the man, and there was a talking snake, and this, that, and the other, right, and the angels, and the whatever.
And I came up with this as a methodology that...
For explaining how the world is and so on, right?
And we have an all-virtuous God who kills innocent children, but that God is completely virtuous and so on.
If I put all of this nonsense that is at the basis of every piece of religion, If I put forward this nonsense and there was no such thing as that religion to begin with, people would just laugh at me and they'd say, you know, this person fundamentally needs to up their medication.
That's the only thing that I could suggest as far as this person goes.
But they would not give me any credibility as a thinker.
So when you have a great degree of conceptual intelligence, what happens is when you hear people say something...
It doesn't matter what other people say.
It doesn't matter what tradition says.
It doesn't matter what is generally accepted.
It doesn't even matter fundamentally what you're rewarded and punished for.
What matters is you hear it for the first time.
It doesn't matter how many other people believe it.
Does it make sense?
Your relationship to reality, to logic, is your own.
And it doesn't matter how many other people believe or mouth the same nonsense and so on.
And so, when you hear Christianity and the nonsense that's in there, or Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or all this crap, this bullshit that's out there, when you hear that kind of stuff, Do you sit there and say, listening to it and evaluating it according to my own understanding of reality, which is not purely subjective and so on, according to reason, does it make sense, right?
That is a fundamental capacity to think for yourself.
Whereas lots of people will say, well, it's true because everybody believes it.
And that is kind of retarded in my view.
And these people can be surgeons.
They can win Nobel Prizes in economics.
Who knows? They could be great biologists.
But they can't think for themselves fundamentally in terms of values relative to reality.
They imbibe far too much prejudice, bias, nonsense, mystical lies from other people.
And, of course, we face this challenge with the question of statism all the time.
Does that sort of help answer the question?
Yeah, but actually the question that comes to mind with this is...
In your recent podcast or video about the younger generation having a significantly higher IQ, In your mind, does this make you feel more optimistic that in the future there will be less mythology because there's a lot more conceptual intelligence around and there'll be a lot less receptivity to the irrationality of all these mythologies?
Oh, sure. Absolutely.
And just to clarify that, and I didn't get that into great detail, though, of course, the paper is available on the board, the kind of intelligence that has grown the most rapidly is what is called fluid intelligence, or the ability to reason from first principles, to think things through for yourself, rather than just to basically swallow the The kind of intelligence that has been growing the most rapidly and most commonly throughout these different cultures and societies is exactly the kind of intelligence that renders people to be more skeptical of mythological nonsense that people bully them into pretending to believe.
I am absolutely, completely certain that in a generation or two we will be able to outgrow mythology as long as the principles are repeated passionately and accurately and people live by those beliefs and provide a beacon for everyone else.
Yes, the capacity is there, and as long as people keep pushing forward the bar or raising the bar as far as knowledge and integrity goes and keep redefining virtue, then without a doubt we can get rid of all of this nonsensical, crippling, straitjacket of fantasy.
Right. It would be interesting to, you know, they've done studies, they've found evidence about this increase in intelligence.
It would be interesting to see if anyone can also measure some correlating evidence that there's fewer Christians in the younger generation.
You know what I mean? Yeah, well certainly I can tell you that for sure church attendance has been declining precipitously in Canada.
Now, America is a different situation, right?
America needs mythology because it's an empire, right?
So the more violent your society, the more mythology is required because the violence is just so blatantly evil.
That the more you need to undermine and corrupt people's perceptions of reality in order to get them to do the mental logic-twisting pretzel maneuvers to justify the violence that is committed by the culture or by the government.
Generally, in all cultures that are not imperialistic, that do not have a military-industrial complex, Church attendance has been declining, like, not by a couple of percentage points, but enormously and precipitously to the point where, you know, if this trend continues in Canada, my understanding is that in another generation, the churches will be empty, which means that they will be filled with philosophy classes, which will be far more productive.
So, yes, it is exactly this kind of intelligence that renders this kind of skepticism to be very healthy and positive.
We have to make sure that it doesn't fall into nihilism, right?
So the danger is that when people lose a substantial chunk of their foundational beliefs in ethics and society and the virtue of this, that, and the other, the danger is, like Russia in the 19th century, as I write about in my novel Revolutions, they fall into a kind of nihilism.
If this is not true, nothing is true, and I also write about that through the character of Rudy in The God of Atheists.
So, You have to watch.
If you can avert nihilism, it's a massive step forward.
If you fall into nihilism, it's a massive step backwards.
And that, of course, is one thing that at least I'm trying to do as hard as I can through this conversation.
Right. Well, thanks.
Glad it could help.
I certainly appreciate the question.
And again, there's more details about that as we get these things compiled.
Thanks very much. I opened the conversation to the question.
Greg is here. Christina is here.
So you don't even, even have to talk to me.
I have a question for you, Steph, if you don't mind.
I certainly don't. There was something that, sorry for all the laughter behind me, I was reading on the boards this morning, you know, you posted the video about the war in Iraq and all the soldiers who end up committing suicide.
And there was a comment posted to that entry that the suicide of young volunteer soldiers is Darwinian, just, and progressive.
I know what I think about that, but I was wondering if you had an opinion.
I do, but I certainly would be more interested in yours, because Lord knows people get enough of my opinions in general, so go ahead with yours.
Well, my opinion would be it depends entirely on how the soldier got into the war and why he went.
If, you know, you have a kid from the inner city of Detroit who just went into the army to get some money for college and So are you saying you didn't marry this guy?
No, I didn't.
Well, that seems rather prejudicial.
Good move. Well, I would say that, I mean, I'm completely in agreement with you.
If you take your average soldier who is not cruising around life with an IQ of 150, who has been subjected to the most intense propaganda and mythology and death cult worship of the military, and truly believes...
That he is defending his country and serving his fellow citizens and truly believes that America, the innocent victim, was cruelly and unjustly attacked on 9-11 and truly believes that by signing up to the military he is protecting his fellow citizens and family against further attacks and truly believes that Iraq had something to do with 9-11 and it was a just and vengeance for You know,
the America who'd never done anything to meddle in the region and certainly didn't install Saddam Hussein in power and certainly didn't sell them any weapons of mass destruction, or as they say, we know that there are weapons of mass destruction because we have the receipts, saith America.
But since this person has been subject to the most brain-mutilating system in the public school planet and has been lied to about the virtue of the military, has been lied to in a propagandistic, horrible manner about America's role in the world and what it does, the American government's role, what it does overseas, and believes horrible manner about America's role in the world and what it does, the American government's role, what it does overseas, and believes that he
And you might as well, you know, blindfold a bunch of not-too-bright people, tell them that there's a million dollars at the end of the race, and have them run off a cliff.
I mean, it is a form of murder to lie to children, particularly in the realm of death, torture, and murder.
So I agree with you, and I have massive, massive amounts of sympathy for the people, the children who learn the truth.
And that's why I use the phrase children with guns, because, you know, you get an 18-year-old kid who's never been taught to think for himself and has been lied to by his parents and his teachers and his government his whole life and the movie makers and so on.
You get a kid like that, and by the time he realizes the truth of the situation and the fact that he has become a totally evil hitman, he's caught in the system and cannot get out.
And, you know, whether you kill yourself or not, if you are a soldier, there's a part of you that's already dead.
And those who suicide are the ones who recognize that fact.
So I would not say that it is brutal and Darwinian and say that a lot of these kids who were lied to and bribed and brutalized into this ghastly lifestyle and who learn the truth until it's too late, I would not say that that is just that they die.
Wake up.
*crickets* I'm done, I promise. Does that help?
Are we on a similar page, or is there anything that you'd like to add to that?
As for me myself, I think that we're definitely on a similar page.
Okay, and I'm so sorry to hear about your ex-fiance, but I can't tell you how happy I am to hear that it's an ex.
That's alright, he'll die by the sword.
Yeah, well, hopefully he won't take too many people with him.
Do we have a question from the chat window?
I overdid myself.
I'm not sure what overdid means.
Is that good or bad? Or I overdid?
Overtalked? Never! Darling?
Does brutalized and brainwashed equal deterministic?
There are few people in the world, in history even, who can invent a science of ethics.
That's something that I would like to lay some claim to myself, but there are very few people in the world who can see through all the lies and propaganda.
If we look at somebody like A child raised in Sudan, do we actually really and truly believe that that child is making the choice to become a Muslim?
Of course not, right? They're just bullied and broken into it, and they will be shamed and rejected and brutalized by their family if they don't, right?
So the children who grow up to be Muslim or to be Islamic in a Muslim country, we do not say that they have chosen that.
And the amount of propaganda that they're subjected to and the amount of violence and bullying and bribery that they're subjected to doesn't make it deterministic, right?
Because not everybody in those stimuli responds in the same way.
But I would certainly say that lying to people of sub-optimal intelligence about basic ethics in the world is something that they cannot fight their way free of any more than, you know, most of us can do surgery on ourselves, right?
I don't think that it's exactly the same as being deterministic, but I certainly do say that if you tell the truth to people as emphatically, repeatedly, and passionately as you can, you certainly do raise the odds that they will not end up trapped in this statist grindhouse.
All right.
Alright, next question please.
Step right up.
The mic, she is yours.
Yes.
Don't make me come over there.
I was on the, for those who don't know, I was on the Mike Stevens Show yesterday, which is available at adventuresinlegalland2l.com.
And, sorry, I did try and record it myself, but no luck.
The technology, she did faileth us.
So, if you'd like to listen to that, we had a good conversation.
I think a gentleman named Don Rawl, what was his name?
Some guy came up in the conversation.
Stan Paul Ron Cole Something like that.
Some politician in the U.S. came up.
I can't remember his name. It's a one-time thing.
But if you are interested in Condor, RuPaul, RuPaul, that's right, RuPaul, you may want to check out that conversation.
And Mark was quite pleased with the line from the Iraq video, when you salute the flag, you are standing in blood.
And we did talk quite a bit about the military.
It was a good show. He has some quality callers, so you might want to check that out to see just what happens when I wing it.
Not that you haven't heard that before.
So, I eagerly await the next caller question.
speak up.
It can't be that the more people we have on the chat, the fewer people want to talk.
Hey Steph, it's me.
Hi.
It's James. I wanted to, if you feel it's an appropriate thing, I know you don't like to talk to, not talk to people, but you don't necessarily like to discuss things with people who are on therapy, so to speak, but you can correct me if that's a wrong sort of whatever on my part, wrong assumption.
When I came in and mentioned what had gone on in the therapy session last Thursday, and I think basically what happened was the therapist said something like, and I think basically what happened was the therapist said
He basically went down a road because I had mentioned at least twice that I had basically broken through my family, and he said that I was trying to feel okay with it.
And when he was saying that, I felt pretty cold.
And I think when I recounted that conversation, you had mentioned that it was pretty much...
Well, he didn't say that was a good thing.
And I guess I just want to sort of, I think I understand it after thinking about a couple of days, but I just wanted to go over it just to make sure that I understand what's going on there.
Sure. Sorry, why don't you tell me what you sort of picked up, and I'm sorry that I was bouncing in and out of that conversation, but it's certainly great that we can talk about it now.
Why don't you tell me what you sort of got out of that, and then, you know, because maybe you've got it totally right, and I don't need to say anything, but just go ahead with that.
What I got it from which side?
From the actual session?
Well, you said that, you know, after thinking about it for a couple of days, you think you've got it, so why don't you tell me what you've got, and then at least I can tell you whether it fits into what I was thinking, if that's helpful.
Okay. Well, what I was thinking was...
You emphasized that I had said I felt cold.
It's like, yes, I did feel cold when he was...
It was like a chill, basically, running through my body.
It's just this dreading of the criticism, really.
And so what I was thinking was, as time goes...
As...
As hours wore on, I was like, well, this guy is supposed to help me...
Oh, let's see. He's not supposed to bring his own value judgments into the conversation between him and me.
I mean, obviously if I'm causing direct harm to somebody, that's different, but that's not the case here.
I'm merely disassociating myself from people who I've already demonstrated have been pretty bad to me.
I mean, I mentioned the abuse, and I mentioned...
You know, the physical and the emotional abuse.
So it's not like these are good people.
Yeah, it's not like they disagreed with me about what kind of milk we should have in the house.
So that's it for them, right? Yeah, exactly.
So what I started to put together in my mind was...
He was...
If he understood...
If he understood that...
You know, that this was the right decision, then the way he went about it was not appropriate.
I mean, or maybe even just not helpful.
I mean, it was really hard for me at the time because it's like I had broken down crying.
When you said this, there was this flood of tears.
It's like, no, I'm not okay with the fact that I had to do this.
It was painful. It was hard.
Yeah, maybe I'm touching on the pain now, but the way I got there, there wasn't a question.
It wasn't necessarily teased out in any way.
I actually also listened to some more podcasts over the weekend, which maybe helped clarify this for me.
I'm in the early 700s right now.
So what I've come to understand is that what I want to ask him or talk to him about is how I felt cold and try to I don't know which way it's going to go,
but I want to say, because another thing I was talking about was some things I've been working on with my girlfriend, you know, just saying, you know, instead of reacting when I'm angry, saying, oh, you know what?
I'm angry. Let's actually talk about this and, you know, let's see what's going on for me and maybe for you and, you know, and everything else.
And, you know, it's totally different from anything that ever happened to my family before.
So, that's a sort of, you know, I want to go back and I have, it's a week from Monday, of course, so it's got a little time, but I want to go back and say, you know, I felt really cold when you were criticizing my decision, or maybe not criticizing,
but when you were saying this, I felt really cold, and, you know, I think we need to really discuss that, because this is an important sort of thing, and this is something that I, you know, This is a big decision in my life.
If it's something that he can't get past, then I need to be able to see that and move on.
But if we can talk about it, I don't know.
But that's sort of what I got out of it.
There should be some sort of curiosity for my benefit.
You're paying. Yeah, exactly.
I'm paying for it. So his words to you when you were saying it, his words to you, if I'm correct if I'm wrong, his words to you were, it feels to me like you're trying to justify your decision to me.
Those weren't the words, but those were...
I guess that could be the gist.
He didn't use the word justify.
He said, I feel like you're trying to make yourself feel okay with it, which is closer to what he said with it.
And that was not your experience of what you were doing.
I wanted to make it very clear that...
That I had done this, you know, and that's where I am, you know.
I felt it was very important to go into this therapy section because he had me fill in intake form.
Good, bad, or ugly, I don't know.
But it was a lot of information, of course, you know, to start out with.
Sorry to interrupt you. Somebody's typing with their microphone on.
If you could not do that, I'd appreciate that.
Sorry, please continue. Um...
Yeah, I got distracted the same time you mentioned that.
What was, where was I there?
You were just talking about how you, sorry, go ahead then.
Yeah, filling out all the information in the intake form, I felt it was very important for me to emphasize that, you know, I have taken these abusive people and, you know, put them on hold, you know, put them on indefinite break, you know, I'm not talking to them.
And I thought that, as far as the therapy is concerned, that is an important thing for the therapist to know.
At least, you know, I would think so.
Sure. It's something I've been working on.
It's something I've been working on for the past, well, many years, but certainly to much more extent in the past couple of months since signing up with FDR, you know?
And to get that, To get that was like a total second guess, like making me think, now is he going to tell me I just did the wrong thing?
You know? Just, um...
Oh, he was telling you, sorry to interrupt, he was telling you that you were manipulating him.
Manipulating him? Yeah.
Like, if I'm uncertain about a decision that I'm making, and I try to convince other people because of my own uncertainty, then I'm using other people, right?
I'm manipulating them.
I'm trying to get their agreement in order to shore up my belief in the validity of my decision.
I mean, I know I've done that before, but I don't think that's what I was doing in this case.
No, I mean, look, if you were doing that, you wouldn't have felt cold.
You would have felt embarrassed because you'd been caught or whatever, right?
And look, every therapist has their own style, and I'm not going to speak about this guy's style as a whole, but I'll tell you what would work for me.
If you are doing something that is manipulative, Then if somebody just says to you, well, you're just being manipulative, that does not help.
Right. If you say to someone on the nose, like if somebody is pretending to be victimized, and you say, well, you're just playing the victim, it may be true, but it doesn't help.
Because the important thing is not for your therapist to identify what is happening, right?
The important thing is for you to identify what is happening, right?
And if your therapist just says, this is what's happening, then he's not leading you to the knowledge and not giving you the tools to reproduce that understanding for yourself, right?
Yeah, that is something else I noticed.
He did sort of throw out a few things.
He said, I'm guessing blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, I mean, he was making accurate guesses, but it wasn't like...
Yeah, the important thing is for you to learn it, right?
I mean, if I'm teaching you karate, the whole point is for you to be able to do karate.
Or I could just sit and watch.
Yeah, you could just sit and watch, or if I just say, if I'm trying to teach you how to cook and I just say, add eggs, stir, put some salt in, and so on, you will make a meal, but you won't learn anything about how to cook.
You'll only learn how to obey orders, right?
Sure, sure, of course. So, from that aspect, I think that you felt cold because you were being given a conclusion rather than being taught how to get to that conclusion.
Any math teacher can give you the answer to a complex math problem.
They can just write the answer on the board.
But what they're saying, what do they say when they put the answer on the board?
What are they saying about your intelligence?
You're not able to get to this point.
Right. Right.
So if he's giving you, let's say, I don't think you were, but let's say you were trying to convince him because you were uncertain about your decision.
If he gives you the answer, he's saying you can't get the answer.
You know, it's funny. I would be on a talker.
It's totally random, but I've had that same experience being in this position of a teacher and people coming up to me and saying, I need help with coding, I need help with coding.
And I was like, you know what? I'm not going to do it for you.
I'm not going to give you the answer because you're not going to learn anything.
Right. You know, I mean, it's just a very simple fact.
You're not going to learn anything if I just give you the answer.
In fact, you're going to come back and bother me more.
I don't want to deal with that.
And I'll tell you this, and again, this is not specific to your therapist, because I just have this one little sentence, right?
But I'm just going to say that it's the teachers who don't think that they're good teachers who give the students the answer.
And the reason that they give the students the answer is to avoid the anxiety of the process of teaching them.
Hmm. Now, this, again, this has nothing to do with your, and we're just trying to figure out why you felt cold, right?
Now, if somebody gives you the answer, and that answer is wrong, you have the additional problem of them projecting, right?
Of them avoiding anxiety, of framing something that you're doing completely incorrectly, and that has to be coming from them, not from you, right?
Yeah. Sorry, it's one thing to be given the answer, it's another thing to be given the wrong answer.
And also, if he's saying, you're manipulating me, but it turns out that he in fact is manipulating you, that's pretty bad, right?
Oh yeah, especially for someone in that position.
Yeah, I mean, then he's accusing you of something that he's doing and you're paying him to do it.
And again, I'm not saying this is conclusions about your therapist or anything.
I'm just saying that this is the stuff that's worth exploring in yourself.
Because you know the answer in your gut, right?
It's just that the coldness that you felt was entirely valid and it's something that you should definitely talk about with your therapist.
Oh yeah, definitely. I intend to.
I just figured I would talk about the conversation you and I had, obviously, which related to that.
And sorry, the last thing is that if he says, you're trying to convince me of something, then he's implicitly saying, you are not certain of your decision.
Now, if you are not certain of your decision, but you don't know it, he needs to lead you to that.
Because there's no point just telling you, right?
And if you're not uncertain of your decision, but he tells you that you are, then clearly he's projecting again, right?
Right. I could see how that could...
It's a tough thing for anybody to accept this whole...
You know, not talking to the family thing, even if they are abusive.
And you'd think that a therapist would get it, but...
And just to clarify, a therapist, ideally, is not supposed to refrain from value judgments.
Okay. What was it then?
I got that. Sorry, what?
It's not supposed to refrain from value judgments, right?
So what they're supposed to refrain from is shaming you with opinions.
So if you come in and you say, I really had the urge to spank my cat with a spatula, then the therapist is supposed to be curious about that, right?
Now, but they're not supposed to say, I have no opinion about whether it's good or bad to spank a cat with a spatula.
Clearly, they recognize that that would be abusive behavior, right?
And the value judgment is, well, you don't want to be doing that, right?
But I'm not going to shame you and say, only evil people would want to do that.
How bad you are. Get out of my office, you evil bastard, right?
So to rephrase that, well, it was wrong.
So to try again on my part...
The judgments that take place aren't supposed...
Well, not even judgments. The actions that go forward from what I would say to the therapist aren't supposed to be ones that end up in shame or humiliation or that sort of thing.
Because if I feel shame and humiliation, it should be because of something that I'm working through out of my history or whatever, not from the therapist.
Well, a therapist who is not trying to shame and humiliate you will say, I sense that you're feeling shamed and humiliated.
Tell me more about it. The problem was not that you felt cold.
The problem was that you didn't feel that you could say, I feel cold.
What you said just now really bothered me.
Well, yeah. Sorry, this could be a great thing for you with this therapist, right?
And so if the therapist says something that makes you feel cold or makes you feel bad or makes you feel afraid of criticism, again, not to flog the real-time relationship book that I'm working on, but the key thing there is to say, wait a second, wait, wait, wait a second. When you just said that, I felt cold, I felt ashamed, I felt this, I felt that, right?
That's the real-time relationship.
This is what I just felt when you said that.
Right, right. And even if your therapist turns out to be the worst therapist in the world, and I'm not making, I don't know, right?
I'm just saying, right? You can get an enormous value out of when you, if he does something that you feel bad about, then you pause and you say, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop the train.
This just happened for me.
Because the whole point of therapy is to stop talking about the past and start talking about the present.
And that you go into the past and you deal with all of that so that you can get to the present, right?
That's why we went back last week to Rod when he was four years old, so that he could have a great conversation this week and get what he wanted out of sharing the philosophy with people.
So I would definitely go and say, I felt this in my last session, and then how he reacts, you keep him informed of your reaction to what he does in the real-time way.
Right, right.
And I suppose that's going to determine pretty quickly, for me at least, whether I have number four.
Yeah, and you stay vulnerable with him, and if he hurts you more, you say, well, now you're hurting more, and if he says, well, you're just oversensitive, and then you feel even worse, and you say, well, now I'm feeling even worse, and you just fucking relentless honesty.
I mean, it's teeth-gritting, relentless honesty, and that's how you get to the truth about your relationships, and of course, that's where you get efficiency, and if you have a great therapy session, then go back, and if you don't, then don't.
Okay, so I'm not going to put it in the final terms like that.
I'll just try to go in there as open as I can.
Yeah, just be honest, right?
Honesty is the first virtue, and honesty brings you clarity and certainty, which is called closure.
Well, thank you very much.
I'm certainly glad to have been helpful, and do keep us posted with how it goes.
Sure. And I don't know if you got the email or not.
I know you've been busy with other things, but I just finished The God of Atheists.
It's absolutely amazing.
It's just an amazing work of art.
I do.
I'm just not sitting at my desk.
Could you mind reading the email? I certainly don't mind the plug, but of course I do want people to buy the book, not just because I wrote it and think it's beautiful, but because it's beautiful and they should read it.
So if you could read the email you sent to me, I'd really appreciate it.
Well, let me pull up the email.
I didn't do much.
I was planning, and I haven't yet, to write a little more of an extensive review.
Just while he's pulling the email up and with all the due skepticism that is attended to an author talking about his own book, this is a completely and totally beautiful and wonderful and funny and touching book with vivid characters and beautiful dialogue.
It's very rich, it's very deep, it's very passionate, it's very powerful, it's very heartfelt.
It is a beautiful, beautiful book.
I don't know of any other novel that's like it that's out there.
And, uh, it got, uh, massively positive reviews and, uh, you should absolutely get ahold of copy.
You can get it, uh, a hundred bucks gets you the audio book, uh, read by me.
And also you can download a copy of the God of Atheists for like, I don't know, 14 bucks or something.
You can buy the print copy, uh, for 20, 24 bucks or something like that.
But, uh, you, you absolutely completely and totally should get ahold of a copy of this book.
It is just a wonderful and beautiful book.
And, uh, Of course, if you don't agree with me, then I will totally give you your money back.
So it's a no-risk proposition for you.
Go ahead, James. Okay.
The God of Atheists is simply an amazing work of art.
I couldn't put the PDF down, so to speak.
I see so much of what you've written and spoke about in that novel in FDR, and I can catch a glimmer of the thrill it must be to finally have it published.
Rarely does a book capture my attention so, though I don't know where I would have been reading this book six or twelve months ago.
It was certainly the right time now.
I think I'll take the time tomorrow, today, to write up a more complete review for it.
If there are any significant edits to the published version, let me know, just so that I don't, you know, I think I'll try to get my hands in the hard copy, maybe, soon, so I can just take a look at that.
Yep, that's pretty much it. Well, thanks.
I really do appreciate that, and I appreciate that insofar as it hopefully will tease other people into getting a hold of a copy of the book.
If you can't afford it, if you're totally broke, I'll send you a copy for free.
Pay me whenever you return your beer bottles, but it's freedomainradio.com forward slash books dot html, stores dot lulu dot com forward slash freedomainradio.
Just go get the book.
You will absolutely love it, I promise.
All right. Monsieur Le Tom, I believe, is up next who wanted to talk about insecurity.
Yeah, how are you, Seth?
Hi, how's it going? Hi, good, thanks.
Yeah, I just wanted to talk about, I guess, something which went away, like, I guess last year.
I used to get quite...
I didn't used to be quite very secure, like, confident and stuff, but that kind of went away.
But right now, I'm getting these...
These things, and it keeps coming back, but way, way more severe.
Like, right now, I'm actually, like, shaking.
It's really weird. And it happens in class too.
Like, just this sudden, like, burst of, like, adrenaline.
When my geography teacher talks about economics and he's talking about our society comparing us to Iran or something and saying, oh yeah, we're so much better because we live in a free market.
It's all capitalism here. This is wonderful.
And talking about how we can stop war with a good democracy and stuff.
And it just... Everyone else in the class just takes it in, and it's fine.
But I'm sitting there, and I really feel this build-up of emotion, and it's really hard to just, like, to shut it out and stay quiet.
When he asks me a question, I just want to, like, shout out the truth to him.
It's really hard. And I just...
I get that this self-confidence that I have now just...
Just to be able to, like, when I talk to people, I don't have to, like, convince them that I'm right in whatever I'm talking about.
Like, I've got a friend who I've just found out believes in God.
Like, I don't need to convince him that God doesn't exist.
I just need to just say, look, we can't be friends, okay?
We just stop talking to me about, you know, the way you want to You want God to give you a break or whatever because, you know, we don't have a friendship.
That self-confidence is...
I don't feel like that's come from me, if that makes any sense.
Like, if it came from me, then I'd know how to deal with this nervousness I'm feeling now and that I feel in class.
Right. This is Tom from yesterday.
We chatted yesterday. Right, right.
That as well. How's Divine Missy doing?
I don't want to give her a name on air, but is she okay?
You mentioned that she was a bit strung out from our chat yesterday.
Yeah, she's been quite strung out, actually.
But she still hasn't listened to the Skype chat again through.
But she's just thinking it through.
It's kind of hard. There's so many ideas that she's thinking through right now.
Yeah, no, and I'm sorry.
It's a little bit of a, you know, it's like, if you've ever seen the slow motion pictures, they're usually black and white film, of a fat guy getting a cannonball shot into his belly.
That sometimes can be a Skype chat with a big chatty forehead, so I do apologize for that, but...
I don't have as much time as I'd like, and of course I'm not a therapist, so sometimes it can bowl you over a little bit, but just be tender and gentle with her and listen as much as you can, because I know that that was quite a lot to swallow.
It's like one of those National Geographic videos where you see the snake with the gazelle inside it, so the digestion does take a little bit of time, and of course that's why I suggested that you guys could talk to counselors in your school situation and so on.
Right. Yeah, I'm definitely going to find a counselor this week, actually.
In fact, me and Mrs.
C are actually seeing a...
Well, we're not seeing a counselor, but we're taking a course, sort of a five-week course, where a counselor comes in and talks about his method that he uses to counsel people.
It's just a short course.
It costs £15, and we can talk about that.
I guess this is our last lesson that we'll have with him, so we'll definitely ask him to point us in the right direction.
He can put us in touch with someone we can talk to.
If you like him and you can get a recommendation from him, so much the better, for sure.
Right, right. Now, let's go back to that.
There were two parts of your earlier question, and we may not be able to deal with them both, but let's go to the first one for sure, which is your feelings, the feelings that you, the adrenaline and so on, the feelings that arise in you when somebody's talking stuff that is not true in a school setting, right? So tell me about that feeling in more detail.
If you could act on that feeling without repercussion, with no negative consequences, what would you do?
Shout at him? And what would you say?
I don't know.
Why are you lying?
Just asking him, why are you lying?
Like, all this Nazi, horrible stuff that you're filling our minds with.
I mean... I can't express it.
It's just this adrenaline.
I don't know what I'd actually say, you know.
Well, you do. It's just it's hard to put yourself in that mindset, right?
Because, I mean, I know you're kind of young and you haven't had that capacity for independent action quite as yet.
But without a doubt, the adrenaline has stuff that you want to do.
But let me ask you, do you think that he is lying consciously or do you think that he believes what he says?
He's lying consciously.
There was one lesson where we were talking about...
It was a general lesson talking about world resources.
This whole idea that we're going to run out of resources, everyone's going to be fighting over the resources, and this is why we get wars over water, over oil, over food.
And it's all going to escalate and there's going to be more war and everyone's going to die.
And the lesson went on.
Sorry, did he actually say everyone is going to die?
No, no, he didn't say that.
He was talking about two schools of thought.
He said there's Malthusians who say, yeah, everyone's going to die.
Like, that's natural because we're animals.
Like, we compete for resources and then we run out of resources and then our population plummets.
And he says, no, no, no, don't believe in that.
And then he says this other suggestion where science will, like, solve everything.
Like, science comes along and fixes everything up, and that's fine.
And so we're like, oh yeah, that's okay, science's good, that might make sense.
And then, so we asked him, okay, so what do you think can we do?
Like, is this situation ever going to be sorted out?
Will war come to an end?
Like... Can we stop exploiting the resources of lesser economically developed countries?
And he just said no.
He just put his pen down and he said no.
And that was the end of the lesson. And I just...
Right then, I thought...
What on earth?
I mean, he's constantly talking about...
Whenever the idea of government intervention comes into play, it's always like...
When people say...
He asked me once what Marxism was.
In the classroom setting, we were talking about world resources and redistribution of wealth.
And he asked me what Marxism was.
And he called me this crazy environmentalist or something.
He thinks I'm an environmentalist who lobbies the government or something.
And I just told him, sure, Marxism is where the government redistributes wealth at the point of a gun.
And he said, yeah, right, that's good.
And then he completely changed the topic.
And I just wanted to shout, we live in this stupid communist society, why can't you see this?
Why don't you admit it?
You know it, but why don't you say it?
Right, right. I mean, I know the answer.
He's head of a geography department, he gets loads of money, and I mean, it's just so sick.
I mean, I'm actually taking a double course this year of geography, so I see him almost every day of the week.
And it's not just him, of course.
There are other teachers as well. But it's really hard.
I've got to work really hard in these lessons just to catch up.
Because I'm a little bit behind half of my lessons.
So it's just really hard.
And I just feel like if I don't have the motivation to...
Like, if I'm not on his side, then how can I just, like, accept all that information and let it fill my brain so I can, like, splash it out on a test paper?
Like, if that's what I need to do, just sit there like a stupid, like, peon being told the truth so that I can, like, regurgitate it in the exam, if that's what I need to do, then, like, I'm not gonna pass this test, you know?
Well, no, you can pass the test, right?
As long as you recognize that there is a goal called get the degree, right?
And I'm just going to assume that you need it, and I think that's a good thing to have, particularly after you've started.
And there's this game, right?
And there's this game called...
I have to speak all of this nonsense in order to get my degree.
It is not a reflection upon you.
It is not a reflection upon your intellectual integrity.
It is not a reflection of you.
If somebody points a gun to your head and says, I want you to lie, then if you lie, it's not your moral responsibility right now.
You're in a situation, you're in a system, you're in a culture, you're in an economy, you're in a country wherein you are forced to jump through a whole bunch of stupid and useless hoops in order to get the credentials that can lead you to a Good life, right?
In terms of having some freedom and economic independence and a decent income and so on, right?
So you didn't make this system.
You didn't make the system that promotes people like this to positions of intellectual or moral authority over children.
You just stuck in this system, right?
In the same way that if you're brought up in Russia in 1950, the fact that you become a communist is not your fault, right?
Because that's what you've got to do to survive, right?
And in this situation, You can absolutely, like I'm telling you, you can get the degree and you can write the test and you can do very well in it.
And you can actually not necessarily hugely enjoy that process, but you can do it without a single shred of shame or guilt.
Because it's not a system that you've created.
These are the hoops you have to jump through.
And you get stuff that is good for you in your life out of this process, if that makes sense.
Right, right. Yeah, that does make sense.
So there's a couple of ways to do it, and I'll just touch on them because, of course, I spent forever in academics, so I've gone through very, very similar situations.
The first thing you have to do is not fight it.
Because you're sitting there seething and your adrenaline is pumping and you're whatever, right?
You get stressed and tense and so on.
And you need to look at it like an anthropologist.
Seriously. You need to look at this like you're reading hieroglyphics from a defunct civilization.
Because in a way, you are. You need to look at this and you need to say, this is the world.
This is the kind of person who has intellectual or moral authority in my society.
And then you need to look at your classmates and you need to drink it in.
You need to understand it. You need to absorb it and say, they don't know that these are lies.
I know that these are lies. This person is being well paid to corrupt the youth and to frighten them.
He's playing out his own weird intellectual sadism based on his own family issues and whatever, whatever, right?
This is the world that you live in.
Because you sit there and rail against it.
It's like somebody waking up who hates getting older and every single day they say, God damn it, I can't believe I'm older.
This makes me sick. I'm mad, I'm mad, I'm mad.
But this is the world that we live in.
This is the world that we live in.
By being a philosopher, by being interested in this, you're training to be a doctor.
Now, if you're training to be a doctor and you notice that everybody is really, really sick, surely that should make you want to be a doctor even more.
And you should be very proud of that desire or willingness that you have to sacrifice some of your short-term peace of mind for the sake of helping the world get out of a pretty godforsaken place, which is where it sort of is now.
So I would say, look, we don't fight reality.
As philosophers, we don't fight reality.
And the reality is, this is the community that we live in, and this is the social situation that you live in.
And you need to look at it like, I'm studying the enemy.
I'm studying the enemy.
I'm getting recon photos of the way that corrupt people's mind works.
And I'm going to make notes both about the content of what this guy is saying and also about the form of it.
And I need to study this and I need to understand it in the way that an oncologist, a researcher needs to study cancer.
An oncologist wakes up saying, cancer is my enemy, and I'm going to research it, and I'm going to kill this cancer, but I'm not enraged at the cancer, and the cancer is evil, and I'm stressed, and you know, whatever, right?
You are in the lair of the enemy, and study the enemy, you can learn all about it, you can drink it in, and you can absorb it, so that you don't get so tense and angry, but you are getting invaluable information on how to be the most effective person to fight against this in the future, and you can't fight against it now in this class.
You've got to get the degree, and I guarantee you this person's not emotionally mature enough to be debated with, because otherwise you would have done it already.
But there's great value that you can get.
You may want to listen to Podcast 300, where I actually take the Christian argument, and I take on the persona of a priest and argue that God does exist with Christina.
And to be able to inhabit the skin of the enemy is absolutely essential in terms of being able to win, right?
You have to know, like if you're a coach of a soccer to football team, you're going to spend half your lifetime studying the plays of the teams you're playing against, right?
Learning how they think, what kind of moves they make.
And so in school, you're getting an enormous amount of incredibly valuable information about what to fight later on.
Drink it in and absorb it.
Don't fight it, because that's the reality of where we live.
Right, right.
That's very helpful. Thanks.
No problem. And sorry, I just want to, because we've spent some time on this one, if there's anybody else who had a question in, I'm happy to come back to your second question, but if somebody else has a yearning-burning, let's just give them the chance to sort of speak up now.
No? Okay, looks good.
So your second question had more to do with your friend who was Christian, right?
Right, yeah. I don't know.
I guess it kind of links in with how I just progress this...
Like you said, you can't win the battle now.
When you're still in school, you're the one who's having all of this propaganda said to you.
It's not a cannonball into the belly thing, right?
Exactly. Exactly.
And if I, like, take a step out of line, it's like the firing squad lined up already.
Sure. So, like...
I guess...
Like, in that sense, I know that there's nothing I can do to say to my teacher now that's going to change anything.
It's not going to do any good.
He's just going to manipulate me and make me feel more frustrated.
But, um...
This...
But I guess, like, what can I do with, um...
I guess, I could explain the situation a bit clearer.
Like, this guy is a Christian, and I've only just found this out after a whole year of knowing him.
Sorry about that.
And basically, this has all come up now, and he keeps bringing it up, the fact that he believes in God, and how he's so offended by my beliefs, because I'm an atheist, and all of this.
I guess it's just...
I don't know how to break it to him.
I can't be your friend if this is how you're going to treat me.
Because he used to be...
I don't know.
He used to have autism or something.
And he's got a lot of problems in...
Like, often when he's talking in a lesson and someone says, and people start laughing, like, he'll turn to me and ask, like, why are they laughing?
Like, tell me, why are they laughing?
And I try and explain it, and I try and say, like, yeah, this might have something to do with your family, maybe?
And I try and get into it, and it just doesn't work.
He just gets... I just meet this wall of rage against me, and I just say, oh, fine.
Don't ask me then. I really...
I can't tell if, like, this is just a hopeless situation or whether it's something which I'm, like, creating.
Like, this impossible situation where this guy who's asking me for some help, like, can't be helped by me.
See what I mean? Would you say that you're friends with this person?
I wouldn't. He thinks we are, but his friendships aren't what I would call friendships.
Okay, so this does not sound like somebody who would be a good friend.
I mean, just honestly, if he doesn't know why people are laughing at him and then gets angry at somebody who gives him an honest question or an honest path about learning it, then this is not somebody who can be a good friend.
This is somebody who's defensive and dissociated and angry, right?
So this is not somebody who could be a sort of good or quality friend, right?
So the question is, what is the challenge with setting up the boundaries with this person, right?
Because he kind of, I'm guessing, right, he kind of glommed on to you and you kind of let it happen a bit, right?
Yeah, yeah, I guess so.
We talked about his family a bit and about his religion as well, and he just suddenly, there was a big wall of defensiveness.
Yes, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, but the important thing is not to focus on his family, but your family.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Right, so there's a reason why this guy's able to glom onto you.
You don't particularly like him, but you start getting involved in his life, right, in his psychology and his family and so on, right?
So what that tells me is that you were not taught to have particularly strong boundaries or to be able to set limits on your relationships with people based on your own self-interest.
Does that make sense? Yeah, I guess so.
Right, so if your parents or your siblings were doing something that you didn't like or that you felt uncomfortable with or didn't work for you in a sort of pleasure way, what did you do when you were a kid and that happened?
I guess there's nothing I really could do.
They wouldn't listen to me.
If I said anything, it wouldn't matter, because they could ignore me, and they could safely ignore me, and I'd still be stuck here.
Right, so you have a pattern here where your wishes and desires are not taken into account, and you were sort of there for the convenience of other people, right?
Right, exactly. And do you see the parallels here?
Yeah, I mean, exactly what you're saying.
I feel as if...
I project onto him the idea that he's just using me to sort out his problems.
Right. Is that it?
Well, I don't think you project onto him, and he's certainly not trying to sort out his problems, but it's far more likely that he's trying to avoid his problems.
But here, you were not taught how to say no to people that you don't like, right?
Or situations that you don't like, and your needs and preferences weren't taken into account, right?
Yeah, you just have to deal with them.
Like, you have to take it.
You have to take it, right? And any time that you attempted to set boundaries in your family, I guarantee you that you were either rejected or attacked or both, right?
Right, right. And so with this guy, this guy gets that about you, right?
He understands that you're not somebody who is at all comfortable with saying no or putting limits on a relationship, right?
Right. Why do you think that?
Why do I think what? Well, he keeps doing this.
Like, even though, even if I do say no, like...
No, no, no. Again, I'm going to try and push the power back into you, into your hands.
You keep doing this, not him.
You keep doing this.
You keep not setting boundaries.
Right? Let me put it to you this way.
Let's say that you have a house in an area that floods repeatedly, right?
We do. Okay, so it's good.
This is a metaphor that works for you, right?
Yeah. The floodwaters come in and your basement gets flooded, right?
And then you don't build a wall.
And then the basement gets flooded again and you don't build a wall.
And then you say, why does this keep happening to me?
It's because you're not building a wall.
Right? It's not the water's fault.
The reason that this keeps happening to you is because you're not setting up boundaries.
Right, so you need to say to this person, I don't feel comfortable when you talk to me in this manner.
Thank you.
I mean, you don't have to say, you asshole, get thee behind me, Satan.
I mean, you don't have to be a jerk about it, right?
Because that's how your parents probably did it, right?
But what you can do is you can say, I don't feel comfortable when you talk to me like this.
And then if they scorn you, they say, I don't like it, I don't feel good when you scorn me.
And then eventually they'll just push off, right?
Because they can't manipulate you.
So it's your job to set up.
It's not his job to manage your boundaries.
It's your job to manage your boundaries.
And if you don't build a wall and your basement keeps getting flooded, there's no point saying, well, maybe the water has had a bad family history.
I'm sure the water has in this case.
But it's your job to overcome your own family history and to put reasonable boundaries on your relationships so that nobody can exploit you.
Because if you're not enjoying this guy, interacting with this guy, you don't have to do it.
In fact, I would say it's disrespectful to yourself and to the virtuous people in the world for you to do it.
You have no positive, unchosen obligations.
You don't owe this guy a single shred of help about his history.
You don't owe any shred of energy to make him a better person or to help him understand why people laugh at him.
You don't owe him one single thin sliver of your time, money, resources, energy, or soul.
You don't owe anybody anything, unless you've contracted for it, or donations.
No, I'm kidding. But you don't owe.
It's your job to say no to people that you don't want to interact with.
It's not their job to back off, and it's not the water's job to not spill into your basement.
Because there are six billion and one crazy people in the world who will try and manipulate and exploit you in this life, and saying it's their job to not do it is unreasonable.
It's your job to prevent it.
And if it happens, to push back and to say, I don't like this interaction.
And I know it's scary, not because of this guy, but because of your family, and you associate that with being attacked, right?
But you're getting old enough now where you can start to practice on this stuff with your sort of so-called friends, right?
Or the people who are around you or pillaging you or whatever.
So the problem is not his family or his history.
The primary problem, as far as you're concerned, is your family and your history.
Right. I really get that.
That actually solves a lot of problems.
Like, seeing it from that angle, like, completely...
It gives you power, right? Yeah, it gives me a lot of power.
Sorry, your only solution in this case was you say, well, I can't build a wall, but maybe I can make a swimming pool in my basement.
Right? So your only solution here is like, well, this guy has glommed onto me, so maybe I can make him into a good friend by having him deal with his past.
That's not the solution, right?
Right, because that's not like using my own power to be happy in my own life, but to be free.
Yeah, no power. And so you want to be free, and you want to start practicing now while you're young, right?
You don't want to sort of do it when you get married and have kids, and you've got crazy neighbors who want to come over.
Do it now, and it's terrible, and it's scary, and you need counseling and all that to help you with this.
And I mean this with all due sympathy to the past, right?
And I know a little bit about it based on our conversation from yesterday, but...
It is your job to do this.
This is your job to manage.
It's not other people's job to not be crazy.
It's your job to be sane.
Right, right.
That really helps.
I'm so glad. Now, I think that...
Sorry, go ahead. I can just see exactly where it's come from, too.
I mean, like, looking at my past, I think, well, I've never...
Like, obviously, as a kid, I wasn't in that position where I could choose.
Like, I couldn't set those boundaries because they'd be set for me.
Sorry, I'll back you up for a second here just so you have more sympathy for yourself as a kid.
It's not that you couldn't set those boundaries, it's that you were attacked for setting those boundaries.
Like, I can't fly, but that's a different thing from being attacked for flying.
Do you know what I mean? That's not a great metaphor, but it's not that you weren't able to or couldn't get around to it or didn't have the time or couldn't pencil it in.
You try to, we all do, set those boundaries.
We all try to set those boundaries and to express our preferences in relationships.
But every time you do it, if you get attacked every time you do it, you're going to end up being averse to doing that, which renders you open to being exploited by other people later on in life.
So you were attacked for doing it, not, I just didn't do it, right?
How exactly would that happen?
I mean, I'm trying to think like how that could...
Well, what happened when you expressed a preference with your parents that conflicted with their preferences?
Like, there'd be, um...
Like to take an example?
Sure. Like when we see my grandad.
Like last time I was asked to go see my grandad, I just said no.
I said no. I've got a girlfriend, I could see them, her and her family and stuff and I like doing that and it would be a heck of a lot more fun than like go sitting in a smelly apartment like talking about the weather.
And what happened with that?
Well, that time, fine.
Every other time before that, before I was big enough, I suppose, tall enough, I'd just be shunned, told, you're wrong because you're not conforming to this family cult.
You know, you're not playing by the rules that we've set.
Right, and it does confuse us as adults when our parents give us liberties.
But basically, if your slave escapes overseas and you write him a letter saying, I now set you free, it seems kind of ridiculous, right?
Right, it does, yeah.
So you have to think about it when you were totally under their control of power, when you were five years old, four years old, three years old, six years old.
What happened then when you expressed a preference that was inconvenient for them or did not coincide with their preference?
Right. Would it be like...
I don't know. I'm just struggling to find something that early in my childhood.
Do you not think you had preferences?
Have you ever tried taking candy from a baby?
Well, I guess there's a million and one things to say about that with my mom.
I mean, she's given...
We've got this whole, like...
Not diagnosed OCD, but you know what I mean.
Just like... You have to clean things in the exact right way...
You can't, like, put a mug on the breadboard.
You can't use this knife for that.
You have to use a spoon to, like, spread jam.
Like, ridiculous things, which would never come to your mind.
But that's, like, for some reason, like, these weird hang-ups and, like, obsessions that my mum has.
She... She laughs about it now, but she actually enforced them on me as a kid.
She'd slap my hand and say, no, don't do that.
You have to do it my way.
You have to completely conform to my neuroses.
Completely insane, you know?
And does she think now that in hindsight she maybe should have gotten some treatment for this problem?
No, she sees it as a hanger.
Right, like it's a funny kind of eccentric little British quirk, right?
Right, right.
Everyone has a million one of those, yeah.
Right, so, I mean, that seems to me an entirely apt example of if you express a preference that's inconvenient to your parents, you get punished and in a somewhat violent manner, right?
Right. I wouldn't call it that violent, but, you know.
It's scary when somebody five to six days slaps your head.
Right. Or even just, like, takes the thing out of my hand.
It's quite, like, what did I do?
I didn't do anything wrong in this thing.
You know, I've been picked up, put somewhere else, like, other side of the room, and now they're talking to me, or they're, like, you know, just completely messing me around just because I did something slightly wrong to them.
Well, and not wrong at all.
I guess what happened is you caused her anxiety in a basic manner and she attacked you in one form or another.
And again, I don't want to say she clubbed you or anything, but it's hard to remember what it's like for us when somebody five times her size gets angry at us in whatever form, right?
It's very, very scary. Right.
I think one of the things that's helped me see that, I don't know if this is healthy or not, but I've got two cats, and my dad is just...
When he goes into a rage, he just storms.
And if the cat does anything...
If he's in a bad mood and the cat...
Something ridiculous like that.
He can go insane at this tiny little animal.
And I'd run in the room and say, he's a foot tall.
He is half a foot tall.
And you're screaming at this tiny little animal.
What is wrong with you?
I mean, it's just so insane.
I know exactly what you mean, but I guess the metaphor I use is like how I see my cat, like running out the cat flap as soon as that happens.
Right, right, except that you didn't have somebody running in the room to interrupt your dad's rage, right?
Right. Right.
Well, listen, I'm sorry, because I would love to spend more time on this, but we have some other people in the queue.
I think it's fairly clear that you can go back and start.
You write this kind of stuff down.
Write down everything that you tried to express a preference that you were attacked for or rejected for or snapped at or whatever.
Write all of this stuff down, and then your relationship with this gentleman in the present will become that much more clear.
Right, right. Okay, thanks so much.
And next up we have the Divine Miss C, not the one we mentioned before, who wants to spin us a web called misanthropic tendencies.
Is she not in? Should we get the next person in?
Okay, Uncle B, you had a question about a sibling foo convo, and I think you had sent the letter, if I remember rightly.
Yeah, I sent the letter and it feels good.
I feel like I put a stake in the ground and it's good.
I have three siblings and I talked to my final sibling.
One thing that kind of struck me in talking to all three of my siblings is how You know, their anxiety level was one thing, but also, you know, it all boils down to them wanting to make their parents happy, knowing full well how evil they were when we were kids.
And I realized that I... I also wanted to, the reason, you know, you asked me two Sunday chats ago, the first time I had a chat with you, why are you still in communication with your parents?
And the reason I was, seeing, you know, going to visit them, spending five, six hundred dollars for Christmas, flying over there to see them and stare at the wall, The reason I did that and the reason I called every Sunday was because I knew it made them happy and I wanted to make them happy.
I just kind of realized this just in the last day or so.
God, that's just sickening when I think about that.
That I actually wanted to make my father Happy, yet he is the most evil human being I've ever experienced.
He's just a disgusting man.
I don't want to interrupt your story with your sibling, but I just wanted to put in a little point of clarity that there's no reason you would know.
Fundamentally, it was not that you wanted to make your dad happy.
It was that you wanted to avoid your own feelings of guilt.
Could you go into the guilt thing?
Well, wanting to make somebody happy is a good thing, right?
I mean, certainly I love making Christina happy and she loves buying me electronics, which is apparently the same thing.
But wanting to make somebody happy is a good thing.
Right? And so there's nothing wrong, objectively, with wanting to make somebody happy.
You could not conceivably have had a genuine motivation to make your dad happy, because as you say, he is the most evil human being in the world.
So it cannot logically be that you wanted to make your dad happy.
What you wanted to do was to avoid the negative feelings that you would have had from not going.
I see. Again, I'm just trying to put that back into you, that you were actually acting to avoid negative feelings in yourself.
But those feelings of guilt for not going, I'm trying to figure that out because, I mean, still deep down I knew my father was...
It was an illusion that he was nice.
I understand that, but if you look at your own motivations for going to your parents, it was not because it gave you pleasure, right?
Right.
And I don't want to put words in your mouth.
I mean, if it did give you pleasure, but if you have an evil guy in your life who bullied and abused you through your childhood and your youth and middle age, you can't want to see him.
You can't take pleasure in seeing somebody who abused you.
I mean, there's subjectivity in emotions, but not to that degree, right?
Right, but, you know, I think...
I put that, I shoved that under the carpet, the fact that he was an evil person, evil man.
I bought his veneer of nice that he put on since I left the house.
Right, and I'm going to pause you again, and sorry to be so annoyingly precise, or at least attempting to be precise.
You did not push your father's evil under the carpet.
He pushed it under the carpet, and you were trained to obey him.
Right. And again, I'm sorry to be so annoying, but it's very important to be precise about what actually happens, because anything else is mythology, and when you have mythology, it disempowers you, right?
It obscures reality, right?
There's no way that you would voluntarily say, this is an evil guy, and I'm going to ignore it, right?
Right. So your whole family, your siblings, your mom, your dad, everybody pretends the complete opposite, as they did when you were a kid, and whenever you were a kid, whenever you acted on something that was true and real, you were viciously attacked, right?
So you're just like, I'm punished for anything that happens that's real, and everybody else has a huge vested interest in covering up this evil, and that was what was actually...
You didn't voluntarily just sweep this under the rug, right?
Everybody else did for their own self-interest and in order to continue the abuse, and you're just trained to obey because you're punished if you don't, and viciously too.
Right.
But I'm so sorry.
I mean, let's get back to your sibling. I just wanted to pause on those two particular issues so that you could get some clarity, have a bit more sympathy for yourself and the survival strategies that you maintained and so on, right?
So you can get more peace with your decisions.
Right, I think in talking with my siblings, it's kind of a mirror of myself and I'm kind of working on that because I think they're helping me figure out where I was, what was happening with me by just me seeing their resistance to observing me, you know, just getting out, getting out of the mythology that they are still in.
Well, sure, sure. I mean, what you're doing is you, I mean, this is how we break from the past, is we act in defiance to how we were crushed, right?
I mean, so for somebody to step out of mythology invites attack.
And that was the story of your childhood, and as we talked about with Rod last week, you can get to the age of 90 and be exactly the same as you were at the age of 4.
Time heals nothing. Growth does not occur inevitably.
I mean, we'll hit puberty whether we like it or not, but we do not hit wisdom, growth, and truth unless we damn well bite and claw for it.
So there's no inevitability to maturity, and we all know this from our own parents, at least most of us.
So, when you decide to act out of mythology, everybody experiences that as an imminent destructive and abusive attack, and they blame you, not the parents.
So it's an attack on their own guilt?
No, no, it's just that any time anybody tells the truth in your family, they get attacked, right?
And nobody wants to look at the attack because the attack is evil.
So what they want to do is they want nobody to tell the truth so they don't have to deal with the fact that there's an evil in the family, right?
So now that you're telling the truth, you are causing problems.
You are attacking the family, right?
Yeah, I'm attacking the mythology of the family.
Well, yeah, you're rejecting the mythology of the family, but what happens is, if in your family, when you're a kid, every time somebody has a glass of milk, all the children get hit.
What are your siblings going to do when you reach for a glass of milk?
They're going to duck.
No, they're not going to duck.
You said if everyone, you're saying if everyone who reaches for a glass of milk gets hit, No, if every child who, like if you have a glass of milk, if you have one glass of milk, all of the children get beaten, including your children, sorry, including your siblings, what are they going to do when they see you reaching for that glass of milk?
They're going to say, don't, don't grab, don't grab.
Right, they're going to attack you like, what the hell are you doing?
Don't do that, stop! They're going to get really enraged at you, right?
Which is completely unjust, but totally understandable.
Because they can control you, they can't control your dad, when they're kids, right?
Right. What's kind of interesting about this is that I didn't really do that because what I've learned in these conversations recently with my siblings is that going from oldest to youngest,
the physical violence got less and less.
So my sister, the oldest, Got beaten the most.
My oldest brother, I think, got beat then, and then my other brother.
By the time it got to me, I didn't need to get beaten.
I did not get beaten physically, because I was already beaten.
My hypothesis is that I was already taken care of without needing physical violence.
Does that make sense? But do you know why that violence tends to diminish down the chain of age?
No. Well, it's because the parents have lieutenants.
I was a lieutenant.
No. Again, we're just talking about the chain of the age sequence.
If anyone gets beaten for drinking a glass of milk, the parents have to beat the first kid quite a lot to get them to not drink the glass of milk.
But by the time the second kid comes along, the parents have to beat the second kid less.
Why? Because the second kid has already seen the first kid get beaten severely and already has some fear before even getting beaten.
Well, there's that to some degree, but I would not say that's the full story.
The reason that the parents have to beat the second kid less is because the first kid is the enforcer.
Because the first kid has felt the full pain and says, I'm going to get beaten if you grab for the milk.
Right, so the older kid polices the milk and polices the younger kid and attacks the younger kid if the younger kid goes for the milk, right?
Right. And the reason why younger siblings so often, it's not universal, but the reason why younger siblings are so often the ones who tell the truth, is that they don't ever get turned into enforcers.
They don't ever get recruited into the hierarchy.
So they never become somebody who abuses another child in the family.
And of course, once you become an abuser, it's almost impossible, especially of children.
I mean, you just never can become a good person, right?
I'm trying to figure out, you know, when you're saying in this analogy of everyone gets beaten if one child misbehaves, I'm kind of, maybe that happened in my family, but I can't remember that kind of scenario really actually happening.
Right, and thank you for pointing that out.
That was a metaphor. And what I mean by that is, even if only one child gets attacked, all the other children feel fearful, right?
Sure. So, when I say all the children get attacked, whether the parent only attacks one child, all the children feel terrified of that, right?
Oh, I was, I mean, as a very young kid, when my sister, you know, when she was in her turbulent teens getting beaten the most and getting screamed at by my father, I was the youngest and I was petrified, you know.
So, yeah. Right. So, that's what I mean when I say all the children get attacked, right?
Right. If your parent only attacks one child, you're all terrified.
And if you see your sibling doing something that's going to invite an attack on that sibling, unless you're a total sadist, you're going to try and control that sibling.
Because him you can control, or her you can control, or influence at least.
Your parent you can't, right?
So it's like me saying to my sister, please don't do that because dad's going to yell and scream at you and that's just going to hurt me.
Well, I'm sure that you cared about her as well, but it was also terrifying for you when this happened, of course.
And so what that means, of course, is that when you start reaching for the glass of milk, even if your siblings are 60 years old, they're going to get mad at you.
So it's like, putting it in current time, I am, right now, by me defooing, I'm...
You're drinking. You're not even reaching for the glass of milk.
You're drinking deep, my friend, and everybody is freaking out because they know an attack is going to occur.
So they're afraid. If the parent can't get their hands on you, your siblings are going to suffer even more.
Okay, so they're afraid that my father is going to get enraged, and they're the ones that are going to have to face that.
Well, sure. And so you're causing the problem for them.
Right. So they're going to get mad at you, because that's what families do, is they get mad at the weakest, right?
Yeah. So, I mean, they haven't gotten mad at me yet, but there's definitely, I mean, there's definitely anxiety.
Sure, absolutely. Look, and I'm not saying it's exactly the same as when you were 10 or 12 or 8 or anything like that, but there is anxiety.
Sure, your dad is also old enough that, I mean, the fear of physical attack is diminished or eliminated, but your dad will know how to strike out, and maybe in terms of inheritance, or maybe, you know, I cut you all off, I'm taking something up, who knows, right?
But, But there will be something which will cause an escalation of tension and probably some pretty outright hostility.
And that hostility may be, if you're lucky, just, you know, we're never going to talk to you again, right?
Which I know is painful, but it's certainly better than, you know, them sort of undermining and abusing and messing you up in different ways.
Well, you know, that's something I can certainly live with.
For me, the worst thing that can happen to me is, you know, I lose an inheritance.
And I don't know how much that would be or what, but, you know, in fact, I kind of feel that it's not healthy for me to expect that.
Yeah, no, I would not agree with you that the worst thing that can happen to you is to not get an inheritance.
What would be the worst thing?
Thank you.
Well, it would be to continue to subjugate yourself to an abusive relationship.
Oh, sure, sure. That, to me, is completely off the table.
That's re-fooing. Right, right.
So what you mean is the worst thing that they could do to you now that you've defooed is not give you an inheritance?
That's what I meant, yes. I'm so sorry.
I misunderstood. No problem.
So does that give you some, again, there's no way to predict everyone's behavior, but does it give you a way of looking at this that makes the behavior a little bit more comprehensible?
Yeah, I think it does, because I've been really trying to figure it out, and it's been spinning in my head, and it's just, you know, this...
Yeah, it'll take some more pondering on it and chewing on it, but yeah, that definitely helps.
And of course, if you're still in conversation with your siblings, you can say, well, how is this all making you feel?
Yeah, and I've been doing that, and that's been working really well, especially in this last conversation.
I said to my brother, I said, you know, I get the feeling that you're anxious.
And he actually said, yeah, I am anxious.
Well, can you tell me about why you feel anxious?
And that really helped Get down to the nitty gritty and it really got down to the point where he, I think, is willing to take a look at this, more so than the other two siblings.
Hey, look, and I don't mean to sound too feral, but I swear to God, I mean, nothing better could come out of this than you all leave this vicious old bastard to die alone.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
That would be great. You know, there is a black simian justice in the world that I completely and fully support, and I don't mean that you go there and scream at his bedside, but, you know, if you have abused children, if you die alone in a dark room, I don't lose a wink of sleep, and I think there's some justice in that that's kind of satisfying.
It's a really sick thing to observe, to watch my siblings.
My sister, for example, I asked her, she's planning to visit my parents this Christmas, and I said, do you want to go visit them without hesitation?
She said no. I said, why are you going?
And she, for a moment there, I could tell.
She saw how ludicrous that was.
Sorry to interrupt, but just give her this idea that we talked about a little bit earlier.
Really, I'm sorry to interrupt, but this idea we talked about, she's not doing it to please them.
She's doing it to avoid her own negative feelings, or her own anxious feelings, or her own feelings of guilt.
It's not about them.
She's manipulating them.
To make herself feel better, and they're manipulating her to make themselves feel better, but it's got nothing to do with making them happy.
Because that's a moral thing, right?
And if you believe that, then you're going to feel really bad for not making your parents happy, but it's got nothing to do with that.
It's just about, you can tell that, and maybe play this part, but it's about her trying to avoid her own anxiety about not going.
Should I just say that, or should I ask questions to get to that?
Well, I'd be kind of blunt, but I'd ask her questions about how she feels.
And what I did with you, you may want to listen to this video again, where I'd say, well, it can't be because you want to make them happy.
Because why would you want to make an abuser happy?
And do you really think that an abuser could be happy?
And what kind of person would be happy if somebody showed up out of obligation, not out of desire?
Right, that's a good point.
I would never want someone to pay attention to me out of obligation.
No, how terrible.
I mean, how insulting would that be?
Christina says, well, I don't love you, I don't even like you, in fact, I really despise you, but I just kind of felt after you bought the ring that it was sort of my duty to marry you.
And so, I mean, wow, God, I mean, like the annulment, bye-bye, right?
What a nightmare that would be, right?
So you can ask a bunch of questions to get her to doubt the premise that she has, but then it's always good to have the answer in your pocket, right?
Right. Another thing that makes me think of this, you know, to my father, you know, I'm nothing more than a son, and it's really an insult to just be a son.
And my brother, one of my brothers said, you know, when I asked him, why do you care about me?
Because I asked him why he's so concerned about me doing all this.
He said, well, because I care about you.
And I asked him, why do you care about me?
He says, because you're my brother.
It's so insulting.
Thanks so much, and I'm sorry to ditch you, but time's a ticket and we have somebody else who wanted to chat.
Do keep us posted, and I think you're just doing for what it's worth.
If it means anything, you're doing some magnificent stuff there, and you're going to do some fantastic stuff to bring this stuff to the light.
You don't know where this kind of behavior is going to end up for yourself, but it's going to be a much, much better place.
Thank you so much for keeping us up to date.
Thanks. All right.
The Divine Missy, save me from misanthropy, which actually is what happens when there's a full moon and you grow a lot of hair, if I understand that rightly.
I used to be a werewolf, but I'm alright now.
Okay, you frighten me, Steph.
You really frightened me.
Okay, now? It's only happening now?
Come on! Okay.
Sorry to double dip, but something that you said to Tom sort of, I don't know, set me off, I guess.
How he should absorb all of the crap that his teachers are spewing, but it doesn't sort of...
I don't know, I guess it's not his fault morally that he has to regurgitate it back out.
Sorry, just before you continue, and I certainly don't mind you tearing me a new one if I've made a mistake, but I just wanted to point out, I didn't say that he should absorb the crap, I said he should absorb the fact that it is crap.
But, sorry, go ahead. So one of the things that I was wondering is since I listened to your podcast on the New York City subway and I see at least twice a day something, you know, some horrible child abuse or some horrible...
Just general horribleness.
And I start thinking, okay, that's one more person that we can't save.
So I was wondering, how do you avoid becoming a total misanthrope once you've sort of woken up to all of the shit that goes on and the fact that it is shit?
It would seem to me that, you know, I guess wanting to save humanity but not wanting to look at individual humans too much, it would just seem to me to be a little bit intellectually dishonest.
So how do you reconcile that?
Well, I mean, that's an excellent question.
We just talked about that today. The first problem is that you're leaving your house and doing anything other than being on the Free Domain Radio Board.
So, look, I mean, and there's some truth in that, but this is a significant challenge.
Which is that we want to save the world, and let's put all pretensions of rank humility and self-abasement aside.
We want to save the world, and we dislike most of the people in it.
And that is a challenge, right?
We are... What I do, the way that it works for me is something like this.
Like, I think there's some real value in living your life and making your decisions from your deathbed back, right?
So that's just one of the things that I do when I'm sort of trying to prioritize my time or my energies or my life, is to say, you know, on my deathbed, am I going to be really happy that I did this?
Am I going to be satisfied that I did this and so on, right?
And that helps me to really focus my time and my energy so that when I'm on my deathbed, I'm happy with what I did and how I spent my time.
That's one thing that you can do to really help that.
And the way that translates into what we're doing here is I think of this completely beautiful world.
A hundred years from now.
Let's just say it could be more, it could be less, probably more.
But let's just say a century from now, there's this beautiful world.
There's this beautiful world where there's no government.
And people don't believe in these sick fantasies of religion.
They don't terrorize their children with stories of hell and bleeding saints and duty and don't masturbate and all this sort of unhealthy, sickening, self-conscious.
You're constantly being watched crap.
Where people are brought up in schools, children are brought up in schools where their minds are stimulated and they wake up looking forward to going to school and they have a great time when they're there and they can graduate when they're 14 years old with all the skills that we might even have right now at the end of university and they can start on their lives and they get an extra decade of life because they don't get it pissed away in the gulags and stupid school systems and they raise their children with joy and pleasure and there's There's enough money that they only have to work two days a week and if one parent wants to stay home or they can save enough money for both parents to stay home and enjoy the babies and the children for the first five or seven years until they go to school,
they can homeschool and perfectly afford it.
There's no need to commute.
All of the things that can be possible.
There's no war. We're good to go.
Who to us would seem like gods is the natural state of humanity.
That is the natural state of humanity, to live in peace and joy and plenty and benevolence.
And yes, there will be sociopaths born into that society in the same way that we have Siamese twins in our society, but they will figure in almost everybody's lives not at all.
DROs will move in to help.
People have these choices. They have these options.
They can travel. They don't need passports.
You don't have to apply to move from one place to another.
You can live your life in peace and plenty.
Those are the people that I love.
Those are the people I love.
And God, I hope they're listening in 100 years to this because we're doing it all for you, baby.
So send your donations back in time, too.
Because by then they'll have time travel.
Those are the sort of shining, beautiful souls that we are working to give entrance to the world to.
We are working to give a world that can support and nourish That kind of beauty and that kind of human potential and possibility where children of four are recognized for the beautiful geniuses that they are and there is an explosion of art and science and culture and commerce that we couldn't imagine.
The progress that is made in a year is what we consider lucky to make in a lifetime.
And that world, that world, that world is what I'm looking back from in my heart of hearts.
I'm living in that world, and I'm looking back and saying, now that I'm there, because this is what I live with Christina, this is my life with my wife, right?
That world, I'm looking back and saying, well, how the fuck do we get there?
And once you're there, you can look back and see how you can get there.
And loving that world of the future and loving those amazing, gorgeous, godlike, saint-like, hagiographically intense people in the future is something that is where my passion goes.
Because yes, absolutely, when you're in a society of lepers...
You have to love who the society could be in the absence of leprosy.
That is a little bit of looking into the future and projecting.
But you have to have that vision so that you have the strength to go out and work your best to heal the lepers every day.
So I would say just fall in love with the future that we are creating for the world through this conversation.
And all accusations of grandiosity can land on me because I am not going to spend my life, my precious coinage on anything less than the most magnificent goal that I can imagine and I can come up with.
Because that's how I want to spend my short time on this planet, is having mad, grand, enormous goals of creating a utopian, perfect, wonderful planet full of joyous, happy, brilliant people who laugh all day long and sing in the shower with more tune than I do.
That is the world that I love, and that is the world that I am absolutely going to die building the bridge towards, and then whoever comes after and all of us will pass that along.
That's how I avoid the distaste and hatred of the present, that there are enormous cavalcades of broken people in the world at the moment, and they are so broken that they attack a healing hand.
We have to try and treat lepers who are biting us.
And we've got to keep moving and look and picture that perfect gap commercial world of the future with no leprosy.
And that's what we love.
And that's what we're building the shining bridge towards, if that helps at all.
Hi, it's Stefan Molyneux.
Sorry, so sorry that this show ended abruptly.
We had an internet outage, which unfortunately axed the show, but we were pretty much done.
Thank you so much for listening. Please drop by freedomainradio.com forward slash books.html or stores.lulu.com forward slash freedomainradio to pick up your goodies.
Thank you so much, as always.
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