Jan. 24, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:25
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| Good morning, everybody. It's Steph. | |
| I hope you're doing well. Look, I'm back in the car. | |
| It's a good old-fashioned podcast boy. | |
| So, I hope you're doing well. | |
| I wanted to... | |
| I was originally going to do some thoughts or impressions that I had of the recent conference, but we have a conference call with the conference participants. | |
| So, I'm going to wait for that. | |
| But what I wanted to talk to you about, and this is sort of in preparation... | |
| For getting ready for the real-time relationship book, as well as those who were at the conference and those who listened to the conference on audio, there's going to be a sort of theme, | |
| if you will, which is really about pain, the acceptance of pain, not necessarily the pursuit of pain, But definitely an acceptance of pain. | |
| And what people are going to experience from that is a steady increase. | |
| When you sort of get under the spell of the real-time relationship concept, then you're going to Experience a steady increase in anxiety, and you're going to be looking at various interactions and say, ooh, should I RTR this or not? | |
| I don't know! At least I do. | |
| So, not so much now, but certainly when I first started working with the concept. | |
| So, I wanted to go over some of the Reasons behind exploring this kind of anxiety and pain, and also some tips on whether or not it's worth pursuing an RTR. RTR is something that has to be earned by people. | |
| It's not something that you just hand out like candy. | |
| I think that those who have earned it, you should provide it to them. | |
| And those who... | |
| When you are enmeshed with and are indecisive about, like family or whatever, you should RTR with them in order to gain some sort of sense of closure with regards to that relationship. | |
| So those are sort of the two circumstances that I would say you should pursue it. | |
| when the person has earned it, and when you're enmeshed in a relationship that you can't sort out. | |
| So, for instance, in the conference there was a lady who was brought by an FDR listener, and she was not a mystic, but she was certainly more open to things like UFOs, but she was certainly more open to things like UFOs, The sort of quantum flux of we are all one and all that kind of stuff. | |
| the Deepak Chopra kind of nonsense. | |
| And there was some... | |
| So she brought some of this stuff up in passing, and it was very sort of brief and so on. | |
| And... I decided not to pursue that topic, right? | |
| To sort of clear that up or to make her sane or whatever. | |
| And there were a number of reasons for that, which I'll sort of pass out here, which will hopefully... | |
| I mean, it doesn't mean I'm right or wrong. | |
| It's just sort of the way that I think about it. | |
| You can see if it's helpful to you. | |
| So... When she said that, I sort of... | |
| looked down the tunnel of time, and I thought, okay, well, I can start to educate this woman on metaphysics, epistemology, true and false, and so on, thus running into all of the family issues that have generated her laxness, let's say, in these sorts thus running into all of the family issues that have generated her laxness, let's say, in these sorts of topics, plus the inappropriateness that she has in bringing these topics up, and not wildly inappropriate, just somewhat, you know, in a rationalist conference, or a conference | |
| somewhat, you know, in a rationalist conference or a conference about philosophy, bringing stuff up, which means that she obviously doesn't know what on earth is being talked about and why she would talk in a situation where she didn't know what the general environment was and how it made her look. | |
| And this would have to do with her own desire for self-shaming and lots of stuff that goes cooking around. | |
| And that would be at least an hour and a half. | |
| At least an hour and a half. | |
| And most of it would be ground that the existing conference participants had already gone over. | |
| I mean, this is not going to be new stuff. | |
| And I was reminded of a Sunday call-in show about a year ago This is back when we used to use Skype from Hell, the Skypecast, those lying bastard technology falsehoods, but this is back when we used to use those, | |
| and lots of people came in who had nothing to do with the conversation, and I spent about 20-25 minutes Talking to somebody about true and false, reality, the mind, and so on. | |
| And there was, of course, a large amount of disgruntlement, let us say, from the more longer-term listeners. | |
| Like, why are you going over this? | |
| We already know this. In a sense, it was like I thought the show was about us. | |
| And to some degree, I think that's entirely right. | |
| That for me to sort of peel off for 90 minutes when we only have... | |
| I mean, we only had a short conference, like a one-day conference with an hour and a half for lunch. | |
| So it was not a massively long time that we had together. | |
| For me to peel off for an hour and a half with this woman would have been, I think, disrespectful to... | |
| Like, I would have had a tough time doing it because I would also have felt anxiety. | |
| Like, is this the right thing to be doing? | |
| Are people getting restless? | |
| Are they feeling anxious? | |
| And so on. And she was there with her boyfriend and he would have intervened and he would have jumped in. | |
| And let's say that as I began sort of to poke around the psychological roots of this kind of inappropriate blurting in her, the emotional tension would have escalated and maybe she would have gotten sarcastic or snappy or whatever. | |
| And maybe I would have had to ask her to leave. | |
| You don't know. | |
| I certainly had a sense that it might go that way. | |
| And then she would leave, and her boyfriend would have to leave, and then he had all this audio-visual equipment there, so he'd spend 20 minutes packing it all up, so we'd have to clear the room, and I mean, it would just be a mess. | |
| Like, carve up two hours of the day, and then how do we get back on track after that? | |
| Like, how do we return to... | |
| I mean, I guess we'd have an RTR discussion point, but it wouldn't be... | |
| It wasn't part of the conference, right? | |
| So... And, I mean, if this person had been a university professor who was in contact with, you know, hundreds of formative young minds in their formative, then maybe it would have been worth it. | |
| But she's just someone, someone brought, right? | |
| So, in that situation, I didn't feel that it was appropriate or right or correct to go down that route. | |
| And I'm very glad that I didn't. | |
| But, of course, for some people, the people who... | |
| I mean, I know this is hard, right? | |
| Because we all are like, here's a rule. | |
| Okay, there's a rule, right? | |
| And so now how do we follow this rule down to the letter? | |
| But we are not robots. | |
| We are not computers. We do not program ourselves with rules and then follow them blindly. | |
| We feel our way. | |
| Like I was talking with someone last night. | |
| Who was saying, gee, I don't know. | |
| I mean, who asked me this question? | |
| I said, I didn't feel like doing it, and I think there were good reasons for that, right? | |
| You could make a different decision, right? | |
| But then the person said, yes, but where do you draw the line exactly between this, that, and the other? | |
| It's like, fuck drawing the line. | |
| Forget drawing the line. | |
| I mean, we're not talking good or evil here. | |
| We're talking about whether you should talk to somebody with complete honesty. | |
| That's not a good or evil situation. | |
| We're not talking axe-murdering versus non-axe-murdering. | |
| Complete, optional, open, honest... | |
| I didn't lie to the woman. I didn't agree with her that UFOs might exist and that we are exactly the same as a table. | |
| But I just didn't know. | |
| She didn't earn that from me, right? | |
| I don't know this person. She's not a donator. | |
| Why would I put all this time in? | |
| But then looking for the rule. | |
| Like, what is the rule? Well, the rule is, what do you feel like doing? | |
| Because this person was saying, well, I don't know, should I read lorockwell.com after these allegations have come to light about potential racism and so on? | |
| And it's like, I don't know. | |
| I mean, that's up to you. It's not evil. | |
| We're looking for these rules sometimes that we can sort of step into, right? | |
| And it's like, ah, that's what I should do. | |
| No, there is no way you can do that and live. | |
| Because there's so many gray areas in life. | |
| So many great areas. | |
| I mean, yes, we have the non-aggression force, we have UPB, non-aggression principle, UPB, and all this. | |
| That's all fine. But, I mean, how much of our day is spent considering whether we shoot a crossbow at someone? | |
| Me, no more than 10 or 15 minutes. | |
| So, I don't think that that is a... | |
| You can't find these rules. | |
| You can't find these rules. | |
| They're going to tell you what to do. And that's just trying to set up philosophy as a kind of authority for you. | |
| What should I do? We're so used to being told what to do that the idea of just doing something is almost incomprehensible to us, like of us being the authority, with philosophy being the guide. | |
| But us being the authority... | |
| It's like eating, right? | |
| Yeah, you shouldn't just eat what you feel like because it won't be good for you. | |
| But you can sort of look for it. | |
| What should I eat? Let me check a diet. | |
| Well, what do you feel like eating combined with the rigor of nutrition? | |
| And philosophy is much more loosey-goosey even than nutrition, right? | |
| Because... Because nutrition is not about good or evil, and nutrition will inform most of the decisions that you can or should make about eating, whereas philosophy, there's a couple of thou shalt nots which impinge very little on our life. | |
| I mean, this is the basic problem of ethics, right? | |
| People who are evil don't care, and people who are good don't need them. | |
| I mean, there's more complicated stuff like integrity and so on. | |
| Integrity is a value, but it's a universal value, which means you don't owe it to everyone. | |
| Paying your debts is a value, and it's a universal value, but that doesn't mean that you owe everyone $100. | |
| Honesty and integrity are a value, they're a universal value, but that doesn't mean you owe everybody honesty and integrity. | |
| Love is a value, it's a universal value. | |
| It doesn't mean you have to love everybody. | |
| In fact, I would say that it would be not sensible to do that. | |
| So we're always looking for these rules, right? | |
| How is it that I can make philosophy my bossy anal teacher, right? | |
| And I think that's a very bad idea. | |
| I think that philosophy should give you certainty and clarity about reality, about the validity of universal ethics and all these kinds of good things. | |
| I think philosophy should do all of that. | |
| But I do not believe that philosophy should regulate your every decision. | |
| Right, this is the thin slicing or the blink stuff that we talked about or have talked about in this conversation before. | |
| This is Malcolm's Guidewell book. | |
| It's very interesting to read. This is where we don't need philosophy. | |
| And where philosophy cannot help us. | |
| I mean, other than in terms of conditioning our responses at some level, or to some degree, or in some way. | |
| But this idea that we know everything about everyone very, very quickly, we don't need a lot of philosophy. | |
| We just need to trust our instincts on that. | |
| So, I mean, Lou Rockwell is... | |
| Didn't publish a bunch of stuff that anarchists wrote before the Ron Paul crash, and now he's publishing more anarchist stuff, but he's a business, right? | |
| I mean, I'm not saying there's no idealism in it whatsoever, but it's a business, right? | |
| I mean, so if I'm drawing readers, then he wants to publish me, and my feeling or my thought is that if my writing... | |
| Then if the Ron Paul thing comes along and my writing is going to not draw readers, then he's not going to want to... | |
| So, I don't have any particular desire to submit new stuff to Lou Rockwell, but I'm also saying, oh, pull the stuff that's there. | |
| I mean, I don't care about it that much. | |
| And so, as far as the rules go, like, I think that there's this strong desire that we all have to find these rules that will tell us what to do. | |
| But that's not really living, I believe. | |
| That's not really living following rules. | |
| You can program a computer to read music and play a piano or even play a violin, I guess, through synthesizers or whatever. | |
| Okay. | |
| And that will be a perfect rendition, like a drum machine, perfect beat. | |
| But that's not really, I think, that's not really art. | |
| That's just photocopies, reproduction. | |
| It's like taking a high-resolution scan of a painting as not being a painter. | |
| And looking for these rules that will teach us how to live is like looking for the paint by numbers that will help you produce great art, right? | |
| And that, I submit, is not going to really help you. | |
| It will create rules for you that will inhibit and paralyze your decision-making process. | |
| Right? It will inhibit and paralyze your decision-making process. | |
| Because what it's going to do is it's going to, whenever you face a spontaneous or unrehearsed situation, which is called breathing, then you are going to say, gosh, what are the rules that I can run with that are going to let me know what it is that I should be doing? | |
| But that's not the same as living. | |
| That's not the same as... Joyously, spontaneously, and sometimes with anxiety, interacting with reality, right? | |
| That's just saying, it's like flipping to the index. | |
| This situation is occurring, what should I do? | |
| and I think that is a very bad idea myself. | |
| So overall I'd say well does it involve good or evil? | |
| No. Which is almost all things. | |
| What do I feel like doing? | |
| And then I wonder why. Then do it if you have to act in the moment, and then afterwards you can ask how you feel about what you did. | |
| And your instincts will give you fantastic, fantastic stuff to do with that. | |
| And that's a process of spontaneously living in the moment, which I think is very rich and wonderful. | |
| So, this is a short podcast. | |
| I'll do another one about another topic, but I just wanted to touch on this one, and we will talk soon. | |
| I look forward to your donations. |
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