Jan. 24, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
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| Hi everybody, it's Steph. | |
| This is sort of part two of what fell out from the conference, the symposium in Miami. | |
| And I wanted to talk about the question of pain and our relationship to it. | |
| Because, as I've talked about at the conference and in the RTR book and throughout this podcast series... | |
| Pain is essential for the maintenance of mental health, just as pain is essential for the maintenance of bodily or physical health. | |
| But the problem, I guess, that I'm concerned with and would like to sort of clarify is the question of our relationship to pain and, of course, its cessation and reversal to mindless heroin-based pleasure. | |
| So... When I say that it's important for us to feel pain and anxiety and so on, what a lot of people will then construe, quite rightly, based on our histories, is that then courage is the overcoming of all fear. | |
| Courage or integrity or that is the overcoming of all fears. | |
| So what happens then is, just as sort of mentioned in the last podcast, They end up with this relationship and say, well, I don't have an obligation to my parents anymore, or my country, or God, or whatever. | |
| But now, I have an obligation, God help me, to the truth! | |
| Right? To... Integrity to honor to honesty to confrontation to RTR to FDR to, you know, pick your acronym. | |
| And I strongly suggest that you not take that approach. | |
| That would not be what I would call freedom, right? | |
| Suddenly now being, instead of bound to your family, being bound to honor or rules or integrity or whatever is, I think, not freedom. | |
| So, as I mentioned in the last podcast, and as I talk about in a bit more detail here, the goal, I think, in the realm of freedom is self-trust, self-efficacy, and pleasure. | |
| Pleasure is the key part. | |
| Happiness is the key part. | |
| So, if you have a relationship in your life, let's just say a friend. | |
| We can take the sort of food stuff off. | |
| But if you have a relationship with a friend... | |
| And that friend, or your friendship with that person is full of anxiety and difficulties and upsets and so on, then I would suggest that, I mean, obviously that's going to make you feel upset, and that's entirely natural, and I would say healthy. | |
| Now, if you repress or avoid that upset, then you're kind of flying blind with regards to that friendship. | |
| The real anxiety in life, in sort of my opinion, comes from uncertainty. | |
| The real anxiety comes from uncertainty. | |
| And uncertainty is danger. | |
| Uncertainty is danger because it means that you feel anxious about something, but you're not actually protected. | |
| So with our parents, what often happens is we feel bad when we see them or when they phone. | |
| And then what happens is we... | |
| Imbibe or accept a story which says that that occurs because we're ungrateful, bad children, whatever, mean, selfish, whatever. | |
| And if we accept that story, it doesn't get rid of our anxiety. | |
| It just makes the anxiety bad, selfish, mean, whatever, petty, destructive, unjust, unworthy, dishonorable. | |
| And what that means is that if we label our own instincts bad, I mean, obviously then we're just back in a Christian world, and to some degree a statist world, and we don't want to pay taxes, but then we consider to be selfish and ungrateful for that. | |
| So that leaves us in a state of danger. | |
| So we don't like spending time with someone, but they convince us that that's only because we're bad and selfish, or mean, or cold, or whatever. | |
| And therefore, we then, because we want to be good, we continue to see that person thus repressing our own anxiety and getting stuck in the null zone. | |
| Up is down, black is white, hostility and fear is love, and so on. | |
| So then the question is, okay, well, what happens if we start to feel or accept our anxiety as valid and be curious about it? | |
| Rather than accepting an instant answer, we feel anxiety because we are mean and selfish. | |
| Right? Which is religious, fundamentally, right? | |
| Where did life come from? | |
| God made it! Where did the universe come from? | |
| God made it! I mean, that's just a non-answer. | |
| It's a pseudo-answer. It's mythology. | |
| Why do we feel anxiety? | |
| Because we're bad, right? That's just a non-answer. | |
| It's mythology. It's pseudo-this, that, and the other. | |
| So, all nonsense. So then, the question is, what do we do with this anxiety? | |
| And for a lot of people, when they get exposed to RTR or that aspect of this conversation, the radical honesty and openness and vulnerability and so on, they say, oh, well, now I have to keep doing that. | |
| And I would say, no. | |
| No. The point of philosophy, the point of RTR... It's not to have you continue to feel obligated to be honest to everyone in your life and to continue those relationships. | |
| So if you have a friend and you feel anxious when talking about your true feelings or your true values, your philosophy, your psychological insights, whatever it is, who you honestly are, If you feel anxiety bringing up those topics around your friend, then a lot of people will end up feeling that, well, in order to be true to philosophy and true to virtue and honor and dignity and so on, then I must speak to my friend about this. | |
| And if I feel afraid, then I should... | |
| Overcome that fear, and I should be honest, but I think that is, again, it's just ordering yourself around. | |
| It's just internalizing the state. | |
| And now that you're conscious of your anxiety, you're still labeling your anxiety bad, in that you say, well, this is cowardice. | |
| And I must not be afraid. | |
| And I must overcome my fear. | |
| And I must be honest despite my fear. | |
| But it's just another way of labeling your instincts or your feelings bad. | |
| Before, you felt anxiety because you were selfish. | |
| And then, as part of this conversation, you now feel anxiety because you're cowardly. | |
| Because you have the standard of RTR, total honesty or whatever. | |
| I'm not meeting my standard and I'm failing and I'm blah blah blah blah blah, right? | |
| I don't think that's progress, to be honest with you. | |
| I mean, it is progress of a kind, insofar as you're not labeling it evil, but now you're just labeling it deficient or cowardly or whatever. | |
| So it's a step, but not yet out of the darkness, just towards the light a little bit, and that's not where you need to go. | |
| So, this is sort of my suggestion, or the way that I work with things, and hopefully it will help you. | |
| Somebody pointed out, let me know what you think is the new, you know? | |
| Somebody actually, the woman at the conference at the symposium had a t-shirt, Freedom Aid Radio, on the front and on the back. | |
| It was, let me know what you think, which is actually a pretty good motto for FDR. I can't believe it. | |
| She came up with a better one than I did. | |
| Evil! Well, we'll come back to that. | |
| But if you're talking to your friend and you feel anxiety, then you sort of say, oh, well, according to the... | |
| Now, universal absolute of RTR, I must speak my mind to this person. | |
| But as you open your mouth to speak your mind to this person, you feel increased in overwhelming fear and then maybe you back out or you avoid. | |
| And then you say, oh, I'm a coward! | |
| I can't believe I didn't do RTR! I can't believe I didn't rise to this standard! | |
| I can't believe! But that's not right. | |
| No, that's not right. | |
| You don't attack yourself for cowardice where formerly you attacked yourself for selfishness. | |
| The point of philosophy is to get you to stop attacking yourself, right? | |
| To stop you from looking at yourself as deficient in some manner and instead to get you to look at yourself with curiosity and with gentleness and with wonder. | |
| I wonder why I didn't open my mouth and talk to this person when I was afraid of him or her. | |
| I wonder why I didn't speak up at the conference. | |
| If you didn't. And that curiosity is... | |
| I mean, RTR is with yourself, first and foremost. | |
| The real-time relationship is with yourself. | |
| And it is with not inventing false answers called badness or cowardice or selfishness or whatever. | |
| It's about not coming up with those false answers. | |
| And instead being honest and saying, I don't know why. | |
| I mean, I had this goal of wanting to talk to this person. | |
| I felt overwhelmed with fear. | |
| And then, by golly, I didn't do it. | |
| But you can force yourself to do it. | |
| You can drive yourself with a whip and say, I must be honest and open with this person. | |
| No, you don't have to. You don't have to get out of bed in the morning. | |
| Seriously, you don't have to. | |
| It's not helpful to replace the whips of your parents with the whips of philosophy. | |
| That is not what I would call significant progress. | |
| It's tempting because we're so used to obeying rules and feeling deficient. | |
| I've got these rules. | |
| I must achieve them. | |
| I've got these standards. I must achieve them. | |
| And when I do not achieve them, I feel... | |
| Bad. I'm deficient. | |
| Now I'm cowardly. | |
| Whereas before, I was merely selfish. | |
| Well, the real-time relationship is if you feel ambiguous about a relationship. | |
| This person's a good friend. | |
| They say they care, but I feel uneasy bringing up what I really feel around them. | |
| Then you can simply be curious about that. | |
| And so you may say, well, okay, I would like to do RTR with this friend of mine, but in the moment I feel extraordinary anxiety, and I really, really don't want to say it. | |
| Not like kind of don't want to say it or feel a little nervous, but really, really don't want to say it. | |
| Well, even that experience is going to help bring you to some resolution with regards to your friend. | |
| If you're completely and totally terrified of being honest with your friend, there's probably a very bloody good reason for that. | |
| Now, if this continues, that you say, oh, I keep wanting to RTR with a friend, I continue to feel like if you get stuck there, then I would say you should either RTR or stop seeing that person. | |
| Because stopping seeing someone is also very helpful in terms of coming to conclusions about relationships. | |
| If you stop seeing a friend and you find that you don't really miss him or her, that's good information to have, right? | |
| Because then you've got the balance card, right? | |
| The left hand, right hand thing. | |
| The weighing in the balance, right? | |
| Because on the one hand, you have my friend causes or I feel great anxiety in the presence of my friend. | |
| I don't feel like I can be honest and I beat myself up for being cowardly and I'm wrestling with myself and I'm torn and I'm tormented and this and that and the other, right? | |
| All fairly double plus on good. | |
| And then if you decide... | |
| Like, you can't break through to the honesty and you then decide to take a break from seeing that person... | |
| And then you find out whether you miss them or not. | |
| And then if you say, well, gee, I really miss this person. | |
| They really make me laugh. They've got great insights. | |
| And I really miss talking to this person and spending time with this person. | |
| Then you have something on the plus column which can help you to... | |
| Override or go back and say, well, okay, there's great stuff, I just have to get past this fear, right? | |
| Because if there's great value in your relationship with someone, then your fear may be more internal than caused by the other person, right? | |
| In which case, you start off small and so on, right? | |
| And you can also, of course, with RTR, you can ask questions about the other person, right? | |
| Do you ever feel like socializing is... | |
| Do you find it empty or enriching? | |
| Like, I'm sort of, tell me what you think. | |
| How do you find... Well, whatever, right? | |
| You can start with asking the other person, right? | |
| And there's an example of this with Tugaris and myself in the conference, which audio will be released at some point in time. | |
| Where you help somebody empathize with you by actually empathizing with that person. | |
| Showing empathy triggers empathy or triggers attack, which is good, and then you sort of understand. | |
| But if you find that being with this person is stressful and difficult and anxiety-producing and you end up self-attacking afterwards and so on, you're torn and tortured, then if you decide not to see that person and you end then if you decide not to see that person and you end up not missing them, then you've got to kind of balance in the | |
| I don't miss this person. | |
| And when I see them, it's... | |
| Right, so that's overall negative. | |
| Not missing is neutral. Actively missing is, you know, a positive. | |
| Being relieved is a negative. | |
| You know, on this scale, being afraid of self-attacking after you see this person is a negative as well. | |
| So, you know, my suggestion is sort of what you do is you just don't have it as an absolute that you have to be honest, that you have to RTR with, you know, everyone on the planet all the time, that you owe people the truth, that you owe them, you know, this, that, and the other. I think that's a very bad idea overall. | |
| It's a very, very bad approach because it's having a standard that That's not based on your own instincts, not trusting your own instincts. | |
| It's saying, well, my feelings are going to be wrong, but these abstract rules are going to be perfect, right? | |
| Which is placing the abstract rules in far elevation to your own instincts, right? | |
| And again, I'm not talking expert, I'm talking about whether to be honest with someone. | |
| So, from that standpoint, anxiety cannot be a perpetual state, right? | |
| The purpose of pain is to help us alleviate it, right? | |
| The purpose of going to the dentist when we have a toothache is to alleviate the pain of the toothache, right? | |
| The purpose of pain is to help us alleviate it. | |
| And the way that we alleviate anxiety in our relationships is we're either honest or we stop seeing the person. | |
| I mean, and you don't have to do either, right? | |
| You can keep doing the anxiety thing if you want. | |
| It's your life. Right? | |
| It's your life. Don't externalize these rules. | |
| It's your life. These are your decisions. | |
| These are aesthetic decisions, not ethical decisions. | |
| Honesty is aesthetic. | |
| It's not... It's not moral. | |
| Dishonesty does not violate the NAP. I'm talking about social dishonesty. | |
| It's APA. It's aesthetically preferable behavior. | |
| It's not moral absolute. | |
| Because it's not moral absolute, you're not bound to obey any rules. | |
| There are choices and consequences, and you should be aware of those, and most of those choices... | |
| The choices are under your control. | |
| The consequences are not. | |
| Like if someone is scary... | |
| To me, then if I spend time around them, I'm going to be scared. | |
| I can choose whether I'm going to spend time around them. | |
| I can't choose whether or not I'm going to be scared. | |
| That's going to be an inevitable result of... | |
| I can choose to hang around somebody who dangles me off a cliff. | |
| I can't choose whether or not I enjoy being dangled off a cliff, right? | |
| So there are choices and consequences. | |
| But they're your choices. | |
| Your choices. You can pick and choose how much honesty you want to have with people. | |
| I would strongly suggest that if you're nervous around someone, that you come to a resolution, right? | |
| Through any number of means, right? | |
| You can be honest with them. | |
| You can ask them about their experience. | |
| And if they start bullshitting and lying, right? | |
| If you say to somebody, you know, what is your experience of... | |
| Like, if you know that you're not having a particularly deep or rich relationship with that person, you say, what is your experience of social interaction? | |
| Do you find it warm and deep and rich and inviting? | |
| Like, all these sorts of things. Well, if they say, oh, it's... | |
| It's fabulous. I have the warmest and best relationship with everyone on the planet, and we are all a table. | |
| We're all quantumly combined in magical ways, and I couldn't imagine things being deeper or richer. | |
| And you say, does that include me? | |
| Oh, yes, my relationship with you is deep and rich and wonderful and magical and intimate. | |
| And if you don't have that experience at all, then you just know that they're not telling you the truth, because... | |
| One person can't... | |
| You can't have a one-sided intimate relationship, right? | |
| That's just exploitation, and therefore not intimate, right? | |
| So you can probe them without revealing anything about yourself... | |
| Right? I mean, you don't have to say, here's what I experience in our relationship. | |
| You can say, well, what do you experience? | |
| And then you don't even say about our relationship. | |
| Like, what is your experience of relationships as a whole? | |
| Like, how far to the ideal? | |
| What is your ideal? And how far to the ideal or away from the ideal do you think you are in your relationships? | |
| And so on, right? And if they get tense and angry at that question, what the hell would you bring that up for? | |
| Relationships are fine. God, let's just go see a movie. | |
| Jeez. Right? | |
| Then you got your answer, right? | |
| You got your answer. So... | |
| This whole approach of asking them about... | |
| There's lots of ways that you can speak to people or find out the truth about their reactions without putting yourself in an exquisitely open, nerve, vulnerable position. | |
| You can do all of that without exposing anything about yourself. | |
| Just by empathizing with the other person. | |
| Or attempting to. | |
| And through that, you will either experience a breakthrough in terms of intimacy or you will experience increased frustration and fear. | |
| And then, you see, some people say, well, you know, this person was hostile towards the very idea of improving relationships, but I know that their relationship isn't great. | |
| So then what I should have done is I should have said, I think that you're not telling me the truth. | |
| I feel that you're not telling me the truth, because I don't think that your relationships are as deep and meaningful as you think they are, and I think you're bullshitting me, and this. | |
| And then when they don't do that, they say, oh, I'm a coward, I didn't say the truth, I didn't... | |
| Right? No, no, no, no, no. | |
| Sorry to be annoying, but I must answer this in the extreme negative. | |
| No, because if you say to somebody, what is equality, how do you feel about relationships, whatever, right? | |
| And they say, oh, fine, perfect, whatever. | |
| And you know that they're lying, then you don't owe them RTR anymore, right? | |
| Because if they're not... | |
| Right? Think of it this way. | |
| If... You lend me $100, and I lend you $100, and then I don't pay you back your $100. | |
| Are you then obligated to pay me back my $100? | |
| Well, of course not. This is mutuality and exchange within relationships. | |
| If somebody RTRs with you and is honest and vulnerable, then I would say there's somewhat of a better situation. | |
| It would be somewhat better to RTR and be honest with that person and so on. | |
| But if they don't, if they just lie to you, then telling them the truth is not necessary, right? | |
| If somebody steals $100 from you, then you don't have to pay them back the $100 that you, quote, owe them. | |
| In my view, you can do whatever you want, right? | |
| But I don't think you're obligated to anymore because... | |
| Because they took the money from you, right? | |
| And the reason that I'm saying all of this is, in accordance with what I've sort of said all along, the purpose of philosophy is joy. | |
| It's happiness. The purpose of philosophy is not following rules, because that is an external standard. | |
| I must follow these rules, like I must obey my teacher, I must obey my parents. | |
| But the purpose of life is not obeying rules, because obeying rules will not make you happy. | |
| Self-trust and integrity to the truth, not integrity to integrity, but integrity to the truth, which is that integrity is not a moral requirement for you to have with everyone. | |
| That it's much more akin to your financial transactions. | |
| That you owe a debt to those who you have received benefit from. | |
| If you get paid, you owe work to your employer, but then you can quit at any time. | |
| You don't owe work to everyone. | |
| This is particularly true for the women, right? | |
| This is not something that women are taught nearly as much, of course, as they should be. | |
| But men, too, to some degree. | |
| But, you know, the purpose of life is happiness. | |
| Happiness. We don't get points in the afterlife for obeying rules in the here and now. | |
| That's religious, right? | |
| And it's so hard to shake this way of thinking. | |
| Right? Because in school, we are taught to obey the teacher. | |
| And we get... | |
| Brownie points or detentions for obeying or failing to obey the teacher. | |
| And with our parents, we are taught to obey our parents, and we get brownie points or not so much with the brownie points for failing to obey our parents, right? | |
| And this is something that we have to get out of the habit of thinking that way. | |
| We don't have to, but I think it's important to get out of the habit of thinking this way. | |
| That we look for external rules that we are either going to obey and feel good about, or disobey and feel bad about. | |
| And the great temptation is to substitute The opinions of our teachers and our parents and our priests and our politicians and so on to substitute philosophy for those things as an external standard that we must obey or we self-punish. | |
| That's making philosophy into a state. | |
| And that, my friends, is not, I think, good. | |
| And to me, there's nothing wrong. | |
| It's like learning any instrument, learning philosophy. | |
| I mean, do your scales, for sure, right? | |
| You don't have to, right? But it certainly will be. | |
| Do your scales. Do your UBB. Figure out the truth and figure out your mind's relationship to reality and your relationship to ethics and so on. | |
| And that's great. But the point of learning an instrument is not to do scales. | |
| And not to play well. | |
| And not to gain approval and not to do concerts and not to be well-paid. | |
| And not to amaze and impress your friends, and not to get chicks. | |
| That's karaoke. The purpose of learning an instrument is to... | |
| Anybody? Anybody? | |
| Bueller? Is to enjoy playing the instrument. | |
| And enjoy the playing... | |
| And you can't enjoy playing the instrument. | |
| You can't enjoy playing the instrument if... | |
| You feel that there's a standard of good playing that you are failing to meet, or meeting and then not meeting, and you feel that there's some cold-faced... | |
| How can you... | |
| How can you eat your meat when you haven't had your pudding guy standing over your shoulder giving you points for good or bad play? | |
| Do you scale? Sure. | |
| But the purpose is to enjoy playing... | |
| The instrument. And that is a thing in itself, not relative to an external standard of perfection of rules, or that's a thing in itself. | |
| and your relationship should be, including your relationship to philosophy, should be to bring you pleasure. | |
| And there is a shock, right? | |
| Because we think that we know how to play the piano, because we've been obeying all these people, as we all have, obeying all these teachers, parents, and We've been obeying all these people in our lives, and so we think that we're good at playing the piano, right? But the purpose of philosophy is to say that we're not playing piano, we're peeing in the snow. | |
| Again, worse for women than for men. | |
| So we're not even anywhere close to a piano, right? | |
| We're in the matrix, right? | |
| And there's a shock, and there's pain associated with that. | |
| But since our goal is to enjoy playing the piano, it's good to know that we're not playing the piano, right? | |
| But rather, you know, chewing on a kazoo. | |
| But the purpose of that shock is to bring pleasure in the long run. | |
| So I can't emphasize this strongly enough. | |
| Do not make philosophy your new boss. | |
| Do not make philosophy your new ruler-tapping teacher. | |
| Do not make philosophy a substitute for your instinctual judgment. | |
| Because it is your instinctual judgment that will provide you the greatest pleasure in this life. | |
| And UPB is really about validating our instinctual judgment that we know. | |
| And it can be hard to do that, and if you enjoy doing that, then you should do it. | |
| But it is really around trusting your instinctual judgment. | |
| Not forcing yourself to do things. | |
| Right? Not lashing yourself upon the cross of philosophy and say, I must endure even this. | |
| It's not doing any of that. | |
| It's trusting your own instincts and your own feelings. | |
| And if you are not doing something that you think you should be doing, like being honest or having integrity with X, Y, and Z, Then, that's totally fine. | |
| But you need to be... | |
| You don't need to be... | |
| It's perfectly... | |
| It's more rational to be curious about that. | |
| And you can often start with the proposition or the premise, certainly at Podcast 970 or whatever the hell this is. | |
| You can always start with, I'm sure I had a good reason for this. | |
| I'm sure I had a good reason for this. | |
| If I felt scared of this person, I'm sure there's a good reason. | |
| I wonder what it is. | |
| Not, oh, I'm a coward, I didn't speak my mind, and it didn't even speak my mind about not wanting to speak my mind, and so and so and so, right? | |
| But there was a good reason for this. | |
| Now, the good reason may be that it was your history, and maybe it would be better if you understood that to do it differently in the future, and so on. | |
| But it was certainly a good enough reason for you to do or not do whatever you said. | |
| And I do correct people and say, well, you know, it was about your past. | |
| But I'm not saying then that they have to. | |
| And I never say, well, you should have spoken up. | |
| I can say, I would have preferred for you to speak up in the symposium, or I would have preferred... | |
| But so what? That's just my preference. | |
| It doesn't mean anything. It's certainly no obligation to you. | |
| So if people... And just not picking on it. | |
| If people didn't say something in the conference that they wanted to... | |
| That's fine. All they have to do is say, I didn't say something in the conference when I wanted to, I wonder why. | |
| I'm sure I had a good reason, but I wonder why. | |
| And then you can go in pursuit of that. | |
| So I hope this makes sense. I know it's a bit brain-twisty, but it's a very, very simple thing, really. | |
| I mean, nobody in this conversation is doing any evil. | |
| So it's time to relax and let your instincts do the walking, because that's going to bring you to pleasure, to joy, to sustainable happiness, which is the purpose, my friends, of this conversation. | |
| Thank you so much for listening, as always. | |
| It's good to be back on the air. | |
| And I will talk to you soon. | |
| We'll have a Sunday show. I'm on a Mark Stevens show this Saturday. | |
| And I look forward to your donations. |
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