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Feb. 9, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:55
975 I want to be a good father...
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Time Text
Good evening, everybody.
It's Stefan. It's 7.37 p.m., February the 9th, 2008.
And I'm coming to you live from the living room because my wonderful wife said she felt a little tired.
And I said, why don't you close your eyes?
And she said, I don't know if I can rest.
Why don't you do a podcast?
It was close!
Was it not close? I said, my love...
I will close my eyes and you can talk to me.
Right. And then I said, I could do a podcast.
You said, yes.
Wait, no, wait, no. You said, yes.
Yes, you said, yes. And then I heard...
Even the word...
Seems to have a rather magical effect.
So, what I'm going to do is I'm only going to podcast until she flatlines, but I'm going to pull up before she actually strokes.
That's really a delicate balance that I try to maintain when doing these sorts of things.
I want her to be asleep.
But not comatose.
So, this may end abruptly if we go code blue.
So, I wanted to talk...
Sorry, this is a bit of a light introduction, but I wanted to talk about something relatively serious, or something sad, for me anyway, which occurred, which was that I was watching Nip Tuck, which was that I was watching Nip Tuck, which is a brutal but funny dramedy, and at the beginning of season two, there is this
and at the beginning of season two, there is this slick dick surgeon who has decided to and he's really in a dysfunctional history of sexual abuse, and And, you know, uses women like Kleenex and so on.
And he has his 40th birthday and he's alone.
And he's, well, sorry, he's alone.
He's got no friends over, and his sort of girlfriend, not girlfriend kind of thing is around, but she's not with him.
And he's just blowing out, he's got two little cupcakes, there's 40 on them, two little candles.
And he blows them out, and he's got his baby in his lap.
And he looks down, and he says, what do I wish for, for my birthday, or something like that.
He says, I want to be a good father.
That's what he said, isn't it?
Yeah, I want to be a good father.
And it's interesting, because in the sort of storm und drang of my family history, there has been a lot of wild emotions for me, both when I was a kid, particularly as a teenager, and later on, through my 20s and Early to mid-30s, and certainly when I was going through therapy in my 30s, a lot of, a lot of emotions.
But it's interesting how it kind of shakes out now that I'm at the ripe old age of 41 and a bit.
Insofar as I thought...
I haven't thought of my father in a while, but I thought of my dad when I saw this guy...
He's older than my dad was when my dad had me.
I'm older than my dad was when my dad was around.
But I thought of my dad, and I thought of my dad saying that.
I don't know that he did, but I'm sure that he did at some level, right?
I mean, or thought about it or whatever.
And I thought of my dad sitting there when I was born or when my brother was born and saying...
I want to be a good dad.
I hope I'm going to be a good dad.
And after, you know, the storm and the stress, and this is because it feels to me almost like they died years ago, in a way.
Like, I know that they're still walking the earth, but it feels like they died years ago.
And, um... So I can look at this stuff, and also, you know, as time falls away from you, you know, it's like each decade is the stage of a rocket, and you move higher beyond the stratosphere into the Van Allen belt and beyond the orbit of the satellites, and it feels like each of your decades kind of falls away.
And that's actually quite a nice thing, because there is a kind of lightness that comes to aging that doesn't occur, or didn't occur for me.
I felt much heavier.
In my twenties, I felt very explosively charged and so on in my teens, and I felt Hysterical in my 20s.
Burdened in my 30s. But I feel now, mostly because I've shifted about 98% of cognitive functioning to my wife and about 120% of the chores.
Actually, about 180% because she had far less to do when she wasn't married.
But in terms of sort of my history and my emotions, it feels like the past is sort of falling away.
And that doesn't mean that I'm not emotional about it.
It doesn't mean that I don't care or feel things about the past.
But it means that I can...
There's more of a richness to the memories than there was in the past.
And there's more sympathy, and I've talked about this before in a podcast, there's more sympathy as well for my parents.
Not for the choices they made, and not for the people they became, or the people they were.
But nobody, of course, gets married and goes through the excitement of impregnation and having, you know, pregnancy and labor and so on and says, gee, I can't wait to mess these kids up.
I can't wait to be a real jerk.
Make my wife crazy with anger and alienate my kids and end up living on another continent.
Like, that's not the plan, right?
That's not what people want. That's not what they look forward to.
And when this guy said to, with his son on his lap, I hope, I want to be a good dad.
That's my birthday wish.
There was something very sad in that for me because I did, as I said, I do think of my dad saying that.
And my mom, too. I mean, you know, you get that baby...
Smelling of innards.
You get that baby wrapped in the blanket, a little pink face, and little fingers gripping your hand, and you look down at that precious life and those bright, bright eyes.
And nobody says, like, let the torture begin, right?
Nobody says that. Nobody says, I can't wait to bully this kid when he crosses me, and I can't wait to dump all of my history on the helpless, trembling...
Pale of shoulders of my child.
Nobody says any of that kind of stuff.
But, I mean, it sort of unrolls anyway.
And thinking about that, I want to be a good father.
It had me feeling very sad about their lives and where, you know, where it's ended up for them.
And they're both sort of, my dad's remarried, but he's not happy.
And All of the strange intellectual fetishes that replaced my parents' hearts.
Hearts, I guess. And my dad with his history of religion and God who forgives all.
I mean, that's obviously a pathology that makes sense given his own history.
And my mother with her.
I'm going to get all the doctors who poisoned me and ruined my Capacity to mother.
You know, all of that. I mean, that you get trapped in these evasions and self-justifications and lies.
And this, of course, is when...
I was talking to a gentleman today about the Foo Review, looking at your family, and this is the...
This is the world that we push our parents towards when we begin to wake up to our histories, right?
We begin to push our parents towards this crazy land of forced justification, self-hunting, hiding, claustrophobia, perpetual upset.
I mean, it is really...
I mean, when the past has been cemented and the wrongs that you have done have been frozen and cemented in history, never to be changed.
Like they're a statue on another planet that can't ever erode, right?
I mean, because the past has been so fixed.
And so, when you look, and you sort of, when you look at, like, this pendulum, right?
And the image that comes to my mind is, like, there's a place called, I don't know, the middle or the fulcrum of your life where there's, like, a sun, and then there's a planet at its orbit, say, to the left, right?
And that's sort of, I want to be a good dad, right?
And then you swing through the orbit of your life, and then where is it that you end up at the other end?
Alone and, you know, unhappy and Twist it up with all the justifications that you have to cling to about what happened to your life.
And I feel sad that that's where it went, and that's where it ended, and that's what happened.
But it also sort of struck me that...
And this has nothing to do with sympathy for the evils that they did.
I mean, this is not like...
I've got to call him...
I mean, there's no desire whatsoever...
Because it's in order to protect almost the sweetness of that moment, that commitment that my parents undoubtedly had, and continue to have, right?
I mean, again, the regret that goes on for parents who are abusive is something that...
Oh, God, I mean, it's just so...
It's so impossible to understand how you...
They go through this recommitment every time.
Every time they yell at their kids, they hit their kids.
Then they sink back to, oh, I've got to do better, I've got to be better.
But then it slips back into the anger and the blaming and the resentment and the feeling of being aggressed against as the parent because we were such bad kids that we made them hit us or whatever.
But, looking at that arc, I mean, there is such a great degree of sadness in it.
And the interesting thing about this sadness is that, and I think this is sort of what I'm trying to get at, I actually know that this sadness is mine.
You know, that is a very, very fascinating thing for me.
Because the self-pity that parents who are abusive have It's something that's real hard to not have in your own system.
So when you start talking to your parents about the problems that you had with them or the bad things that occurred, they switch to self-pity, they burst into tears, and sometimes you feel guilty or sometimes you feel sad.
But I know, and maybe it took me until I was 41 to get this, but I know that This is actually my feeling about my past.
It's not my parents' feeling about their own regrets.
It's actually my feeling of sadness that there was not the desire for the knowledge that could have averted the outcome.
The knowledge was available.
Even in the 70s when all of this stuff was going down.
This was not like the 1270s or the 1470s.
It's the 1970s. The knowledge was available.
Counseling was available. Therapy was available.
Medications were available if necessary.
But there was such a lack of a desire to follow through on that commitment or that desire to be a good parent.
And I really do understand that In a way that I don't think I ever had before.
And I was just sort of sitting there looking at all the feelings that came up for me when I saw this guy say, I hope I'm going to be a good dad.
I want to be a good dad.
That it's my feeling about my history.
It's not my parents. It's not somebody else's story.
It's not my brother saying, oh, you're exaggerating.
It wasn't that bad, right?
It's not that feeling of frustration at that.
It's not a feeling of needing to emphasize that it was that bad to convince people to sort of convince my brother.
It's not that feeling.
And it is an adult looking at another adult, right?
Through this ice wall of time, right?
Because I'm older than my father was now when he was having that commitment to say, I want to be a good dad, as I'm sure he did.
And it's looking at that man through this ice wall of time as one man to another with sadness and with sorrow at the result.
Without forgiveness, without sympathy, with some empathy for the desire to be a better man than he was, and to my mom, for her desire, however fleeting and however intermittent, to be a better woman than she turned out to be.
And that, you know, when she was a kid in pigtails, she didn't sit there and say, well, I can't wait to have a ruinous marriage to a man and then scream at my kids for 15 years and then fall into a never-ending depression and end up being a spiteful, vengeful, litigious ex-patient and harry people into the grave.
Like, that was not the plan.
That was not what she wanted for her life.
And looking at them now, at their age, which was slightly younger than I am now, when they made those decisions, I am able to...
It feels like I'm able to see that with a certain kind of sorrow and almost tenderness.
But again, it's a very...
I'm not explaining it very well, but it's without any sort of...
But that desire that they wanted to be better people and then the beasts within them that they never wanted to tame or never were willing to wrestle down arose and obscured that goal and that desire for them to the detriment of myself and my brother and of course to themselves most of all.
But I can actually see them not as a child who was abused by his parents And not as a sentimental fool who wants to wave the magic wand of forgiveness over the graves of the past and think that that brings anything back to life because it doesn't.
But to look at them with some degree of empathy for the choices or the decisions that they made and more particularly the ones that they refuse to make.
And it's a very interesting feeling It's a very interesting feeling because it is my thoughts about my family that are not a reaction to my family.
It's my feelings, thoughts and feelings about my family, but it's not in reaction.
It's not hot frustration.
It's not anger. It's not bitterness.
It's not yearning. It's just a regard for this...
Ruined structure that I escaped from, or that I got out of, looking at it for what it is.
Not with the hysteria of needing to escape, or the anger at having been trapped in there for so long, but just looking at it as a structure, as a place inhabited by broken people.
It's an evaluation. And, I mean, maybe this is some aspect to do with closure about my history.
See, it only takes eight years after you need food to begin with.
But there was something else that I thought about when this guy said, I want to be a good dad, I hope to be a good dad.
And that is that there's a lot in that for people.
Like, when I got married to Christina, I didn't sit there for days or weeks or months beforehand saying, gosh, I hope that I am a good husband.
I want to be a good husband.
Because I knew that Christina would order me to be a good husband.
And as long as I obeyed, then I would be a satisfactory husband.
Oh, sorry.
She was just about to...
But see, I felt that you might be flatlining, so I thought I'd pull you up a little, you know, take off the anesthetic a little bit.
A little mild joke. A very mild joke.
But I didn't, because, I mean, I love this woman, body and soul, inside and out, top to bottom, backwards and forwards, and there's nothing about her that I would change.
And... So I didn't sit there and...
I mean, I loved her and love her, and I didn't sit there and think, God, I hope I'm a good husband.
Because, you know, if I had that question, I wouldn't marry.
If I had that question, I hope I can be a good husband to this woman, then you don't hope that you can be a good husband, right?
You don't sit there and say, I hope I can somehow pull it off to be a good husband, right?
And it's in the same way when a father, and this father, I'm thinking about it back to my own father, when a father says, I want to be a good father, it's because he knows he's not going to be a good father.
But he's hoping that the want is going to be enough, that the desire is going to be enough.
But that's almost like setting up a future defense.
It's like planting an alibi so you won't get convicted.
And so I think even the disasters are so embedded in the absence of critical, rational, conscious thought and self-examination.
The unexamined life, it's not just not worth living, but it's always inflicted on the helpless, on the dependent.
But that feeling, I want to be a good father, is so wrapped up in knowing that you're not going to be a good father, and knowing that you're not going to do anything about not being a good father.
Like, if I'd never take a flying lesson, could I go up in a plane and take the joystick to land?
Say, well, I hope I'm going to be a good pilot, right?
But that would never make any sense.
I hope I'm going to be a good pilot.
And flying a plane, almost less important than raising a child, right, in terms of long-term commitment and The need for skill, empathy, love, warmth, compassion, strength, virtue.
If I say, I hope I'm going to be a good pilot, I really want to be a good pilot, but I don't take any lessons.
I'm just setting up something sentimental for myself that I can be sad about when it doesn't materialize.
But it's not because I really...
If I say, well, I know for sure I'm going to be flying my first plane in nine months.
I hope I'm going to be a good pilot.
Somebody says, well, maybe you could take some flying lessons.
No, I don't have time for that.
But I really hope I'm going to be a good pilot.
The same thing with people who go, I hope I'm going to be a good husband.
I hope we're going to have a good marriage.
You get engaged 6 or 12 or 18 months before, and you say, well, take some therapy, take some premarital courses and so on.
No, we're too busy for that, too busy planning the work, but I hope it's going to work out.
And it's that hoping, that crossing your fingers, you know, grabbing the scalpel and cutting with no knowledge and say, God, I hope I'm going to be a good surgeon.
And so there's something in that, I hope I'm going to be a good dad, I want to be a good dad, that has embedded the unfolding disasters that followed.
It is embedded so intensely and intently in that basic statement.
I want to be a good dad.
I hope I'm going to be a good dad.
The guy in NipTac clearly and absolutely and totally is not going to be a good dad.
If you watch the show, you sort of know what I mean.
But it is very interesting when you can look at these stages of the rocket that have fallen back to Earth and see the shape of the trajectory in a way where you can feel some very important, at least for me, very important and powerful things about your family, but not as a result.
Of what your family did to you, but as a way of, I hope, with some maturity and reflection and empathy, looking at this terrible, terrible story and seeing that the real freedom comes, as it always has, from closing the chapter and knowing the cause.
And that's how we can shape a different More trajectory in the future than the ones we have been launched on from the past.
So I hope that this makes some sense.
I hope that this was helpful and thank you so much for listening.
Of course, I look forward to your donations.
The RTR book is out.
I strongly, strongly recommend that you pick it up for like 11 bucks and change.
You can get a copy. If you have no money, let me know and I'll send you a copy.
You can pay me if you like it. Thank you again for listening as always.
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