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May 29, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:22:25
1079 Guilt (Convo)
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Time Text
Hey, how's it going? Oh, I'm going okay.
How are you? Good, good.
This is too cool for school.
It really is. And it's nice to, just in case this ever went out, it'd be nice for people to have someone other to look at than me, so that's nice.
Oh, sure, sure. I actually think this, I think based on the content that I'm going to talk about, I think this could be a public But I'll see.
I'm not going to self-censor or anything.
Excellent. I think I'd feel comfortable with it being released at least some level.
So, yeah.
Should I start in? Yeah.
So, yeah. I've been having trouble processing over the past week the email I shared with you, the one that my parents sent me last Tuesday.
Do you want to read it out?
Yeah, I'll do that. I've got it up.
Greg, we realize you asked us not to communicate with you, but we just wanted to let you know that we are available anytime you want to talk to us about how we have disappointed you.
If your happiness means that we cannot be in your life at this time, we respect your wishes and hope that changes at some point in the future.
We do hope you will tell us how you are feeling and what we can do to be more supportive parents for you.
With our love always, Mom and Dad.
Right, right.
Sorry, go ahead. I was just saying, the feeling that was the predominant feeling after I read that, was really, guilt was the longest lingering feeling, although anger was the strongest feeling, but that subsided and let the guilt linger, if that makes sense. Sure, sure.
Sure. And do you have thoughts about why you may be feeling that?
What do you think are the thoughts behind the feelings?
Yeah, I was thinking about that last night particularly, although the thoughts have been there all week.
Last night I just kept getting especially this image of this couple shaken up by this loss and just holding hands and waiting for their son to return.
And it's not a happy image to have.
And it's creating these feelings that I'm the hurtful one in this interaction.
Sure, sure, sure.
And what are your thoughts about those thoughts?
Well, I don't think that they are...
Particularly evidence-based, based on what I know from my past and even the more present interactions with them.
But it still is enough to create this ambivalence.
Sure, sure. Well, it's, I mean, I know for people watching this, this is going to sound all kinds of cold and hotless, but I know quite a bit about the history of your family, and this is a very clever letter.
Right? Right. Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's exquisite, right?
I mean, in terms of its delicacy and all of the stuff that is not said and the surface, quote, rationality.
I mean, it's a very sophisticated letter.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
It's very. So, what did you feel when you first read it?
What was your initial feeling?
Let me think. Well, when I first saw the email in the box, anxiety.
And then when I read it, sadness.
I'm sorry, can you just copy it into the chat here so that I can have a look at it as well?
Thank you. Absolutely.
So it was anger and then it was sadness, right?
Anxiety, when I first saw the email, like in the box before I even read it.
Oh, for sure, yeah. It's like someone is sending me an email and it's not likely to be positive to me, right?
Right. Right, okay.
Right. And then you felt anger, is that right?
Yes. The anger was specifically towards what we can do to be more supportive parents, as if they're at a base of 50% supportive, but they just need to be increased to...
And then sadness.
And then the sadness turned into the guilt, which has been the lingering feeling.
And the guilt, the reason I wanted to talk to you was the guilt has been making it harder to reassess my anger and sadness over the past few days.
Well, sure, that's what guilt is for.
I mean, that's why people use it, because it is a very large antidote to anger, for sure.
Because guilt is anger at the self, right?
Guilt is anger turned inwards at yourself.
Which is that I've done something wrong.
I'm cold. I'm heartless.
I'm selfish.
Guilt arises from what is portrayed in relationships as a win-lose situation.
So you obviously have heard of the concept of sacrifice in relationships before.
That when you have children, you sacrifice your kids' needs here on the left.
Your kids are elevated. Your kids' needs are elevated and your needs are put down and it's a win-lose situation.
You sacrifice in the same way that you may not want to go to work but you go to work because you want to eat.
Guilt arises when a perception has occurred in relationships that it can't be win-win.
Oh, sorry about that. We just went all kinds of south, but it's okay, we're cutting edge.
Was the video lost there?
No, I think it's still there.
So the last thing I heard you say...
Oh, sorry. Well, it's to say that guilt arises from a perception in a relationship that when one person...
I guess this is on your right?
Yeah. When one person is providing goodies, the other person is receiving them, right?
And so there's this implicit flow of goodies from one person to the other, right?
Flow of goodies from one person to the other.
Guilt is when this relationship is set up And then when it's time for reciprocity, we don't give back.
And then we feel that we are not providing a just recompense for sacrifices which were made for us in the past.
Does that sort of make sense?
Yeah, that does make sense that it creates this hierarchy that's not symmetrical.
Right, because if our parents say to us, Yes, there were tough times when you were a kid and you were up at night, you had scurvy or whatever.
There were tough times but it was never a loss for me.
I mean I don't run Freedom Aid Radio and say, you bastard thieving listeners, it's all a sacrifice and you owe me your kidneys.
I mean yeah, there are times where philosophical conversation is tough.
This is not this call but this month being one of them.
But I would never portray it as a sacrifice.
I mean that's just a pride issue.
I mean I'm no victim.
I'm not at anybody's beck and call that way.
So I throw myself into the relationship with the listeners and into the Free Domain Radio conversation with great joy and passion and I feel incredibly privileged to do this.
So it's not I'm sacrificing anything for the listeners.
I quit my career. I gave up everything for you people and now you owe me whatever.
With parents, it's like yeah, there were tough times when you were a kid but we had children because we wanted children.
We hope that our parenting of you was something that doesn't always have to be perfect and always perfectly enjoyable but is rich and is exciting and so on.
Guilt is when you are given the perception that resources have been given to you at somebody else's expense and then Something has flipped and you owe them something back and when you fail to give that back to them, then it is considered to be a dishonor, right?
Like I lent you $1,000 and now you owe me $1,000 back and you're just not paying it, you thieving rat bastard, right?
Right, right. That's the first thing to understand about guilt.
It is the self-attack that comes from the perception that you owe somebody something in a just manner, but you don't want to give it to them.
Then it's like, well, why don't I want to give my parents back their just, quote, desserts?
In a positive way, right?
If Christina buys me something wonderful, my wife, for my birthday, which she does, then why is it that I would not want to buy something for her birthday?
Well, because I'm selfish.
I'm a taker. There's always intense negative pejoratives that are associated with this failure to reciprocate in terms of relationships.
The reason it turns into a self-attack is because you feel, and this is my thought and tell me if it makes sense or not, but you feel deep down that you kind of owe them something and you're dishonorably not paying it, right?
Yeah, yeah. That's what religion is founded on, right?
God loves you. Jesus died for your sins, so you owe him, sucker.
It's the same thing with the state.
This is what Socrates said about the state, that the state validated his parents' marriage and gave him birth.
He owes allegiance and because it's a democracy, we owe the government.
It's this idea that we simply owe people.
For obligations that we never voluntarily incurred and of course when we're born to parents, it is not a choice of ours, it is a choice of theirs and how they raise us is not a choice of ours because we are children and we are helpless and we are dependent but it is a choice of theirs.
People do this all the time and I'm sorry to give you a big lecture.
I just want to put it in context before we go back to how you feel.
People do this all the time.
They're trapped in their relationships.
Their wife is a taker or their husband is a taker.
They're victims. All of this is about like I give and I'm not getting back.
If you give to get back, that itself is selfish which is why you're able to make other people feel selfish because it's a projection.
I don't buy Christina a birthday present so that she will buy me a birthday present.
It's not an obligation that I'm creating for her because if it were, it wouldn't be generous.
It would just be a boomerang, right? I throw, I get back.
So the spirit of true generosity is to give and not with the intention or with conscious or unconscious with the intention of creating an obligation on the part of the person you're giving to because then it's not generosity, right?
Then it's just a form of manipulation.
Right, exactly. My wife can leave me tomorrow.
My wife can go anywhere that she wants.
She can go and do anything. She can divorce me.
She can do whatever she wants. She's not obligated to stay with me in any way, shape, or form.
The fact that I am madly in love with her and devoted to her in no way requires that she is that way in return to me because then it would be kind of like a grappling hook.
That I would be sinking into her flesh to reel her in like a winch cable on the back of a truck or something and that's not the case.
I love her because she is wonderful and I take pleasure in her company and it's certainly my hope that she continues to feel the same way about me but my passion for her is no obligation to her whatsoever and this is very different from a parent-child relationship because at least She was sucker enough to foolishly get married to me so not the case with children who are born to parents.
They have no choice in the matter, no choice in how they're raised usually.
So this is the first thing to understand that guilt fundamentally is a feeling of self-attack that comes from feeling like you owe someone something and you're just selfishly – you're a selfish taker and you're just not paying it back.
So after that speech, tell me what you think about that.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense with regards to the imbalance, because looking back on how I felt after the email, when they phrased it, or it was actually written by my dad, because it was from his email address, address, but when I'm sure they talked about it, how we have disappointed you.
So that already frames it as...
It just is. It's not funny.
I'm sorry. I'm laughing because it's so transparently manipulative, which doesn't mean that it's easy to receive and it doesn't mean that I don't sympathize, but from the outside, it's just like, ew.
It's like that Ghostbusters thing.
Like, whap! I just got slimed, but sorry.
Go on. Oh, sure.
Well, what struck me when you were talking about that was if they frame it as they have disappointed me, and I defoo because they've disappointed me, they didn't buy me that extra pair of sneakers as I was growing up, as Greg G. put it, then what I'm doing is horribly unjust.
If what they did was me.
Was, sorry? Oh, if all they did was to me, then what I'm doing is unjust.
Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Most times when you confront people in your life with your needs, it's almost hard to blame them in a sense because it's such an automatic response because of the amount of corruption in the culture as a whole.
Automatically, the response will come back, I didn't mean it.
I didn't intend it.
I'm sorry that you're upset or disappointed or bothered by something and what happens is people then will take the approach like you're some kind of bizarrely wired trigger bomb and they don't know what sets you off and they have to kind of – I don't know, like dance around you or trying to figure out the combination that's going to open you up without getting you weirdly crazy angry like you become a tinfoil hat person to them for some reason.
Don't mention 9-11.
Those people, right?
And so they then have to portray you as somebody who's just irrationally angry.
They have fundamentally no idea what they could conceivably have done to make you this angry or upset or like who knows?
But they love you so much that they will do their best to listen to whatever insane shit is making you so angry and they will Try to find some way to appease you like some crazy villain in a bad soap opera.
Just pay him the money.
Just get him whatever.
That's sort of what I get from that.
It disappointed you.
The issue is not disappointment.
The issue was abuse.
Right, right. And if they say, we have no idea, they're basically backing up the dump truck of pure crazy, right?
Raising it and dumping it all on you, right?
Right, right.
To be more supportive parents is also like, as you say, they are supportive maybe 50% or 60% but you're so irrationally demanding that anything less than perfect 150% support and they're out of your life completely.
Again, you're this ticking weird time bomb that they just have to kind of appease and dance around because you're just so nutty and volatile.
Okay, we don't know how we could have been more supportive but But tell us and we'll try to meet your crazy standards just to make you happy because we love you, right?
Right, exactly.
I don't know, that triggered something in me.
Is that projection?
Because they did have crazy standards that were impossible to meet.
Oh yeah. This is all projection.
There's nothing about you in this letter at all.
This is all projection.
This is all manipulation and projection.
The confirmation letters we get from the DFU experience are all fabulous confirmations of exactly why we're doing what we're doing.
If that's the road that has to be taken and it's never a fun road and it's not a road that anybody takes even remotely likely, it is a horrible, horrible road in the short run.
But whatever we get in terms of communication, this is a perfect confirmation as to why you did what you did.
Because what are they saying?
Nothing happened. We did nothing wrong, that you have a rational standard of perfection, that it is merely the fact that you're disappointed, that it's causing you to have some sort of insane diva hissy fit and kick us out of your life and we'd love to be more supportive though we don't know how because we don't even know how we weren't supportive in the past.
I mean all of this is, hey, nothing happened.
We're perfect. You're the crazy one.
There's so much anger in this email that, I mean, it's pissing me off and I'm not even in your family.
Right, just a bunch of bubbling rage under the surface.
Yeah, I mean, do they seriously have no idea?
If they were given a million dollars, could they seriously not...
At all? I mean, you've talked to them about your complaints, you've explained it to them, you've been trying to be open with them, they were there, they remember, they're not senile, they don't have mad cow, they're not demented.
So, somebody dangles a million dollars in front of them and they would have absolutely no idea what your complaints are about the abuses in your family.
Yeah, and even as some of the Most volatile stuff since my childhood occurred months ago.
It's not like they have to go even very far back.
Your dad is screaming at you and doing all this monstrous, horrible stuff a couple of months ago.
They're like, well, maybe we were just somehow not perfectly supported for this crazy, insane, massively high-standard fellow, this weird child who gets upset for nothing.
Like once more, they're throwing you under the fucking bus, right?
Once more, your reality, your history, your needs are completely sacrificed for their own selfish defenses, right?
Right, right. We will do anything to make you happy, they say, right?
But that sure as Sherlock was not the story, not two or three months ago.
Sorry, go ahead. Right, right.
Yeah, and I think a sense of guilt that I'm getting is also that my brother, as I mentioned before, is probably getting ten times this story from them.
Sure. Sure, but why is that?
Why does that make you feel guilty?
I'm not saying you shouldn't, I'm just, what's the connection there?
I don't know, I just don't like the idea that he's...
Well, he did say the other day he doesn't like being in the middle of this.
Sure. Well, it's a very tough position for him, but it's not you who's making it tough.
It's your parents. Should your brother get an example that you don't ever stand up to bad people, that you don't ever fight for your own space, that you don't ever stand up for what is just and decent, honorable and respectful being treated in that way?
Is that the example that you just shut up and take it?
I mean the example that you're giving to him is a clear exit path to a highly dysfunctional and destructive family and your only other option is to hang around and pretend that nothing is wrong Which is going to give him completely messed up signals, right?
That's very true, yeah.
I mean, the sibling thing is, I mean, I don't want to diminish it because I know it's not easy and there's no, I mean, what it was like six months ago, I had to go back and talk to my wife once more about my nieces, right?
And that's not even as close as your brother.
So I understand that that's not easy, but we don't want to end up taking the fall for the corrupt and false behavior of others.
When you see someone stand up in your life and simply not put up with abusive treatment anymore, for sure you're going to have all of the bullshit that the abusers are going to come up with is going to come spraying all over the place.
But you have an example which you didn't have before which is somebody saying, This is optional and this is not satisfactory to me.
I can't reason with these people.
I can't have my needs which are completely reasonable met which is no screaming, no name calling, no abuse, no verbal abuse and so on.
I can't get my needs met.
They won't listen to reason and therefore, I don't need to stay in this relationship.
Life is short and I'm not going to sit there and have my personality, ego and self torn down by crazy irrational bastards.
He has that example in his life now and It only takes one for the possibility to exist and for the option to become real.
Right, right. So, I guess I'll...
I'm meeting with him on Friday in person for the first time since the defu, so...
Right. I'll have to see how that goes.
And I guess this will be...
Trust my instincts and...
Well, the best thing you can do with regard to this is simply listen to him because he's getting a forceful wave of corrupt and propagandistic mythology from the parents, right?
It's like a tsunami.
It's endless. You sure as heck don't want to be a countervailing set of stories.
I'm not saying that yours would be stories, but to him, it's like, shit, they're coming at me this way.
They're coming at me this way. What you want to not be is that guy coming at him this way, but just say, how are you feeling?
What are you thinking? Not what are my parents saying, but how are you thinking?
I mean, this must be tough for you.
Just be completely open to his experience because he's saying, I'm caught in the middle here.
There's you, the parents.
And so don't be that other side of the sandwich, right?
Just talk to him, listen to him and absorb what he's going through without explaining or justifying yourself without, you know, what are they saying about me kind of thing but just, you know, and sympathize with.
Now, if he asks you questions, of course, right?
But I think he's in a place where clearly your parents are more than willing to erase your history and your experience in order for their own petty defenses to function.
Therefore, they are going to be doing that, as you say, even more so with your brother.
So he's in a place where he's getting propagandized and not being listened to.
And I think that what you want to do is listen to him to take some of that pressure off of the unreality that is kind of washing over him.
Yeah, I mean, about the tidal wave you were talking about, I do have, I mean, he and I talk on the phone about every day he calls me, or I call him, or actually I will send him a text message saying it's okay to call because I want to make sure he's out of the house.
But if he's out of the house and he wants to talk, he'll call me.
Oh good, okay. He actually did say that my dad will just come into his room several times in the evening and just sit there.
Sure. And he walked in one time, my dad did, and said, I don't want you listening to that Stefan Molyneux guy.
Right. Well, I mean, from your dad's perspective, that is perfectly right.
I mean, he can't go back and be a better father.
That ship has sailed years ago, right?
He can't go back and be a non-abusive father.
He can't go back and give you guys a better or a different childhood, right?
So given that that's impossible...
I mean he can't pay back the money he stole so of course he's going to say don't listen to theories of property rights.
I mean that makes perfect sense.
It's the only strategy that he's got left.
I mean it's far too late now for him with regards to you or your brother because Once you have made the decision that you're not going to put up with negativity or abuse in a relationship and you've taken the steps to make your needs known and you've tried to deal with it in an honorable and open fashion, once that ship has sailed and you've said, okay, well, this isn't going to work and so on, if the person only changes then, it doesn't work, right?
Because if they say, okay, well, if you're going to leave me, then I'll change, then they're basically saying, well, I could have changed.
It's just that I'm not going to change for you.
I'm only going to change if you're going to leave me, which is fundamentally for me.
It doesn't break the selfish pattern at all.
But they're still admitting that they could change.
It's just that your misery and your broken downedness was just no motivation for them to change.
But now that their own interests are being threatened by God, they can find it in themselves to change.
Well, that's why ultimatums never work in relationship because if somebody is going to accede to your request only because of an ultimatum, it means that they still don't care about you fundamentally at all.
Right, right. So if your dad were to say now, yeah, I guess I did these bad things.
I'm going to go to therapy. I'm going to change.
It's like, well, I guess that's great for you, but my childhood is dusted and done, right?
So it doesn't go back and change anything in the past.
So if you want to do it, that's fantastic.
It doesn't have anything to do with changing what happened to me because that's not going to happen.
Even if he did say all of that, it would only be because the appearance of the integrity of his family was threatened and that was a negative consequence for him.
That's very true, yeah.
And I do know Almost for sure that no one outside my family that I haven't told, other than a few friends that I've told, no one knows yet.
I mean, they haven't told, they haven't mentioned anything outside the family.
I don't even know if my grandparents know.
Oh, sure. I think it took Christina's parents at least a year, close to 18 months, for people to even bring it up as an issue.
Or a topic. Because they hope.
They hope that they're not going to have to talk about it with anyone and you're just going to come back.
You're magically going to reappear.
Oh, I'm sorry. And I went too far.
And yes, it is a cult over there at Freedom Aid and blah, blah, blah, right?
What can I do to make it up? That's the fantasy that they live with.
And that's why I'm constantly urging parents, be proactive in stepping up and fixing the mess that you've made in your family.
Be proactive because if your kids have to do it, you're done.
Right, right. Yeah, yeah.
So, I mean, obviously, as you can see, what you were saying was really bringing back a lot of the sadness.
Yeah, tell me what you're feeling, enough about my Waffle Burger.
Well, when you were talking about that this letter is a confirmation of what happened in the past, an erasure of my past, just this tremendous wave of sadness.
Came up, because it really is.
It really is a confirmation.
There's no...
This is not a grope, but a hug.
There's no way... Oh, thanks.
But go on. There's just no way their email could have been any different.
No. No.
I mean, the email is what it was.
It was... And it goes back to what you were saying I think a week ago on one of our private conference calls late night when we were talking about that you don't leave, you don't ban people really because you're angry.
You leave because you're bored.
And this is an example of just a boring ass defense, right?
I couldn't have predicted it from my situation just because it's my situation, but I'm sure if I would have said, hey Steph, do you have any idea what the first email back from them would have been?
You probably could have, from what you know about my history, guessed.
Yeah, I mean, if they felt that you would be open to bullying, then it would have been a bullying and angry one.
Clearly, the way that you exited was enough to help them understand that you made business, and so they go to the backup defense, which is erasure of you, manipulation, and self-pity.
Right. And in a way, I would have preferred, and they knew this, I'm sure, I would have preferred the God damn it, you fucking asshole!
Why the hell do you have to do this to our family in this time of need?
I mean, that would have been easier to work through.
It's like, fuck, screw you, right?
But this is like...
Go on.
Oh, this is the full-on telling me I'm the bad one without being obvious enough to say you're the bad one.
Sure, absolutely and I mean your parents aren't stupid.
I mean obviously you come from highly intelligent gene pool.
Your parents aren't stupid and whatever it is that's going to be the hardest for them – for you, sorry, is what they're going to do.
I mean that's just – There was no chance of anything else because it's what people don't understand.
I've said this before. I've just mentioned it again.
This is more to the parents who end up watching this than anything else, that your soul can die.
If you smoke enough, you get lung cancer.
You can't be cured. If you continue to do bad things to your children, to inflict your will on them, to not listen to them, to ignore them, to control them, to disrespect them, Your soul will die.
You won't be able to come back.
You won't be able to turn around.
After a certain amount of eating straight sugar, you're going to get diabetes even if you stop.
You can't change it after a certain amount of time.
If your arteries are clogged, sometimes you're just going to have that heart attack.
And it's the same thing with your soul and your relationships, that if you continue to pile abuse and neglect and control and downgrading other people in your life, you simply will be unable to recover from it.
And that's why they're beyond the point of no return probably by years and years.
And there's just no possibility of any other kind of response.
And still, we hope and we cross our fingers that parents will turn it around and we've seen a few do it or at least we'll try and do it.
Oh, did we leave it?
Okay.
Oh, so sorry about that.
No, no, no problem at all.
We're cutting edge maybe.
So, yeah, so I was just saying that we hope that people will do it before too late.
But Tolstoy said that every happy family is alike but every unhappy family is alike.
I'm happy in its own particular way and as you can see, that's not the case.
Happy families and happy people have a great degree of variety but unhappiness, defensiveness, victimization, self-pity, manipulation, it's just the same fucking script over and over and over again.
It's like stimulus response.
You might as well program it into a computer and I think that's what you mean when you say there's nothing that's going to be new for me here.
There's just going to be defensiveness and manipulation and self-justification on the part of my parents And there's no room for me in that kind of psychodrama, right?
Right, and after the spontaneity I've experienced with people here at FDR, it's like, why would I ever want any of that defensiveness again?
Right, right. I mean, just by the by and...
Sorry, go ahead. Sorry?
No, you go ahead. Why would I want to talk to Eliza on the computer, right, when I can talk to these real people?
Right. I was just listening to a radio show today, this morning, where they were talking about how the kids – kids these days, don't I sound young – they're watching like – like they're spending six hours a day in front of a screen of one kind or another.
But this is good, this one.
But computers or video games, televisions and so on, six hours a day.
And so the radio show host was – and everyone was called.
The parents were calling in and saying, turn them off.
Just throw the Xbox out the window.
Dump the Wii down the incinerator or something like that.
And I mean what a load of crap.
What a load of crap. That's always the case that people have when it comes to competition and this comes to your relationship to philosophy, right?
People always have this knee-jerk reaction when it comes to competition.
Someone is underselling you in business.
You want to run to the government and ban that person from coming into your market.
You don't want to up your game.
You don't want to improve your processes to compete more successfully.
It's just like let's shut that person out and retain this monopoly.
So I didn't call in because nobody would even understand what I was saying or maybe they would but wouldn't like it.
But for me, it's like if your kids are watching video games, playing video games, watching TV and being on the computer for six hours a day, And you don't like that, then shutting it all off is completely petty and ridiculous.
What you want to do is compete more successfully with the video games by being a more interesting and engaging parent.
I mean, you don't just shut out competitive elements.
What you do is you say, okay, this is going to require that I up my game to the point where I'm going to re-engage my children and they're going to prefer me to punching someone's virtual face on the Wii.
But parents don't want to do that.
They don't want to up their game and say, well, my kid is over there because she actually doesn't find my My interaction or having a relationship with me to be that stimulating.
He'd rather be racing a simulated car.
So when it comes to simulated car versus interacting with me, my kid goes to the simulated car.
And so every asshole on the planet says, well, we should ban the simulated car or turn off the Xbox.
And it's like, no. I mean, that's ridiculous.
Like saying, my wife is attracted to another man, so I'm going to lock her in the fucking basement.
I mean, what a load of crap. If my wife is attracted to another man, I should be nicer.
I should bring her flowers. I should up my game so that she is then more attracted to me rather than just locking her in the basement and saying, well, that's it.
You can't see any other. I mean if your kid doesn't like you to begin with and that's why he prefers spending time online or on the Xbox, then cutting those avenues off doesn't make you any more fun to be with and in fact makes you less fun to be with and so you're actually working against yourself but of course it's People are too traumatized from their own histories to figure that stuff out.
It's the same thing with your parents.
Rather than say, what is it that Greg is getting from philosophy that is not getting from us that we can bring to the relationship?
What they do is say, don't you go listen to that philosophy.
They don't want to compete.
They just want to ban competition.
Yeah, and I asked my brother what my dad said about Stefan Molyneux, that, like, if he knew about the family stuff, and my brother said, yeah, he says he purposely breaks up families, or something like that. So, certainly, it seems to be the approach that Christina's parents are taking with you, to blame you.
Sure. And it's...
It's gross, and it does make sense, given what you were saying, that telling my brother me back when I was with them to not do this philosophy stuff anymore is totally not gonna work.
Because I asked my brother how he felt when my dad said that.
He said, really angry, because he doesn't trust me to make my own judgment about what I listen to or watch, right?
Right, and why don't these brave parents who have so much to say that is negative towards me, why don't they give me a call?
I have Sunday shows that are open.
This is what I do full-time.
I'm happy to take calls from parents if they want to.
If your dad wants to call me up man-to-man and chew me out for doing the bad things that I'm doing, why does he go and pick on his 17-year-old dependent son rather than a 41-year-old man who could listen to him and talk to him man-to-man where he doesn't have that kind of same Why doesn't he do that if I'm of such concern?
Only two parents have called me in the entire time that I've been doing this and within a month afterwards, they both demanded that the podcast be removed because they didn't like how they sound and one of them accused me of doctoring the podcast to make him sound worse.
It's completely lunatic stuff.
I'm happy to take the calls.
If you're a parent and you're out there and you see this and you feel that Some anonymous guy on the internet has more power over the fabric of your family than you do, that you who had primary care custody and control and authority over your children for 20 or 30 years,
that that bond and that central relationship, that I have some magical voodoo internet power to shatter the foundations of your family that otherwise would be as strong as the rock of Gibraltar, Then call me up.
I'm more than happy to hear how it is that I'm doing things wrong or doing things badly, but I can certainly tell you that from where I sit, it is not the case that some impassioned and reasoned arguments over the internet can shake the foundation of a strong and positive union.
I mean there's no podcast that could make me fall out of love with my wife.
There's just no podcast and there's no message board and there's no group of hate and hostiles out there who can make me give up my love of what it is that I'm doing.
It's just not possible. So if it's so fragile that a podcast causes it to, quote, break, then you have to ask yourself why was it so fragile to begin with, not that I have some magic He-Man internet power to tear Oaks asunder with my bare hand.
Right, exactly. The reason they went to my brother instead of to you was obviously because you would have stood up to them.
Well, they don't have any power over me, so if I stood up to them or not, I certainly would have listened, but I would not have been cowed by their power over me, and so that's why all of these heroes studiously avoid me.
Right. Bully their own children rather than talk man to man to a grown man who's independent from them.
Right, exactly.
Sorry, go on. No, I was just saying yeah.
Now, I didn't want to ride over your feelings and that was a bit of a sort of tangential thing and I just wanted to make sure that I got a sense of where you were emotionally.
Still plenty of sadness.
Anger is bubbling up, but there's something blocking the anger from quite being accessible.
Well, tell me about the sadness.
What's going on there?
Well, just memories that are bubbling up when you're saying that.
Like when you were talking about the telling kids not to...
They're trying to ban video games or whatever, or install chips so that they only play a half hour day or whatever the hell they make video games to do.
Yeah. It reminded me of a specific incident when I was, gosh, I couldn't have been older than 10, maybe 12 at the highest.
My dad walked into my computer room where I was sitting doing the computer and he said, you know, you've been doing way too much computer recently.
Right. You're just a monster.
He said you're just a monster?
Yeah, yeah. He said you're just a monster about how much you do computer.
He said I just told Scott the same thing and I just want you out riding bikes and doing more stuff than just doing computer.
Right. Right, and of course, there's no curiosity.
Help me understand what you get out of the computers.
Help me understand what you like about them.
The reason, of course, that he doesn't like you being on the computer is because you're choosing to be on the computer rather than talk to him and that makes him feel anxious and upset and irritated and guilty, of course, because he knows he's not the kind of parent that you're going to want to sit and chat with.
Right, right. So because you're making him feel bad, he's going to attack you, right?
Right, it's the same concept in On Truth of you putting your head on your desk and the teacher yelling at you.
Yeah. How old were you when this happened?
I was thinking at the highest 12.
Right, so this was just around puberty, right?
I was pretty young. And this was just around puberty for you?
Well, I was a little later.
I was actually later than my younger brother when it came to puberty.
But it was around the time that puberty would have been hitting.
I think I ended up being around 14 to 15.
Right, right. No, and I just ask, because apparently puberty lets you grow hair, so I'm still waiting for mine to kick in.
I'm no biologist, of course, or doctor.
But I mean, this time, when you're around 12 or so, of course...
I mean nothing in families is accidental even when things happen, right?
So at a time when you're approaching puberty or puberty is in the air, sexuality, male sexuality is in the air, I mean that's a time where you really need your dad, right?
Right. Because you need to talk to him about manly parts and all of the things that's going on.
The hormone onslaught is about to begin.
Guys are concerned, how tall am I going to be?
Whatever, what's happening down there?
All of the stuff in terms of your feelings for girls, all of that stuff is stuff you really need your dad for.
The fact that you were spending a lot of time on the computer rather than talking to your dad, at this particular, at this crucial point in the development of your masculinity is just heartbreaking.
Oh, right, and I do remember, I mean, the first real, I mean, I know there were the young kindergarten crutches, but the first real, like, puberty crush that I had, I actually told my parents about.
And I was nervous about telling them, but I was kind of excited and having all these feelings, and I remember that was a source of constant ridicule for me for the next year.
Like, like, how's, how are you and Margaret doing?
Right? Like, I'm so sorry.
I've never told them since, obviously, about any of that.
I have very, very minimal experience dating, and I think a lot of it's just the sense of ridicule of being vulnerable about feelings like that.
Yeah, for sure. They call it puppy love and so on, but the first sexual or romantic attraction that you feel towards a girl is hugely serious for a child.
I hugely, of course, parents will all roll their eyes, it's so cute, and they'll, whatever, diminish it, but it's not that way when you are going through it.
I mean, you feel a sense of devotion and reverence and awe, and it's all highly charged.
I mean, parents need to help kids through that, particularly fathers and sons.
I mean, it happens with girls, but I mean, that was your father's job.
My own brother, I mean, I liked some girl who worked in a record store, so of course, I'd go in and pretend to look for manly records rather than the Anglebert, Humberdink and ELO that I was into at the time, some fresh big ball metal or something.
My brother came in and I was talking to this girl and he came in and he went up to my – drew his finger across my chin and said, oh, Steph, wipe the drool off, why don't you?
I mean when you're struggling to get through your shyness and I was a very shy kid, when you're struggling to get through that, I mean that kind of humiliation that people – when you're in that exquisitely vulnerable position, that is just people's – certain kinds of people's knee-jerk reaction and it is completely tragic.
I mean I hope that you will not continue to let the humiliation of these bastards rob you of the openness and joy of free expressions of love and attraction.
It's their Pettiness, right, should not rule the future and expansiveness of your heart.
Oh, right, right.
That's very true. I mean, that's something I was working with a little with my therapist, and once I come back into therapy in a couple of weeks, I'm going to definitely, and she said, actually, and this is a question that's just an aside I have for you, she recommended That I try a man therapist since I have a lot of issues being vulnerable with men.
Does that sound like a decent idea to you?
It could be. I had a female therapist and that helped me a lot because some of my issues were to do with the fear of sex.
I think obviously a competent therapist should win out I mean, because a competent therapist is going to be a lot more than the gender.
If you have the choice between two equally competent therapists, I would think that – and this is very hard for me to judge because I grew up with no father.
I never had a father around that I knew of other than visits from time to time, which were just ridiculous and awkward.
So I can't judge this very well because I didn't have a negative father imprint, so to speak, which is different from what you experienced.
I think that...
I'm sorry, I really can't give you any judgment other than to say trust your gut because it's so far from what I had to deal with in therapy that I... Sorry, I just don't think I would love to.
I love giving advice, but I just don't think I can give you anything good here.
Oh, no, that's fine. And I do realize that I also have my fair share of mommy issues, right?
So it's not like I have...
It's not like my mom, I don't have to work with female issues, because obviously a big part is also being vulnerable with women, right?
They kind of are two sides of the same coin.
Right, because you have a caution around self-expression, right?
I mean, you play your cards a little close to your chest at times.
I mean, I'm like a ridiculous emoto slut, right?
So it's sort of different for me, but I think for...
I mean, and I wasn't always this way, but I sort of figured, you know, that...
I'd rather my heart hit the wall at 100 miles an hour than roll into it at 2 miles an hour.
So if it's going to go splat, I want it to go splat in a big way.
So I've always tried to sort of be open and live extravagantly with my feelings, which gets me into a lot of trouble with people who think that's somehow the opposite of philosophy.
But I mean that's certainly that wearing your heart on your sleeve is fundamentally an act of strength and confidence and is very attractive to me.
to people who are themselves confident and open-hearted.
I think you are that way naturally just based on having known you for a while but I think that that challenge of opening your heart and living extravagantly and openly that way is something that you want to have that freedom.
It doesn't mean you always have to do it but to have that freedom and I think any authority figure that you work with who's going to be kind and supportive with you I think is going to be helpful whether it's a man or a woman.
Right, right. I mean, from my experience in therapy just now, I mean, this woman was fantastically supportive and really, I mean, I think I went through more self-knowledge over the past, I think,
two and a half months of therapy than I really have in a long time, just because so much bubbled up and just having a safe place To be vulnerable face-to-face with someone was just fantastic.
Right, right. Well, I mean, I don't want to be Mr.
Dentist and pull the sadness out of you, but I mean, the sadness, I think, has to do with an acceptance of who your parents are, because we all have this mad hope that we use to quash our grieving process, right?
They could change, therefore I don't actually need to give up hope, but I think that the giving up of hope in these kinds of situations is accompanied with Tremendous sadness because it is that hope that has kept us going for so long and that hope that has actually been helpful for us as children in terms of keeping our capacity for bonding and positive thoughts with people, positive experiences with people.
Giving up that hope is really, really painful and there is a grieving process that occurs in the DFU that doesn't have to do with accepting that you're not going to see your parents again but has to do with accepting that you never saw them and they never saw you and I think that's the long-ago ache that you're probably feeling.
Yeah, because it's pretty deep.
It's not like the...
It's not a surface sadness.
It's very deep in my gut, and I feel it, and it takes a few minutes after I feel it to have it show up in my...
In fact, it really has to bubble up from my core.
So I do think you're right that it's something deeper than just accepting that I'll never see them again, because that would be pretty surface...
Yeah, and that would be about the future.
This is about the past. Gertrude Stein, who was an American writer from, I think, the 1930s, 1940s, She had a very difficult relationship with her brother and she wrote something about her brother that always sort of reminded me maybe about the feelings that you're feeling, certainly my experience of going through these feelings.
She wrote about her brother.
She said, little by little, we never met again.
That to me has always been a very powerful way of putting it.
Little by little, we never Matt again and what that's like, it's like the wind uncovering a portrait of emptiness or of loss with the sand blowing off it.
It's like little by little we never met again and it's like little by little we accept this never meeting, that we never knew our parents intimately, that they never knew us, that it was always defensive, that it was always selfish, that it was always exploitive, that it was always abusive.
It was not united and then split.
I mean the defu is actually not a completely accurate phrase because there never was a family of origin in the way that we would understand it emotionally.
Right, right. It's not a place to escape and feel safe.
It's a place where you have to escape and feel safe somewhere else.
Right. People didn't die because they were always ghosts.
I mean, it's a sixth sense scenario, right?
We look back at the movie and it's like they were always ghosts.
And we had to fake the connectedness that was never there because it's not like your parents are more defensive and manipulative now than they were when you were younger.
In fact, People tend to mellow with age.
Your parents are less defensive now.
They probably wouldn't have been able to pull off this letter 10 years ago.
They're less consciously aggressive and defensive now or even unconsciously.
When you were younger, there was even less connection with them than there is now.
I remember saying when I was younger, Yeah, I love my parents, but I don't like them, that godforsaken phrase.
I know that's a pretty common phrase, but yeah, that's very accurate, what you're saying, that there never was a correction.
No, and it's not about accepting the present, or making decisions about the present, it's about accepting the past and what always was, or rather, what always was not, right?
That's the long ago ache that's from the diaper onwards, right?
This long ago ache of wanting to have a family that you could connect with, be listened to, respect, love, honor, obey, wanting that so much.
We want nothing so much as children than to look up to and respect our parents and to admire our parents and to obey them because they are wise and right.
And caring and they have credibility and they don't abuse their authority and they use it to our advantage and they're delighted that we're in their lives.
We want nothing more than to love and respect our parents.
And when they act in these ways that are so petty and self-righteous and destructive and abusive, it is just so utterly beyond heartbreaking because they rob us of the treasure of devotion.
And obedience to a glowing goodness that we so want to follow like a plant follows the sun when we're children.
And we miss that every day when we're kids.
And we have to fake and strain and pretend that it's not what it is.
Or that there is something that there just isn't.
And that is just... It hollers you out, right?
It hollers out your heart. It turns it into one of those like weird African boobab tree shells that is like empty rattle inside.
It hollers you out having to fake a connection that isn't there and having to obey people you don't respect.
Children just desperately want to respect their parents.
It breaks their hearts when their parents act in immature and destructive ways.
And then, I mean, yeah, okay, then you have to fake it with your parents and pretend that...
The heart is broken by the fact that you can't love and respect them, because that's what you want to do the most when you're a child.
I think there's still a big part of me that wants it now.
No, that's your parents.
That's not you. That's not you.
That's not you. Your parents – there's no way that 20 plus years of your direct irrevocable and empirical experience could lead – do you still yearn to fly unaided?
Do you still yearn for Santa Claus?
So there's no way that after 20 plus years, you could still yearn for something that you've never experienced and this every indication will never ever occur.
It's their holding out their belief, their hope, because they consciously, or who knows, believe that they are worthy of respect and you're damn well not giving it to them and that makes you a bad and ungrateful child.
Unjust, unfair, because we have earned respect and you're not giving it.
I mean, isn't this what parents say all the time?
You owe me respect.
Well, no, we don't. I do owe me respect.
Earn it or shut up, right?
And if you earn it, I will give it to you involuntarily.
And if you demand it, it's like love.
If you earn it, it happens of its own accord.
If you demand it, it never occurs at all.
All you get is the outward show and appearance of love, patriotism or shit like that, family fealty, fear.
But no, there's no way that you have hope for your parents.
There's just no way.
They want you to have some kind of hope because if you have hope, then it's your fault.
To some degree at least, right?
So this is part of the guilt, right?
Yeah, that guilt letter.
If there's no way that they're ever going to treat you with respect, dignity and openness and honesty and vulnerability and so on, then you can be guilt-free, right?
But if you have some hope that there's something you can do, some combination of words, some I don't know, jujitsu river dance that's going to break through the defenses, then the onus and obligation still accrues to you, right?
To find a way to make it happen.
But it's never going to happen.
And that releases you, right?
I don't wake up every day and say, I yearn to jump 30 feet straight into the air unaided.
I go out and keep trying because it's impossible.
So when you yearn for the impossible, it's because other people want you to feel bad for failing to achieve it.
I mean, we understand this with Christianity, right?
This idea that the thought is equal to the deed in terms of sin.
That it's an impossible standard, even if you accept the more benevolent tenets of Christianity, it's an impossible standard.
That's just designed to make you feel guilty for failing to achieve it, not because it's a genuine standard that people want you to achieve.
In fact, they make it impossible to achieve so that you will feel guilty for failing to achieve it.
Right, right.
And, you know, actually, I'd like to slow down for a second, and I'm actually feeling kind of frustrated at the moment with myself because I've noticed a bit of a flattening in the moment of my affect.
Just now, while we're talking, you mean?
While we were talking, it started when we were talking about the hope.
And I don't know if you've experienced that, but I was getting pretty deep, and then when we started talking about the hope, I experienced a flattening Of my affect.
And a bit of a...
I still feel the sadness, but there's a tringe of numbness and dissociation, so that's what I wanted to kind of stop there and pull that out, because I didn't want that to come out in.
No, that's good. That's good.
Now, it's interesting to me that you said we were talking about hope.
Right.
Because we weren't.
What were we talking about?
Thank you.
Guilt. Technically, we were not talking about hope.
We were talking about the opposite of hope.
We were saying there's no hope.
We were talking about the absence of hope, the opposite of hope.
We weren't talking about hope, right?
Right, right, right.
Exactly. That's interesting that I framed it as we were talking about hope then.
Well, it's interesting in conjunction, and this is fantastic that you're picking up on all of this.
I mean, way too RTR with yourself, bro.
Thanks. It is fascinating that you talk about hope when we're actually talking about the complete opposite of hope at the same time as your own emotional experience of yourself diminishes, right?
That indicates that something is moving in to eclipse your experience, right?
Right. Which means that...
Something is... Go on.
So you said something is probably just opposing itself on top of my own personal experience and kind of hiding it from me?
Yeah, when we...
I think we got close to it, or we did identify what was making you feel...
Sad, which is this long ago historical ache.
When we accept that our parents were not close to us when we were one or two or three years old, we accept that it's the length of that empirical experience that allows us to know for certain in the future it's not going to change, right?
Right, right. Once we get that length of non-connection, we give up hope for the future, right?
Yeah. If it hasn't happened for 20 odd years, It's not going to happen, right?
Like if a girl tries to become a ballerina and she hasn't got a single role by the time she's 35, what's going to happen?
She's going to say, you know what?
I'm never going to be a ballerina. Never.
Now, she's not going to feel that the second day she's trying to be a ballerina, or at least she's not going to feel it reasonably, but after 20 years of trying to be a ballerina, if it's never happened for her, if she's never got one call back, Right?
than to say I'm going to be a ballerina tomorrow starts to sound a little deranged, right?
Oh, did we lose him again?
Thank you.
Son of a... All right, we'll call him back.
Let's see if we can't ring another few minutes out of this somewhat inconsistent technology.
So yeah, we were just ending up, if I remember rightly, you were...
You felt a flattening of effect when we started talking about the question of hope and you characterized it as hope though I was saying that it was actually more hopelessness or an absence of hope and that we felt that that might be an eclipse or an intervention from history as to sort of keep you off that path if that makes sense.
Yes, can you explain a little more about, because you were using a ballerina before when we cut out the final time.
Right, and you said that you thought that you might have some hope for your parents, and I said that this was not your feeling, or at least in my opinion it's not your feeling, but this in fact would be your parents' feeling, because you're too intelligent and empirical a human being, To think that something is about to start happening when it hasn't happened and in fact is happening, to your knowledge, even less and less as time goes forward, that it hasn't happened for like 20 years, right?
I was using the ballerina metaphor just to point out that it doesn't seem to me empirically likely that you have hope for your parents because you have empirical and constant Experience or an empirical and constant experience of them not providing what they should provide as parents,
right? So it can't be that your hope has been generated or derived from anything within your experience and your understanding, right?
Yes, yes, that makes a ton of sense.
So if that is the case, then we have to look We still follow the benefit, right?
That's what I always say, follow the benefit.
Who benefits from you having hope in this relationship?
My parents do.
And all the... A tertiary effect, all the future bad people who could want to form future relationships with me.
Sure, yeah, for sure. But your parents aren't particularly concerned about future bad people, but only their own immediate ego gratification, I would guess.
Right. So the illusion certainly serves them, right?
And as we said, it is at your expense because if there's hope, then there must be something that you're doing that's not right, that you could be doing differently in order to achieve this better relationship, right?
Right. Yes.
Let me give you a sort of silly example, right?
If you are my coach and I'm an opera singer or I claim to be an opera singer but I have a bad voice and no sense of tone, I'm tone deaf, then there's no possibility that I'm going to be an opera star,
right? Zero. If you think that I can be an opera star, it's because I have the voice and I have the pitch, but maybe I'm just not motivated enough or maybe I just don't work quite hard enough or maybe there's some way to unlock this potential within me,
right? In other words, I have all of the necessary equipment, but it's your job as a coach to figure out why I'm not achieving what I'm achieving.
Right, right.
And it is also the case that if you were willing to invest your resources in such a difficult opera singing student, it would be because I had extraordinary potential, right?
Because there's lots of people out there who have good op voices and good pitch who will be happy to work, right?
Yeah, exactly.
So you must have a hugely high opinion of my capacities as an opera singer if you're willing to put up with my difficulties, my tantrums, my whatever, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Because with regards to your parents, there's lots of people out there who will be happy to have a relationship with you who won't be manipulative and abusive and derogatory and difficult and mess with your head all the time, right?
Yes. Yeah, exactly.
So if you say, well, as far as relationships go, if the relationship is an opera singing career, then my parents have no voice and no pitch, no sense of pitch, then clearly it's not, I mean, if I'm your opera student and I can't sing worth a damn and I get mad at you because I'm not an opera star, it's kind of ridiculous, right?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it is.
Now, if I want to retain the illusion that I can be an opera star, I'm going to want to sell you on that possibility so that you feel guilt if I don't make it, right?
Right. So you're going to put the responsibility onto the coach who's not coaching you.
It's like, hey, I can do it, but I just can't do it with you, so there's something wrong with you as a coach.
Right, exactly.
Yeah. Yeah.
Well, like you said in my first podcast a week ago, framing the responsibility to me as the bad one.
For sure, yeah. If I can be the opera star but I'm not, it's because you're a bad coach, right?
You're just not doing something.
You're telling me to do something wrong, right?
Yeah, yeah, and I'm curious if that has a lot to do with the lingering guilt I've been feeling over the week, because in this break, in between these videos, I went and took a walk, and I noticed that the feeling of flatness and the lack of affect that I was feeling was very similar to the feeling of numbness that I felt in tandem with the guilt.
So I'm curious if that...
If that was similar, if that, when we were talking about the lack of hope, if that was a very similar...
You started off this podcast by saying that there's a disparity, or if I feel guilt that I feel there's some sort of disparity, and that would make sense given if I'm If I'm able to fix them but I'm not, then that would make sense and that could be the disparity, is that maybe? Oh, for sure, yeah.
Guilt is – well, let's go back to our leveling, right?
So they've given you a whole bunch of stuff, you've received it, and now you owe them back for whatever reason and you're not paying it.
But it's based on an illusion that you were on the receiving end of people who chose to have you voluntarily as a child, right?
If I choose to – If you have a child, then I'm taking on that response.
I can't blame the child then for being ungrateful or disobedient or whatever.
I mean that's ridiculous. I'm the one who chose to have the child.
So it's based on an illusion.
Our emotions fundamentally evaporate in the presence of illusion and all we end up with is manipulation.
So if you believe that you owe your parents something and it's not true that you owe your parents something, Then you're going to feel guilt, a kind of heavy and vaguely depressing sense of obligation.
You're going to feel like it's not you who's making the decisions.
You're going to feel like you're kind of like a puppet of somebody else's and it's not your vitality, your joy that's driving your decisions and there's no greed.
There's no self-interest. There's just a heavy fantasy obligation along the lines of Jesus died for my sins, right?
Well, there was no Jesus and he sure as hell didn't die for your sins and you don't have sin.
Other than that, it's a perfect contract.
That kills people's emotional response fundamentally and I think that's the flattening because it's an illusion.
You don't owe your parents anything.
You owe them justice, I think, like you owe everybody justice, but even that's a choice, right?
Right, exactly, yeah.
Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.
Yeah, and I mean, when you say that, the emotion's coming back, but I think...
Yeah, I think that guilt is something to just explore and figure out in the ecosystem.
Because I think getting through this guilt and figuring out where it comes from will allow me, would you say, To explore my true emotions even better?
Absolutely. You don't see babies in the crib just waking up and punching themselves in the head, right?
At least I never have. Maybe in some freaked out Romanian orphanage or something.
Babies don't wake up. We don't self-attack by nature.
We self-attack because we're We're physically attacked if we don't self-attack or emotionally or verbally attacked if we don't self-attack.
So you didn't take this obligation on because you're a masochist.
You didn't take this obligation on because you just love making up obligations for yourself and you certainly didn't take this obligation on because you genuinely feel spontaneous generosity towards those who abused you.
You took this obligation on because you would be viciously attacked if you didn't pretend to.
So you internalized it like we all do because it's much more efficient, right?
Parents who are corrupt and manipulative and controlling will always sense when you're faking it.
So you have to make it real.
You have to, you know, once more with feeling, you have to sell it to your parents, right?
And so you just internalize it and that's how the infection spreads.
But this is scar tissue.
Guilt is the scar tissue of having been attacked as a child, either existentially in the form of religion or more directly in the form of parents.
But the reason that you feel guilty is because you were attacked as a child.
I mean there's some stuff that's complex about these kinds of conversations and certainly how guilt manifests and where it makes it complex.
But why we feel guilty is really quite simple.
It's just that we're attacked and we do that as a self-defense thing.
Right.
Right.
That makes a lot of sense.
Right.
Definitely rings a bell.
Yeah, so it's sort of like if your parents had broken your leg, you'd be stiff on a leg and then philosophy or psychology would be like physical rehab, right?
You'd sort of fix the leg, restore the mobility and so on, which would be painful.
But you wouldn't sit there and say, my leg is mysteriously broken.
There's something wrong with my leg.
My leg is weak. It's like, no, my parents just broke my leg and now I've got to fix it so that I can run again, right?
Right, exactly.
And I think it's just understanding those external influences because we internalize them so well and they start to feel almost like it's part of our personality that it's hard to remember that it all was just inflicted from outside and we just tried to cope with and deal with it as best we could.
Yeah, and would you say the internalization has a lot to do with why I framed it as hope rather than hopelessness?
Yeah, because your parents want you to have hope because that way you'll keep trying.
You'll keep hanging around. It's the negative economics.
They'll release you from guilt if you keep hanging around.
They don't have anything positive to offer you but they will release you from negative feelings in the short run like a drug like heroin or whatever while making it worse in the long run.
But yeah, the hope is exactly what keeps people in abusive relationships.
I mean, we're all aware of this when it comes to the woman whose husband beats her up.
Every time after he beats her up, he brings her flowers and he promises that he's never, ever, ever, ever, ever going to do it again.
He's so sorry, right? Right, right.
Exactly. Sorry there.
Can you hear that? Yes.
Oh, good. Good.
I thought, sorry, I thought I'd provoke my inner defenses.
Yeah, exactly.
No, yeah, about the abusive wife, yeah, that metaphor totally makes sense.
Yeah, once she gives up hope, she leaves the relationship, right?
But the husband wants her to continue to have hope, because as long as she has hope, he can continue to abuse her.
Right, right.
Your parents, for want of a better word, like abusing you and we know that because that's what they do.
Now we say, well, maybe they don't like it but they certainly prefer it to the alternative because anytime people do something consistently for 20 plus years, they prefer doing that, right?
Yeah. And it's not like people can have jobs that they don't like and say, well, I went to my job for 20 years but children are optional.
Working is not, right? Right.
So your parents want to keep you around.
The guy who beats up on his wife wants to keep her around so that he can continue to beat up on her.
So he's going to keep dangling the hope and, well, you pissed me off and I don't know what the problem is and fogging and all this kind of manipulative stuff to keep her disoriented, feeling guilty, down on herself, wondering what she did to cause this, trying a different approach.
Well, that didn't work. I'm feeling guilty again and fogging and nothing bad happened but he gave me flowers and he's a really nice guy.
This time is out in public. He's so charming.
He's just going to keep her in a tilt-a-whirl of confusion so that he can continue to pound on her.
Right, right.
Exactly. I mean, they want their whipping boy.
They don't want their whipping boy to go away, and so they're going to make it that you're bad for wanting to protect yourself.
Right, right.
Yeah. I'm sure they feel an intense amount of anxiety of not having me to be their whooping boy.
Sure. Well, I mean, because it raises the question then that their own conscience...
You're allied with their remnants, the remnants of their conscience, right?
Within them. And that enrages them, right?
Because they did what they did because they assumed they were going to get away with it.
That's why they get so mad at philosophy and philosophers or psychologists.
It's the same thing that when men were beaten down on their wives, they would always get mad at the feminists who would come along and say, you don't have to take that sister, come on.
So they did all of this on the expectation that they would get away with it because of course for many, many generations parents have because the whole idea is that you have to stay with your parents for the rest of your life which is complete propagandistic bullshit and so Certainly this conversation that – like at Freedom Aid Radio, you don't. I mean of course not.
It's ridiculous, right? There's no draft called biology and you don't have to stay with your parents and in fact if we want a better world and we as free marketeers think that it's important to privatize state services, isn't it also important to privatize parenting which means that it's no longer a universal monopoly, a closed shop union that you can't quit.
That is the best way to reduce the quality of something is to make it coercive and involuntary.
And so to improve the quality of families, they have to be voluntary.
That's what works in the free market, that's what works with families as well and this is how the world gets fixed.
It's brutal and there's no other way to do it.
Right, exactly, exactly.
Do you live actually on a highway?
I'm just curious about that.
Like, are you actually on a median here?
Sorry, go ahead. I'm just waiting for the truck to, you know, splat!
Imagine sleeping through this stuff.
I really can't, but then I have the sleep of a hyperactive Japanese squirrel, so, you know, I couldn't, right?
So, good for you. Right, right.
Well, it's interesting, 'cause yeah, I did kind of link it to the email as to I did kind of link it to the email as to why I was feeling the guilt, because for the first 36 hours until I got the email, I was feeling just on top of the world, like just absolute
I was walking down the street, From the coffee shop, and I just said, I'm free.
And I just started walking like there was a big spring in my steps, and there was nothing that could have stopped me.
And then I got the email, and I felt that guilt, and I tried to journal about it, and it just wouldn't go away.
And that's why after a week of that, I wanted to have this call, because it was like, Yeah.
The feelings that are ours, we should be sympathized with and we should absorb and we should accept and we should work with and so on.
But there's other stuff that's just a fuck you toxic virus that we need to fight off like an infection.
Anger is what we need for this because this is not you.
This is just scar tissue from fucked up people from your history that you had no control over and that you were subject to.
So those things you just fight off.
Like somebody comes into your apartment and wants to slap you around, you're going to fight them off, right?
And it's the same thing with these kinds of inflicted, foo, toxic guilt things.
I mean you just have to fuck you, fight them off, right?
Right. Exactly. Exactly.
And the anger, as you know, is what really gave me the strength to do what I did a week ago.
And then this guilt just kind of vanished a lot of that, or not vanished it, but eclipsed a lot of that anger.
Right. And that's what they wanted, because the anger was what freed me in the first place.
Right. And guilt is an attempt for us to, it's a story which says we have control over something we don't have control over.
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