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June 15, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:15:54
1088 Sunday Call In Show June 15 2008

The surge in Iraq, arguments for moral relativism, forgiveness as a virtue, and rising from the ashes...

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Time Text
Well, good afternoon everybody.
It's Steph and wife.
It is 4 and a bit p.m.
on the 15th of June 2008.
And I guess two wee quick topics.
Can't do it? No announcement for now?
No? No?
Do you have a hand puppet that can do it?
No? Okay. Alright, we'll hold off on that.
So... I guess the first topic is, as you may or may not have heard, the surge is working, which means that the 30,000 troops that have been shipped to Iraq have actually done a fair amount to lower, as it is supposed, the violence that, yea, has been tearing apart what used to be Mesopotamia.
And... It's very interesting, of course, how that is all being portrayed in the media.
The savage is working because I guess a year ago there was over 120 US Marines or military personnel killed in a month, and I think this last month, yay, it was only about 19.
So it is considered to be that the surge is working.
And, you know, it just took that extra $30,000 of troops that, yay, Barack Obama did rail against to get out there and bring peace or relative peace to Iraq.
Now, of course, it could be said, and of Iraq more than most other places, they made a desert and called it peace.
But... Of course, to me, with a purely amateur and semi-retarded knowledge of military affairs, the answer seems obvious.
And because it seems obvious, that usually is a good indication that it's wrong.
But I'm sure I'd throw it out there anyway, just to put it out and see what you guys think.
To me, the answer as to why the surge is working is actually quite simple.
And the reason that the surge is working is because the insurgents, al-Qaeda and so on, Have decided to stop killing Americans, and why have they decided to stop killing Americans in Iraq?
Why? Oh, why is the body count down so much?
Well, if I were And wanted to strike out an enemy.
Of course, the first thing that I would want to do is lure that enemy into range, which of course was the whole point behind 9-11, which was to get the US to, they thought, I guess, invade only Afghanistan in retaliation for 9-11.
But they got the two-for-one sandwich deal of Afghanistan and Iraq.
And so the reason that the surge is working is because...
Barack Obama, I guess, has been slated to win for quite some time.
Barack Obama wants to get the troops out as quickly as possible.
In fact, in 2007, he sponsored a bill designed to get the troops out of Iraq by the end of 2008.
And so if Barack Obama wins, which is not unlikely, then they'll take the troops out of Iraq.
And then I guess you could also say that they will take the troops to some degree out of Afghanistan, but for sure they will be out of Iraq.
Now, why, of course, would Al-Qaeda not want the American troops out of Iraq?
Well, it's a little hard to get to them at Fort Bragg, but it is relatively easy to get to them when they're all nicely packed into the sardine can of the Green Zone, where you could just lob some mortars in and kill all of the Americans that you want.
So, in my estimation, if I were running this nefarious campaign, what I would do is say, holy shit, if we keep killing all these Americans, it'll be a really great case for Barack Obama to take...
The Americans out of harm's way, and we kind of want them to be in harm's way as Al-Qaeda, so let's stop killing them, at least until the election is over and a commitment to stay, or at least until Barack Obama says, well, okay, the surge is working, so we're going to stay, and then, of course, he won't be able to do an about-face.
And say we should leave again, otherwise he'll be called a flip-flopper in the seesaw pendulum manner of John Kerry.
So they're going to stop killing Americans until the election.
This is my prediction.
And then when the election comes back, when the election is done and commitments have been made to stay in Iran, why then?
They are going to kill the Americans again.
And, of course, they want to kill enough Americans that it's very expensive for America to stay.
But they don't want to kill so many that America decides to leave.
So it's a balancing act.
But, of course, as we all know, when it comes to Iraq, America is not going to leave until it goes bankrupt.
There are already permanent bases in America.
America occupied Hawaii over 100 years ago.
Still there. America occupied the Philippines.
Hey! Still got military bases there.
Good heavens, over 60 years after defeating Japan in a thermonuclear meltdown, guess what?
America is still there.
In fact, was it about a quarter of the Okinawa landmass is devoted to American military bases?
And, of course, America gets a lot of money.
Through these service agreements, quote, service, it gets a lot of money out of these countries.
Billions of dollars paid by each of these countries, by West Germany, by Japan, by other places where America has basis.
It extracts billions of dollars out of these countries to pay for these basis.
It doesn't quite pay for them, but it makes a lot of money for the people in charge.
And so there's no question, I mean, that this follows the logic of colonialism and imperialism, which is that America will never leave Iraq until it goes bankrupt, in the same way that Neither Germany nor Holland nor France nor Italy nor England left their colonial holdings until they ran out of money and became bankrupt.
So this is the same pattern over and over again.
This is exactly what you get.
When you want a state, this is what you get every single time.
So, of course, you can't discuss this in the media.
You can't say, well, the surge is working, quote, working, because they want to make sure that American troops stay in Iraq so they can keep picking them off and breaking the back of the empire in the Mujahideen-approved way that was Charlie Wilson's war, I guess, late last millennia.
So... You can't talk about that.
You can't talk about that because what that means, of course, is that the American administration fell entirely into the trap after 9-11 by invading Islamic countries, which, of course, is exactly why 9-11 occurred.
And if the administration has seemed to be playing into the hands of Al-Qaeda while calling them the most evil organization in the world, though I still believe that their body count is far below that of even a minor government if you include things like prison, But you simply can't talk about it.
You can't talk about how the fact that America is staying there is serving the terrorists perfectly, because that blows too much mythology right out of the water.
Anyway, just thought I would mention that, and we have another topic if people are feeling shy today, but I'm sure that you're all enormously backed up.
So if you have questions or comments, we'd like to bring them up.
Oh, just before, just before we start, might I suggest the Miami tapes, which you can get at freedomainradio.com forward slash miami.html, where you get to hear what people are calling the best presentation that was ever done in the FDR environment.
And I didn't even do it.
Christina's was very popular.
Which is fine. But yeah, because you may remember the show Interrupt a Therapist, which we did for a while there.
But yeah, pick up those.
It's 25 bucks. You get almost six hours of really great RTR concepts and practice, some great role plays, and Christina's amazing presentation on husband wrangling, which was relatively short and allowed me to do a backflip, which I've never done before.
So... Give a shot at that, freedomainradio.com forward slash miami.html.
$25 only.
That was just to pay the production costs of transferring them from the original wax vinyl.
So if you'd like to drop by and pick those up.
There's also two new podcasts out there, which I would highly recommend.
The first is, let me just check the numbers here.
One thousand and...
Oh, I know this one.
Wait for it. Wait for it.
One thousand and eighty-six, one thousand and eighty-seven.
Objectivism and UPB parts one and two.
They're in the fourth feed, I guess.
So if you could, if you want to pick those up, they're all free, of course.
It's fantastic. Christina's help has been fantastic also.
And again, thank you to those who sent me back some feedback.
Up in the Diamond Plus section, there's the first section of the new book, Practical Anarchy.
We are about 80% of the way through the second draft, and then I'll put it out for the Diamond Plus people in case you wanted to have a swing at it, a swing better at it, in which case I would be happy to get some feedback from you before we go to PDF and recording.
So I feel free to have a look for that in the next couple of days.
And that's it for the news and the weather.
And so I turn it over to you, the esteemed and most magnificent and munificent listeners.
And thank you for the couple of people who signed up for the Freedom Aid Radio subscription this month.
Only, only, only, only for you today.
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Nothing! It's, what, 70 cents a day.
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And for that...
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If you apply it with a roller, it's quite a bit.
So thank you again so much for the people who are signing up and helping subsidize what we do and spread the word about philosophy.
So thank you again so much.
And for the wonderfully kind donators who have been shoveling cash at me, the Bath is almost full of gold coins and the Bath webcam is almost set up.
So for a certain amount of money, you won't get that sent to your work email.
So thank you again so much and I will talk to you soon.
As far as... Where are you taking the claim that the surge is working from?
Where am I taking that from?
Oh, this would be from the American media that they claim that the large reduction in violence that has been occurring since the surge came up is testament to the fact that the additional troops are working most well.
Yeah, I just turned off my pan, I guess, from what particular article of Because I don't know. I've read different things, but I haven't really been keeping up on it lately.
So, like, I mean, in the past month, I really haven't read anything.
So I was just wondering where you'd read it.
Oh, I had read it in, and I can dig this up and post it on the board, but where I was getting this reference from was a Maclean's article, which is a Canadian magazine, but it was quoting a lot of U.S. sources.
And the statistics are pretty impressive in terms of a very large reduction in the number of U.S. casualties since a month or two after the surge started.
Okay. One thing that they've actually been doing is blocking off neighborhoods with cement walls and paying people to not fight, basically.
Just sending money to them en masse, rather than go out on more patrols, stuff like that.
So it's interesting that they've just shifted the violence more towards the taxpayers than the Iraqis themselves, and they've found that to be more successful.
Oh, yeah. No, that certainly is true that bribery has taken the place of battle.
But nonetheless, I mean, all that, of course, is going to do is give them more money to buy weapons to continue to fight, right?
Yeah. But doesn't that also damage the economy further?
Because you're paying people not to work, and now you have a generation of young people growing up Without any sense of, I guess, going out for a job.
They just think they get a check from the government to basically sit around with guns.
Well, sure, but I don't know that they have much of an economy as a whole.
I think that their economic activity is largely delegated to selling firewood and fruit as far as I can see.
I don't think that they – I mean the oil is still not being produced.
So I think that their economy is pretty much shot.
And of course, so many millions of Iraqis have fled the country and those tend to be the ones who have the most mobile assets.
It's in other words the rich and the professionals whose assets are learning and skills.
So trying to lure those people back is going to be really tough.
I think most of them have either wedged their way into some other Islamic country or in that kind of null zone between countries in the 10 cities.
So I mean the cost to human capital, I mean let alone people like deaths and the cost to capital equipment.
But the cost to human capital is simply staggering and will go on for generations without a doubt.
Doesn't this create a feedback loop for the government that – this has worked well for them, drawing more money from the taxpayers instead of – and just using it directly in Iraq.
And it's been also keeping it out of the news pages now.
so there's been less criticism of the Democrats about the war.
I guess they've just been focusing on the election, really.
And when you say the government, do you mean the American government?
Yes, I do. Well, I don't know that the current American government, being largely Republican, would have a big incentive to keep criticism of Democrats out of the war.
But for sure, during this time of transition, the question comes up, you know, the clash song does come up, right?
Should we stay or should we go?
And certainly the military-industrial complex is going to find it to be a very good investment to pay off Thank you.
Thank you. Yeah,
well, yeah, that's what I would expect, because they're not having to deal with nearly as much criticism now, and they're still able to send out all that money and keep all these, I guess, military jobs going in their home states.
So I just don't see it ending anytime soon.
I don't think that they really have that impetus anymore.
No, it won't end until the money runs out.
And I think that's been evident for some years.
Imperialism never ends until the money runs out.
I mean, that's true of Romans, the Greeks, the Peloponnesians, the countries, the European powers that I mentioned earlier, all the Asiatic powers, the Austro-Hungarian.
It never ends until the money runs out, for sure.
Do you think that will make it more apparent that the political process is useless for ending wars?
Or do you think it's just going to stay this way?
I mean, in the way that people approach, I guess, anti-war thinking, agitation, whatever.
Do you think that it's...
Well, I spend a lot of time on war in the new book, and this is just a plug for the book, which is a ridiculous thing to do because it's free.
But if this book works, and I don't mean my contributions, but the contributions of people who distribute it and who may be able to come up with great ideas to add to it and so on.
But if this book works over the long run and if the theories that are presented in the book are true, practical anarchy, then we as a group have done the greatest possible good for the planet that any group could conceivably provide.
Because if war is dependent upon statism and anarchy is the cure for war, and not to mention all the otherills, but even if we just talk about war and democide, the murder of citizens by their governments, then saving millions of people's lives a year – more, then saving millions of people's lives a year – more, in fact, but let's just tens of millions of people's lives – That's about as good as you can get.
I mean, that's the cure for cancer, right?
If you can cure war, it's actually better than a cure for cancer because war is not a lifestyle choice, but a lot of cancers are related to lifestyle choices.
And that's why, again, I mean, I would hugely thank the donators and the subscribers and Christina, of course, and the people who are giving me feedback to make this thing as good as possible because if we're right, then we have, as a relatively small and committed group, created...
The solution for the end of war, right?
This is the swords into Plowshares Tome, which we can provide for free as a gift to the world.
There's nothing better that I can do with my time.
I suspect that there's nothing better than any of us can do with our time than to put these thoughts together, to put them out there and start to create a permanent cure for the ultimate plague, which is war.
So... I think that we will win over time, but of course the problem is that people psychologically have an avoidance mechanism with regards to their governments.
And what that means is that everybody knows that they're powerless with regards to the state.
But nobody wants to actually experience that emotionally because it's really painful to experience the helplessness and the power, the feeling of subjugation that occurs to all of us when we realize that we're just a bunch of fucking tax livestock for people to milk and grind up into meat as they see fit.
That is an incredibly humiliating experience to go through.
And people avoid that.
I mean, who would want to feel humiliated when you could choose to feel hysterical and patriotic instead?
And who would want to choose the isolation of recognizing the reality of the power structure that we live in when you can go to rallies and watch all the pretty balloons float to the sky?
So, where real helplessness exists with the state, people will simply avoid trying to change the state in that way.
You don't see people marching about welfare anymore unless it's threatened to be cut.
Because they just know it's completely out of their control what the government is going to do in terms of the welfare state.
And it's the same thing with the military-industrial complex.
You'll see a couple of parades, but people don't really try and change it because they know they can't.
It's the same thing with public schools as I talked about in a podcast about Dr. Phil about 18 months ago.
People will just automatically avoid where they have no control to avoid experiencing the humiliation.
And thus, as I talk about in the recent podcast, the barrier to truth is psychological, not syllogistical.
So, sorry. Yeah, we will win, but it's going to take time and it's going to take some psychological wrangling for sure.
Yeah, I was going to say that it sounds like a very effective tactic, especially with people who are against the war, but like you mentioned earlier with marchers and stuff like that, I feel like a lot of anti-war people have an investment in not getting anything accomplished and just spinning their wheels.
Well, sorry, I don't think that's the case.
What they're doing is they're avoiding the reality that they can't get a goddamn thing accomplished, except by becoming an anarchist, which creates a great deal of social cost for them, right?
It's the show of conscience.
It's the pious show of conscience that I wore a death mask and carried a sign and therefore I did something effective about the war.
But what you really need to do to do something effective about a war is to use the against me argument with the people in your life.
Do you support the use of violence against me?
Nothing else is going to achieve a goddamn thing until we push the moral evil of the state forward as a topic that we're willing to live by, our opposition to violence, that we will not have people in our lives who consistently and persistently support the use of violence against us.
That's called taking the non-aggression principle seriously and marching with a goddamn sign and wearing a death mask is a complete show.
It's a kabuki theater for your conscience.
It has nothing to do with actually ending the war.
I don't mean you, of course.
You're the one! No, I mean, I've always thought that way because stuff always really bothered me.
And it really did strike me as they're just doing it for fun.
It doesn't seem like it has any particular...
It's certainly not effective, at least, besides for that.
Yeah, plus what I hear, you know, is that the anti-war chicks, like the animal rights chicks and some of the environmental chicks, totally easy.
That's what I hear. So, I think it's around the make love, not war thing.
Just kidding. I have no idea.
But... But there's got to be some reason other than, you know, it's a communal thing, it's a conscience thing, maybe it's a good way to score dope, I don't know.
But it's got nothing to do with actually ending the war, because that involves bringing the reality of violence, the reality of the dedication of violence in the people around you, to their own forefront, to their own knowledge, because the state is just a concept.
Therefore it exists in people's minds and has to be confronted there, not on the streets.
Don't they in a very real way support the continuation of war, I mean by their actions, by creating an illusion that things could be changed if just more people walked on the streets, if just more people, I guess, wrote about war or something like that?
Oh sure, it's like the voters, right?
Like if nobody votes, then we give up on the illusion that we can control the state, right?
So everybody who votes is voting to continue a system by pretending that it can be controlled when it can't be, right?
Yep. Oh, wait.
Did you hear me? Sorry. You said yes.
Yes. Okay. Damn it.
That was so emphatic. I was waiting for the thunderclap of something else.
Nope. Nope. I'm pretty tapped out.
Yeah. All right. Well, thanks, man.
Appreciate it.
Who's up next?
I thought that Astragal had some questions to ask earlier. - Thank you.
Yeah, he's typing in the chat window.
I mean, it's hard to find them.
It's in a whole stream of stuff, and I'm not sure exactly where...
Christina, can you see where it starts?
He doesn't have a microphone, no?
I'm here. I'm sorry?
I'm here. Oh, excellent.
Great. Okay, good. Sorry, that's just trying to find it in the chat window.
It's not so easy, so speak on, my friend.
Well, I believe when we were talking, I was waffling on about the nature of truth, and you decided that the conversation could go on for days, which is a slightly conservative estimate,
in my opinion. Yeah, if I remember rightly, and correct me if I'm wrong, of course, but your perspective or opinion was, or claim, was that truth, there's no such thing as ethics in an objective truth sense, but if enough people believe in a certain ethical system for long enough, it turns into a premise?
I can't remember the word you used.
It was a P word for sure.
That's kind of it.
It's not that I don't believe in ethics.
I do believe in ethics, like medical ethics, for example, or an ethical stance against abortion or whatever.
There are ethical codes.
What I believe is that the ethics themselves are pretty much in direct opposite to what you believe from what I've read of UFP. I'm about 40, 50 pages in at the moment.
Is that they are entirely subjective, and they are pretty much value judgments built up by people over time.
So it's sort of a collective set of hardened opinions, or time-hardened opinions, is that right?
Yeah, it's an honor code, if you will.
Like, for example, chivalry is a collection of...
Moderately random, self-consistent rules that became the ethics of the day for the right social class.
To act in a chivalric manner is deemed to be ethical, to behave in an unchivalric way is deemed to be unethical.
The examples you use of the universal prescription against murder, the universal prescription against rape, and the universal prescription against theft, They're all pretty hard and fast, although murder is certainly the least concrete of those, to my opinions. There's lots of ethical murders out there.
17th, 18th century France, absolutely chock-block full of, well, Germany as well, most of the continent, chock-a-block full of dueling.
Which are matters of honour, where you march out onto the heath in the morning, take six paces and turn around and shoot each other on matters of decorum and manners.
Those were entirely ethical murders.
And sorry, I just want to make sure I understand what you mean by ethical murders.
You mean murders that were considered to be virtuous because they were justified by a commonly accepted ethical code, is that right?
Yeah, pretty much. I'm a bit...
Basically, one of the working definitions I have for a moral decision is not strictly speaking what I believe, but it's what I use as a classification.
For a moral decision. A moral decision is a decision that's been measured against some value system that's deemed to be a moral code.
So for example, if you examine your actions against a moral code and decide on the basis of that moral code whether your action is right or wrong and act in accordance with that moral code, then you're acting morally.
Right, and that moral code, just to play devil's advocate, right?
I mean, that moral code could include Nazism, right?
Yeah, sure. I mean, it is a good Nazi acting immorally.
From a subjective point of view, from our subjective stance of morals or our aesthetic choice of morals or whatever particular buzzword you want to use to differentiate between the two of them, we can say that they are categorically immoral.
But to the Nazi in question who is measuring his decisions against the moral code of Nazism, he's acting entirely morally.
Sure, absolutely.
I mean according to the way that you look at ethics, it's just conformity with a standard of making decisions and that standard of making decisions has no objective relation to an objective set of ethics.
It's just what is commonly accepted in that environment, right?
Yeah. Pretty much, yeah.
In fact, yes.
Yes. Now, is it your opinion that there's no such thing as objective morality, or is it an objective fact that there is no such thing as objective morality?
In other words, is it your opinion like you like ice cream or something, or is it an objective fact like ice cream contains milk?
Well, funnily enough, I'm a bit of a semantic whore.
Not all ice cream contains milk.
Okay, but you know, whatever, you know, gases expand when heated, you know, whatever it is that we want to put out there as a fact.
Is it your opinion that there's no such thing as objective ethics or is it a fact, an objective and universal fact that there's no such thing as objective ethics?
I can't really answer that as one question.
Is there such a thing as an objective ethic?
No, no, no, sorry. The question is, is there such a thing as an objective fact?
In other words, is it an objective fact that ethical systems are subjective?
Right, okay. There you're dealing with the base assumption of science, that facts are verifiable.
Right, and do you believe that facts are verifiable?
I believe in the assumption that facts are verifiable.
I can't, however, prove it.
You can't prove that facts are verifiable.
Is that right? No. Yeah, I can't prove it.
And again, the assumption that facts are verifiable.
I mean, there's a reason that scientific methodology is based on the assumption that facts are verifiable.
Because if you dogmatically state that facts are verifiable, then you lose the ability to falsify that particular statement.
And if you can't falsify a statement, it doesn't qualify as science.
Well, I don't think it's quite so self-referential insofar as facts are verifiable according to the scientific method.
Thank you.
Well, yeah, but again, it's classically written as the assumption that...
I'm not sure what you mean by classically written.
Do you mean that it's not true that facts are verifiable through the scientific method?
Well, certainly from the very limited scientific training I've had, which is extraordinarily limited, most of my knowledge comes from talking with people who study these subjects.
I am a person of very, very low education insofar as...
Following a standard educational route goes.
I left school at 15, I have no civilian qualifications whatsoever.
Everything I've learned, I've learned through associating with a variety of students, my friends, for 20 years and talking with them for hours and hours and hours and hours on end about their subjects.
I've got a general grasp on a wide array of things, but I know next to the fact.
I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I appreciate what you're saying.
I wasn't asking you for a resume, though, and I'm not trying to pin you down.
I'm just trying to, you know, if I don't understand where you're coming from in terms of truth statements, it's hard to move forward.
Is it your contention that you do not believe that it is a fact that the scientific method can establish facts?
Okay. Okay, I'll answer that as simply as I'm able.
I don't believe it's possible to categorically state that you can verify facts.
I believe it is basically an assumption that you can verify a fact.
Okay, sorry, sorry. Now, just a sec.
Can I just finish?
However, I live my life...
In accordance with a belief, or if you like, a faith, that the scientific method is essentially the most valid way of looking at reality.
I believe in gravity.
I believe in evolution.
I believe in science.
I essentially believe that facts are verifiable.
I just think from...
I don't know, from a...
A standpoint of rigor when looking at the universe, it just seems important to me to just not take that step from the assumption that facts are verifiable and therefore everything that science says is categorically true.
Right, okay, I understand.
So your assertion is that we can't prove absolute knowledge that science is valid, right?
Yes. Just in that we can't categorically state that God does not exist because you can't prove a negative.
Well, to me that's not quite true, but we can talk about that perhaps later.
So what you mean is that there's another kind of knowledge that you haven't talked about yet.
Because if you say that we can't know for sure that science can provide valid information, and you believe that to be a categorically true statement, right?
Yes. So, therefore, there must be some other way...
No, I wouldn't say...
Sorry, let me finish.
Because you said that science cannot provide categorical or true answers or validate information in a categorically true way.
And what that means is that there must be another standard of truth that is bigger than science that allows you to make the kinds of categorical statements about science that science can't make about the universe, right?
In other words, you say that science can't provide truth, but you're saying that as a true statement, which means there's something outside science that allows you to compare science to something else and say that science is not true.
No, I'm saying all I have to work on are my assumptions.
I'm not saying there is categorically something outside bigger than science that will explain science fundamentally.
So it's not categorically true that science cannot provide categorical truth?
No. I can't prove that either.
Is there anything that you believe is true?
is true.
The flippant answer would be righteous indignation.
Okay, and if we were non-flippant?
Because this is serious stuff, right?
I mean, philosophy is all around what is true, and if there's no such thing as truth, then philosophy is just a con job, right?
Well, no. What I mean by that is if there's no cure for cancer, and I'm selling a cure for cancer, then I'm a con man, right?
And if there's no such thing as truth, and I talk about truth in philosophical terms, and I'm not offended, right, but this just would be a natural consequence, right, that I would be a con man.
Yeah, sure, but I don't think it's necessarily safe to say that the only battles that are worth fighting are the ones we can ultimately win.
Okay, but if we could just get back to – if you could tell me if there is anything that you can say is true.
I think the closest I could get, and I am a little bit fuzzy even on Descartes' pretty much categorically true statement of I think therefore I am.
That's probably one of the tougher ones to get around.
But even so, I can kind of vaguely rationalize the idea of the fact that I might be a delusion in the way somebody who thinks he's Napoleon is delusional.
Right, so if I don't exist, then you're arguing with a phantom within your own mind, right?
Sure.
Sure.
Well, sorry, don't say sure as if I'm making something up.
I want to understand what it is that you mean.
No, no, I'm saying sure, yes, I agree with that statement, yes.
There is no way for me to ascertain, really, in any way I can validate that you exist.
Okay, now, sorry, let me just ask you about something that you mentioned earlier, and I'm just trying to sort of map the sort of radical Cartesian skepticism that you have going on, which is fine.
I just want to make sure I understand it.
But you said earlier that you cannot say that there's no such thing as a God because you cannot prove a negative.
Now, is that an absolute statement or can you possibly prove a negative?
Well, I think given the right level of evidence, you can prove it.
This is good.
This is good. Because I'm trying to find something firm that we can build something on, right?
So you say that it is possible to prove a negative and to achieve certain knowledge about something, right?
Well, I'm saying given the right level of evidence, I'm not...
No, no, I understand. I understand.
I'm not saying we make it up, right?
But it is possible...
I just want to state, though, that I'm not entirely sure that you could actually reach that level of evidential criticality to actually get to the point where I could actually 100% accept it.
So it's not for sure that you cannot prove a negative?
It's not – no, it's not for sure.
I can't really – ultimately, like I said, this is pretty much a sort of philosophical approach to looking at the way I look at – Oh, no.
It's not a philosophical approach at all, what you're doing, just technically.
But let me ask you this.
Is it for sure that it is not for sure that you cannot prove a negative?
It's not for sure that it's not for sure that it's sure – there is no sure about any statement that I make.
And are you sure that there's no sureness about any statement?
No. Of course I'm not sure.
So you can't say that, right? Yes, I very much can.
I can be very much – You can't say that there's no such thing as certainty because then you're making a certain statement.
Well, yeah, but that to me… Come on, come on, come on.
You've got to give me that one, right?
Because this is by your own definition, right?
I mean, I don't mind giving you all this other skepticism for sure because there's lots to be skeptical about in the world.
But if you say we can't know anything for certain, that's a self-detonating statement, right?
Because then you're certain that we can't know anything for certain.
You've already created an exception to your own rule.
Well, yeah, but I can't be sure that I'm writing my assertion.
But you can't be sure that you can't be sure if you're writing your assertion.
Anytime that you make a positive statement about anything, you're wrong by your own definition, right?
No, I may be wrong.
Well, sure, but that means that you can't make any positive statement about anything, right?
No, but I can sure as hell make a lot of negative ones.
Oh, no question. I'm with you on the negative stuff.
I mean, I'm swimming in it, brother.
I can totally get the negative stuff, right?
But I think that that's a real challenge for you, right?
Because the one thing that I always suggest to people is you need to try and live your philosophy, not just keep it in an abstract corner of your mind.
So I think that it would be very interesting for you to try and go through one day without making a single positive claim for truth.
Because that's not what you were doing earlier in the chat window, and that's not what you were doing earlier in this conversation.
In fact, and I don't criticize this, I'm just pointing it out.
If you listen or when you listen back to this conversation, which is recorded and will be put out as a podcast, I think if you go through, you will find that you've made 50 to 100 positive truth statements that were not ambiguous.
So I don't think your philosophy can actually be practiced.
Yeah, I'll make more as well.
It's the thing though, that if you're not able or willing to practice your own philosophy, doesn't that cause a problem in terms of credibility?
Again, it's not really the philosophy by which I live.
Well, then why do you advance it if it's not how you live?
Well, I'm not – well, I'm discussing it.
No, no, no, no, no.
You're not discussing it.
Earlier in the chat room and today – I'm not being critical.
I'm just pointing out, right? Earlier in the chat window and today, you put forward positive truth claims that now you say are impossible to practice.
I'm just – and I'm trying to free you from this uncertainty because I don't think it's philosophically or logically valid.
The Cartesian demon thesis that we're in the, you know, we could be a brain in a tank or in a matrix.
Yeah, the planet could turn into a cheeseburger at any second.
I'm sorry? The planet could turn into a cheeseburger at any second.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, nobody can live like that, and nobody can live without making positive statements about truth.
For instance, you obviously are accepting that I exist to some degree, or you wouldn't be debating with me.
You accept that words have meaning.
You accept that the internet works.
You accept that thought can be translated into sound and transmitted effectively.
You are accepting the validity of my ears as a sense organ.
Every single thing that is to do with our interaction requires an absolute acceptance of an objective and truthful reality.
And what I'm saying is that if that's how you're living, why not just believe that?
Because there's no evidence whatsoever to the thesis that we're a brain in a tank or whatever.
You could say, well, what if the universe is expanding by twice its size every millisecond and everything else remains its nonsense?
Because there's no criteria for disproof.
And where there's no criteria for proof or disproof, there's no intellectual content in the thesis whatsoever.
I might as well be saying, you know, flim flam with the ole for tang for tang biscuit barrel.
Is that true or false? People say, well, I don't know.
It doesn't make any sense, right?
So that, I mean, why I'm talking to you in such depth about this is that I think it would actually be better and healthier for you and, as a philosopher, I say much healthier to the planet because you're obviously a very intelligent and verbal person with a great degree of reasoning and language capacities.
I think that you should take these gifts and work to spread truth and reality in the world, not skepticism and subjectivism, which I think is unhealthy for you and for the world as a whole.
Sorry, when you say Nazism is just another lifestyle choice, personally, I don't think that you're adding to your own virtue or to the virtue of the world because it's not.
I didn't make a value judgment on Nazism.
I know, but you should make a value judgment on Nazism.
Well, okay, I will.
It's abhorrent and wrong.
But you don't have any philosophical backup for that, right?
No, I've got my own personal prejudices.
I'm sorry? No. I've got my own personal prejudices and aesthetic...
Yeah, but you hate Nazis the way that Nazis hate Jews.
It's just another kind of... No.
No, I don't hate Nazis.
Okay, you should, in my opinion, but as a moral philosopher, I think that it's important for us to try and reach for clarity, not to reject a lot of fog, because certainty causes problems, logically.
And I don't want to keep pounding on you on this.
I mean, either you'll accept or listen to what I'm saying or not, but do keep plowing on through UPB, which I think has...
Some good arguments as to the objectivity of ethics.
But your position is completely logically unsustainable.
I mean, just technically, professionally, as a philosopher, you can't say that there's no such thing as certainty.
It's absolutely unsustainable.
It's like being a mathematician and saying that there's no such thing as numbers and 2 plus 2 equals blue.
It's just an incomprehensible position to have.
Well, yeah, but maths is a special case in point.
Maths is one of the cases where you absolutely can, and I believe you absolutely can.
In fact, there you go, there's an example somewhere I think you can.
Hey, look, we have certain knowledge and you're not a relativist.
How fantastic. That's wonderful.
Well, the thing is you can make an absolutely true statement in maths because maths is entirely self-defined by humans.
Oh, good heavens. No, that's not true at all.
No, I mean, maths represents the discrete objects within the world, right?
Sure, well, no, maths is used to model discrete objects.
No, but it's derived from the fact that there are discrete instances of things in the world.
So the fact that there are two rocks on the road means I can point and say, look, two rocks, and I'm actually conceptually organizing the discrete instances of things in the world.
Maths arose because of physics and the nature of reality that it splits into separate things which can be conceptually aggregated and counted.
Sure. Yeah, yeah, sure. Again, I accept all of that.
Math is a very rugged structure.
Well, thank you. Look, I want to make sure that we have time for other people to talk.
I certainly do appreciate you coming by, and you do have a very exciting and challenging perspective.
And I certainly do appreciate the debate, but I do want to move on.
Have a listen to this, though, and see whether or not you can't swing yourself around to get behind the absolute statements that you make, which I actually think are very good and healthy.
And I just don't think it's great to have a theoretical underpinning that is completely the opposite of how you live and speak, because I just think that causes psychological confusion and upset within you and a kind of destabilization.
But that's total opinion, right?
So, I mean, that's just my perspective.
But I certainly do appreciate the chat.
And do let me know if you have a chance to listen to this, how many absolute statements you can count, because on the receiving end, it's quite fascinating.
And I can totally understand the problems of objectivity and philosophy.
I mean, I've been wrestling with them for decades, but I think they can be solved, and I hope that you'll plow on through UPB to see if I've managed to do it.
Can I just make a couple of closing statements?
Of course, yeah. Just no absolute ones.
Just kidding. Well, first of all, to address Matt K, who said that I don't hate Nazis, I just want to make it categorically clear that I don't hate anybody.
Nobody. Hate is just a poison.
If you let yourself hate anything, then there's no end to it.
An eye for an eye just leaves a world full of blind people.
And essentially what I think, the philosophical stance I take of skepticism is kind of a buffer between me and that kind of bigotry.
If I kind of work on the premise that I can't disprove God or categorically prove this, that, or the other, then I can't really just say that you're being ignorant for believing what you believe.
It means that I have to kind of consider the point of views of others, even people I consider to be nuts, bonkers, or evil.
Because I really don't like the idea of, like, Categorical evil.
No, I don't hate hate.
I understand hate yeah it's more an intellectual exercise but I live in the real world I know that falling down hurts.
I know that rocks can kill me.
And yeah, I guess that's kind of enough for my...
Okay, got it.
No, I do appreciate that.
It's a challenging position to hold.
I hope that you will at least be open to the possibility of being wooed out of it.
And I certainly do appreciate the tenacity with which you held your position and argued for it, in my opinion, most excellently.
So thank you so much for taking the time to call in.
And I hope that you enjoy the books.
And if somebody else has another comment or question, we have time for one or two more.
I'm going to be reproducing this fine gentleman's accent for the rest of the show, just to mess with people's heads.
Because we are one. Sorry, go on.
Yes, I love the Scots.
Anyway... Hey, hypnosis!
I'm so sorry that we've been missing each other left, right, and center on Skype, but I'm all ears.
All right, well, I still want to make that appointment for later, but I just couldn't...
I did have a question in mind when I first hooked up, but now that...
The gentleman has thrown the bumper sticker in my face again.
I'm going to have to respond to that.
Oh, sorry. Just for those who've just joined us, for those who are listening later, this is exactly what is meant by hooking up over the Internet.
So I just want to clarify that, and please continue.
You've called me out!
No, the bumper sticker, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
It's a perfect example of that kind of moral blindness, to use the word.
An eye for an eye was actually, if you look back in history, was the response to the procedure of the world beforehand where if someone did you wrong, You would then, you know,
not only would you do them wrong, you'd murder their family, you'd burn down their farms, you'd slaughter the village, you know, I mean, things really got nasty back in those days, and it was King Hammurabi who said, well, wait a second, hold it, hold it, hold it, I'm going to run out of people here in my kingdom.
The punishment should fit the crime.
Eye for an eye means that if someone does you harm, They are morally obligated to give up an equivalent harm to you.
Now, obviously, an eye for an eye literally does not make up for a harm, but the point was that the punishment should fit the crime, but the real point behind that was only if someone aggresses against you do this rule come into play.
So, for the whole world to be blind, that means at least half the world must be involved in aggression.
And I don't think that's the case.
So, I really dislike this mischaracterization of a concept of justice being twisted into, well, you can't hate anybody, you know.
Well, I agree. There is a real logical challenge, of course.
I mean, logical impossibility in the statement that nothing is wrong but hatred.
Nothing is bad but hatred.
Nothing is negative but hatred because, of course— Oh, no, I agree.
I agree with you. And I don't mean you're making this point, but I just sort of pointed out.
Then to say that Nazis are not wrong, but of course Nazis hate a lot of people, and if hatred is bad, then Nazis must be bad, and if nothing is bad, then hatred is not bad.
So, you know, people just tie themselves up in knots with this hyper-Buddhistic kind of open-mindedness.
It just doesn't work logically much, though.
We'd like to live in a world where all of that were true, but sorry, go ahead.
I thought I was helping make that point, but yes, I totally agree.
That's the issue.
It's a logical fallacy because if you think it through, it's obviously self-detonating.
I love that phrase of yours.
It's perfect. It was just that eye for an eye thing that tripped me up first.
I was actually calling to...
I have not heard you respond in any forum that I've listened to, maybe I've missed something in a chat room or something, to the situation in Texas with the fundamentalist Mormons and the government seizure of their families and property.
Do you have any views on that, or is that something you'd rather just stay away from?
No, I mean, I don't have any particularly strong views on it.
I certainly don't agree with children being raised In this kind of religious cult, but of course it is rather odd to me that the government will fund religious schools from mainstream religions, but they will go in and take the children away from less mainstream religions.
Logically, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
If you look at the doctrines that were being taught in that compound, they are mainstream Christian religious tenets.
And so...
To me, it's just another example of hypocrisy, and I don't know, of course, what happened behind the scenes, why this should be allowed to continue, versus something like Mormonism, but it could be that they were evading taxes, It could be that they pissed off someone in power.
It could be that other religions were scared of their growth.
But it certainly doesn't have anything to do with protecting children from psychological damage or harm because if that were the case, then religious schools as a whole would be shut down because what was being taught to these kids was pretty much the same as what's being taught in many religious schools.
Now, as far as things like polygamy goes, I mean, who cares, right?
As far as the child rape goes, yes, we care.
And to the degree that children are removed from an environment where they're going to be sexually exploited and impregnated at the age of 14 or 15, you know, there's not a lot of things that I will thank the state for doing because I oppose it on principle.
But if it takes armed people to go in and pull children out of that kind of sexual exploitation situation, I'm okay with that myself because they can't protect themselves.
and the sexual exploitation of children is one of the greatest evils on the planet.
So that's my perspective for what it's worth.
It's not particularly well thought out, and I don't know a huge number of details about this situation, but those are my thoughts for what it's worth.
No, and my view is very, very much the same in the fact that I would – I like the idea of having a free market situation where people who were perceived to be at risk by neighbors could act directly and then of course be answerable to their own actions if it turns out that they were incorrect or they acted in such a manner that violated the other person's rights as well.
Before you have a true marketplace of action, you're always going to have these mixed situations where, yeah, a good is being done, but the manner in which it is being done is very evil and costly.
But I just had never heard you even speak about it, so I just wondered if you had any thoughts on it.
Right. And I mean, of course, when it comes to, you know, well, the indoctrination of children, of course, particularly in the south of the United States, where the veneration for the military is completely hysterical, and the patriotism is sort of heavily armed, don't mess with Texas.
Gunboat patriotism is so extraordinarily high that, of course, that actually causes far more deaths, rapes, murders, and child abuse in the world.
Having a military in dozens or hundreds of countries around the world, 800 plus military bases, that's all supported, of course, by propaganda in the schools about the justice and heroism and nobility of the American military.
But of course that is something which the government isn't going to touch.
That propaganda is far worse than the propaganda that is inflicted upon the children in religious cults because at least those children don't end up having armies with nukes.
So again, it's a gang.
It's a turf war.
That's all I assume that it is.
And some children may end up being protected as a result of this turf war.
But that's all I assume it is.
Just one mafia gang got too big and had to be smacked down.
Yeah, the turf war, that's a good look at it.
As Mark Stevens says, if the government was all about protecting your life, liberty, and property, they wouldn't be the first ones to take it.
Yeah, I wonder what's happening with old Mark Stevens.
I haven't heard from him in a while.
I was supposed to be on every month, but I think after the last convo with the Ron Paul and religious stuff, I might be on the back burner for a while.
Who knows? We'll see.
I'll have to give him a ring next week.
I appreciate the opportunity to talk and I think that this conversation is probably the sanest and most rational around and is doing the most good.
I can only say good things and I hope my subscription donations are coming back in because I hadn't heard anything back No, I hugely appreciate that.
The Opnosis Jones statue in the Red Room receives lots of kisses and the occasional hump, so I certainly do appreciate your donations and support that way.
And that's the new banner, actually.
FDR entering its third year and still not nuts!
That's what we're going for.
Because I know that there have been some skeptics on the planet that we would make it this far.
But, you know, year three!
Still not mad! I think that's going to be tattooed on the forehead.
I guess I'll need a little rotating number or LED thing for next year.
No, I think that's so vitally important.
It's a test of a methodology to keep things on course without going off onto weird, you know, impossible missions and undoable things that most groups do.
The friends that I have when I was attached to conservative groups, it's painful to talk to these people because it's like, You know, there's so much they understand that's right.
There's a guy, I think I posted something on the board last week from a guy named Bill Whittle, who runs a website called Eject, Eject, Eject.
And on his homepage, he used to have a statement, which he's taken down because he's redesigned the page, which I really like.
It says, All those qualities in your fellow man that you thought were there, all those good qualities in your fellow man are all true.
I mean, this man is an amazing pastiche of absolute wisdom and just complete missing the point.
And it's like, my interest is, how do we engage these people who understand so much of the truth about the free market?
I mean, I listen...
He recently posted a radio interview on there, and it's a guy with such a brilliant mind, and yet it's all about how America's military is right.
And it's like, well, yeah, but you're missing something here, Bill.
Well, I don't know about this guy in particular, but it's been a topic around here more in the sort of Diamond Plus area.
I mean, you know, the political and religious libertarians have never been particularly comfortable with free domain radio.
I mean... Lord knows the feeling is mutual, so it's not – it's not nothing to take offense at.
But this aspect of what we do – I mean it's interesting because I do get regularly criticisms from more – I wouldn't say established libertarians but people who have been around the libertarian movement longer sort of saying, Steph, why are you doing all the psychological stuff?
Why are you doing all the family stuff?
Stick to the economics.
Stick to the philosophy.
Stick to that stuff, right? The stuff that hasn't worked in 40, 50, 60, 70 years, you mean?
Yeah, or if you count Socrates, 2,500, right?
But the funny thing is that when I say to them, I say, you're a fan of the free market.
Yes, I'm a fan of the free market.
It's like, well... My listeners want to talk about it.
I mean, they want to talk about how philosophy applies to their personal lives as well as stuff in the abstract and this and that.
So, you know, call me crazy for following market demand, but I don't get to dictate topics to my listeners.
I don't get to know – no one who's really lived in the free market and it takes a real academic to say you should just do something different to somebody who's really embedded in the free market.
It's like the free market is – there's no boss, right?
So the idea that I can somehow dictate topics to my listeners and say, well, I know that you people really want to talk about the family.
But no! We're going to go into another analysis of how federal reserve policy drives up the inflation on the dollar.
Then what would happen?
Well, if you've been in the free market, you know exactly what would happen, is that people would stop listening to me, because there's only so many times you can say, Fed is bad, government is bad, force is bad, right?
I mean, you have to actually start to dig into, if you want to keep listenership and keep people engaged, dig into other topics that are more actionable.
Because, of course, when you start talking about personal issues in a philosophy show, what happens is you get a beautiful enhancing, escalating feedback loop.
Because we're not going to turn over the Fed, so we can keep talking about the Fed until we're dead.
And nothing's going to change.
We just say the same things. Or the Fed's going to do something new.
Ooh, that's bad, right?
But when you start to bring philosophy into your personal life, we are actually out there doing stuff.
And so there's a feedback loop where we tried this and this is what happened.
And we can re-inform the discussion, right?
So that's why it stays vital.
So to me, it's just interesting.
This is just sort of by the by, right?
That the political and religious libertarians have some problems with this conversation because we talk about personal topics, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable and so on.
But the idea that I'm somehow responsible for this or leading this is, I mean, you just have to not be in the free market to think that.
I just always think that's kind of an interesting topic.
It's just what people like to talk about.
Well, I can just tell you from personal experience that I've been a libertarian for over 20 years, and I have had almost zero influence on the world, the government, the size of the Federal Reserve, inflation, etc., etc., etc., and it's only when I started to apply free domain radio ideas to my life I've had some real, real personal change.
I have my life back now thanks to applying what you have shared with us.
Yes, but that's only this life.
We don't know about the next one, remember.
Sorry, that's an in-joke for those who've been listening to these call-in shows for quite some time.
Just search for Theosophist.
Anyway, sorry, go on. I'm busy.
Also, I've been working on trying to expunge the remnants of Scientology from my psyche.
I think Metamucil can help with that.
I'm taking great pleasure in watching that whole fraud slowly dissolving under the pressure of the Internet.
I think the internet is the salvation of humanity.
The idea that...
And in fact, Bill Whittle, in this interview, he points this out.
He says, you know, the difference between now and all the times in the past is because ordinary people could not talk to each other.
They had to go through the gatekeepers of the states and the rulers.
Right. And it's like now we can actually get the truth out.
And this has never been...
A condition that we've had in the history of the world.
And I'm really totally excited about this.
We're standing on this threshold of a golden age of humanity.
If we can only, you know, get to enough people, you know, before the terrible collapse of everything, which there's many people out there talking about.
Well, that's true. I would say, though, that the golden age will probably only come about if we can get Ron Paul to run again.
I don't care if we have to use formaldehyde and tasers, but we're going to get that man up in front of a podium, hopefully delivering a baby at the same time.
We came so close!
So close! Well, thank you, Steph.
I just wanted to share that, and I'll give the mic up to another worthy...
Well, thank you very much, and we'll talk, I guess, later this week.
All right. The lines, they are open.
Operators are standing by.
You can get your signed William Shatner plate for only.
Oh, just I get a lot of background hiss.
Just a reminder, if you're not talking, if you could mute your microphone, that would be excellent.
And if you are talking, if you could also mute your microphone, that'd be great, because otherwise it tends to interrupt my ranting.
Not to take control of the spotlight and shine it on somebody who might not want it to shine, but there's a discussion in the chat about forgiveness, and the claim is that you have to forgive people who have made you angry, or else you don't get rid of your anger.
And I'm just wondering if she wants to tell us more about this.
Sure. Sure, I'll pop in.
Allie? Yeah, it's me.
I forgive you. Thank you.
Although I still feel the rage.
Sorry, go ahead. Okay, so...
Okay, I'm so sorry. Just before you start, and I do hate to interrupt you just at the beginning, but for those who don't know, this fine young woman is...
It comes from a different world, for most of us.
A world where there is nothing but patience in the air.
Where you and I breathe oxygen, she breathes tolerance and patience.
So it may be a slightly different situation for you than it is for most of us.
So from the planet patience, from all the way through Skype, I mean that with all sincerity.
I mean, sometimes when I have run out of patience with a listener, she will jump in, spreading love and barmy gooey goodness all over the place.
So... Just that it's a different place that you're coming from, which I hugely appreciate.
And I'm more than happy to hear the case.
Okay, well, maybe it is because I'm probably a lot different than most people or any normal human being in general.
But I just had to...
For me personally, I think that...
What started this off was that whole Nazi discussion where it was like, I don't like Nazism, but I don't hate Nazis or something like that.
Where I agreed with that.
Where, personally, I separate actions from humans, in a way.
Where I see a lot more in a person than just the action.
Where, for me, I have to see their background.
I have to see what made them do the action.
And looking at all that makes...
Pity them more than hate them.
And that pity makes me forgive them for whatever action took place.
So... And I guess there's a lot of confusion and frustration with that statement.
Sure, but maybe what you can do is tell us or tell me a little bit more about what you mean by forgiveness.
What does it look like? And let's take an example of a child who was grown up who was mistreated by a parent.
And we can take any example, but this one is relatively common.
this child would, if I understand you correctly, would benefit.
Like you're not saying forgive people from the standpoint of, you know, Jesus will give you puppies in heaven or anything like that, right?
But you're saying forgive people because it's better for you, right?
Yeah, I mean, okay, so to take that example, what if I was a kid, kid.
What I would have to do is, um, growing up and being mistreated my whole life or being abused and whatever, um, that would fill me with a whole lot of rage, right?
Like, a lot of rage, like I wouldn't be able to contain the rage.
And so what I would have to do...
It would fill you with a lot of anger, I would say.
Rage is usually anger acted out unjustly.
So if your boss yells at you when you go home and hit your kid, that's rage, right?
And if the boss yelled at you because his wife yelled at him, that's rage.
But if you feel anger or the fight-or-flight mechanism when someone's running at you with a knife in an alley, that's healthy, right?
It doesn't mean that you kill the guy or whatever, but if you've got to run away, you kind of want that adrenaline, right?
Okay, yes. Sorry.
My brain is on autopilot.
No, no, no. I'm interrupting and being annoying, but I just wanted to differentiate between anger and rage.
No problem. Yeah, I'd be filled with a lot of anger, not rage.
You're right. A lot of anger at the situation, at basically everything.
And so for me to be able to become healthy, I'd have to take steps towards learning to live and cope with this anger or letting go of the anger entirely.
I'm sorry, and I just want to make sure, and I really do apologize for interrupting.
So I just want to make sure I understand the decision tree.
So the decision tree is, you either learn to live with your anger, or you let go of the anger entirely?
Yeah. I don't think that's necessarily the only choice.
Sorry, go ahead. I'm saying I'm going to become a fully healthy person.
Well, there is another option, right, which is to work through the anger and then have your anger available to you as a self-defense mechanism if you are being exploited, but have the richness of all your other emotions there as well.
So, I mean, and that would generally be the therapeutic approach, which is not to say that you can't will away your anger.
And you also can't just magically make yourself forgive people, but you have to sort of work through the anger as an energy within you that you need to not banish but harness in a more rational way.
That would be like learning to love with the anger.
Okay, okay, good. I just want to make sure we're on the same page.
Yeah, no problem.
And even learning to let go of the anger, it's only learning to let go of the anger with that one situation.
It's not learning to let go of the entire emotion anger in general.
Right. I guess there are those two paths he can take.
And the path that I'm talking about with forgiving the person that hurts you or whatever is the path to learning to let go of the anger in regards to the situation.
And I'm not saying that's the only way to let go of your anger.
I'm just saying, in my experience, that's what I have to do.
Can you tell me what you mean by forgive?
So, forgive your abuser.
Tell me what you mean by that. What does that look like?
Okay, so...
Sorry, I had to think, because I haven't formulated these thoughts before.
No, there is to be no thinking on the Sunday shows.
Go, go, go! Don't pause, don't hesitate, don't consider, don't think...
Stop using me!
What it is, is forgiving the person is not necessarily forgiving what they've done.
As in, like, let's say, I don't know, whipped you or something.
You're not forgiving them for whipping you, but you're understanding that they're a human being and that there were probably a lot of things that went into that action.
Sure, like nobody has kids, really.
No sane human being has a child and says, boy, I can't wait to whip them.
Right? Nobody says that.
I mean, we all have visions.
Parents are dewy-eyed, you know, kids hugging you and so on.
And then people look up from the fact that they've hurt their children with horror.
And I mean, I fully do understand that.
And I've seen that certainly in my own family.
But you did a very clever flip there.
It was very sneaky, but again, I forgive you.
Because what you did was you used the word understanding instead of forgiveness.
Very tricky. Well, for me, that understanding is the step that you have to take towards forgiving the person.
Because as soon as you understand the background of the person and what went into everything that went into the action, I can't help but forgive the person for what they've done.
So what you're saying is that people's decisions are conditioned by their histories.
Yeah. So there's no free will?
I don't really think there is.
Right, and I can fully understand that, because if there is no free will, then it would be like getting angry at getting a sunburn, right?
I mean, it's not the sun's fault, and that's just what happens when there's enough radiation hitting your skin, right?
And you're as tidy-wighty as me.
So for you, it's like, if you understand the history, then you understand that the person had no choice but to do what he or she did, and therefore getting angry at that person is like getting angry at gravity or aging or other things with which we have no choice, right?
Right. And then I think it's just a self-destruct sort of thing where, like, why are you being angry at the sun?
What good is that going to be, like, what good is that going to do for you?
Well, but if somebody is angry at the sun, isn't that just a product of their history?
I can't understand why one person's history causes them to whip a child and therefore we should not be angry, but another person's history causes them to be angry at the person who whips them and therefore that is not good and should be changed.
Do you understand? Like the one person you're saying you should change your thinking and look at things in a different way and do things that are different, but you're saying that to the person who beat the child, well, it's an inevitable product of your history and it couldn't be changed and once we understand that, we don't feel angry.
Like, you're giving free will to one person, but not to the other.
I just want to make sure, or if you're not, I'm missing something.
Yeah, I guess you could say that I am.
Oh no, she's broken into fluent Swedish or Swiss.
I guess you could say if you had a fruity accent.
Well, this is where my whole thought process becomes really, really confusing.
Not only to other people, but to myself as well.
And where it breaks down and I can't really explain it anymore.
Well, yeah, that's because of Brexit, right?
Yeah, it really breaks down.
With all due respect, you're a brilliant woman, and I don't mean to, but it doesn't become hard for some mysterious reason, right?
It becomes hard because it becomes illogical, right?
Right, and I guess this whole forgiveness thing is really illogical, which is why it's really hard to explain to anyone what I think, because I break from logic at some point in time.
Well, does that trouble you?
I mean, that's the question, right?
Does that indicate that there may be something more to examine in this position?
I mean, as far as I understand it, you're a fair old fan of the logic thing.
Yeah, I mean, I guess I break from logic in a couple parts of my life, so it's not that big of a deal to me, because if I feel like I'm living a happy, healthy life, then...
It's okay to not understand how I got there.
Right. Like, I mean, if you're driving along and you hit one deer and then you bounce into a whole bunch of other deers, it doesn't really matter because you've already hit the first deer, right?
Right. Got it.
So that was a totally aesthetic feat of an argument, going down Bambi and everything.
But does this relate to something like your agnosticism?
I'm not sure where you are on that spectrum, but is that sort of what you mean?
Yeah, I mean... Yeah, a lot with my whole deism thingy.
I'm not the most logical person in the world.
And while I give props to Logic, I realize that I really break from Logic a lot.
Okay, I'm going to put a shout-out to Logic, and then I'm going to take it out back and hit it with a brick.
But the shout-out comes first, and then we drive over it.
But that's nice, at least. Exactly.
That's good. That's good.
Okay. So what you do is you find Logic with a searchlight in order to get a beat on it.
Is that right? Yeah. What?
I'm sorry, you lost me there.
Oh, never mind. I'm going on to days of, like, very little sleep, so you lost me without one.
I think I went one metaphor too far, which is not unusual to me, but I think that's important because when you advance an idea, and this is just, to me, this is just about being upfront, right, and whether you want to do it or not for you, but...
If you advance an idea about forgiveness, I think you say, this is completely illogical and has a total double standard, and I assign free will to the victims but not to the perpetrators, and I say to the victims that you should adapt and do things better, but I say to the perpetrators of injustice, you could never have done anything different and I have sympathy and understanding, and If you put that word forward, then I think that's sort of truth in advertising.
But if you put it forward as if it's a theory that makes sense, and again, I'm not saying it doesn't.
I'm just saying that we haven't been able to find a way to make it make sense just now.
But I think you need to put that forward and saying, this is something that is contradictory and illogical, but it is my position anyway.
But if you put it forward like it's a reasonable proposition, then people have to find the logic.
That's kind of like putting the caveats in fine print, if that makes sense.
Right. I thought that I had made the disclaimer at the beginning of talking about it all was that this is just something I believed.
And I was trying to explain it to people what I believed.
No, no, no. But it's not something that you believe.
No, again, this is just to be annoyingly technical.
It's not something you believe.
Like, you don't come in and say, I like chocolate, right?
But you come in and you say, people should like chocolate.
People should forgive. It's more than just a belief.
It is a prescription, right?
I'm confused. When did I say that?
You said that people should forgive other people in order to be happy.
In order to get past their anger, people should forgive them and they should look into the histories of those who've done them wrong and understand the factors that led to them doing them wrong and so on, right?
I mean, for you, this was a prescription for health.
It was not an, I like candy, right?
No, I said there were two ways that someone could address something.
And the way I addressed it...
Was that one way.
And then there is another way to address it, which is like the therapeutic approach that you were laying out earlier.
Well, let me ask you this.
Do you believe that it is beneficial?
I'm not saying it's proven, but do you believe...
Would you prefer it if other people took the forgiveness route?
Do you think that it's better than staying angry or whatever?
Um... And I can use the chat window if I have to, so don't make me.
I'm not trying to corner you.
I just want you to understand the difference between, if I understand it right, the difference between saying, I like forgiveness because it puts the taste of candy in my mouth, right?
I mean, which is a personal preference, right?
As opposed to forgiveness is better because of X, Y, and Z, and it's more objectively true.
Right. Sorry, I'm scrolling back over the chat window, and I guess that I was saying that.
Oh, I have no doubt that you were saying that, because I have no doubt that you were saying that.
And again, this is not a criticism, I'm just teasing out the challenges.
If you put it forward as a true theory, but you also know that it's contradictory and illogical, then that's a problem, right?
Right. You know, if you sell something to people saying, this is going to cure your cold, right, and then after they buy it, you say, oh, it doesn't actually cure your cold, right?
Then that's not particularly up front, right?
Right. I get what you were saying.
And so that was my bad.
I apologize.
I'm just kidding. Hey, nothing but forgiveness.
You were conditioned to do this by God.
And I think that we can all understand that.
Yeah. No, I apologize for putting it out that way.
I didn't mean to.
Didn't mean to. Well, maybe I did.
But in the back of my brain, I didn't think I was doing it that way.
Didn't mean to. Interesting.
Go on. I'm sorry.
What do you mean by didn't mean to? Do you mean that you meant to type something else?
The way that I perceived myself as doing it was I was explaining something.
About a personal philosophy.
And I guess I could see that I was putting it out more as a prescription.
But there's no such thing as a personal philosophy.
That's like saying personal physics.
Right? A personal philosophy is an opinion.
It's not a philosophy, right?
Like, I can't say I have my own personal physics of the universe, right?
And this may be the difference in terms of understanding, right?
But technically, if it's just your opinion, it's not philosophy.
Like, if it's just my opinion that Jupiter is a happy fat man, right?
That's just my opinion, right?
It's certainly not. I can't say that that's science.
And then when somebody says, well, it's not true, I say, well, it's my personal science, right?
Yeah.
I think she's just saying that now.
What do you think, honey? I'm confused.
Yeah, okay, move on.
Whatever, whatever. I'm really confused about what you were saying.
You kind of lost me like halfway through there.
Sorry about that. A philosophical statement is one that is rational and hopefully empirical, right?
Okay. Yeah, okay.
I understand that. If it is not rational and empirical, then it is not a philosophical statement.
Right, so to use an example I've used before, if I say, I had a dream about an elephant last night, that is not an empirical statement.
Nobody can tell whether that's true or not, right?
Okay. That's not a philosophical statement.
Okay. If I say, I like the beach, that's not a philosophical statement, right?
Right. Because it's just personal preference.
Right. Now, if I say that A is A, or 2 plus 2 is 4, or the world is round, or whatever, right?
Then that is a statement which has objective truth value, right?
Okay. And therefore that can be considered a philosophical statement.
Okay, I see where the difference is.
So it'd be more like saying it's a personal belief system?
No, it's not a belief system either, because as soon as you say system, you say that system implies that it has to have some kind of logical consistency, right?
Okay, so it's just a personal belief.
I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand.
It's my opinion. Right.
And it's illogical.
Okay. And personal opinions that are illogical, and I hate to use this phrase because I know that you are a wonderful and delicate and virtuous lady, but personal opinions which are illogical tend to generally be called bigotry, right?
So if I say, I don't know, Chinese acrobats are all thieves.
Wait, no, let's go with something that's not true.
Oh, I don't know, like I'm just going from the movie, what was it, Ocean's Eleven?
If I say, all Chinese acrobats are thieves, then that is a personal opinion that is illogical, right?
Right. So that would just be a prejudice, right?
Or an error, right?
Okay. And if you say, I have a philosophy which requires that some people have free will and some people do not, then that's just an error, isn't it?
Like if you say, I like ice cream, that's not an error because you're not proposing a logical contradiction, right?
Right. Okay.
But if you say, my personal philosophy is that ice cream is composed of fire, that unless you're talking about some sort of hellishly spiced tandoori ice cream, it's just an error, right?
Right. Now, if you say, well, I prefer to persist in my error, then that's just faith or bigotry or whatever.
And again, I'm not trying to put you in any kind of category like that, but putting the word personal in front of philosophy doesn't turn something into a philosophy, if that makes sense, because philosophy has pretty annoyingly rigid requirements like internal logical consistency and conformity with empirical evidence and that kind of stuff, right? Okay.
I guess I'm just confused because I hear so many people use the term.
I know. All the time when talking about stuff like I'm talking about.
Oh, I totally understand.
It's totally right. Oh, absolutely.
And if I were subject to facial tics or Tourette's syndrome, that would be one of the things that would create it in me because people just say, well, if I can't prove it, my philosophy, if my philosophy is illogical, I'm just going to put the word personal in front of it and continue to call it true, right? But putting the word personal in front of it If I put, say, as an answer to a math test, 2 plus 2 is 5, and the teacher says, well, that's not correct, and I say, oh, no, no, that's just my personal math.
Does that make it any more correct?
Okay. See, I thought that personal philosophy meant that it was just something that you live by and no one else does, if that makes sense.
Well, but A, that's not how you present it, right?
Because you say that people should live this way, right?
Right. And I understand that I did that, and I understand that that was bad.
Well, I don't know, but I mean, I don't think it was bad because you just had never been annoyed by me.
I mean, I know you've been annoyed by me in a number of different areas, but you just hadn't been annoyed by me in this particular area, so I'm not sure that it was bad, right?
It was just something you hadn't really thought about.
Right. But it wasn't a good way to present it, if that makes any sense.
Well, I think now that you're aware of the requirement for putting out a truth statement, which is higher than, you know, it makes me feel good, it's just something to think about.
But you're absolutely right, and there's no reason why you wouldn't think the way you do, because everybody says, it's my personal philosophy.
You know, my personal philosophy is to treat squirrels as if they're royalty.
You know, people will just say anything and say it's their personal philosophy, but philosophy is a pretty technical term.
Now, Unfortunately, people like the Dalai Lama have turned it into a highly non-technical term, although nicely robed.
I must say, those robes are pretty snazzy.
But philosophy is – the Socratic discipline, the Aristotelian discipline of philosophy is annoyingly precise and does require a huge amount of labor to come up with truth statements.
And hopefully, we come up with them in this conversation.
They're useful to other people as well.
But if you're going to say that people should live this way, and I hugely applaud your desire to do that.
I mean, don't we all want to be in a community where everybody's watching our back and in a good way and helping us out with things that they believe to be true?
So I hugely applaud the intent behind trying to help people become happier through consistent application of principles.
I mean, that's good.
We all like that.
But the challenge is that if you're going to put something out as true, and it turns out to be logically inconsistent, then it's not true.
And you can't put it out as true, and then just saying, well, it's just my personal philosophy, doesn't make it consistent, right?
Okay. So then if I get questioned about it again, how do I talk about it without making that same mistake that I did earlier today?
Personally, what I tried to do, with varying degree of success, is I tried to use the argument from inflammation or inflammatory rhetoric.
And what that means is to say, this is true, and if you don't believe it, I'm going to make you burst into flames.
That's one approach that you can take, which I had varying degrees of success with.
Varying degrees means zero.
That's one possibility. Other thing...
Look at that. It's the slow joke.
Wait for it, right? But...
Well, the first thing that I think that you could do is to question the validity of your premise, right?
So if you say, well, forgiveness is good, but it turns out that that leads to a contradictory situation...
Then saying that forgiveness is good and taking the approach that you're taking doesn't work.
So it may be that forgiveness is good and you need to find another approach to it.
Right. And my particular approach, and again, this is not proven.
I've certainly got empirical evidence from myself and a number of other people, and I think there's some logical consistency to it, but I haven't put it down to full rigor.
But... I think that understanding is very important, and that's why I pounced on that difference between forgiveness and understanding.
I understand that my mother had her entire world bombed into oblivion in the Second World War, and that she lived in a world that was So terrifying that I don't think I could even conceive it, right? I mean, her mother was blown apart in the fire bombings of Dresden in 1944 on a bombing raid that one of my uncles on my father's side was actually piloting in.
And she lived in a world that was just blowing up and literally blowing up in a way that I can't even fathom.
And what happened to her during the course of that?
You know, a girl racing across Germany, living in a series of orphanages, pulling her own Anne Frank thing from time to time because she came from Jewish parents.
This is all a complete nightmare.
And so I can understand some of the traumas that helped shape My mother's capacity for evil.
Right. Now, that having been said, there are people who went through the war who didn't turn out the way that she did.
So it's not causal in that way.
And there are people who went through even worse than what my mom went through, I'm sure, who also did not turn into people who assaulted their children and so on, right?
So, while I can certainly understand that if the war had not occurred, my mother would have been a very different human being, And that she didn't sort of wake up and say, or she didn't float above the world in some sort of platonic pre-birth state and say, if I could just be born to a Jewish family in 1937 in Berlin, boy, that would be about the best thing ever.
I mean, there's nobody who would want that.
There's almost any other time in history, save perhaps the Black Death in 14th century London, would be any place you'd rather be, right?
So I can totally understand that.
And that does breed context.
And context, to me, does not breed exactly the same thing as understanding.
Because for me, the purpose of anger is to remove you from a situation of danger.
Right? That's the fight or flight mechanism, right?
So, some guy comes at you in an alley, you want to have the happy Flintstones totally feet in order to be able to get away and for that you need a lot of adrenaline because you know he's got adrenaline and so on.
Or if you are cornered and you have to fight, you want all of that PCP, I can take on 10 cops kind of rage, right?
So, to me, anger...
It's an emotion that is designed to eliminate danger from your life in one form or another.
Now, from my own experience, when I began to truly dig into my family history and truly began to try and put myself in my mom's skin, so to speak, and not in that Silence of the Lambs kind of way, but just to try and understand where she was coming from, what that gave me was some sympathy for the history that she had experienced,
for sure. But more importantly, what it gave me was the courage to talk to my mother, to say to her what was missing in our relationship, to say to her what I wanted, to say to her what was unacceptable to me, to say to her the things that caused me pain in the past.
And when I did that a number of times, I began to understand that my mother wasn't going to change.
And the understanding that my mother wasn't going to change and that whenever I would interact with her, I would be hurt or frightened or angered or damaged in the process.
What that did, the anger about my past...
Helped me to let it go, right?
Because to me, letting go of abusive relationships is letting go of anger, right?
Because if people hurt you, then they're going to make you angry.
If they provoke you, they're going to make you angry.
If they taunt you, they're going to make you angry and hurt and all the other.
But we just talk about anger. If they're not going to change, and empathy and understanding change.
Will help us accept what can be changed in our lives and what cannot be changed.
Once I understood that my mother was not going to change, then the anger and the desire to be treated with dignity and respect in my life caused me or helped me along the road of saying, if this relationship cannot become non-toxic, then I will not have it in my life.
And it's accepting that limitation of what we can control in other people's behaviors.
Now, to what degree does that involve forgiveness?
I don't know. But I will not say ever that I forgive my mother for the history that I suffered at her hands.
But I will say that I don't actually think about her that much anymore.
And I live a calm and wonderfully happy life, partly because these toxic people are not in my life.
And I think that's what the anger...
Was, therefore, the anger was there to say, something's really bad, something's really wrong, these relationships are not positive for you, and I wanted to make sure that I was being just, so I gave the people in my life every opportunity to listen to my concerns, to negotiate a better solution to the relationships that we had.
And when it turned out that that was impossible...
After months of attempting to have a productive outcome to these conversations, then I got angry at them because they just kept manipulating.
And so what happened? I got those people out of my life.
Like I want my immune system to get angry at cancer cells and cold cells and flu.
So I get angry and, you know, eliminate them so I can stay healthy.
So I don't know exactly where forgiveness fits in there, but for sure I certainly agree with you that empathy and understanding is very, very helpful.
And forgiveness in terms of understanding that nobody wants to end up hitting their kids or anything like that, but that people make choices which… I don't know that I would ever forgive, but it kind of becomes a moot point, if that makes any sense, because in a sense there's nothing left to forgive, because the past is in the past, and she's certainly not inflicting any harm on me now, so forgiveness kind of becomes a non-issue, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I guess that's where I'm different from you in that respect.
Where, for me, if I lost them, that didn't get rid of the anger.
Yeah, the understanding didn't get rid of the anger, and it got rid of the anger until I forgave them for it.
Can you give me a more specific example?
Without getting into really things, but it's like, It's like, um, I don't associate.
Oh, she's coming and going.
Sorry, that was just a bit of a spasm on your side there.
Yeah, I think what she's doing is self-censoring all the really personal stuff she's talking about, which I can understand.
So, use the hand puppets, quick!
Type it in an ASCII. Oh!
And down she goes. Alright.
It looks like a slot has unexpectedly opened up.
Hi, Steph. Hello?
Hello? Hi, Steph.
Hi. Can you hear me?
Sure can. I wanted to bring up exactly what she was getting into when she fell off the planet just there.
She was basically saying that...
She wanted to forgive the people so that she could kind of go on with her life.
But my experience with it has been that the people who were enabling the abusers around me were the ones that were definitely trying to get me to forgive so that I could basically forgive them.
So they would feel better, right?
Yeah, definitely. Well, there's no doubt.
I certainly do agree with you that people who've done a lot of wrong in their life do kind of crave forgiveness.
It is their heroine, so to speak.
Sorry, go ahead. Sorry about that.
We just noticed that whenever I made a really good point, your internet seemed to cut out.
We were just sort of commenting how coincidental that seemed to be.
Okay, that was totally not my fault, okay?
No, no, no, of course not.
We understand that. Sorry, we just had somebody else who was bringing in, I don't know if you want your name or not, but we just had somebody else who was commenting on this issue of forgiveness, so I didn't want to interrupt.
If you'd like to go ahead, you guys talk if you want.
I'm going to have a burger. No, I'm kidding.
But bring that stuff up, the person who was just talking, if you'd like to continue with your thoughts.
Yeah, my name is Ashley.
I've been on the boards discussing abuse and how to kind of escape my abusers, so to speak.
Because I basically jumped back right into relationships with them after I thought that I did all the healing I needed to.
And what I found was a big existence of lies.
And basically people playing these games around the truth and it's not helping me at this point.
I'm trying to leave. And what you were talking about with forgiveness in order to move on, I can understand that because my mother, who was trying to kind of cover her tracks, In her role of the abuse that I experienced was trying to get me to forgive, you know? And that's like the therapeutic way to approach it, right?
I mean, that's what we all want to do.
We want to understand the people to feel like they're capable of the goodness that we think we're capable of or that we deserved, right?
Wait, I'm sorry. Were you talking to Steph or me?
You, really. Oh, okay.
I'm sorry. No, I think...
No, I'm kidding.
Go on. Wait, so I'm confused then.
Can you try to restate that?
Yeah. Sorry. Oh, no, no, no.
It's not that. I'm really running on very little sleep, so it takes me a little bit longer to grasp a concept than normal.
So if you can just restate it, please, then I can address it.
Well, I was introduced to the concept of forgiveness in order to feel better about the people I was forced to live with.
They were kind of forcing forgiveness on me to kind of forgive themselves for enabling abuse.
And I was just wondering if you kind of had the same experience as I did, where it was like, okay, let me forgive, but I won't forget.
And then you're stuck feeling all this crazy anger and the rage you experienced.
I mean, I think I know why we get so angry.
It's because... Sorry, if I understand that correctly, I think what she's saying, and I'm just going to translate this to lack of sleep language.
Forgiveness bad. No, it is that people who've done us wrong in our life Will want us to forgive them so that they can feel better about themselves and that it can actually be a dangerous thing because then if we believe that and we forgive them, then we actually feel to some degree or can feel that we should stay in relationship with them because the test of forgiveness is… Do I stay in a relationship with this person?
If somebody's done me wrong and I forgive that person, then I should not want to separate from them because that would indicate that I hadn't forgiven them.
And that can actually be a tool for people to keep us in their lives when they don't have any intention of behaving in a better way, using this concept of forgiveness.
Ashley, was that sort of what you were saying?
I want to make sure I characterized it relatively well.
That was exactly it.
After my abuser would hurt us, or me, He would come with toys and be like, oh, you know, I'm sorry and forgive me.
It's all good. You know, I'm not going to hurt you again.
But then it would happen again.
And that's translating into what I'm seeing now.
I'm around my mother now and I'm noticing she's doing all these crazy mind games with me like she did before and it's because I led her to believe that it was okay for her to do those things by forgiving her.
And so if I understand Ali's position correctly, and again, I don't want to sort of jump in, but as you mentioned, you're cooking on an astronaut's amount of sleep, but certainly if we forgive somebody within that context of forgiveness, there must be a commitment to not re-offend,
right? So clearly, if some woman's husband sleeps around on her and she forgives him, then clearly that has to be based on the understanding that the sleeping around is never going to happen again, right?
Because forgiveness for someone who's done us wrong must include within that the requirement that that wrong not occur again, right?
There's a lot of trust involved.
Yeah. It's like the sleeping around.
Oh, I think I made another good point, so I think her internet is...
No, is it really?
No, no, you're back. Oh, no.
Sorry, go on. Okay.
I was saying, you can't forgive someone who's just going to keep on re-offending because...
Because what?
One more time. This is going to be self-destructive.
Okay. And so, if it's not something healthy to do, then don't do it, is what I believe.
So, for example, with my whole forgetting thingy, like, if forgetting that person meant that I was gonna be around them and, like, they were gonna smack me again, well, why would I be around that person?
You know? Why would I change it?
I'm sorry, you're kind of like, I was like kind of programmed to think it wasn't their fault that they were doing this, you know?
Or if it was their fault that you're still morally responsible in a sense for forgiving them because forgiveness is like a moral virtue and so on, is that right?
Closer to God? Yeah, yeah.
Right, so if you fail to forgive, it's because you're holding on to unjust anger, and in a sense, you've become the punitive one now as the victim who is failing to forgive, right?
Yeah, I don't believe that.
I mean, I just strongly, strongly don't believe that.
I do think that we should, to get clarity, because if we grow up with abusive relationships, then we have a lot of not clarity.
Like, we live in a Swiss fog about those relationships, because that's the only way they can continue when we're children, to be exploitive or abusive.
I think that it's really worth sitting down with people who've done you wrong, And talking to them about your needs with as much awareness as you can bring to the table with alertness and record the conversations if you can to listen to them again later so that we can actually experience our past directly for the first time.
And that to me is an incredibly illuminating experience because once I actually – because I just didn't bring needs to my family.
I mean it's just not something I ever did.
So when I actually began to bring the...
I was in therapy and worked through all this with a therapist.
When I actually began to bring my needs to my family and to my friends...
And these weren't unjust things.
It wasn't like, I need a back rub and a million dollars or anything like that.
It was just a million dollars, which I thought was more reasonable.
But when I brought those needs to people and I was able to see what happened when I brought needs.
This was the first time I bet that I'd brought needs to my family since I was two or three years old.
And it was so incredibly enlightening to see what happened with my family and with some of my friends when I brought needs to them.
And this is what I prefer and this is what I like.
And again, all of it was stuff I was willing to reciprocate.
All of it was stuff that was reasonable, I believe.
And it was really, really instructive and illuminating and very liberating.
When you put your greatest spiritual and psychological effort into communicating with someone and you're open and you're vulnerable and you're willing to listen but you hold on to what it is that you need, that's what I believe brings closure to relationships that aren't going to work because once you go through that effort and you realize, well, I couldn't have done it any better, I couldn't have been more open, I couldn't have been more reasonable, then you simply walk away knowing that if it doesn't work, It's not because of you, right?
And it's just because the other person isn't willing to or doesn't want to make it work.
And that's very liberating.
And that, to me, is where the purpose of this kind of communication lies.
Well, that's always what...
Well, personally, that's always what I've been looking for.
This liberation, this, you know...
But I'm dealing with somebody who's so insanely intelligent That she can actually listen to your show and be like, I agree with Steph on these points,
you know, and then go ahead and tell me that she's been a victim her whole life and, you know, claimed to be this amazing, like, somebody who just changed her whole life just so that I could get away from my abuser.
Sorry, Ashley, but that tells you, and if you want to have a conversation with yourself and myself and your mother, I would certainly be happy to do so if you thought it would be helpful.
But the important thing to remember is that if you're talking about something that is troubling you and the person that you're talking to starts talking about her own experience only, that tells you a lot of what you need to know, right?
Like if I come up and I say to my mom or whatever, I say, this stuff and this stuff and this stuff was painful to me as a child.
And she says, well, let me tell you about my childhood and everything that was painful about that.
And that tells me, I mean, no matter how intelligent she is, she's still making such a basic error when it comes to having empathy with someone, which is that you don't interrupt them to talk about yourself, right?
Exactly.
That's kind of why I'm like screwed up when I try to talk to people.
Like, I've learned from her it's all about me, me, me, and I, I, I, and it's so annoying and, like, selfish.
Well, sure. And, of course, that habit can fall down through the generations, right?
So, for you, then, doesn't it become when you talk to people, it's either you serving them or them serving you?
It's not so much of a give and take.
Exactly. Yeah.
Like, I was having a conversation with somebody online.
I'm not going to say their name out of respect.
I don't know. But it was like we were having an exchange of information about each other.
And then we disagreed on something.
And I was saying, well, could we agree to disagree?
And she didn't want to drop it because she felt like we could negotiate.
And I had no idea what the hell negotiating meant in regards to a friendship.
Right, and you are probably not particularly alert to the signs that somebody is not able to negotiate early on, because it all shows up very quickly.
Once you get alert to the signs in people, you can very quickly figure out what kind of person they are and the degree to which it's worth investing in interacting with them.
I can't. No, I can't.
Right, right. Well, you can, but you just don't have conscious access to it yet.
Yeah, I go on intuition.
Right, right. Or if you have it, you don't trust it, right?
Yeah. It's like I was trying to see if she was as vulnerable as I was in some aspects, and that's just exploitation.
It's like wrong, you know?
That's kind of like prying into somebody's personal space without even knowing their name.
Right, right, right, for sure.
But I've always been done to me.
I've always, like, for instance...
I used to journalize a lot, especially when I was about to turn 18.
And my mother took all of my journals and gave them to a prosecutor.
And I couldn't get them until after I turned 18.
Because she was trying to build a case on my abuser at that point.
And she was exploiting all of my innermost thoughts.
Right. And it was like there was no sacred component to my existence anymore, you know?
Well, but if that is true, and I'm certainly willing to hear the case, but if that is true, then why would you still be in contact with this person?
I'm addicted to her.
Well, but that's not an answer, right?
That's just another way of saying, I don't know.
I'm the annoying guy who says that I don't know is not a valid answer, just so you may know that or you may not know, right?
Well, I still feel like I'm dependent on her, and I thought that I could trust her after leaving, and then years of hating her and loathing any idea of contact with her.
I came back because I really needed a place to stay, you know, and donated a kidney to my husband, and I figured from a financial point of view, maybe I could trust her there.
But it's not like that.
She's just jumped on every single emotional part of my life again, and I just can't deal with this.
Well, no, but you can deal with it because you are dealing with it.
that the question is why are you still having someone like this in your life?
I mean, do you think she's going to change?
That's my...
I mean, up until I started listening to your podcasts, I had a deep, sincere belief that she could change.
And how old is your mother, just roughly?
Okay, so 56, and so she's been your mother for several decades, and she is who she is, and she can't undo the past, and is she in therapy?
Is she taking that approach to self-knowledge?
She's in therapy.
She is on medication for bipolar.
She goes to Al-Anon meetings still.
And she listens to Dr.
Joy Brown. And how long has she been doing this kind of stuff?
Since I was seven.
So, again, I'm not going to hazard a guess at your age, but a while, right?
Years and years she's been doing this, right?
Yeah. Okay, so if she's been working at this stuff for years and years and years and years, and this is where she is, this is where she is, right?
Yeah, I know.
So, I think that the thesis that she is going to change has some weaknesses, let's say.
Yeah, and that's where a lot of this anger that I have right now is coming from.
It's like, I need to get the hell out of her house.
I just don't know how the hell I'm going to do it, because I don't have the financial resources, and then I'm just...
Well, but sorry, but this is a cause and effect thing that's a problem, right?
Because one of the reasons you don't have the financial resources is because you moved back into your mother's house, right?
Yeah, it's kind of like welfare.
Yeah, I mean, it's like if you don't have to provide for yourself, then you will end up dependent on people, right?
Yeah. So saying that you can't move out of your mother's house because of your financial dependence is putting the cart before the horse because your financial dependence has been brought about partly by your willingness to move back in with your mother, right?
Yeah, and at this point I'm ready to leave, you know, and even watching her and looking at her makes me sick.
Okay, so when are you leaving?
I don't know. Well, you see the challenge in this conversation, right?
You say that you're addicted to her, but you're ready to leave.
And then you say, "Well, I don't know when I'm going to leave," and so on, right?
Well, I have like a million things going on.
My husband and I, I feel like I need to split.
I feel like I'm kind of awakening, I'm like waking up to who my true self might be right now.
Right, right. And I've been making some plans, like I might go to...
See some relatives in Florida, and I have relatives in Oregon, and then in New York, and I'm just kind of trying to figure out what I can do with myself.
Wait, wait, wait. Sorry, sorry.
Hang on a second. Hang on a second.
Your problem is dependence upon your family, right?
Yeah. Help me understand how going to see other relatives is going to solve that problem.
I mean, just to play annoying devil's advocate guy here, with all due respect and affection, help me understand how that solves the problem.
It's like, you know, crack is a real problem for me, so I want to really switch to go to Florida and switch to meth.
I want to get connected with who I am, really, without her...
Crazy upbringing style.
I'm totally annoying, but you were thinking of going to stay with relatives, right?
Yeah. But that is not solving the problem.
Forget about the parenting and this and that, right?
The problem is that, I assume you're not 16, right?
Because you're married and you're in your 20s or later, right?
Yeah, I'm 26.
You're 26? Okay.
Now, you can get your own place, right?
If you get a job, and maybe that job is a waiter, or maybe that job is, I don't know, newspaper delivery person, but you can get a place, right?
Even if it's one room in a shared house or something like that, right?
It's my right. Well, I don't know about your right, but it certainly is your opportunity, right?
Yeah. Yeah. And you sound about as enthusiastic as if I were saying, I want you to sit in for Susan Sarandon at the end of Thelma and Louise.
Well, that's what it feels like.
It feels like I'd be just jumping off of a cliff because I just have, like, not an ounce of self-confidence.
I totally understand that, and I'm certainly not trying to put you in a situation where you end up without self-confidence, but I can guarantee you that if you're 26 and you say, the only way I can go is to go and live in somebody else's house, that's going to be really bad for your self-confidence, right? Yeah, it is.
It's just that I've crashed and burned a couple times.
I've been in hospitals and...
I was diagnosed bipolar when I was 12, and I got hip to the fact that they weren't helping me when I finally left my mom.
Well, I had refused to stop taking the medication before I left my mom, but then she tried to commit me for that.
And she was just horrifically violating me.
All of my sanity, all of my rights, you know?
I totally understand that, and I really do have a lot of sympathy for you.
I mean, huge amounts of sympathy for you with that, for sure.
For sure. But, if you're listening to this show, you're very intelligent.
This show is not for the average person, right?
I mean, we can go with that as a basic thesis, right?
Yeah, I swear, like, I didn't even think this place could exist.
I swear. No, I know, I know.
So we can accept that you're very intelligent, if not brilliant, right?
Yeah, I'd like to accept that.
That would be nice. Well, because if you weren't, you'd have told me to, you know, that I was an evil culty bastard and you'd have, you know, gone elsewhere on the internet to someplace less challenging, right?
Right. I mean, yeah.
I consider myself...
Sorry, go ahead. Sorry. No, I consider myself pretty intelligent, creative.
I've been exposed to the theater.
I have a lot of talent.
I love to sing and express myself, but then I have a dual personality, you know.
I'm really not that...
I'm not that...
I'm not confident at all.
It's just what my mom wanted to showcase me as because she had been exploiting me forever.
I'm going to keep cutting you off, annoyingly so, when you tell me bad things about your mom.
Because I got it, right?
I got that she's a really bad person.
And I totally got that.
You have a habit of going, and I don't know if it's because nobody's ever accepted that you were raised by a monster.
I'm perfectly happy, based on the facts that you've told me, and I have no reason to disbelieve you.
I'm perfectly happy, Ashley, to accept the fact that you were raised by an evil monster.
And I know for a fact that these evil monsters exist.
So I see that.
I get that. I really do.
Right? You don't have to make a case for me.
I accept that fully and completely.
The fact that, you know, you as an intelligent, creative, able-bodied woman at the age of 26 is nervous about getting her own apartment tells me exactly how much life she attempted to squeeze and crush right out of you.
Right? Yeah.
So I'm there.
That's why I'm not going to let you talk about her, because that's the past, and I fully accept that she is a seriously bad apple.
Well, I really expect myself to be more like my father.
I really expect myself to assert myself to my situation.
Do you think an assertive and healthy man marries a woman like your mother?
No.
Right.
He was a spineless.
He was spineless.
He was absolutely spineless.
If I remember this rightly, your mother was actually institutionalized before you were born, right?
Yeah. So we got a guy who looks across the entire acreage Of women and says, hey, you know who I really want to have a kid with?
The woman who's been institutionalized.
So I personally would scrub that phrase, I want to be more like my father, right out of my vocabulary.
Because he's no healthier than she is.
You have no template.
To work with from your family, and I guarantee you from your extended family either, because this is a whole system, is it not?
And what that means is that you get the exciting and horrible task of inventing your own templates, your own life, your own philosophy, so to speak.
You know what I mean?
Yeah. And that's really tough.
That is really tough. On the plus side, you get...
Scary as hell. I'm sorry?
It's really scary. Oh, it is totally scary.
It is totally scary.
You know, the feeling I get is I call it the end of the earth feeling.
Like you're staring down the barrel of a friggin' gun.
I know. I know.
Absolutely. It is very scary.
There is no easy way to achieve this.
And I don't want to turn into my sister.
Well, but I'm not sure why you're picking personalities from the freaky people around you when you can create your own.
Yeah. It's like I was saying, well, I was raised in the mafia and I don't want to be like Luigi the Hitman and I don't want to be like Vera the Prostitute and I don't want to be like this guy.
It's like, don't be like any of them then.
Be who you are.
But that is going to mean that you're going to have to ratchet up your self-esteem inch by inch.
And that means that, obviously, first and foremost, you have to get yourself out of toxic environments.
Right? I mean, if you want to kill yourself of cholera, the first thing you have to do is stop drinking water with cholera in it, right?
Yeah. I mean, if you're going to have a chance for courage and stability in your personality, it has to be, and I'm only accepting, and I have no reason to disbelieve it, accepting the corruption and evil of your extended family and your immediate family.
The first thing you're going to have to do is get out of that environment, right?
No matter what else happens, that has to be the first step.
If you're going to have a chance.
Now, if you don't want to have a chance, so it's too overwhelming or whatever, then you can stay there, but then you can't stay here and complain about it, right?
Because then you've just made the choice and say, well, it's too much for me out there, and so I'm going to stay here.
And then you can say all the bad things you want about your mom, but you're still choosing to be there, so it doesn't really mean much, right?
Yeah, right. Because complaints, and look, you have valid complaints.
I mean, I'm totally with you there.
You have valid complaints.
But we either act on those complaints or we stop complaining, right?
If your mother is the best place for you to be, then it's the best place for you to be, right?
I don't think it is, but I can't make that decision for you, of course.
Nobody can. I know where I should be.
Don't give me another relative, please.
I'm just kidding. Where should you be?
There's a second cousin, see, who actually is in the Mafia, but I think he's a really good guy.
Sorry, go on. I know I should be someplace with no influences.
I sometimes feel like I should be immersed in education.
But I don't...
I have confidence that I could pay for the education.
Well, but see, you're looking 600 miles down the road, right?
Yes. I'm saying get out of a wheelchair, and you're saying, but I don't know how I can win the Olympics, right?
Well, I don't know if you can win the Olympics, but I sure know that you're not going to get to win the Olympics if you don't get out of the wheelchair, right?
Yes. So, if you can remove yourself from a toxic environment...
Whether you end up in education, running the UN as an entrepreneur, as a mime artist on the street corner, I don't know.
But looking 400 miles down the road and saying, what am I going to be in two years, is just a way of paralyzing yourself with the immediate decision, which is, how do I get out of this wheelchair?
It's a one-step-at-a-time thing, right?
I don't really know that concept.
You know, the one step at a time.
You absolutely know that concept, because otherwise you wouldn't be paralyzing yourself with 600 miles down the road, right?
You know the danger of one step at a time, or the strength of one step at a time.
Otherwise you wouldn't be fighting it with the six million steps, right?
Yeah, but my fear is that I'm holding on to my husband as a safety blanket.
You know, to... To not explore who I can really be.
Okay, and I'm going to... Let me stop here now, just because this, obviously, we can only deal with one problem at a time.
And I noticed this the other day, that we would try to get...
We'd get close to the solution to one problem, and you're like, yes, but what about my kidney?
Or, yes, but my husband...
Like, you move on to something else, right?
And that's a defense that you have around decision, right?
Around decisiveness. You get close to a decision, and then you bring up another problem in your mind, right?
Seems that way. Yeah, and I don't mean this in any way negatively.
This is just an observation.
It's just my amateur over-the-internet observation, so take it for what it's worth.
But we've talked about a lot.
I would say have a chance to listen to this conversation and see what else you can gleam out of it.
But we can't deal with your whole history, your family, your extended family, your career, your future, and your marriage in one conversation, right?
Hello? No, no, not quite.
Two, maybe, but not one.
It's like, hey, I thought you were good at this stuff, man.
No, you are good, and I appreciate your time.
It sounds like, I appreciate your goddamn time, you limey bastard.
Don't call me on my stuff.
I want sympathy, not answers.
Right, I understand. Okay, well, I mean, do keep us posted.
I mean, have a listen to this again and, you know, just focus on, you know, one step at a time, you know, one thing at a time.
And definitely the toxic environment to me is the first thing before you can get any kind of clarity.
You have to get the smoke out of your eyes, so to speak.
So do keep us posted about how that goes.
Sure, thank you.
Thank you. And we have time for one more teeny tiny Tina Turner question, if anybody has anything to add to this here Sunday show on the 15th of June, 2008.
I am all with the earring.
Yeah, only teeny tiny ones.
What are we going, over two hours now?
Two hours, 60 minutes and 33, 34.
I could go on, but I won't.
Anybody? Anybody find me?
Oh, board progress.
Yeah, okay. Bill is flashing us just a little bit of thigh here.
And, oh, here comes the belt.
Oh, that's an IT... Oh, yeah.
That's IT man boobs if ever I've seen them.
Shake him, sailor. Sorry, you were typing.
We have a gentleman named Bill, and I love that name because he never sends me one.
And Bill is magnificently and kindly upgrading the board software to the point where I think we only have 15 forums from our current 61.
No, I think he's working on that too.
But he's upgrading the board software, which is why a few people have been getting friend requests from Free Domain Radio, which is unusual.
Because normally Freedom Main Radio eliminates friendships.
But in this case, it seems to be bringing it in.
So he says he's got everything fixed up except one permission area on the media galleries.
And I think that's the picture of me in the bathing suit.
And actually, Bill, that's not a permission error.
That is actually just an aesthetic or taste error, which I think would be the way to do it.
If it's the media galleries, Bill, by the way, we can just toast those and do those later.
And I don't have to sketch your whole weekend for that.
So, you know, we're looking for that.
And it's going to be wonderful new stuff.
He gave a preview of the new board to us, I guess, a week ago today.
Was it last Sunday? Everyone was up.
And so you've already ruined most of my life.
What is another weekend? In fact, Bill, I think that's going on the homepage as yet another listener endorsement.
But I really do appreciate that.
And Bill, the magnificent and highly, highly talented.
If you ever want an IT guy who absolutely can do a fierce moonwalk, he is the guy you want.
He can wrap down with the hood very well.
Thanks again to Bill so much.
He's just been doing a magnificent job.
We actually have a board that is not my programming in ASCII text because of Bill's exquisite specialization and skill in this area.
So thank you again so much. Yes, it would have been COBOL without a doubt.
So, thank you everybody so much for dropping by this Sunday show.
Thank you to all of the listeners and all of the participants.
I think that, Ali, it's safe for you to plug back your internet in now.
And actually, when you call her on a cell phone, she always has a piece of tinfoil handy to crinkle into the ear and say she's going into a tunnel, too, when you made a good point.
So, that's just something to remember.
And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful weekend.
I look forward to shooting the book out to the Diamond Plus people this week.
And I will talk to you soon.
Thank you again for subscribing, for donating.
Please feel free to continue doing that to help support this conversation and have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week, my fabulous, beautiful, talented, exotic, and miraculous listeners.
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