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July 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:18:31
1108 Nihilism

The genesis of emptiness...

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Time Text
Hello? Hello? Hi, how's it going?
Alright, sorry about that. Is the sound okay?
Yeah, it's really good. Okay, great.
So, am I talking to Horatio?
Yeah, that's me. Fantastic.
Alright. So, I guess we were just chatting on the chat window, and you had some...
Some thoughts or some feelings, I guess, with regard to the topic of conversation, which was nihilism.
Is that right? Yeah, that's right.
So tell me a little bit about your history with nihilism.
It is, of course, an interesting philosophy and certainly does have some value, in my opinion.
But perhaps you could just tell me sort of a little bit about your history with it.
Well, I started with nihilism when I was about 18.
A friend introduced it to me.
Before that, I just wasn't interested in philosophy.
Well, perhaps because my father always used to make fun of people who were interested in philosophy.
I'm not sure why, but up until then I was never interested in it.
And then this friend came along and he was a nihilist.
We talked quite a bit about that and soon I became a nihilist too.
Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say that I'm sort of in the process of giving up nihilism.
I think there's little left of that in me.
I mean, the philosophy. But perhaps some of the effects...
Perhaps I still have some of the effects.
Well, can you tell me what worked for you or attracted you to nihilism in the first place and what displaced it?
Well, thinking in retrospect, I think I was really frustrated at people's ideas about morality, and so the idea that morality was completely subjective and there was nothing true about that, I guess, appealed to me at the time.
Sure. So it's sort of the idea that, like the Nietzschean idea, that morality is invented to either control slaves to tell them that things are moral, which the masters permit for themselves, right?
So, for instance, we have a moral system, or there is a moral system in the U.S. that says something like...
Speeding, when you're on the highway, is really bad, or drunk driving is really bad.
However, if you start a war which gets hundreds of thousands of people killed in Iraq, you get a pension and a speaking tour, so the morality is just inflicted upon the weak, so to speak, to keep them weak and guilty.
Is that sort of right? Yeah, that's right.
I haven't read an issue, but from what I hear, it's pretty much the sort of philosophy that I had.
I was just going to say that I read, well, I heard the audiobook of Untruth, The Tyranny of Illusion, and I thought it was great, and it made me, it helped me understand some of the causes for, some of the emotional causes for my being interested in nihilism.
Right, and of course one of the Not-so-great secrets of FDR is that On Truth is a pretty nihilistic book, right?
I'm not sure why you say that.
Oh, simply because it talks about morality that is simply used to control others.
Oh, yeah, yeah, I get it. Yeah, and of course, what I say is that your parents don't know morality, they just use morality in order to control you and to get you to attack yourself.
Right. Now, of course, without UPB, untruth would lead a lot of people towards a rejection of ethical standards as it is, right?
But in order to build...
In order to build a new building, you have to tear down the existing building, right?
That's what that was for. Yeah, totally.
And I'm in the process of listening to the audiobook of UBB. I've listened to most of it once, but I think I'm going to listen to it again, or again.
Well, I think...
Some of the ideas of that book are starting to make sense.
Right. One of the challenges of that book is that it's not so much the argument for ethics, it's the redefinition of ethics.
That is the real challenge of UPB, right?
So the redefinition of ethics insofar as ethics is universally preferable behavior, not if you want to be good, you have to do X. And, of course, the expansion of the definition to universally preferable behavior subsumes or includes the definitions that are used by nihilism, right? Because nihilism says there's no such thing as morality, and therefore to say that there is such a thing as morality...
It's a false statement, if I understand it right.
Right. Well, one thing that I realized about nihilism is that the effects that it had on my life were really hurtful, I'd say. So...
That doesn't make it false, but at least it gives me quite an incentive to try to look at the theoretical base for nihilism and see if something is wrong there, because I think that's a pretty important question.
So perhaps I'm talking to this friend that got me into nihilism, and I'm telling him about this, and of course he says, well, the fact that nihilism is bad for you doesn't mean that it isn't true.
And I'm like, well, yeah, but it does give me an incentive to look into it.
Right, right. And of course one of the challenges of nihilism intellectually, one of the challenges of reading some of the great nihilists is that there is no such thing as a should or an ought, and there is no such thing as morality in the world, right? So when people say you should do this because morality commands it, well, morality doesn't command anything.
Gravity commands, but morality does not.
So, I mean, the nihilists, I think, in my opinion, are on to a very important truth, but they slide towards cynicism and to some degree despair and that world-weary wisdom that says that, you know, it's a sort of reduction argument, you know, love is a biochemical illusion, free will is a...
It's a neurological fantasy and so on.
So it takes a lot of the beauty and virtue out of the world by correctly identifying that there is no such thing as ethics.
It then says, then there is no such thing as truth.
There is no such thing as value.
There is no such thing. And then all joys or all of our natural responses to health and beauty become an illusion.
And I think that's where some of the world weariness sets in, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.
And of course, pretty much every nihilist in the world, or at least most of them, will say that you're not right, that there can be showing nihilism and whatever, but you look into what their lives are like, and there isn't a whole lot of showing there.
A whole lot of what? A whole lot of joy or happiness.
No, no, there's not.
There is that world-weary, I am correct, and being correct makes me miserable.
Right. Right.
And that, of course, creates an impossible situation, which is that we only fundamentally want to live because of a positive experience of living, right?
Right. And so, if it is true that a positive experience of living is an illusion, then the nihilists create an impossible situation where life becomes stripped of joy, which means, of course, why live?
And yet, so the truth which life is required to create, I mean, there's no such thing as truth In the universe, truth is required by human beings who are alive to create and communicate it, right?
Right.
And of course, one of the contradictions that seem to appear a lot in nihilist people is that they say, well, I'm into philosophy because I seek happiness, right? I'm into philosophy because I seek happiness, right?
And then, on the other hand, they say, because of my philosophy, I conclude that the only logical course of action for any human being is to commit suicide.
Right. That's kind of...
And of course, if you had, so the truth, life is required for the existence of truth, but the existence of truth negates the reason or desire for living, right?
Right. Yeah, so I mean, any time, any time, in my opinion, any time where an insurmountable paradox is created, I always want to look, first and foremost, Not to the arguments, but to the childhood, if that makes sense. And one of the things that you had mentioned when you first brought up your attraction to nihilism was your father, right?
In this call. Yeah.
So tell me a little bit about, and we can talk more about the philosophy if you like, but because there's an obvious contradiction at the heart of nihilism, of course nihilism is also to say that there is no truth, which of course it has to make a truth statement and arrive at that conclusion by a process of reasoning, and so you can't have a truth statement which says there is no truth, right?
It's a logical contradiction. So when these kinds of logical contradictions are overlooked, Very rapidly or very quickly, then from my standpoint, what happens is we have to look at what it is in the history that creates a blindness to impossible situations or logical contradictions and,
of course, a cynicism about values and joy, and that almost always comes from the parent, and I found that nihilism is more associated with the father than the mother, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I'm not sure about if it comes more from fathers or mothers.
I'm not sure I could...
I mean, I don't know about that, but yeah, the idea that nihilism comes from early childhood traumas, yeah, I totally agree with that.
And is this something that you came to before you were listening to FDR, or was it unrelated or something later?
No, no, I totally got that from FDR. I was into, I guess I should say, a process of giving up nihilism when I came to FDR, but yeah, FDR was a major help in that department.
And do you know or can you remember was there a particular moment or a particular statement or a particular podcast that brought you closer to this idea or was it something that grew slowly over time?
Well, no, I think it grew slowly over time.
I was always interested in philosophy and psychoanalysis and when I saw The kind of approach that F.E.R. took in regards to that, it made a lot of sense.
And as I listened to more podcasts and recently the book on Truth, well, I just realized that I hadn't been looking at psychoanalysis in the right approach.
And when you began to think of it in this approach and looking at your own history, what was it that began to come to mind for you?
Well, of course that my parents were really bad people and they hurt me a lot.
And that my nihilism was, in a way, trying to normalize all of those experiences.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how it helped you normalize that stuff?
Yeah, it's pretty much what you said in the book on truth.
What you said earlier in this conversation is that if my parents were using morality as a tool to control me and to get me to do what they wanted,
And by convincing myself that there was no such thing as morality, I didn't have to look into the horrors of my childhood that had to do with morality.
Not all of them, but the ones that did.
And how did that premise that there's no morality help you avoid looking into your...
Childhood because, of course, the paradox that would first jump to my mind is I say, okay, well, if there is no morality, then my parents were lying to me about ethics, which is painful, right?
It's not pleasant to be lied to by those in authority, particularly around the question of virtue, because they are using your desire to be good in order to… Sort of corrupt you and have you end up in a bad situation.
But then, of course, the paradox becomes, well, why would I feel pain about being lied to if there's no such thing as morality, right?
Right. Well, I think in my case it was something that you talked about.
I'm not sure where, but...
The idea that since...
Well, basically the idea that all good is invented and that I had realized this and everybody else was just stupid or something.
And so I didn't think that my parents wanted to inflict pain on me, but rather that they were...
Too, quote, stupid, to realize that morality was an invention.
Right, so they didn't use morality to inflict harm, but rather their illusions about morality used them, so to speak.
Is that fair to say? Right, that was my view.
I no longer...
at least looking in retrospect what got me into nihilism.
And can you tell me a little bit more specifically about the way in which your parents use ethics to control or to bully you?
Well, the first thing that comes to my mind is them telling me that I was a bad boy and that I used to be good when I was very young like when I was two months old or something like that and that as I grew older I became bad or something like that and it's like for example they wanted me to go to school and I didn't want to go to school and there would be A really big issue about this.
I wanted to stay up during the night so that I would be tired when they woke me up to go to school.
I used that tiredness to try to avoid going to school.
It's very worthwhile, but they used to scream at me and sometimes used force even to get me out of bed and to go to school because that was something that you had to do.
And, well, that was really traumatic to me, I think.
Just one of the things.
And I remember I had this memory of having this conversation many times with my mother and also with my father about my saying, for example, I don't want to go to school.
And they would say, well, but I go to work every day and you think I want to go to work?
And I just replied, well, if you don't want to go, then don't go.
I'm not forcing you to go.
At the moment, I didn't realize this.
But thinking back in time, I now see that what I was trying to say to them is that If I don't force you to go to work, then why do you force me to go to school?
I never went as far as to say that, but from what I remember in the conversation, that was pretty much what I was implying.
And how old were you when these conversations were occurring?
8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
Right. So, I mean, you had a very logical and rational grasp of the issues and philosophy.
We should all be as good a philosopher as we were when we were six, right?
That really is the goal to get back to the clarity of the issues because that's when we were still in a pre-propagandized state in many ways.
And, of course, what you're saying to your dad is...
Just because you choose to put chains on yourself, it does not give you the right.
If you check yourself into a prison, that does not give you the right to lock me up, right?
Right, I think that was going on for me.
Actually, when I was 15, I sort of started...
Well, I'm not getting into the theoretical...
Grants for naive listen, but I started believing that there was no such thing as good people and that people that did good only did it because they were stupid or something like that.
Right, or bitter, right?
I mean, your dad wasn't necessarily dumb, but he was bitter about his own work situation or work environment, and that's what drove him to...
That's what drove him to dislike so much your freedoms, right?
Yeah, I think I could see that at the time.
Right, right, that makes sense. And what was it that you disliked about going to school so much?
Well, the whole environment was pretty bad.
I mean, It was pretty much like a prison.
Yeah, I think that's a pretty good analogy actually.
The teachers would always impose their authority on me.
Perhaps I didn't want to be there, I didn't want to listen to them or whatever, and they would attack me or say that I was bad or something like that.
Also, I had a pretty bad relationship with the other students at school.
Sure. They would often attack me on a daily basis.
And well, that didn't make it any better, right?
And the fact that I often wanted to leave school and the teachers and The authorities at school would not let me.
So I was in prison until it was time to live, right?
Right, right. I understand that.
And was it because you were bored?
Or what was it that was your primary objection to how you were being instructed?
Well, I was bored, yeah, definitely.
But I think the worst part was being attacked by teachers, other students, etc.
Right. I mean, I don't think my experience was quite the same as yours, but I certainly do remember very strongly myself when I was in school seeing some of the kids who were attacked, which is, you know... What is morality for these people if they can't even protect the children who are forced into their care, right?
I mean, if you force someone, if you lock someone in your basement and you don't, I mean, if I don't feed you, it's not murder, but if I lock you in my basement and I don't feed you, then that is murder, right?
So if you force the children into this environment and then you do not protect them, that to me is just direct, I mean, For the abuse that the children are suffering in these schools, it falls not particularly on the other children, but on the social environment that puts them there, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does make a lot of sense.
I think I felt pretty helpless during all those years.
Well, sorry, pretty helpless is an understatement, isn't it?
I mean, was there any pattern that you were not helpless?
You were completely helpless. Yeah, I was.
And this is true in school in general.
The ethics go far beyond and they put us in these churches.
In particular with the schools, of course, we know, at least I knew pretty early on in my life, that we had to go to these schools, that it wasn't even my mother's choice or my father's choice.
Now, boarding school when I was six was my father's choice.
Turned him into such a robust power.
Very aware, when it came to public schools, that I had to go.
I mean, that the society as a whole, not just my mother, but that the society as a whole was forcing me into this situation.
And that was That was a very important factor for me.
I'm not sure whether you processed it that way or not.
It sounds a little bit like you did, but let me know.
Yeah, I did. Also, the certification for why they had to send me there, which was that I had to be prepared for my future.
It didn't make sense because I didn't learn almost anything at school and most of what I did learn I learned elsewhere so it didn't make any sense to the idea that I had to go to school because I had to learn how to do all these things and I would go to school and they would teach me some irrelevant stuff that I had to memorize and I couldn't see any use in those things.
Perhaps it was because my school was really bad.
I'm not sure, but that was the experience that I got.
No, the schools are bad all around.
I mean, my boarding school was a private school and was not appreciably better.
I mean, the problem is there's a corruption of philosophy which spreads everywhere in society.
So I don't think it was just your school, but I'm going to challenge your statement because I think that, obviously, you're very intelligent and you're somebody who enjoys learning, right, which is why you began to look into philosophy and nihilism.
I think that you processed exactly correctly what people meant when they said you have to go to school to teach me anything.
But that's not true. They were teaching you, quote, an enormous amount, right?
And I think that you knew exactly what the purpose of the school was.
That makes a lot of sense, actually.
Yeah. Go on, I'm never shy about how I'm making sense.
I've never seen it like that, but yeah, I can totally see what you're saying.
You're saying that it wasn't that they needed to teach me some knowledge, but that they had to teach me how to be the kind of person that they wanted me to be.
Yeah, what is it that is being taught?
You know, when people say, well, you have to go to school...
To be socialized and to learn how to be successful in your society.
And that's very true.
You do get taught that in school.
It's just that the conclusions and what it means about your future and your society are just horrifying.
Right, and it wasn't like when I wasn't in school, I wouldn't see anybody.
I mean, I had many friends that I used to see when I wasn't in school, so it wasn't like school was the only way for me to socialize or anything.
So I just didn't see any use in going to school at all.
It was just a complete negative.
Yeah, I mean, if you take a child and you torture that child and you say, I am preparing you for your adult life, what does that say about your adult life?
That you're going to be turtles.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
And I think that children, particularly sensitive and intelligent children like yourself, Children understand that very well, and I would guess the way that we would figure that out is, do you have problems with ambition in your life or procrastination?
Yeah, huge problems actually.
I'm dealing with them, but yeah, I do.
But do you understand why that is occurring from this experience?
Yeah, and actually your video on procrastination was pretty important.
But watch it from then on.
Videos and podcasts from you.
I think that the old truth book was really huge, but I only...
But yeah, I can totally see your approach to procrastination.
It makes a lot of sense, and I think that's exactly what's happening to me.
Thank you. you Of course, is that we basically say to kids, you have to be traumatized to succeed in this society, which means that you have this wonderful choice when you grow up.
Would you like to be a bully or would you like to be a victim?
There's no other choice, right?
There's no third choice. Do you want to be an exploiter or do you want to be exploited?
And it's really hard, if you are a basically ethical and sensitive society, To find any kind of ambition to succeed in a society like that, if that makes sense.
I just recently figured out that my parents really wanted me to be the bully type, which is what my father is.
And I think the only reason they didn't succeed is because my mother I really hated my father, or hates my father.
And I could never understand why they stick together, but I mean, my mom used to send me stuff like, your father is a sick man, you should stay away from him.
This is especially because when she started working outside again, because she had a What's the word?
She's a pediatrician and she had an office, I'm not sure what the word is, next to her house.
And she used to work there until I was about nine and then she moved to working in a hospital.
And during this period, which was when I had to spend a lot of time alone with my father and my siblings.
My father used to beat me pretty often.
And I would come to my mother and talk to her about this.
And she would say, well, he's a sick man.
You should stay away from him.
If he's upstairs, you should go downstairs.
And that sort of nonsense.
Which was impossible because...
I spent a lot of time with him.
My mother would do 24-hour shifts in the hospital, so there was no way that I could stay away from him all the time.
But in either case, it didn't make sense to me why she would choose to marry this man, have children with him.
She chose to stick with him.
Of course, sorry, the irony, I mean, and it's, I say only irony in the loosest sense of the word, but the irony, of course, is that here is a woman who has dedicated herself to the caring of the health of children, right?
Yeah.
She's a pediatrician, and she marries a man who physically, and I'm so sorry to hear about that, of course, it's just beyond evil, who physically attacks her child, right?
Her children, yeah.
Yeah, I have two younger sisters and one older brother.
We are each two years apart from each other.
Right, right. But I mean, that's just beyond strange, right?
I mean, that you would have a woman who dedicates herself...
She's taking care of the health of children and making sure that they stay healthy and she probably gives them, well I'm sure she does, she gives them immunizations, she gives them checkups, she makes sure that they stay healthy and then her own children are being beaten by the man she chose as her life partner.
Yeah, of course. When I was young I had this idea that she used to give to me that And other people in my family used to give me this idea as well that she was a really good person, that she got into medicine because she wanted to help people and all this complete bullshit because it was always to me that she didn't care about helping people.
Abuse was taking place at her home and she didn't do anything about it.
No, I mean, of course, that is entirely correct.
And, of course, what she did was she blamed you.
She blamed the child as to why the violence was occurring, right?
That the onus is upon you to control and take care of your father's abuse, right?
Right, she would say that he was a sick man from a psychological point of view because actually she studied psychology before studying medicine and this actually makes it worse because it means that she understood a lot of how human beings Right.
So what I was saying is that...
No, actually I forgot what I was saying, so go on.
And... Your father, of course, he would say that you provoked the abuse by being a bad boy, a bad child, right?
Yeah, totally. Yeah, he was.
Right, so this is somebody who uses ethics to blame you for his own violence.
Because, I mean, obviously, anybody, even if you're not...
Even if you're not that rational, even if you're not that sensible, even if you have an IQ that is pretty low, it's not that hard to figure out logically that no matter what a child does, beating a child is worse ethically, right? Yeah.
I mean, we accept that when it comes to adults, right?
This is the sick thing about our society.
Because there's no defense against wife-beating called, she didn't make my dinner, right?
Yeah, of course.
But then again, my father did hit my mother on some occasions.
I didn't actually remember this until a friend of mine...
We talked about this incident where he was at my house and we heard screaming and it seemed like my father had slapped my mother or something like that and I ran there to try to stop him or something.
But I didn't actually remember this until he told me about it.
But it seems like, yeah, he didn't really have a problem with hitting her wife either.
Right, right. So, I mean, this is just an ultimate bully and a coward and just a revolting human being and, of course, nothing but sympathy for everything that you experienced.
I have very little sympathy for your mother.
In fact, I would have even more horror for your mother than for you because your mother was trained in this stuff and had not even the excuse of a lack of knowledge about these issues, educated, professional, studied psychology and so on.
And, of course, I mean, it is so – the real sickness is to blame the child for the abuse, right?
And I'm not saying that she said you caused it, but she said it's your responsibility to control it.
But, of course, what she's saying then is that she says I, as an educated, professional, independent adult, can do nothing to stop your father's abuse.
But you, as a helpless, independent, and young child, have that responsibility, which I cannot exercise, right?
Hello? Yeah, yeah.
Sorry, I don't mind if you take a moment.
I just want to make sure that I'm not cut off.
Sorry, take your time if you need. I'll just mention a little bit more about that, because metaphorically, I think, well, logically, it's important to understand, but sometimes it's easier to get it.
I mean, if I can't lift a rock, if I say, you know, there's this 500-pound rock, and I can't lift it, does it make much sense for me to call over my 8-year-old child and say, you lift it?
Yeah, it's horrible. It is, yeah.
I mean, if she can't control your father's abuse, then saying that you should is staggering, right?
I think in her mind, she tried to control it by, I don't know, pushing him back when she was around or something like that.
But of course, this is nonsense because if she really wanted to stop it, then...
All she had to do was sleep.
Absolutely, yeah. No question.
She could have left. Certainly, getting a hold of the abuse is very easy.
You just tape it or you hide a video camera.
That's very easy to get a hold of that.
And through that, she can actually get a restraining order so that your father is not allowed to see you unsupervised.
You were always and forever one day away from being whisked away to a secure, safe, and more sane environment.
Always one day away.
Every single day of your childhood, you were only one day away from that kind of safety.
Yeah, totally. And although she isn't a religious person, in fact, she's an atheist, when I talked to her about divorcing my father, she would often have this Blank stare.
Like, she couldn't say anything about that.
Like, I don't know, like, it was a sort of forbidden topic or something.
And why do you think it was forbidden?
Or should I say verboten?
I'm not sure, actually.
Oh, I think you are. I think you absolutely are.
The emotional reason for why this was a forbidden topic, that's pretty obvious for me because she didn't want to deal with it.
No. No, it's deeper than that.
This is not because you lack intelligence.
I get that you're highly intelligent, but this is just something that the propaganda of your family has disallowed you access to.
Right, because if you, are you talking about disowning your father, or as we call it, defooing?
Is that right? Yeah.
Well, if you can leave him, right, she's got a story in her mind that she couldn't have left him, right?
Right. And why could she not have left him?
What's her story as to why she couldn't have left him or why she didn't leave him?
Well, she's not very open about this, but from what I got, I think she thinks that that's just something that you don't do.
like her children needed a father or they needed the economic support or whatever, which is all nonsense, of course.
But I'm not sure if this is what you're trying to get or if you're seeing something deeper that I'm not seeing.
Well, let's just have a look a bit at your mother's justifications.
Now, was it because she felt that there were practical economic reasons?
In other words, he made money and having more money was better.
Is that right? Yeah, but it wasn't like he made a lot of money.
In fact, she made decent money as well.
They both made about the same amount of money.
She had this idea like her children needed that extra amount.
Well, she's a doctor, right?
So she's not like a waitress, right?
Yeah, totally. I mean, where I live, doctors don't get paid that much because there is a huge monopoly from the state, but yeah.
Okay, so, but I mean, she can't claim, really, that she couldn't have afforded to support you guys without your father's income, right?
No, of course not.
In fact, most of our patients are people who live...
Well, and of course, she didn't ask you kids, right?
She didn't say, do you want a few extra toys and a slightly larger house, or do you want to not have your dad beating on you?
Of course, of course. And it wasn't even like she cared for him because I don't remember a single time of her being affectionate with him.
Oh no, no. Oh no, I can totally understand that.
I mean, it's a hideous mutant existence to call this any kind of marriage or love or relationship.
And of course, if she had divorced him and she could have proven the abuse, which would have been very easy, then she would have received alimony and child support, right?
Right. That's not even the question.
I'm sure she was just making this stuff up to not divorce him.
Right, so if she then has no good reasons for staying with your father, right?
Then obviously she must have bad reasons for staying with your father, but Consciously, she's not going to say, well, I chose this guy because I had an evil and abusive childhood.
I chose this to replicate that childhood so that I wouldn't have to experience the horror, and so I would re-inflict it on my children.
All the standard stuff that would have been the motivation for this kind of marriage.
Now, of course, if you suddenly decide to...
Not suddenly, but if you decide to no longer see your father...
Then her story comes crumbling down, right?
Her story about you can't leave your father, you can't disengage from this man, her story comes crumbling down, right?
If I say no man can lift 100 pounds, and I define lifting 100 pounds as virtuous, and I say, well, virtuous is impossible, or what I did was virtuous.
If some man comes along and quite easily lifts 100 pounds, Then my whole justification, my whole story falls apart, right?
I'm not sure about that.
She wasn't very...
She didn't offer a lot of resistance when I moved out of their house and said, I didn't want to see my father at all.
She didn't say... Something like, oh my god, you can't stop seeing your father or something like that.
I'm sorry. I thought, I mean, maybe I misheard you, but I thought that she did have some issues with you ceasing to have any contact with your father.
Oh, no, no. No, she didn't.
Oh, sorry. Okay. Now, can you tell me why you have any contact with her?
I don't actually, but I used to about six months ago or five months ago or something like that.
Then I told her that there was a lot of stuff that I needed to think about and that I wouldn't be seeing her for an indefinite period of time.
She said, She didn't understand why I had to not see her while I was thinking over all these things.
I didn't go into details because I felt I wasn't ready at the time.
Right, right, okay. And what's the story with your sisters?
I'm not sure I understand.
Well, if you're ceasing to see your father...
Oh, right, right. Well, my two sisters and my brother still live with my parents.
I never had a close relationship with any of them, so...
I mean, every now and then, perhaps I... over MSN, but...
Whenever I go into details, the other day I told him that I was ready to discuss some of the topics that I've been going through with him, but he didn't reply.
Yeah, which of course is itself a reply.
Yeah, totally. And so, as far as I understand it, this nihilism or this history that you went through, Left you with suicidality, is that right?
Yeah. What's your thoughts or understanding of that?
I'm not sure I have all of that process, but at the time this traumatic childhood and The moral bullying that took place left me with an idea that I was somehow evil or bad or something like that and that I didn't have any worthiness.
And so I think on top of that, because of that, I got into nihilism, and that provided the theoretical background for why I should commit suicide.
I didn't actually go as far as to attempt it, but I was pretty close.
Right. I understand that.
And again, massive sympathies to it.
I think, though, that there's something missing.
And again, I know that I'm, you know, jumping the gun because I just asked you for a brief introduction.
And I'll mention what I think is missing, which I think is very important from your processing of your own suicidality.
Trauma does not, and this is all my nonsense theories, right?
So just take it for what it's worth.
It might be completely false.
But this is what I have seen and this is what I have experienced.
Trauma does not make us suicidal.
Trauma is obviously pain with regards to particular people in a particular circumstance.
It's not universal.
People kill themselves in ways that we can understand when it comes to, you know, they have an incurable illness and that pain is all that they will ever experience, if that makes sense.
Right. Yeah, I agree.
It's not because we've been hurt that we try to kill ourselves, but because we are helpless about being hurt at the time.
Right, and that means, sorry, no, not at the time, but in the future.
It means that we are born into a prison cell, and we spend 18 years tunneling to get out of that prison cell, and then we break out of that prison cell, and we simply find ourselves in a larger prison called the world.
That is when suicidality hits, because we believe or we feel that there is no escape from prison because the world is a prison.
Right, right.
I struggled to get out of that living hell and then I got out and it wasn't a whole lot better.
Right, right. And this is the very important aspect of child abuse that is very, very often ignored for reasons that, as we talk about it, will become quite obvious.
Child abuse is experienced by the child Primarily as, of course, abuse by the parents towards the child.
But the abuse which is lifelong and which is harder to see has absolutely very little to do with the family at all.
The real abuse that occurs that is what makes breaking out of the prison futile and is what makes people suicidal is is not the abuse that occurs within the family, but it is the social context that permits the abuse to continue,
right? So you were a kid, you were beaten, and you were sent to school, and you were told by your teachers what goodness was, right?
Obeying the teacher, doing your homework, being on time, being neat, being presentable, all that kind of stuff, right?
Yeah. But all of these people who were telling you what goodness was and how to be good never once intervened while you were being beaten, right? Right.
In fact, I would imagine, if your childhood was anything like mine, I would imagine that the fact that you were being beaten, in fact, marked you for further abuse within the social environment that you were in, within the school in marked you for further abuse within the social environment that you I'm not sure I get what you're saying.
Well, sorry, I'm not being very clear.
What I mean is that, for instance...
I never did homework.
I couldn't. I went home.
It was a battleground. I simply tried to survive as best I could, but I did not do my homework.
This is just one example of many.
So I did not do my homework because my mother was...
Functionally insane. My brother was sadistic.
My home life was chaotic, to say the least.
You know, there was violence.
There was verbal abuse.
It was a war zone, right?
So, what the fuck am I going to do my homework for?
It doesn't make any sense.
I've just got to survive, right?
Right. It was the same for me.
I almost never did my homework either.
Right. And so, we don't do our homework because...
We are being abused, right?
Right. It's not that I couldn't do it because when I had tests at school, I would very often get The best grades, but I would never do homework.
And, of course, I was told that this was because I was a bad kid.
Yeah, absolutely, right? So this is what I'm talking about.
And, of course, I would show up to school, and my clothes would be torn, and we may not have any soap in the house.
I might smell. I might be hungry.
I might be broke. I might beg for food.
All of these things that occurred for me in my childhood, and they all occurred in full view of society, right?
Teachers used to say to me, and I've mentioned this before, but teachers used to say to me, you know, oh, Steph, because I'd always have my nose in a book, right?
I'd always love to read. And they'd say, oh, Steph, if effort matched ability, you'd be an A+. The implication, of course, being that I mysteriously just lacked effort.
I just was lazy, right? Right.
Now, no one, not one single solitary human being, And this is in boarding school where there was a priest.
This is among any of the probably 120 odd teachers who instructed me.
None of my friends, who I can't blame because they were kids too, of course, but none of my friends' parents.
I mean, my mother once took off to Houston to meet up with some guy she met through newspaper ads, was the internet dating of the time.
And she left for two weeks and left my brother and I with $30, right?
And we ran out of money and we'd go over to friends' places while they were having dinner and look hungry and cross our fingers, right?
Otherwise, we'd be...
We'd be hungry, and then we wouldn't be able to sleep.
We'd fall asleep in class.
We'd get yelled at for being lazy and inattentive, right?
So what happened, and of course, this is all just the adults, right?
So literally thousands of people passed by my orbit from zero to 18 in a number of different continents.
I mean, this is how crazy it was.
My mother, we kicked out when I was 15.
We had friends of ours come and live with us to help pay the rent and so they could be closer to school.
All their parents were perfectly aware that we were without any parental guidance or involvement at all.
My mother had moved out.
Well, actually, we'd helped her out, so to speak.
And in all of this, not only did people not do anything, but they blamed my brother and I for the inevitable effects of the abuse and neglect that we were experiencing, right?
Yeah, that's really horrible.
I had no idea that your childhood had been so terrible.
Right, and I don't want to distract you from your childhood, but what I tried to process as early as possible was Was the basic idea that it was not what my mother did to me and my father did to me and my brother did to me that was the primary problem that I was going to face as an adult.
Because I can move away from my...
I got my mother out of my life when I was 15.
So I can move away from there, right?
Right? Well, the problem is not where I'm coming from.
The problem is where I'm going to.
The problem is not the shithole of a family that I leave behind.
The problem is the shit prison of the culture and the society and the world that I'm moving into, right?
It's not the history that made me the most anxious and depressed.
It was the future.
That made me the most anxious and depressed because I was moving into a world that let all of this happen to me and not only did nothing but blamed me for it.
I had a friend in junior high school and his father He was a professor.
They lived in a big house.
He didn't have to work.
I always had to have jobs since I was 11.
He didn't have to work. He spent his summer sitting by his swimming pool reading.
Nice guy. And he was driven to school by his mother in the morning.
And he was either given money for lunch or given a nice packed lunch.
Whereas, of course, I'm ferreting behind the couch trying to find change to buy some food, right?
He was, of course, called a good student.
He's a good student. He works hard.
And I was like, why aren't you doing your homework?
What the hell's wrong with you? I would be punished for the effects of abuse, and I was set up against the same standard as this fellow who had every conceivable natural advantage known to man.
And these people, who not only did nothing to Help me in my times of most desperate need when they knew everything that they needed to know.
Everything. My doctor, even.
None of these people did anything.
And furthermore, they blamed me for the effects that naturally accrued while I was trying to survive this desperate situation, right?
And these people want to talk to me about fucking ethics?
That's the nihilism, right?
Yes, I can totally see that.
I'm really sorry to hear about your childhood.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
But this is why I wanted to focus on your suicidality.
Your suicidality, in my opinion, does not come from your childhood, but it comes from the culture.
It comes not from the prison cell that you're breaking out of, but the horrifying knowledge that you're breaking into a prison cell from a prison cell.
Yes, I totally get that.
I think when we are happy or depressed or have all of these strong emotions, it's not about the past but rather about how we feel our future is going to be.
I think that's what you're trying to say and I agree with that.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, when we look at suicide, we certainly can't escape the reality of the fact that we had a history.
We can't erase our histories.
But suicidality is not about erasing the past, just logically, because the past is already there.
Suicidality is a rejection and erasure of the future, right?
So it can't be about history.
It's got to be about the future. Right.
Yeah, so that makes sense.
And that's why I started with this book on truth.
I mean, the books are sort of designed to follow a sequence which is around a sequence of healing that worked for me.
So I went through a period of very strong nihilism where I was nothing but cynical about the protestations of virtue in a society that had abandoned me.
To be mauled by parental wolves and others throughout my entire childhood who then talks to me about my need for duty and responsibility and virtue and hard work.
I mean, that's all nonsense.
So we go through this bottomless, vitriolic hatred of the society that we live in, which is the untruth thing.
It's the unmasking of the false ethics of all of those around us.
Of course, the UPB is the resurrection of ethics in a more consistent and rational manner, and then with that knowledge, after going through the nihilism and then the knowledge, we can have the relatedness, which is RTR, right?
And then we can have the inspiration of others once we're related, which is the books on anarchy and so on.
I just wanted to make sure, and I'm sorry if I sort of overexpounded here, but I wanted to make sure that this part of you that was suicidal or feels that way understands that it's a fear of the future, and not even a fear, a knowledge of the corruption of the social environment that you live in that drives those feelings.
Yeah, I can see that, and I think...
I haven't realized this before this conversation, but yeah, I think I understand that now.
I mean, I do understand it consciously.
I'm not just completely sure that I'm seeing that I have processed all of that.
But yeah, at the very least, I'm in the process of doing that.
Right, and the fundamental, just so you understand the fight that to some degree chose you, the culture wants us dead because if we don't die, we will kill the culture.
Oh yeah, totally, yeah.
It is a win-lose, right?
Either we're crazy or they're evil.
Yes. So the culture wants us to die...
Because if we survive, we're going to nail this fucking culture to a wall, right?
Yeah. This is why bigotry, which is just another word for culture, this is why bigotry, corruption, and evil always tries to kill the philosophers or cause the philosophers to kill themselves, right?
Because if the philosophers live, the culture is going to die.
The culture as it is right now.
And this is nothing abstract. This is just...
If we continue to shine our light as brightly, what happens is that all of the evil people who subscribe to the current culture will see their own dark side.
In the light that we bring up over the world, people see the darkness, which they don't see if we're put out.
So the suicide alley that you feel is the murderous impulse that comes from those around you, your parents and the culture.
All of those who did wrong and called themselves virtuous will be exposed as we continue to talk about philosophy from first principles.
Yeah.
This is the magnitude of the fight that we're in, right?
This is what should give us strength, because don't we feel weak or broken for being suicidal?
But it's not the case. We're just involved in an absolutely massive fight for the soul of the future.
And this is a fight where there are literally billions of casualties.
Yeah. Regarding this, I have one question.
You said earlier in this conversation that you think nihilism can be useful in some sense, or perhaps I got you wrong there.
I wanted to ask if you think nihilism can help people in some way, even if it is to get them involved in philosophy or just If it can help people at all.
Oh yeah, I truly believe that.
I truly believe that it can.
Because it's true, right?
It's true that contemporary ethics are corrupt falsehood, full of bullshit and the stink of Satan, right?
So, the reason that nihilism is so valuable is that It's true.
It's true that we are surrounded by pious, corrupt, and evil lies.
That what is called morality is a methodology of brutal control and pompous self-absolution for eternally recommitted crimes.
Right, so what you're saying is that you would say that nihilism, I mean the whole contempt for one's own life, is part of a process of being cured from this disease?
Well, Sebat, I wouldn't define nihilism as a contempt for one's own life.
I would define nihilism as An understanding of the falsehoods of contemporary morality, of contemporary values.
And this is why I called on truth a book on nihilism, right?
But this is... I would view it as an understanding that what is taught is about lies, about justifications for the crime...
I think we're good to go.
looking for the truth, right?
I mean, if your compass is broken and you don't know it's broken, you just head merrily off in the wrong direction off a cliff.
But when you realize your compass is broken, you start looking around for other landmarks, right?
So nihilism is like, fuck, this compass is broken, right?
It doesn't point the right way at all.
In fact, it points the wrong way.
That is the beginning of knowledge, right?
To disbelieve in that which is false is a necessary prerequisite for searching for that which is true, right?
Right.
I can totally see that.
I think my question was more about the depression that often accompanies nihilism for most people.
If you think that's part of the natural process of getting rid of all of this corrupt morality and And all of this?
Or if it's just a deviation from the goal?
Well, I don't know that depression – I think that if you have to invent everything yourself, then that's a heavy load to carry, right?
I mean, that's one of the reasons I put all this stuff out, particularly for free.
If you have to invent everything yourself, if the values that are preached are false means there are no values, then you're going too far in your rejection, right?
It's like the Catholic who wakes up and says, there is no God, and therefore everything is a lie, right?
That goes too far in the rejection of that which is false to the rejection of everything that could be true.
And I think if we go to the rejection of that which is false, that's good.
If we then go too far and say nothing has meaning, nothing has value, nothing has truth, then I think that is going too far and that is going into a negation of everything which is not a rational response to falsehood, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does.
Thank you.
Is there anything that you wanted, I don't want to take up everybody's Saturday, is there anything that you wanted to add to what it is that we're saying?
Has this been a useful and helpful conversation for you?
Oh yeah, it's been really helpful on the theoretical level.
I didn't allow myself to feel a lot in this conversation, perhaps because I was afraid of Of disrupting the conversation in some sense, but I think it's been helpful.
I just need to process all of these things emotionally, and not just intellectually.
Sure, I understand that.
Clearly, since I started asking you about your history, I would not view emotions as a disruption.
I don't view emotions as a disruption to the intellectual process, but rather as a fairly firm foundation for it.
We don't have any intellectualism without emotion.
In other words, we have to have a desire for the truth in order to think at all, and therefore intellectualism is the icing on the cake of passion, of emotionality.
I don't particularly view at all emotions as a distraction from an intellectual conversation, but rather the purpose of it.
But what may be more comfortable for you would be to, you can listen to this conversation again, and you can feel what you feel about your history and so on.
You may want to do that more in isolation than in a public arena.
Well, I really see what you're saying, and yeah, that's what I think, but it's not how I'm trying to be.
Oh yeah, no, I understand that for sure.
And I think that it's good to have a more theoretical understanding of where the emotions are coming from so that you can differentiate between...
I mean, we're all infected with emotions that are designed to harm us, right?
The shame, the guilt, the allegiance to false things, the feelings that if we disagree with those in authority, we are bad or broken.
We're all inflicted with these defense mechanisms that are traumatized, like they're inflicted on us through trauma.
And it's good to have a theoretical understanding of things so that when those emotions come up, we can differentiate between the true self feelings and the false self defenses, right?
So when people feel despair about breaking out of a prison cell into a larger and even more ghastly prison, when they feel despair because what they're told is not true, this invisible apple thing that I talked about, I guess, two years ago, when they realize that everything they've been taught is not true, then they feel despair because And that's what UPB is for, is to provide a way of overcoming that despair, right?
Everything is a lie, and my virtue, my desire for virtue and my love of beauty was used to impress me in the service of evil.
That brings despair and horror, and that's why the next book was UPB, which is designed to give you a way of climbing out of that horror.
Some people... I don't.
There's a lot of people who get really angry at UPB. It's one of the books that makes people the most angry because it is a spear in the breast of the beast.
Some people don't want that beast to go down because they feel that beast is them.
I think the theoretical understanding is good to help us differentiate The false feelings are the false defenses from the authentic experience.
So that could be what it is that you're trying to get a handle on before you allow yourself to feel more in this way.
Because, of course, the feelings before have led you to some degree towards suicidality, of course, I would say.
That those feelings are the false self-defenses, or rather the defenses of your parents and of your culture.
So I think it makes good sense for you to get...
A theoretical pinning or underpinning for your feelings so that they don't overwhelm you and push you into a dangerous place.
Right. I think it wasn't so much my feelings that got me into considering suicide, but rather my rejection of feelings because they were always used against me.
Not by myself, but by others.
So that kind of makes me afraid of feeling and especially of expressing my feelings.
So yeah, when you asked about Getting into this conversation over Skype, I thought that I would be able to allow myself to express my feelings, but I'm not sure why I wasn't.
Well, but this is part of self-trust, right, which is to simply accept that your feelings got you through your childhood, which was brutal and revolting, and your feelings got you past suicidality, and your feelings got you interested in philosophy, particularly how we talk about it here, and got you involved in this conversation, and so on, as you say last Saturday when you felt depressed, you got involved in the conversation.
So, I would trust your feelings, right?
There's nothing... I mean, if you didn't feel...
I would simply be curious, and this is more in the Real Time Relationship book, which comes after UPB, but just say, I wonder why.
Maybe it was exactly the right thing to not be emotional, but to strive for a more intellectual understanding of your history and what led you to where you ended up, or the low point.
But simply to be curious and not say...
I wonder why, you know, it's curiosity about the self, just as we have curiosity about ethics that leads us to different theorizing.
It's just a relaxation, a self-trust, and a curiosity with the self that leads us, I think, to the greatest self-knowledge.
Right. I guess what I'm saying is that whenever I've been open to somebody, I mean, lately, and especially on FDR, It's been really good, so what I'm saying is that I think I wanted to be open about my feelings in this conversation,
but somehow I just repressed them, if that makes sense.
Sure. And is it that you feel disappointed about that, like you were hoping for or wanted to express more emotion?
No, no, no. No, I'm not disappointed.
I'm just trying to figure out why I did that.
Oh, I see, I see, I see.
Well, I won't, because we've been talking for quite a while, I won't continue this with this now, but I think it is a very interesting question to ask yourself.
And the way that I would do that is you can listen to this conversation and You know, on headphones while in a sort of physically relaxed state.
And when you come to the point in the conversation where you felt emotions but then did not express them, listen to that part of this conversation over and over again and try and figure out what the trigger was and what the response was within you.
Yeah, that seems like it would be really helpful.
You have recorded this, right?
Yes, Greg recorded it.
My recorder was not working, but Greg recorded it, so we will send a copy around.
Cool. And have a listen to it, if you don't mind.
I have had a lot of requests to deal with the questions or the topic of nihilism.
I think this would be a good introduction.
I would really appreciate it if we could release this as a podcast, but have a listen to it first and let me know what you think.
Oh, no, no. By all means, go ahead and release it.
It's not like I don't want it to be released or anything.
Well, I really appreciate that.
And do let us know how it goes, how you feel when you listen to it again and what happens from there.
I will. Thanks. You're very welcome.
Have yourself a wonderful day. And thank you for taking the time to chat.
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