All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 26, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:19:38
1186 Sunday Call In Show - October 26, 2008

Boundaries, history and personal archaeology.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, thank you everybody so much for joining.
This is Sunday, the 26th of October, 2008.
And it is time for the Sunday listener mosh pit of philosophy.
Just a few brief orders of business to begin with.
We are going to...
I'm going to continue to push for the voting for 2008 Podcast Awards.
We are top 10 finalists in the category of...
And if you could go to podcastawards.com, that would be great.
Just click on education, put your name and email in.
You can vote once per day, per email, per IP, and of course no spamming.
And we can de-grammer the world one vote at a time.
And as many of you have expressed a wish, we could end up on top.
Thank you so much for doing that.
We really do appreciate it. It would be a great boost for us to win.
The current events videos, there is a collection or a playlist of them available now, which I will post up in the video section.
And we have been getting some very good responses from that.
The YouTube viewership of Free Domain Radio as a whole is up 200% since I began the current events series in late...
September. And, last but not least, and perhaps most, the referrals from YouTube to Free Domain Radio are up between 400 and 500%, which is fantastic because, heaven knows, it was getting rather a challenge to find people to come to Free Domain Radio through advertising.
There is a sad diminishment Of advertising dollar effectiveness.
You get a low-hanging fruit, and then you just get the fruity, low-hanging ones like me.
So, I just wanted to mention that.
That's it for orders of business.
And if you want to ask questions, make comments, I am all ears.
I was thinking of running a contest.
What do you think? I was thinking of running a contest where people could guess how popular each of the FDR books were based on downloads.
I must tell you that I mean, we're not even at the end of October.
Okay, one more order of business.
And we've had almost two terabytes of book downloads this month.
I actually have to upgrade the Box account, and I'm very glad that those aren't coming off the FDR server.
Can you imagine how slow the podcast would be?
Dear Lord, it would take as long to download one as it would be to listen to it.
So I am very pleased with that.
The free books are just doing fantastically.
And we're up at around 30,000 free books.
Again, you know, not to pound you on the donation thing, but, and thank you so much to those who've recently signed up for the $10 or $20 a month subscription.
You have been vaulted into the elevated and illustrious, almost ethereal ranks of silver and gold.
And donations, the middle of the month is always a little anxiety producing.
And so if you have a few shekels or you haven't donated for a while, if you could donate, that would be absolutely fantastic.
There's a lot of outreach that's going on from FDR.com.
We have just passed 540,000 video views, which is not too bad.
That's about the equivalent of one cheesy mid-level 80s video.
And that is really impressive for a philosophy show.
And thank you so much to those who have been gathering emails that we'll be sending out invites to.
And I also did send out the most recent FDR newsletter.
That's number five. You can sign up for that on the podcast page if you want to get a look so-called under the kilt.
of FDR. So wear welding goggles, of course.
So that's it for the news and the weather.
I am all open with the questions, comments.
Feel free to jump in.
Hey, Steph. I have a question, if you don't mind.
Sorry, could you say again? I said I have a question, if you don't mind.
How's the connection between Moscow and Canada, by the way?
Good. We're actually joined by the Arctic, so it's not bad at all.
Oh, well, you know, there you go.
Must be some sort of under-seas cable going the other way.
I'm feeling really, really, really, really apprehensive about this conversation, but I guess I'll just sort of go with it and see how it goes.
There's a lot of things that I could talk about, obviously, now that I'm in Moscow, but there's one specific situation that I wanted to ask if you have any ideas on.
I'm living with another teacher who's a sort of, you know, middle-class Anglican girl from England.
And recently, just this week, her parents came to Moscow and they stayed with us for four days.
In fact, they've only just left this morning.
And while they were here, you know, the first night that we met, we were all sort of I was sitting around and they were having a beer, like they do.
I was just sort of sitting there.
And, you know, her mother started asking me about my family.
It was basically in the sort of, you know, we support our daughter, my flatmate, you know, coming to Russia, but we have some sort of misgiving.
So, you know, what does your mother say?
How does she feel about your being over here in Moscow?
And, you know, the first thing that popped out of my mouth was, well, I don't really have any family.
And she said, well, you know, your parents died?
When did they die?
And I didn't really know what to say.
I didn't want to go into my family entirely consists of abusive assholes who basically neglected me for my entire childhood, so I'm not so much with the speaking to them.
And I also didn't want to say, well, I basically didn't know what to say, so I just sort of went with what her mom said and pretended basically as if my parents were dead.
and That's sort of a thing that I've been wondering about not only for the past three or four days while they've been here but just in general What the hell do I say when people ask me, well, how does your mom feel about you being here or just about my family in general?
And I was talking with another FDR listener about this and he said that one of the things he does is whenever people in his hometown ask him about his mom and dad, he just basically gives them sort of a non-answer.
Which I guess I could do as well.
But, you know, obviously this is sort of a problem for more people than me.
So after that long monologue, I was wondering if you had any sort of ideas.
Sure. I mean, I think it's an excellent question.
What was your purpose in saying, I have no family?
Which is not factual, right?
It's not a factual statement.
You do have family. You just don't like them or speak to them, right?
Right. It was actually, I didn't really think about it.
It was just the first thing that popped out of my mouth was, I have no family.
Right, which then gets you into a further hole, right, as you sort of found out?
Yeah, basically.
Yeah, so I mean, it's sort of like saying, I'm a terrorist, right?
Right. And then people say, well, what kind of terrorist?
It's like, well, I don't want to talk about it anymore.
Like, you've already made a statement that is going to be surprising or shocking to people, and then going further with that is really tough, right?
Right. Well, we just faced this when we were baby shopping, or shopping for baby stuff, and...
Someone was asking us about, you know, do we want to get registered so that friends and family can buy stuff for the baby and so on.
And friends and family, what do these words you mean?
And then Christina pretended to only speak that Urdu clicking language and we got some space that way.
So there's options. That's what I'm saying.
My mother is a test tube and my father smelt of elderberries.
Something like that. Something completely non sequitur.
I could pretend to only speak Russian.
Right. I was birthed out of the forehead of Jupiter.
But no. Which might even be true, who knows.
What is the fact statement?
What is the most honest and truthful fact statement that you could make if you weren't concerned about the reactions of the person who was listening?
I have family living.
But I have decided, after a lot of really painful thought, not to talk to them anymore because, you know, basically talking to them was making me sick and they were abusive assholes.
And what is your anticipation of the response that people will have to that?
Wow, okay, you're entirely unreasonable.
And they back away slowly.
Right, so there's not going to be, I mean, there is some truth in that, but the problem is if you take that approach, Charlotte, you can't pack enough truth in it to make it comprehensible to other people.
Yeah, which is why, you know, I don't plan on ever doing that.
Right, right. So, like if somebody says to me, what are your political views, right?
If I say, I'm an anarchist, well, that's just, again, that would just be shocking to them, right?
They wouldn't know how to process it, right?
Right. So, if I want to talk about my political views, God help them, then I will say X, Y, or Z. You know, well, I start from first principles of voluntarism and nonviolence and go from there, and this is where I end up.
And, you know, and then at that point, they're usually cloying at the car door like a ferret in an old aquarium.
But... Yeah. Yeah, and I mean, you know, basically, her mom, she didn't want that kind of information.
It was just like... Oh, God, no.
Well... No, she wanted a sort of, well, I have some misgivings, but I want someone else's opinion to make sure that my idea is okay and my daughter is going to not die here.
Yeah, she wasn't looking for any information about you, probably.
She was just looking for confirmation of her own views, right?
Right, exactly. Okay, so recognizing that situation for what it is...
I mean, you don't have to answer anything, right?
I mean, if somebody says to me, well, what are your political views, and I don't want to talk about it with them, or I think it's just a rhetorical question, I just say, well, they're complicated, but tell me more about what you think.
Right, so if somebody says, well, what does your mother think of you coming to Russia?
They're like, well, it's complicated, but let's talk more about what you think.
Okay. Right, just the artful, I mean, if you want to figure out how to do this stuff, just watch any political debate, right?
The art of the non-answer is a skill that philosophers are wise to figure out, in my opinion.
Mm-hmm. Three different objections pop up to that in my head.
Well, no, go ahead. Let's get them out, right?
And also, be prepared, right?
I mean, this question is something we all face.
We all face.
And it's good to have an answer that you have some...
a framework that you have ahead of time so you don't just try and wing it, if that makes sense.
Yeah. I mean, you know, before, a couple of joints ago, I haven't really...
I haven't thought about the question at all of what to say when people ask me about my family because, I mean, usually people don't.
Right. That was actually the first time in nine months since I'd eat food that anyone asked me, well, you know, what about your mom?
Really? Ruth didn't ask you at all about your family?
No. Oh, man.
Not really. Oh, man.
Those actors. Anyway, okay.
Yeah, I mean, for like obvious reasons.
But anyway, so the first sort of thing that popped up in my head was, well, you know, giving a non-answer is almost as dishonest as like outright lying and saying you're dead.
But I don't think that's true.
I'm sorry, could you just repeat that bit?
I just missed the beginning. Yeah, first thing that popped up was, well, giving a non-answer is almost as dishonest as outright lying.
Well, it's not lying.
It is complicated with your mom, right?
If it wasn't complicated, you wouldn't have any difficulty or ambivalence talking about it, right?
Right. So you're not lying.
You're saying it's complicated.
Okay. And it's just a question of being appropriate to the situation, right?
So let's say that I just went to the doctor and the doctor said that I had...
Knee rot! And my legs were going to fall off, right?
And, you know, some guy at the baker or the grocer or whatever says, hey, how you doing, Mr.
Molyneux? And I say, oh my God, I have knee rot and, you know, weeping.
I mean, I'm not saying this is you, right?
But this just response is appropriate to the intimacy of the question, right?
I just say, hey, I'm okay, right?
Because it's a call and answer rhetorical question, right?
And so when people say, well, what does your mom think of this?
It's like, oh, it's complicated.
And then, you know, just turn it back to them, right?
Now, anybody who's reasonably polite will certainly understand that you don't particularly want to get into it, right?
Because they're strangers, right? And we don't discuss our personal issues with strangers, right?
That's just a boundary thing, right?
Yeah. And so a reasonably polite person will say, oh, okay, well, let's get back to the real issue, which is what I'm thinking and feeling, or the only thing I'm interested in talking about.
And somebody who's not so polite will press on, right?
In which case you can say, well, I don't really feel comfortable talking about this, or I don't really want to talk about this, and just, you know, let's get back to you, right?
This is not sort of about me and my family, but let's focus on you, or just say, oh, you know, heaven's sakes, I feel a sudden and explosive bowel movement coming along.
I must leave. Excellent.
It gives them too much information back.
Hey, what do you know?
And then store a very large whoopee cushion in the bathroom.
And that way you can probably get the whole place to yourself.
Well, I tell you what, there are enough weird noises around here that no one would probably hear it.
Right, right. I mean, in around the clatter of small arms fire from the Putin mobs versus the Medvedev mobs, you're probably okay.
But no, I mean, it's a rhetorical question, you know, and it's not easy, right?
I mean, I'm not saying there's any – it is an awkward moment for sure.
And we've done our fair share of dodging, right?
After we defood, people would ask, you know, how's your family?
It's like, yeah, they're fine.
And we assume they are, because the only time we ever get communicated is when there's some sort of disaster.
So they're fine, right?
When did you last see them?
Oh, it's been a while, right?
I mean, there's all these kinds of things, right?
Oh, how come? Well, you know, it's complicated.
But hey, let's get back to...
Do you know what I mean? You just don't have to lie, but you don't have to give an answer.
And a polite person will be very sensitive, will recognize that you're not comfortable talking about it with them.
And of course, a polite person won't press you to reveal family secrets the first time they meet you, because that's the indication of a crazy person, right?
Yeah, or someone with like completely no boundaries.
Right, which is, you know, you say tomato, I say tomato.
But yeah, I know it's not easy and you can just practice these, right?
It's just good to get this down.
This is, you know, I hate to reduce it to this, but this is also like sales, right?
So in sales, you research your competitors and you figure out how you're going to answer certain objections where you say, where the customer says, well, but their solution is half the price.
And you say, well, yes, but I have a huge drug head.
It's very expensive. So there's ways that you will rehearse these responses so that you give these polished and not stressful responses to questions which you know are going to come up.
And this comes up for everyone.
Yeah. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
Did you have more objections to the vague answers?
Like, did you want to do a role play where I'm slippery as a foggy candy and eel and you are trying to grab me?
Or do you feel relatively content about this?
It's relatively content enough that I can't sort of remember the other objections.
So, I mean, they were probably as invalid as the one that I... Well, not invalid, but sort of not...
Actually objections to what you're saying like that was.
Yeah, and to me it's a good test because most people will just back off right away, right?
Most people will just back off and they'll get that you don't really want to talk about it or whatever, right?
Like you say, I'm in this cult where I'm not allowed to discuss my family or something like that.
And most people will recognize that you're not comfortable with it and so on, but other people will pursue it.
And those people, of course, are the people you least want to talk about stuff with because they're the ones who are the least appropriate, most inappropriate in this kind of area.
Yeah. Makes sense.
And I think, sorry, the last thing I'll say, we're not the only people with this kind of stuff, right?
Right. So if there's some, I don't know, some...
Some woman has a miscarriage, right?
And she goes to a work function a couple of days later.
They say, everybody says, how you doing?
How was your weekend, right? What's she going to say?
I spent it rocking, weeping and bleeding, right?
I mean, that's not, she's not going to respond that.
So we all have these appropriate secrets to keep, if that makes sense.
These tragedies which are personal to be shared with close friends, to be discussed that way.
So we really, you know, we're not freaks with bizarre secrets that nobody else has.
Everybody has their tragedies that are not for public consumption.
Of course, right? Everybody in the world has these things because nobody gets a smooth ride through life.
So what we're facing here is nothing freaky.
It's nothing bizarre.
It's just that in most of our families, we weren't allowed to have A private life that was not for public consumption, right?
So we're just not used to setting up these kinds of boundaries.
But this is common the whole world over, right?
Someone has just had a big fight with their spouse, right?
And they show up someplace and People say, how are you, right?
He's going to say, oh man, you know, I barely dodged that vase, you know, or something like that.
He's going to have to, you know, smooth things over and reveal what is appropriate to the situation.
So there's nothing freaky or weird in this.
This is a very common human response to an accidental public question about an intensely private matter, if that makes sense.
Okay, that makes sense.
Thank you. You're welcome.
I hope it helps. It's sort of nice speaking to you again.
It feels really weird over here.
Weird like cold and drunken?
No, I mean, the entire country is sort of basically on the verge of collapse.
You know, that may not be such a difference in some ways, right?
I mean, if you've been following the US news lately, But in the race, the valuation between toilet paper and the U.S. currency, it's sort of a dead heat.
Sorry, go on. Well, I mean, it's much more overt over here than I'm used to.
I must say that the U.S. dollar is at like a two-year high against the ruble, so you guys are doing much better than I am.
Yeah, actually, the Ruble was originally called the Scruple, but they realized they didn't have any, so they went back to the original name, to the latter name.
Yeah, no, it is a wild, wild country.
I have never, I mean, I've never been to Russia, but I certainly have had some Russian friends, and I have never seen more philosophical energy poured into pointless, like rubber-never-meets-the-road questions in any culture in my life, so it really is quite wild.
The degree to which they debate abstracts while the plane goes into a mountain is really quite stunning.
If they even debate it all.
Yeah, I mean, that may not mean.
Maybe it was more of the intellectuals who left that I met.
But it does seem to be a pretty a country with a tortured relationship to ideals, to say the least.
Like they love these ideals, but they worship this brute power.
So like Putin can say, I admire this man because he raped 10 women.
Right.
This absolute subhuman brutish thuggishness.
While at the same time, you can get this, you know, Dostoevsky and kind of wild soaring Christlike abstractions.
It's just a wild country that way where.
The men are brutes and the women are ethereal.
That's sort of been my experience. But anyway, let me not tell you about Russia since you're there and I'm not.
Alright, well, have a good night, everybody.
It's like almost midnight here.
Right, and midnight lasts two years because she's very fun.
Nice chatting with you. Good to have you back and stay in touch if you can.
Yeah, we'll be. Bye.
Now we drink and dance!
Sorry. What other questions do people have?
We are wide open.
Christine is here as well. If you want something that's fairly straightforward.
Yeah, I kind of have a question.
Sorry, you kind of have a question?
Yeah, no, I do have a question.
Was that the kind of question, or is this the real question?
It's a real question. All right.
Yeah. A couple days ago in therapy, I... Yeah, I have a question.
A couple days ago in therapy, I brought up the experience I had as a boy with my mother.
I mean, caring about my mother.
And I know that I cared about her because that was a mechanism of survival.
And I feel really sad about it.
And I'm not sure what to do with this sadness and kind of process how I know.
Am I being coherent or am I losing it?
I guess my question first and foremost, and I certainly do appreciate the feelings that you're having, is why are you sleeping around on your wife?
What? Why are you sleeping around on your wife?
Tell me that. I don't have a wife.
Yes, you do. You have a wife called a therapist, and now I'm your slutty mistress in something entirely too low-cut.
Oh. I mean that with some seriousness, and it's nothing wrong with that.
You have a relationship with your therapist, and what's missing with the relationship with your therapist that you're asking me?
And there's nothing wrong with asking me.
I'm perfectly happy to answer, but I think the more important question is to figure that out, if that makes sense.
Okay.
Okay. I don't know.
Well, I guess...
I want to say that the session ended at 45 minutes, and maybe I just shouldn't be asking this question of you?
No, there's nothing wrong with asking the question, of course.
I mean, we're all friends and I'm happy to help if I can, but I don't think that's something you're processing as yet And I think that's important Okay They feel kind of surprised I Excellent. Yeah, I feel surprised, not kind of surprised.
Well, because you said in the chat window, I think it was yesterday or the day before, that you felt really down.
When was your therapy session? Friday.
So, the therapy session was Friday, and you said it was 45 minutes?
Yeah. That seems a little short.
Why is it so short?
That's just how we have it set up.
I have 45 minutes on Tuesday, 45 minutes on Friday, and group for an hour and a half on Wednesday.
Right, okay. So this week you had three hours of therapy, right?
Yeah. And you're asking a therapeutic question here.
And again, please don't misunderstand me.
I have no problem with you asking it.
But if you get a good answer here...
My concern is that it's going to become an adjunct to the good answers that you should be getting from the other therapy that you're taking, if that makes sense.
Okay. I mean, I really did figure out a lot of stuff on Friday, actually.
And I thought that I was really happy with those answers that I got.
But then you fell down, right?
Yeah. And I couldn't figure it out by myself.
How to get past it.
And how did you feel when your therapist tapped her watch and said 45 minutes on Friday?
His. His, sorry.
I felt a little rushed.
Well, the way I recall it is I kept talking for a minute or two after the time went up.
All right. So you felt rushed?
You said you felt a little rushed.
You mean rushed out of there?
Yeah, I mean, I would have rather kept talking.
Right. Right, because...
So what happened with that feeling, right?
What was that feeling?
Rushed is not really much of a feeling, if that makes sense?
Okay, I felt disrupted because I felt really connected to my therapist on Friday.
I'm more connected than I usually do, but not the only time that I felt that kind of empathetic connection.
I mean, I think I'm starting to reap the results of being with the same therapist for a few months now, and that I'm getting more of a Complete connection, but also...
I guess one of my big issues is disruption of connection.
I mean, it was something for me as a kid, something in my romantic relationships too, so...
Right, now, if the major issue that occurred with your therapist had something to do with this disruption of connection, and if that is related to something to do with your mother...
Then I think that's the real issue, not the content of your therapy session, if that makes sense.
Okay. And then talking about the content of your therapy session won't actually help, if that makes sense.
In the long run, I mean.
Okay. No, that makes sense, because there'll just be another issue that'll pop up later.
Yeah, because if you say, well, I feel really anxious when the intimacy or the connection is disrupted...
So then I'll go and forge another connection.
That's masking the symptom, right?
And what you need to deal with.
And that's why I sort of interrupted the content of your question to look at the form, which is why is it occurring.
And again, I don't want to put words in your mouth, so just tell me if I'm completely wrong.
Did you feel a connection with your mother that was then interrupted that was there when you were a kid, right?
Were there times where you would feel close which would then be interrupted or cut off or would she abruptly sort of terminate those things if you got too close or anything like that or was that not part of your upbringing?
I don't think it was that when I got too close, it was just that it would end arbitrarily and her movements, her comings and goings would be unpredictable and she would sometimes pay attention to me and other times she would not and sometimes she'd be gone.
I probably wouldn't make eye contact with her for Like, weeks at a time, and then she'd be very interested in what I was doing or whatever, and I'd always be trying to get her attention.
And this is part of what I've been addressing, is figuring out the nature of my relationship with her.
I mean, Friday, the thing that was discussed in particular was how much it hurt for me to really care about her and have her be attacked all the time by my dad.
Okay, and tell me about the caring.
You say you cared about her.
Tell me about that. Um...
I mean, that would be more in the child's conception of the relationship rather than what I know of it now.
Does that make sense?
It's more in the child's words than I would use.
Yeah, we're talking a necessary biological attachment, right?
Yeah, yeah. And splitting, right?
Because what we do when we have a good parent and a bad parent is we're splitting the relationship between them, right?
So we're saying, my good, innocent, wonderful mother somehow got stuck with this ogre and it's my job to fill the hole in her heart that he keeps excavating, right?
Yes. Which is not rational, but it's certainly necessary as a child and there's no child who doesn't feel that.
And of course, that is almost always the story of the mother, too, right?
Right. I have sadly and arbitrarily been swept up into this brutal, matriarchal, ugly world.
I, the sensitive Blanche Dubois, white orchid of purity, and so on.
And this self-pity and this lack of responsibility for the man that you chose to spend your life with, it's pretty common among this type of woman, at least as I've seen it.
Right. And, um, I mean, part of that tracing back was, it was important because I identified with my dad later on in my, um, I kind of flipped over to identifying with my dad and I did flip back and forth as well, but eventually it solidified more, um, with identifying with my dad.
So, um, I think connecting with the, I think, are we off topic?
Not for me, but go on.
Okay. I mean, I feel sad.
Well, do you mind if I mention something here?
Yeah, go ahead. This is just something that I mention with a huge amount of sympathy and empathy.
But... I don't know if you've ever heard of the phrase, running to stand still.
It's also a U2 song.
Yeah. The amount of desperation that is in the world of children who feel the need to constantly maintain the good approval and interest and affections of their parents could power approximately a third of the universe.
Have to become clowns, have to become compliant, have to become, quote, helpful, have to learn how to do chores, have to provide value.
That is not just who they are as human beings.
But it has to be me, plus intellectual achievement, plus good grades, plus compliance, plus obedience, plus, plus, plus, right?
Yeah, that was me with my parents.
That is an absolutely exhausting...
Exhausting childhood.
It is like spending your childhood trying to run up the side of a gravel mountain.
Everything gets dislodged, you slide down, you're clawing your way back up, you never get to rest, and you never climb to the top, right?
Right. Everything you cling to peels off, falls away, right?
That's what it was like, yeah.
Right. And the awful legacy, and I'm speaking about this because when you were up for the barbecue, there was a change for me in you from the beginning to the end of the weekend.
At the beginning, you were tense, and again, this is all just my opinion, right?
But you were tense, and it was hard for you to...
Feel that you had value unless you were doing something, unless you were talking about your book collection or your achievements or your writing.
You kind of had a billboard, right?
And this is not particular to you, and it's not pathological.
It's just a natural result of having to be you plus status commercials to be of value to your parents, right?
Now, by the end... You had relaxed a lot, in my opinion.
You had relaxed. You felt more comfortable.
You felt that you were valued for being in the room, right?
Not for doing something, not for providing value, but for being in the room as who you were.
And your sense of humor had...
Yeah, I think.
Does that make any sense to you?
It's interesting that you bring up my physicality, because I just went out for drinks with a friend of mine from childhood on Thursday, and it was one of the first things he noticed about me was a different...
I used to have a twitch, actually, a really bad one, and it was one of the first things he noticed is that I wasn't...
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
Other people brought that up at the barbecue as well.
My voice had a lower pitch than it did when some people came up to New York in March or something.
At the beginning, I don't know if you've seen that Seinfeld where there's that woman who always walks like she's carrying suitcases, invisible suitcases.
Straight arms. Again, we all have our tics.
I have them and everyone has them, right?
But that's just something that I noticed really eased off during the weekend, right?
Yeah, yeah. And I mean, I used to be much worse.
I used to slouch all the time and stuff like that.
That's changed a fair amount.
Right, so...
I mean, to me, what happens...
I'm trying to put myself in your shoes, and what I'm sort of getting for myself, which, again, may mean nothing, is that...
You would work very hard to get your parents' good opinion through some sort of achievement, through some sort of prize, through some sort of obedience, through some sort of...
You desperately would try to get their good opinion, and then you would get their good opinion, and of course, everything that you have to earn through strenuous effort diminishes, right?
But relatively quickly, right?
I mean... Yeah, it's no longer good enough.
It has to be tough. I'm sorry?
It has to be topped, you know?
Yeah, it has to be topped, or it's going to fade, right?
Yeah, and actually, it's one of the things that I think was, I mean, major with my relationship with my fiancée, is that she picked me to help her manage her father.
Right. As weird as that sounds.
And managing her father was relatively easy for me.
It was like lifting a five-pound weight when I... I've been accustomed to lifting 50-pound ones, you know.
Right. Well, you are very intelligent, obviously, and you're very, very aware of social status and its manipulation, right?
Yes. And again, this is no criticism.
I think it's an essential skill to have to survive in this fucked-up environment that you grew up in, right?
Yeah, just something that I felt ashamed about, but I don't really feel so ashamed about it anymore, but I definitely felt really guilty about it afterwards, and I'm not bragging or anything, but when my dad got remarried, I was his best man, and I made a speech, and the whole wedding party spent the rest of the When congratulating me on my speech, they ignored my dad and they were all shaking my hand.
Oh, I have no doubt that you served your father's vanity most excellently.
Yeah. You dropped in this bonfire of the vanity's hellhole, right?
Yeah, that's just...
I mean, after that, I felt really disgusted with myself, and looking back at it, I feel guilty.
Well, I mean, you can if you want, but I think that's...
No, I mean, I don't really feel that way now, but I did.
Right, I mean, that's like...
To me, that's like, you know, if you live in Africa, it's like feeling guilty for checking your shoes for scorpions before you put your feet in there.
I mean, that's just a survival strategy, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but I am really keenly aware of those things.
I'm really keenly aware of how to get into somebody's good graces rapidly, when I want to, and so on.
Well, but you will only get into bad people's good graces that way, right?
Because good people will see it for what it is, right?
Which is fear and manipulation based on trauma, right?
Sure. I mean, that stuff doesn't work on good people, right?
No, it doesn't. I mean, I was much more, if you want to, impressed or whatever, I mean, I was impressed by you the whole weekend, but I was much more impressed when you were relaxed and more comfortable in your own skin at the end of the weekend than at the beginning of the weekend where there was a lot of status stuff coming out, right? I mean, I understood that status stuff and I sympathized with it, but I think the good people will be impressed through the authenticity, not through the status stuff.
Yeah, I think certainly that The old tricks don't really work so well on a lot of people from FDR. Right, and that's why you get to, that's why, it's because I neither, obviously I didn't attack you for that stuff, but neither did I respond in a, you know, ooh kind of way, right?
It was like, it is what it is, you're saying what you're saying, I'm...
Processing and I understand it.
I understand where it's coming from.
But because I didn't respond in a way that was hierarchical to what you were doing, you had a chance to relax into something more authentic, I thought, towards the end of the weekend.
Sure, sure. And the reason that I'm bringing this all up, JC, is because I want to frighten people into not coming up to the FDR X-ray radioactive lab of personality evaluation for next summer.
Just kidding. No, but the reason that I'm bringing this up It's that, as a child, when we have to work like crazy to achieve our parents' good opinion, and we do that because that brings us a feeling of safety, right? Sure, at least temporarily.
Absolutely. It's, you know, it's...
It's a temporary shark cage that gets taken away later, right?
But at least for that little bit, you get the essential rest.
And knowing, you knew when your father got remarried, after you made this great speech, you knew that you weren't going to be attacked by anyone for the rest of the night, right?
Oh, yeah. So you could relax, right, about that.
Sure, sure.
So, I think, this is sort of my...
I mean, this is also, of course, partly based on my own experience as well, but this is what I think occurs, is that when somebody appears snappy or breaks a connection or withdraws or whatever, right, what that signals for you is it's time to get on the endless bicycle grapple mountain again, right?
Your rest is over, Sonny, back into the water with the sharks and start fighting them off, right?
Yeah, like when Lauren did that in July, the Seattle woman, that killed me.
You know, that sent me to crazy town.
Like, I had to do anything and everything I could think of.
But I mean, I left immediately, but still.
Like, that happening just totally set me off.
Right, so I would say that when your therapist says, you know, sorry to interrupt you, but time is up, right?
However nicely he does it, whatever, right?
I think that what that communicates to you is that the connection is broken.
I'm back in the doghouse and I'm exhausted.
I don't want to have to do it again, but I have no choice.
I've got to start winning back people's approval.
That happened on Wednesday in group two.
Oh, okay. Maybe this is coming together for a reason then for you.
What happened on Wednesday?
On Wednesday, I... I think I skirted towards breaking the rules of the group by...
I mean, I got really angry.
This one woman reminded...
Well, the sequence events went something like this.
A therapist points out that the point of group is to connect with other people.
And then I connected with this other woman and hated her.
She was like my mom.
And, you know, and then I... We kind of had a spat.
And I did...
I kind of thought for a bit that she was my mom, and I yelled at her, and the therapist stopped me, and I scared one of the other women, and I felt bad about that, and I felt like I'd broken the rules and screwed up, and people who had, you know, the other people who had liked me and looked up to me now saw me as, you know, a loose cannon.
And I, you know, I spent the rest of the short amount of the session trying to make up.
trying to, you know, redeem myself, make up for it, you know?
Yeah, don't do that. Don't do that?
No, look, I mean, I think you're doing this for a reason, and I think it's a very healthy reason, and I'll try and elucidate it briefly, and you can see if it makes any sense.
Sure. If we want people's approval because we're frightened...
They're bad people, right?
Right. I mean, we see this played out, obviously, in a much smaller way on the board, right?
If you get some person coming in who's aggressive or dismissive or scornful or superior or something, right?
You know, we all have this temptation to pile on and to get this person to understand and to turn them around and to get them to see and blah, blah, blah, right?
But I don't debate with people where I feel threatened, aggressed against, right?
Because I don't want to change the mind of bad people, right?
Okay. So...
If you understand that your degree of desperation for your mother's approval and your need for security around her, that that did not arise because you wanted to love her or you felt love for her or anything like that, that arose out of brute, biological, conditioned, unavoidable fear of abandonment, of disapproval leading to essentially death.
Because you started this by saying your affection towards your mother, right?
And again, I'm not saying that this is not something that you feel is valid, but this is what you started this part of the conversation talking about, right?
Yeah, I mean, I tried to qualify it.
Yeah, no, I understand. But if you look at how you sparked off this woman on Wednesday, that's your primal experience of your mother, right?
Yeah. Now, did you want this woman's approval?
No. No.
Right! So do you see this is your actual experience of your mother that happened on Wednesday?
Yeah, as a morally disgusting woman who...
I mean, the way I put it is I feel disgust when I hear you talk about her describing her relationship with her father.
Right, right.
I mean, I feel disgusted and then extremely angry at her for her claims of, number one, being a victim, and number two, I mean, fine, she was a victim when she was a kid, but I mean, talking about how presently, how she's, you know, helpless or whatever, and then she said that she didn't Like, being disrespected, even when she talked about basically how her whole life is more or less organized around maximizing the amount of disrespect she receives.
So... I mean, the hypocrisy ticked me off, and the lying ticked me off.
Right, so, and I'm with you there, so Wednesday, you feel...
Obviously, it doesn't have much to do with this woman, right?
It's to do with your mom, obviously.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Perfectly aware.
Yeah.
And then Friday, you experience the other side, which is when you feel cut off by your therapist, you feel anxious and depressed, sad, right? you feel anxious and depressed, sad, right?
Do you see the connection between these two?
Do you want me to go a little further?
You have to go a little further for me.
Oh, and it's hard to see.
And it may be not true, right?
But this is sort of what I'm getting.
When you experience the disgust that you feel towards your mother, when you were a kid, that was never an acceptable emotion to express, right?
Not if it was authentically mine.
No.
Only if it was shared with my dad.
No, no, no. I mean, to your mom.
To your mom? If my dad said it was...
To her?
Not while I was really young, no.
So when...
No, no, actually not while they were...
So you're saying that when you were older, you could have a productive conversation with your mother where you said, Mom, you disgust me.
Not productive, but I would yell at her and stuff like that.
I mean, at the tail end, before the relationship, totally, before I stopped talking to her entirely, when I was 15.
Right, but when you were a kid, it's not an acceptable topic, right?
No, not at all, not when I was a kid.
So, when you were a kid, as you say, she would really run hot and cold, right?
Yeah. And you would be, as any child would be, you were desperate to get her back into the, quote, hot zone, right?
Yeah. Because cold is terrifying, right?
Right. Well, sorry, I don't want to convince you it's terrifying.
I guess I'm sort of asking if it was.
Yes, it was incomprehensible, really.
And, I mean, she was gone for a lot of my infancy and toddlerhood, just not there.
She was getting her PhD that she never even finished.
Right, so the threat of abandonment was very real, very visceral to you, right?
Yeah, it was known, actually, because, I mean, my dad and my babysitter raised me when I was really little.
I didn't start to have significant time with her at all until I was at five.
Right, so what you're seeing, I think, in this Wednesday to Friday switch, is you're seeing the two sides of power.
You're experiencing the two sides of maternal power.
And I mean the abuse of maternal power.
I mean, maternal power can be the most beautiful thing in the world.
But the abuse of maternal power.
And the first is aggression.
And what that is, is spraying crazy into the room.
So it's when moms will sit down and talk a whole bunch of shit that turns your stomach.
Like as you say, when we're doing on Wednesday in group, right?
Yeah, I mean, this woman is completely full of shit, and I'm completely disgusted by her.
I mean, there are other women in the group who I'm not actively disgusted by, but this woman...
No, no, I got it. I got it, right?
So you're seeing this aggression on the part of the mother, right?
The aggressive crazy, right?
Yeah. And then with your therapist, you experience...
Sorry, we experience that when we're later.
As men in particular, we experience that after puberty, right?
The crazy? We experience our anger at crazy mom, at aggressive mom.
We experience that primarily after puberty.
Oh, yeah. Totally.
Absolutely. Because before puberty, we're too small.
We can get hit. We can get abandoned.
But with puberty comes...
Fuck you, I can make it on my own now, right?
Yeah. Actually, around puberty, once my mom tried to hug me and I shoved her to the ground, and that's when our relationship changed a lot towards the anger.
Oh yeah, there's this flip where you're no longer looking up at your mom physically, but you're looking down at your mom, right?
Yeah. And that's a big switch, right?
So Wednesday, you experienced adult JC's experience of his mom, right?
Yeah. But Friday, when your therapist, quote, cut you off, right?
You experienced the other side of maternal abusive power, which is really the foundation of maternal abusive power, which is abandonment.
Rejection.
Coldness.
Cutting you off. Sure.
And I mean, I think it was highlighted because the session up to the end had been probably one of my best with him so far and most productive.
Right. And with your mother intimacy, the quote, the closer you got, the worse the rejection was, right?
Right. Oh yeah, for sure.
Even if it rejects the same as it's always been, it feels worse because you were closer beforehand, right?
Yeah, I mean the same thing with my relationships now.
Previous ones at least.
Yeah, what happens is you, at least in the past, you would charge in and you would, it's called fusion, right?
So you would charge in and you would completely mesh in an orgiastic kind of soul mingling, you know, everything is perfect, you're the perfect one, everything's perfect, perfect, perfect, right?
And then there would be a problem, the whole thing would fly apart, right?
Yeah.
And of course, that is, the desperation to merge with the mother is never satisfied when the mother is manipulative and distant, right?
Thank you.
So we're always hungry for that merging.
But then when we merge, we start to feel anxiety.
Because we know that the next thing that comes is the rejection, right?
Yeah. So I think this is good.
I know it's not easy.
But I think that what you're trying to do is you're trying to...
Your unconscious is coming up and saying, look, we have these two experiences of mom, which is...
A desperation for connection and a fear of her craziness and her anger.
And anger towards her, right?
Craziness and anger starts with fear and then after puberty it usually goes to anger, right?
Yeah, I mean...
I mean, part of what I went over is that My connection to her was also punished by the degree to which she let my dad attack her.
So it was like I was being attacked while she was being attacked as well.
Right, right, for sure.
And it all rests upon the illusion of ownership.
The illusion that you had anything to do with how your mother treated you.
That's why we feel desperation.
That's why we feel anger.
That's why we feel depression.
That's why we feel this need.
That's why we keep climbing or trying to climb this gravel mountain.
It's because we have this fantasy that we have something to do with how these people behave.
Well, the myth would be I was not working hard enough.
Yeah, I'll try this, I'll do that, I'll do the other, I'll try this, I'll approach this, I'll win this, and now I'll get angry at her.
All of this is an attempt to influence the behavior of your mother, right?
Yeah, like the anger was an attempt to influence her, to attempt her to get her out of her depression.
Because, I don't know, that's what my dad showed me.
Well, to get her out of her self-pity.
Like, we're always trying to dislodge people with...
The force of our feelings, with our arguments, with our rhetoric, with our passion, with our withdrawal, with our...
We're always trying to get people to change their behavior, and fundamentally, when we're children, we're trying to get them to act better, right?
Oh, yeah, sure. Like, just be a fucking reasonable parent, right?
Be a reasonable parent. I'm not asking for perfection here.
Just don't be an idiot. Don't be a bitch.
Don't be an asshole. Just be a fucking reasonable parent.
This is all we're trying to do as children, right?
Yeah, my interest in politics started when I was a kid because, you know, I was the great reformer, you know, trying to tell my parents, this is what you do to be better.
Dad, you should yell less.
Stuff like that. The great yelling less program.
Right, right. So we have these very strong reactions with our parents because we have to have this belief when we're children that we can do something to affect the outcome, right?
Right. But nothing I did seem to have any positive effect, actually.
To me, it seemed like it was the opposite.
Right. And as we get older, and we view things with a deeper understanding, we get that we were yelling at statues.
Yeah, I mean, she was never going to alter.
Yeah, she's a narcissist, Again, this is all clinical bullshit I'm just saying here, right?
But we're just using labels for shortness, for conciseness.
But if she's a narcissist, which obviously given your dad, God knows, right?
Twelve different diagnoses.
But she has no capacity to be influenced by other people's behavior.
Now, that doesn't mean that she doesn't change her behavior if other people, like if someone in power is angry at her, she might conform or whatever, right?
But all of that is just...
Self-management, because she's afraid of someone in power, she'll act to appease them because of her own feelings, right?
It's got nothing to do fundamentally with the person in power, right?
It's all self-management. Yeah, I mean, that was the idea, is yelling at her, she'll actually do something, versus just be depressed.
I mean, the thought for me that came out in therapy was, maybe she'll die if we don't yell at her.
I totally understand that.
And when we get older, I think that we can have the sympathy...
To ourselves, particularly to our younger selves, to say, I totally get why you felt that you had to do something, but there was nothing that you could do.
The victim can never heal the abuser.
Ever. Ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever.
And the more the victim tries to heal the abuser, the greater the danger of becoming the abuser, right?
There was nothing that you could do to alter your mom, the hot and cold, your dad, his yelling, the temper, the vanity, right?
You were lashed to a locomotive that kept jumping the tracks.
You weren't given access to controlling it.
You weren't given access to hand brakes or to the throttle.
You had no control whatsoever.
Over this mad machine, this broken, fucked up machine of a family.
You had no control.
you had no capacity to alter the behavior of your parents whatsoever.
People imagine that they can control these evil people, these people.
And of course, they believe that they can control these evil institutions.
Church reform. Government, politics, running for office.
I'm going to change the system, right?
Barack Obama's going to go into Washington and change the system, right?
But we can't change these systems for the better.
We can't change our families for the better.
We can't change governments or churches for the better.
We can't. That's why they have to go.
I don't mean the family as an institution, right?
But the family as it's so often practiced, the abuse of power.
They can't be reformed.
They can't be reformed.
I can't reform my family.
I mean, obviously, I've got a kid on the way with Christina's mild participation.
So I'm hoping to remake the family as a wonderful institution.
I can't change my family, my family of origin.
You can't. Completely and totally.
You might as well be yelling at a hurricane and getting mad when the hurricane doesn't obey you.
It's mad. It's crazy, right?
It's like having a debate about global warming and inviting the weather and then telling the weather to settle down.
It's crazy. And it's perfectly sane when we're children.
We have to have this illusion of control.
But maturity is understanding that there was nothing we could do.
Absolutely nothing we could do.
And that it was really healthy to not believe that for a long time.
Because otherwise, we'd have given up completely.
We'd have fallen into complete despair.
Yeah, it's true.
So much of human society is devoted to this illusion of control.
If I vote, I can control my society.
If I read these books, I can control...
My family, if I sit down and talk with people, if I have an intervention, I can control these people.
If I get angry, if I yell, if I hit my kids, I can control them.
If I pray to God, I can control the outcome.
If I look up my fucking astrology sign, I can predict tomorrow.
If I burn incense, the woman will call me.
Right? All of this magical thinking is endemic to the world.
Because it is so hard emotionally to accept we can't control people.
The only way we can ever change people's behavior is to inspire them emotionally.
Every time you try to control them, everybody goes down the shithole.
Yeah. I don't feel as sad anymore.
I feel kind of raw, but...
Well, the sadness comes, in my opinion, and tell me if this is nonsense, but...
The sadness comes because you feel you failed.
That if you'd only done something, your mother's connection with you would have maintained itself, right?
Because of course that's what she told you.
You've done something wrong.
You have displeased me.
Therefore, I will no longer be close to you.
But it's nonsense. Oh yeah, for sure.
That is what she told me explicitly.
I have no doubt. On a number of occasions.
And my dad too.
Right. Right.
And so, if we feel that we've failed at something, right?
So when your therapist said, time's up, JC, you gotta go.
You feel like, oh, the connection is broken, I did something well.
I don't know if I felt that way, I just felt kind of like I had to self-manage a bit.
But you felt sad afterwards, right?
Yeah, when I got back home.
But of course you couldn't control your therapist and say, no, I want 12 hours, right?
And you couldn't control your mother.
The situations were the same, right?
Obviously, your therapist is not being abusive or anything like that, but if you look at it that way, you're getting that you couldn't...
I mean, your therapist didn't do anything wrong.
You know it's 45 minutes, but when he cuts you off, you feel like sad, right?
Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the time I set it up so that it works okay.
I deal with whatever I'm talking about by the end of the session, but that time, no.
And I think there's a reason why you did that.
And the reason that you did that was so you could re-experience your mother's disconnection, right?
It has to be.
Because you had a mom thing on Wednesday, and then you had another mom thing on Friday.
That's all I'm saying, is that you're working on the mom thing.
Yeah, I've made a conscious commitment to that for the past month or so.
Now I feel sad again.
Okay.
But, um, kind of relief...
And that's okay. I mean, it is sad when our parents withdraw their affection from us and make us work to earn it back.
That is not something that children should be peddling up a slippery slope to get a hold of and to maintain and to retain, right?
We don't make human beings, in this case literally, Dependent upon us and then withhold our affection and good graces.
We just don't. I mean, that's just such an abuse of power, right?
But the temptation is so great for so many people.
So many parents, right?
Of course. I mean, I was just thinking, my parents kind of defood me before I ran into FDR Yeah, a defu is not an action on the part of you.
A defu is simply a recognition that there is no relationship.
It is not the breaking of a relationship.
Like if you're sitting in a car that's 40 years old, has no engine, no tires, is full of rust, and has springs sticking out the seat, and you think you're driving across the country, and at some point you just shake your head and go, holy shit, I'm sitting in a rust bucket at the back of an ESO station, In the outskirts of Des Moines, I'm not crossing the country.
I'm not in a car that drives anywhere.
I'm not in a car that works.
It's all an illusion.
If you then get out of that car that has no engine and has no wheels, do we say, oh my God, he's abandoning his cross-country drive.
He's no longer driving cross-country.
It's like, no, he never was driving cross-country.
He simply recognized that reality.
That there is no relationship.
And there is no empathy and there is no connection.
When people have abused us, there is no possibility of a relationship.
And I don't mean like they yelled at us once or twice and then apologized.
I'm not talking about anything like that.
When people have systematically and repeatedly harmed us as children, there is never any possibility of a relationship with them in any way, shape, or form ever.
Because those people are acting in a completely fucked up, alien, sadistic...
In a sociopathic way, they lack empathy, and they will always act out their cruelty.
And all we're doing when they have rejected us over and over and over and over and over again is we're saying, hey, you know what?
There is no relationship here.
They chose to reject me.
I certainly didn't choose to be born in this family.
They chose to attack, to humiliate, to reject, to punch, to kick, to scream at, to send to Sunday school, to propagandize, to lie, to manipulate, to exploit, to control, to hit.
They chose to do all of that.
And I'm simply recognizing that if somebody five times my size hit me or yelled at me repeatedly, there's no relationship.
There's no relationship.
It's just a recognition. We don't will a defense.
We recognize that we have always been rejected and that there is no relationship.
Yeah, and I certainly haven't had any second thoughts about that at all since I expressly stopped talking to them.
Right. Anarchism is not getting rid of the state.
Anarchism is recognizing there is no state.
It is an acceptance of a fact that there is no such thing called the state.
There are a bunch of guys with guns, for sure.
Right? Atheism is not rejecting God.
Atheism is accepting there is no God.
Anarchism is accepting there is no state.
And defu, if it is occurring, is a recognition that there is no family.
There's only this accidental biological cage that we're damn lucky to get out of.
But it is not rejecting something that is.
is, it is accepting that something is not and never was and never will be.
We're not driving cross-country.
We're just sitting in a rust bucket.
That's all Adifu is.
So the conclusion is more or less that I was triggering abandonment again with my therapist?
I think you were triggering the anger and you were triggering the feelings of sadness and panic at the abandonment In order to highlight that you still feel, as we all do, and this is not bad, this is not delinquent or anything, but a significant part of you is still operating under the principle that you could have had an effect on your family.
I hardly think about my family outside of therapy though.
Well, that's a very bad sign, right?
Yeah, it gets expressed through persistent thoughts about the last girlfriend, just in my head, over and over and over.
So, is that a stand-in for my family?
It's the same kind of principle that I could have had an effect on.
Well, I mean, look at your relationships, right?
They start off with this idealistic merging, and then they end up with this bitter separation, right?
Yeah, you think more about your family and you'll act it out less in your relationships.
You should be thinking a lot about your family and your history, in my opinion, particularly while you're in therapy and particularly while you're doing, as I did, three hours a week, right?
I didn't do any group, but I guess I had my group in therapy, my ecosystem.
But no, you should, in my opinion, you should be thinking about your family a lot and you should be remembering and recalling the experiences that you had as a child The desperation that we all felt to create a better environment for ourselves.
The fantasy that we could do it was essential for our survival and completely insane.
Yeah, I mean, I write about therapy, but...
I write about what goes on in therapy, but if I'm journaling, it's certainly about what's happening now and not about what happened in the past.
Although I have written about the past...
Like, a couple months ago, but I haven't really gotten back into that lately.
Right, and so you're just saying, let's get back into it.
Okay. Yeah, I'm kind of scared because my family history is kind of screwed up, and that's also probably why I went out for drinks with this friend of mine, this old friend of mine.
I don't know if I'd call him a friend now, I mean, because, I mean...
Well, I mean, certainly I think that we've got enough to work with.
Well, you have enough to work with.
Is there anything else you wanted to add about this?
Was this relatively useful?
I know we were pretty wide-ranging.
I was just trying to get where you might be coming from because I know it was a little unclear for you.
No, this was clear.
And I went through the whole thing without Christina rolling her eyes at me once.
Oh, is that a good sign?
Is that unusual? And with that, for making that little open and closer hand yak-yak-yak-y thing.
So that's very good.
So yeah, I think we'll consider that positive.
Is there anything else you wanted to add at the moment?
No, I don't think so.
I mean, I was curious if Christina had anything to say, because you just brought her up, but otherwise, if she doesn't...
I mean, you can move on.
All right. Well, thank you very much.
I appreciate that. And remember, it's nothing you could have affected at all.
These die were cast long before you came along.
All right.
Well, thank you very much. Is there anyone else who had another comment or a question, which we can take before les finis de la choux?
Sorry, I don't mean to get all Gaelic on your asses.
Going with the ones. All right.
Well, thank you everybody so much for a very good show.
I really do appreciate these excellent, excellent questions.
I may be having a debate on Halloween with Qtron Man.
Qtron Man versus Steph Bot.
He came across like a tiger.
Let's hope he doesn't turn into a lamb.
And we're going to have a debate on anarchist epistemology because he believes that when I say the concepts don't exist, that I am anticonceptual.
In the same way that when I say the concept of money doesn't exist, I don't have anything to spend.
But we shall see.
He's quite down on anarchists, and he seems to be a pretty staunch objectivist, a very intelligent fellow.
Certainly fairly punchy, but we can certainly survive that, I'm sure.
And so hopefully we're going to have a debate at the end of the month.
On Halloween, which perhaps we can make into a live cage match event, which will be excellent.
I have a boxing outfit from when I was in the Cub Scouts and when I was about seven.
I'm fairly sure I can still squeeze into it.
And even if I can't, it'll probably be pretty entertaining to watch, if not a little sad.
So perhaps that will be the pre-show show, so to speak.
And I'm sure it won't be distracting for him if I debate in that outfit with a boa.
So that will be going on at the end of the month.
Other than that, I don't think there's anything monstrous.
I never heard back from CNN, which is not too shocking to say the least.
This week coming up, I have been attempting to roll through the fetid, creepy, socialist mess of Barack Obama's platform today.
And I don't know if I'm going to make it to the end.
I'm going to try and do that, and then do McCain's, and then I'm going to try and do a review of Zeitgeist, which is that a no-profit society plus a bong will not be the way of the future.
The bong seems to be necessary for this movie.
Certainly the first bit about money I think is good, and then it goes all kinds of nutty into, you know, robots will light your bong for you and toke you up.
But we will do a review of that, which I've had at least, I don't know, 20 requests to have a look at.
It is just to me amazing how people can just go so wildly off the rails.
But perhaps the same will be said of us in the future, though I don't think so.
Anyway, thank you so much for dropping by.
I really do appreciate it. Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week.
That's really all I've got planned.
We have eight weeks until the LCF makes his officially scheduled entrance, which does not mean that he may not be late or earlier.
He or she. That is correct.
Or if we really roll snake eyes, he or she.
But no trannies in the family as yet.
We'll see. So thank you so much, and do check out...
I did a podcast...
Sorry, the sound wasn't wildly great, but I did a podcast...
Recently, I called The Truth as Psychotic Drug, which is a gripping title, but a very good podcast.
Let me just pick up the number here so that I can do the official thing and refer to it by its number.
1184. 1183, The World of Third Child.
1184, The Truth as Psychotic Drug.
drug if you are debating with people i'd recommend it of course if you're listening to this you've probably gone past it and 1182 ethics reloaded upb is a good animated video to check out so thank you everyone so much for your support as always i hope that this conversation is doing you proud for your participation and your financial generosity to keep it going it all depends upon you Thank you so much. Have a wonderful week.
▲
Export Selection