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Dec. 28, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:17:32
1242 Sunday Call-In Show December 28, 2008

A live dream analysis.

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Thank you everybody so much for choosing to join.
This is the Sunday Call-In Show on December the 28th, 2008.
It is just after 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time.
And a quick baby update, which will now be the obsessive opening to everything and anything that I will be talking about.
And Isabella is doing just beautifully.
She has gained two inches.
In length, unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, each one of those inches is entirely upon her cheeks.
She has breastfed cheeks, which is really quite amazing.
She actually looks pretty much permanently now like a very small version of Dizzy Gillespie playing an invisible trumpet.
So that's very cute.
And she is...
Yeah, I mean, she's gaining weight.
She's thriving. She's clear-eyed, absolutely gorgeous, a true heartbreaker, heart stealer, and I absolutely adore her.
And it's, as I mentioned in I Did Fatherhood Part 2, it's fascinating to just...
Oh, here she comes.
It's fascinating. Hi, baby geeks!
It's fascinating to see just how quickly babies do grow.
It really is quite... Remarkable.
At this rate, I'm pretty sure she could take me in about six weeks.
So, of course, I'm being ultra nice to her for that very reason.
It's also interesting and something I wasn't quite expecting, but this, I think, has more to do with Christina than with myself, is that parenting is actually very relaxing.
Parenting is actually very relaxing and I'm really starting to understand, I think, What it's like for Christina, or what it's been like for Christina to be my wife for the past six years.
Insofar as your life gets...
I mean, I'm always saying she falls asleep very easily.
I'm slow to fall asleep, and that's because she's a much nicer person and has a clearer conscience.
And now, with Isabella in her lives, it's become sort of clear to me what my wife's experience has been.
Because when you do...
Kind of have to devote yourself to caring for a bald, confused, often lost, and largely non-self-sufficient life form.
Your life does sort of simplify quite a bit.
And that's been quite surprising.
Parenting, at least our parenting so far, has been a very mellowing experience.
It's been very relaxing.
It's been very soothing, very calming.
And that's very nice.
But of course, we're helped along by Isabella, who is, dear Lord, we could not have invented or conceived of a healthier and happier and calmer baby.
She is just absolute magic.
And she is very, you know, she lets us know when she's upset.
She's easily soothed. So in that sense, she's not like me.
But she is just perfect and just wonderful.
And parenting so far has been Not a perfect joy, because that would be boring, but an absolute joy, I can say that, without a shred of a doubt.
And the times that we spend together is just completely wonderful.
And if anyone's remotely interested, just send me an email.
If you have kids, I'm constantly reading fairy tales.
If anyone would like a recording or a podcast of those, just let me know.
I can easily slap on a mic while I'm reading them to her.
If you think that would be of interest or of help to your kids, just let me know.
So... Anyway, that's it for baby news, baby updates.
Of course, I don't have a huge amount to talk about other than to say that so far, December has just been a monster month for a free domain radio.
We had our very largest single day of downloads ever, 110 gigabytes in a single day, which is really quite remarkable.
And of course, this is the month where we get to count The Matrix video, which has gone to almost 100,000 views, which is going to be quite large.
And so, Free Domain Radio is just humming along beautifully.
And again, thank you everybody so much for doing the posts about Free Domain Radio and some of the promotion, I guess some of the reposting of our stuff that has been going on.
I really do appreciate that.
Baby kicks. It's all right.
The restaurant is almost open.
The restaurant is just being unbuttoned.
Do not panic, my queen. Baby, don't you panic.
And so it's been a wonderful month for that and I really, really do appreciate everybody's support.
So it's going to be very interesting.
I think, if I remember rightly, I did the numbers for last month, there was a slight dip, which is usually the case in November because Thanksgiving and travel and so on, people are busy for Christmas.
There was a slight dip, I think 5% or 6%.
In the total media views, but I think that we're going to have a monster month in December, which is just wonderful.
I believe it's going to be a 40% increase in podcast downloads, and of course, it's probably going to be triple the viewership.
There are, I think, now well over 4,000 subscribers to the video channel, and we're close on 900,000 video views, which is absolutely fantastic.
So, it's been quite a month.
And so, thank you again all so much for that.
So, that's it. Is there anything else you wanted to add to our intro?
No? Okay.
She doesn't seem to be that hungry.
Do you want to... You fed her?
Okay. She's just staring a little bit off to the left of Daddy's face because babies can see dead people.
That's my theory. That's why they're always looking just a little to the left or just a little to the right.
And you know, it's amazing because she is...
She's really getting a face, right?
Rather than having that red raisin of a baby's face, she's actually getting like an honest-to-goodness human face.
And we like that, don't we?
Anyway, so that's it for the introduction.
And it's nice to have a new tangent other than my own random thoughts.
So I'm just walking back and forth here with Isabella.
So if you all have questions or comments or issues, please do let me know.
I'm just going to Hand her off.
Just a few more people want it to be added.
I will take her back in a sec. You want to do that?
Okay. Oh, actually, sorry.
There's one other thing we need to do, which is to switch.
I didn't know if you were coming up, so...
Oh, we'll just take a sec.
Yeah. Sorry about this.
I just have to switch so Christina can hear the audio.
It's moving, I know. It's a critical catastrophe when that occurs.
All right. So, if you all...
It's your show now. Endless proud daddy stuff is done.
So feel free to ask whatever you like.
You want to say hello to the nice listeners, sweet nubs?
They're the reason that daddy's in your face all day.
Rather than at some stinky office.
Oh, I think she's falling asleep.
Well, I'm going to keep talking then because there's nothing that puts my baby in a coma like daddy's endless droning.
But then I'm sure I don't have to tell my listeners that.
Probably have very similar experiences.
Yeah, sure, Greg, if you want to do...
I mean, no one else is stepping up. If you want to do a dream interpretation, I think that would be perfectly all right.
Sure. Well, thank you.
And so I said during the Christmas call that I've been having really intense dreams recently.
And this one was on Christmas Eve that I had this one and it's really been bugging me since I've had it.
And it actually woke me up screaming.
It was quite intense.
And it's a pretty short dream too, so I can basically get the facts and story out.
Sorry, just as a by-the-by, one thing I've learned over the last little while is if you wake up screaming, what you need is an enormous breast.
So you might want to get a hold of one of those.
That can be really helpful. Sure.
Well, I'll work on that.
This was actually during a nap.
I fell asleep at like 2 or 3 and dreamt this during the nap.
And so what happened was I was in a two-story house and it was neither the house that I grew up in where my parents live now nor was it the house I live in now.
So it was a completely different house.
And I'm not entirely sure if it was from my future or just like if I was me now but in a different house.
And I was upstairs sitting in I guess my bedroom or my study or whatever it was.
I don't remember if it was a bedroom or a study but it was certainly my room.
And I was looking outside the window and I could see people entering and leaving my house.
Sorry, people in what?
People like strangers, people I didn't know.
Were they screaming out of your house?
Yeah, they were just coming in and out almost as if it were like an open house where you're going in and looking at a house that's for sale.
Right. And so I didn't do anything about that and I just kept doing my thing.
I guess reading or sitting and relaxing.
And then I saw a man that looked like my father.
And upon looking closer, it was my father.
And he came into the house.
And I was like, oh no.
And I just panicked.
And went to the other side of the room where there was another door.
And I reached for the door and tried to open it.
But a creature came out that was also my mom.
So like this...
Almost banshee-ish, you know those in the movies, the creatures that can go really fast and you can never quite see it?
Like blurry creatures that run through the woods?
Yeah! But I knew that it was my mom.
Right. And she jumped on my back and started to strangle me.
Wow, okay. And I screamed, if you touch me one more time, I will kill you.
Right. And then I woke up screaming.
Right, right. And in a sweat, like a cold sweat.
And I'm actually quite sweaty right now on my hands thinking about it.
Right. Okay, so you had a, you woke up in a house that may have been your house as a kid.
There were people coming and going like it was an open house.
And I'm sorry, I just missed.
Where did your mother emerge in the dream?
Oh, sorry, just to correct what you just said, it was neither the house that I grew up in, nor was it my house now.
So it was an entirely different house.
Oh, I see, I see. Okay.
And it was an open house.
So you said people were coming and going, right?
Coming and going, in and out.
And my mom came from, like, the shadows.
Like, it was a dark room upstairs.
Right. Almost like an attic.
And she came from, like, the rafters or the corner...
Right. And jumped out and wasn't making words.
And this was after my dad had entered the house, but my dad hadn't come upstairs.
Like I hadn't seen my dad except when he was entering the house and when I started panicking and trying to leave.
And so my mom was like making the like shrieking noises as she jumped onto me.
Right, right, okay.
Okay, and then you said, you know, she jumped on your back, and do you know what she was trying to do when she was jumping on your back?
Did you have a sense of that? She was grabbing my face.
I got the sense that she was trying to strangle me.
Right, okay. And then you said, leave me alone, or if you touch me again, I'm going to kill you.
Is that right? That's what I said, yeah.
Right. And is that when you woke up, or did anything occur after that?
Right after I said that, I woke up in that disoriented state, and it took me a few seconds to realize that I was on my couch in the living room.
Right, right.
So in a sense, I mean, in a very metaphorical sense, you did kill her because you woke up, right?
Right, right. I killed the Banshee.
Right. The dream image ended because you woke up.
Yes, yes. And one thing that stuck out to me was that she's on me, and I say, if you touch me one more time, I will kill you.
So it's not like she touched me, let go, and then I say, if you touch me...
It was like she was still touching me when I said, if you touch me one more time.
So that stuck out to me.
Right. And it's also, according to the logic of the dream, what you did...
In attempting to talk to your mother in this way, what you did strikes me as irrational.
Like almost suicidal?
I wouldn't say suicidal.
Like jumping into a pit?
No, what I mean is that if a person jumps on you and is trying to strangle you, there is no possibility of verbally establishing boundaries, if that makes any sense.
Right, right.
Because what you're attempting to do, if I understand this correctly, is you are attempting to establish boundaries by showing consequences for her actions.
If you do this, then that, right?
Right, right.
Yeah, exactly. And given the circumstances, this was not a negotiable situation.
You might as well negotiate with a rabid dog, so to speak, right?
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, exactly. So that's the first thing that struck me.
But just before we get into that, what happened in the day or the night before?
Probably the day if it was a nap.
What happened in the day that may have had some effect on this or may have caused this?
Well, during the day...
I'll go from the day before to that day.
That was Rich's and Colleen's visit.
And Chris, their friend.
They were all here. And...
Over dinner, we talked about quite a lot.
But one of the things that I did talk about was my feelings of...
My future and of what I'm going to do and how I'm going to get out of this city because I signed this lease and I'm wanting to get out of this city now.
We had a Skype call, a video call with Jake and Greg in Mexico.
And then we went to bed, and then when we woke up, we went out for coffee, and then they left.
And then I was reading some psychohistory.
And do you remember what psychohistory stuff you were reading?
Yes, some of the book Foundations of Psychohistory.
Right, and if I remember rightly, there is some of the Killer Mother stuff that's in there.
Yes, it was dealing with some of the infanticidal and on, that kind of psychoclast stuff.
Right. Yeah, and that stuff is very intense for sure.
Oh, I can't read more than a few pages at a time.
Okay. And do you remember in particular what you were reading from that book?
No, I don't.
It was because I just started it and I printed it out.
And so it was really just laying the groundwork for the psychohistory stuff.
Right. So not getting much into the actual meat of the theory just yet.
Okay, okay.
So it was the chapter, the evolution of childhood is what the first one's called.
Right, and for those who don't know, very, very briefly, DeMoss' basic thesis is that there are a sequence of increasing sophistication when it comes to child raising, and his basic argument is that before the 18th century you simply could not find examples of parenting that would not be considered illegally abusive by today's standards,
and that the growth in society in terms of our sophistication and our empathy and our ethics is very much wrapped into the quality of the parenting that we get and that there's a kind of lurching forward of parenting standards that occurs and that the early parenting standard is I think he calls it infanticidal and we're basically there are usually at least a few baby bodies per family and these can be calculated to some degree of rough,
rough accuracy by looking at male and female Where there's an off balance in male to female ratios, you know that infanticide is occurring because obviously it should be mostly 50-50.
And the infanticide would occur more commonly with girls, of course.
And so when he calls kill the mothers, it's because there is a kind of retroactive abortion that occurs after birth where the mothers will kill the babies.
And of course that has a huge effect on society as a whole.
Siblings see babies being killed.
There are Babies are thrown into the outhouse.
There are babies in the gutters.
There are babies by the side of the road.
And that, of course, is a pretty psychotic society to live in.
And he says that that's relatively common in antiquity, relatively common, of course, in the Dark Ages, relatively common in the early to middle age period.
And then it begins to be replaced by another kind of parenting in the late Middle Ages, which is where infanticide begins to decline.
And there is some minor, like, if you're completely obedient, then you will receive some positive parental feedback, which did not seem to be much of the case earlier.
And he traces, of course, the fascist movements in Italy and in Germany and the communist movement in Russia to the lingering effects of this kind of infanticidal or child-destructive parenting.
So, just very briefly, that's where he gets this sort of killer mother from, because Of the enormous amount of infanticide that he has tried to work out, and not just him, but this psychohistory group has worked out throughout history, and given that it was almost complete matriarchy when it came to early child rearing, that mothers regularly killed their babies, and of course we see this in nature, and we came from nature, so it's not necessarily all evil, it's just the way that society was.
And that has a strong effect on our consciousness.
Is that any of the kind of stuff that you were reading, or is it way off from there?
Yeah, because I remember flipping forward in the book and looking at the graphs that he's drawn, where it looks like a bunch of logarithmic graphs that go upwards in terms of how childhood has evolved over the years.
Right, and so where there are these, he's called them psycho classes, because of course society doesn't move forward, or we don't all move forward as a line, right?
So there are more sophisticated families, more sophisticated and enlightened parenting, more gentle kind of nurturing parenting in society, along with the truly murderous Charles Manson kind of parenting style.
So there are different psycho classes within society.
And, of course, he's very pleased with and is encouraging the moving forward to a more modern psychoclass.
But even within our modern society, we see more primitive psychoclasses, which is where we get criminals and politicians and soldiers from.
It's from these more primitive psychoclasses, from these more primitive parenting styles.
Right, that's accurate.
And that's what I was working through with my...
Because it was like an hour after I read some of that that I was just sort of pacing and then I would sit down and breathe heavily and think in my chair.
And it was like this hour time span from when I read that to when I napped.
Right.
Now, did your tiredness come across suddenly?
Is it unusual for you to nap at this time?
No, it's not unusual. Unless I was in the coffee shop that one time.
Right. But no, it's not unusual.
And like then, with the coffee shop, it's interesting I bring that up because that was a sudden onset as well.
And this was very...
Like I was up and I had a big old coffee with Rich, Colleen, and Chris.
And I was chipper and full of energy.
And then I read this and just...
I've certainly noticed in my life that when I am attempting to deal with particularly challenging psychological stimuli, that napping arises very suddenly.
At least that's the excuse that I give to Christina.
Oh, honey, I have to deal with an inner imago.
I'll be back in about an hour.
Good luck with the baby.
Sorry, I don't mean to make light.
But there does seem to be that, you know, when we have something to work out, a nap can bring us face to face with that, which can be very powerful, as you say, very frightening, but very helpful, right?
Right, and it's odd for me that when I nap, I dream.
I mean, normally my dreams are in my nighttime sleep, so...
Right, right. No, I think that's quite right.
And it means that, I mean, you hit REM, obviously, very, very quickly.
And that usually, I mean, that can indicate a number of things that you didn't sleep well the night before.
But it does seem to be the case, at least I've noticed that when I have a lot going on psychologically, I dream when I nap and I feel a sudden urge to nap.
I certainly notice this whenever I put out a book.
I just, I get very tired very suddenly.
For a week or two just as the book is coming out and have quite vivid dreams because it's processing the challenge of what it is that I'm I'm putting out and readying possible responses so so it could be of course that that so what was occurring for you Well the same sudden nap like this with instant REM sleep also occurred when you released the media scares video all right Right,
right, right, right.
It is, and I mean, one of the things that is, ah, forget about that.
that let's get let's go back to you okay so because you did experience some death impulses when you were a kid right I'm starting to fall right now and I'm not sure why Okay. You did experience some death impulses, some insistence towards annihilation.
Something was in your psychological environment, and I particularly remember just at the end of latency, just at the onset of puberty, that you had some destructive thoughts, right?
Oh, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
I know what you're talking about now, and that's something I've been working through in therapy.
Ah, okay. And has this been a topic you were working on recently in therapy?
Until I had to take a week break for Christmas break just now.
Right, okay. It's been sort of a constant going closer and closer and closer, getting more and more and challenging these thoughts more and more.
Which thoughts? Also, the destructive thoughts that just...
Not so much that I have them now, but challenging what I had in the past and figuring out why I had those and what the root causes of those were.
Right. And are you at the stage where you're looking at the root causes within yourself or within your environment?
Right now I'm looking at my inner thoughts and what my beliefs influence with regards to those thoughts.
Right. Okay.
I mean, I don't want to accelerate or interfere with what's going on for you therapeutically, of course, right?
I mean, you have a strong and good relationship with your therapist, so I don't necessarily want to do anything to mess that up.
But the one thing I will mention is that there's no way these thoughts were self-generated.
Right, right. Right.
They came from your environment, right?
Right. Yeah, that hits me pretty hard right now.
So tell me what that means to you?
Well, it's pretty clear that I mean I do have a history of nihilism and self-indihilating thoughts and now just thinking of I mean we can focus on what beliefs I have that Would cause those in me.
But it's also, now that you say that, it's...
My environment was also generating those thoughts.
And I'm finding it really, really hard to think about this right now.
Do you want to keep going?
Do you want to stop? It's completely up to you.
No, I think it's important to work through this right now.
I'm feeling a strong desire to keep going.
Alright, and is there anything in particular, any direction you'd like me to proceed that your thoughts are suggesting?
Well, I'm thinking it's very, very early for me in my history.
Sure, sure.
And it feels really deep, really thick in my gut.
Right, right. And it has something to do with, without getting into any details, it has something to do with the stuff that you felt, and I'm sure rightly, that you had to submit to at the hands of your mother that you didn't want to.
And we've talked about this before in the show, right?
What were the alternatives to obedience, right?
Well, just speak up.
There's a reason I didn't do that.
Yeah, there's a good reason you didn't do it, for sure.
Right, right.
The greater the exploitation, and this is, again, all just theory, right?
But the greater the exploitation that occurs in parenting, the greater the threat.
That is involved.
Right? The greater the exploitation, the greater the implicit or explicit threat.
And the threat, of course, takes two forms.
One is violence or punishment or abuse, and the other is abandonment, which are synonymous to the mind of a child, right?
Because both results in death, right?
And I've been just saying this because I'm so conscious of this as a parent, right?
That if I show Isabella Any kind of disapproval or withdrawal, right?
Like if she's screaming, I have to stay present with eye contact with her, with soothing voice.
I have to handle and hold her hysteria, her upset, whatever it is bothering her, right?
So if I'm changing her and she's really upset, or when we were bathing her and she didn't like it, we have to stay with her, we have to stay calm.
We have to stay with eye contact.
I don't have the option as a just parent to withdraw or to disapprove or to hold her at arm's length or to break eye contact or to stop soothing or to raise my voice or to snap or to stop talking or to put her down.
I don't have that option because then that is a threat to her.
A parental withdrawal I'm at the point where I don't even like to blink.
But that's just me, right?
But I'm very conscious that her upset, whatever is occurring for her, her upset is in no way ever a license for me to disengage as a parent.
In fact, it's quite the opposite.
It is when she is the most upset that she needs me the most.
To be right there, eye contact, calming.
And if I feel emotion, if I'm upset or if I'm crying because she's crying, I don't hide my emotion, but I stay with eye contact, and that tends to soothe it, right?
Because intimacy is authority, and intimacy is security.
You can't have authority or security or love without intimacy, right?
So where we have parenting that has within it the implicit...
Punishment slash abandonment paradigm, we experience that as the threat of annihilation as children.
And again, I'm not talking about a parent who snaps after we've been crying for an hour.
Again, it's not, you know, there's a sun, like the sun in the sky has sunspots that does not darken it, but that's different from a black hole, right?
So I'm not talking about perfect parenting, I'm just talking about the approach that we take.
So, the greater the exploitation, the greater the threat of abandonment or a punishment which the child experiences as a death impulse.
This is my theory. Again, I'm not saying any of this is proven.
We're just trying to see if it fits anything that you have experienced.
And so, to me, the reason that I'm bringing all this up is that, to me, the degree...
of exploitation that you suffered that you were forced to suffer would result in the absorption of a large amount of threat a large amount of threat of abuse or abandonment which would then show up for you emotionally in my opinion When the exploitation was no longer as possible,
right? Don't we all face the darkest times once we get some relief from exploitation, right?
It's sort of like when your leg is pinned, right?
You don't feel it until they lift the log off your leg, right?
Then it hits you like hell, right?
So it's when the relief occurs, when the exploitation diminishes, that the stored up death impulses or death commandments or The murderousness or whatever, the abandonment or abuse, that's when that begins to spill up.
So if the amount of exploitation you experienced began to diminish at the end of your latency period and the beginning of puberty, then that's when those death impulses would have flooded up.
Again, this is entirely subject to what works for you, and this, again, is just a theory, but how does that strike you?
Does it seem to resonate at all, or is it way off the mark?
It totally resonates, because, I mean, as you and I both know, we've talked about my latency period, and it was a period of a lot of death impulses in myself, and it was intense,
and it was very real for me, and it makes, I mean, this was the topic of one of our very first chats over a year ago, and I'm seeing more and more.
I don't see the...
I mean, it feels very, very early for me.
I'm not seeing actual images yet, other than what we've talked about before.
But it feels real, what you're talking about, about early exploitation.
And I'm really not liking what I'm feeling in terms of Seeing that side of my family.
I mean, I've explored a little bit before, but it's really dark.
Well, it is dark, but it's not your darkness, right?
Right? I mean, it is dark, and again, I'm not trying to minimize your experience.
It's not your darkness.
You didn't do anything wrong other than try to survive, right?
Because the darkness that...
If we have that kind of darkness around us when we grow up, everybody wants us to internalize that, right?
I am now soiled goods or dirty goods.
I am marred. I am broken.
I am full of darkness.
There is darkness, right?
And again, I'm not trying to minimize the difficulty and the horror of what you went through.
But it's not your darkness, right?
I mean, if you're in a bus...
And the bus driver crashes, you don't get your license taken away, right?
It's just something that is done to you by other people in charge.
It's not your darkness.
It is dark, for sure, but the darkness is entirely external to you.
Everybody tries to pound that darkness into us, like driving nails into a log, but it's not true.
It's not real, right?
You were born into this family.
You had... These things occur to you.
There was no choice in the matter for you.
You would never have chosen this family.
So there is darkness for sure, but the darkness is not yours.
It is a grim and difficult situation that you acquitted yourself, in my opinion, with honor and with dignity and with courage in surviving.
And I believe that looking back, You should open yourself up to the possibility of looking at it not as a darkness that fell over you like a huge and heavy wet black curtain, but rather a darkness that you fell into through no fault of your own,
were born into, and that you triumphed over and survived and flourished to become the wonderful man that you are.
That this should not be necessarily looking back like into a horror movie that has infected you permanently, but into a dangerous, difficult situation that with almost no resources and with a new mind you had to navigate and struggle to survive, and to look back at it as a triumph and a heroism and a darkness that you have escaped, left behind you, flown above.
Left behind.
And that the wings of reason and courage with which you have flown away from this darkness, that these are things to be enormously proud of, to have survived and to have flourished in the way that you have to have survived and to have flourished in the way that you have from such
I think there is great light in that surmounting.
there is great honor, there is great dignity, there is great beauty, there is great courage, there is great integrity, there is deep honor and light in the surviving and the overcoming of that.
I just wanted to remind you of that because it does sometimes feel like the darkness is going to roll over us, right?
It's very easy to internalize it, and it's something that, I mean, it's so hard, because, I mean, I know this is not the first time that you've told me not to internalize this, but it's just so hard to keep reminding myself of that.
Well, sure, and that's because, that is, because, I mean, Damasus' theory, which seems pretty valid to me, and it's hard to prove, right?
But that children, for highly dysfunctional parents, the children can become these poison containers, right?
That parents who themselves are full of darkness pour that darkness into their children and gain some relief from their own black histories.
So that is part of the overcoming, is to recognize that you are trained to look at this darkness as your own, because that's the burden that your parents entirely unjustly inflicted upon you, right?
I mean, after the past few minutes, Steph, I'm feeling more relief.
And I'm feeling still sad, but not as scared, though.
Yeah, the horror is important to feel, but it is essential to understand that it is not your horror, right?
The horror in life occurs not from suffering wrong, but from doing wrong.
There is no horror in suffering wrong.
Wrong. Right?
So that blackness, that darkness, what I would call evil, can only arise authentically within our own hearts if we have performed an injustice, particularly a repetitive one, and particularly against the helpless, right, against children.
So that sticky, black, ugly, shelob's web darkness, that interstellar emptiness, that horror, that is your understanding, and I think an accurate understanding, of what doing evil feels like.
But you have not done evil.
So it's not yours.
Right? Right.
That darkness is very essential for you to know, but it's not yours because you suffered wrong and survived and triumphed over evil.
You did not do evil.
So you can't feel that as a result of your own actions, right?
Unless you strangle the hamster and haven't told me.
No, no, not so much like that.
Right. So that's just, and I think that's the boundary.
I mean, I think that's sort of the boundary that the dream is talking about.
Because you're not doing evil in the dream, right?
You're suffering an attack, right?
And in that case, why am I trying to negotiate with a banshee?
Well, I would say for two reasons.
One is that you had to have the illusion that your Mother could be negotiated with in order to retain any sense of efficacy.
That's the Simon the Boxer thing, right?
If you had accepted that there was no possibility of negotiation with your mother, no possibility of ameliorating her attacks, then you would not have survived, either physically or psychologically, in my opinion.
And the dream is now saying that illusion is, which was useful at the time, Is now revealed as false, because she doesn't back off when you tell her that, right?
In the dream. No, no, she doesn't.
Right, so the dream is saying, no negotiation is possible.
And where no negotiation is possible, what we get is closure, right?
I feel that right now. Right, isn't that the whole point of RTR is we attempt to negotiate, we are open, we are vulnerable, we are honest, we attempt to connect, we attempt to get our needs met, we attempt to have our preferences known, we negotiate, we open, we open, we negotiate, we give real-time feedback, and if it turns out to be completely impossible, then we can let go and recognize that this is a ship that is sinking, it can't be saved, so we have to go in search of new lands, right?
Right, right. I do.
Sorry, but I think the important thing is that it's not just your mother in the dream.
There are two others, there's your father, and there are all the people coming in and out of the house, right?
Yeah, I was just going to ask about that, your thoughts on that.
Well, that's the huge mystery, right?
That's the huge mystery, which actually is not much of a mystery, but it's something that we, those of us who've been through these kinds of histories, it's something that we are always aware of, right?
Which is that we move through society being savaged by our parents, and people don't act to help us, right?
Oh, right.
People are coming in and out of the house.
It's an open house, right? Your parents socialized, right?
Yeah, oh yeah. So, everybody came and went and no one did any?
No. And you know, I mean, this is something that came up yesterday and the day before for me, which was after this dream.
I don't know if you looked at that article I wrote on why economists don't look at the hidden costs of religion.
No, I haven't had a chance, sorry.
Well, I took it down because after examining my motivations for writing that, I realized that it came from an angry place in me, not against economists, not against Lou Rockwell and Walter Block.
I mean, screw them.
I don't care if they don't focus on religion, ultimately, right?
What I more care about is the, I guess, economists in my own childhood, the society, the, quote, scholars who...
I saw it and did nothing, and that's who I was angry at for not focusing on the abuse of religion.
Right. And so I took that down because I realized there was probably more to process, which, given this dream, seems entirely accurate now.
Right. Right, for sure.
For sure. For sure.
And, I mean, this is also something that's come out of all this media stuff that occurred in November, and I guess early December as well, right?
Everybody's so concerned about the safety of children who are susceptible to evil cults on the internet, right?
But, you know, the guy in question in the article, hundreds and hundreds of people knew about his violent father and no one lifted a finger to help him, right?
But now everybody is shocked and appalled at the risk he's facing from a website, right?
Right. This is vile, right?
It's... This is where we get prone to nihilism and to despair, when we see the gap between the virtues that people proclaim in the abstract and the cowardice and immorality that they practice in their lives, right?
I mean, this is hard to see, right?
The gap between theory and practice and the hypocrisy that occurs in the world.
And, of course, I've got a premium cast about that one called Nausea, which I'm sure you've heard.
If you had a chance to, it's worth listening.
But that's hard, right?
And there's a lot of darkness in that, right?
Right, right.
No, there definitely is.
I mean, we have a whole social safety net.
We have a whole social safety net, right, designed to...
Everybody says, well, you know, we have child poverty programs up here in Canada that have been running for 40 or 50 years.
Of course, they don't do a damn thing to alleviate child poverty, but Canadians...
Basically give themselves carpal tunnel syndrome and spine injuries, patting themselves on the back about how much they care about the safety and the health of children, right?
And yet, I sailed through, on three different continents, hundreds if not thousands of people who were perfectly aware of what I was suffering at home and the mental illness or evil, whatever you want to call it, the destructiveness of my mother, right? I mean, she was institutionalized, for heaven's sakes.
I went to visit her. Everyone knew, right?
So, thousands of people in three different continents.
I was sailing through all of these people who all trumpet about how they are only interested in helping the poor and bringing comfort and safety to the children.
And meanwhile, I'm getting regularly mauled by a lion in the middle of all of these self-congratulatory moral heroes.
Who turn a blind eye every single time, right?
Right, right.
And that's why no one says anything, because the moment that anyone says anything, the attack dogs come out, because what happens is, when you act with courage, you prick the conscience of cowards, right?
When you act with integrity, you prick the conscience of the hypocrites, right?
Right, right. When you say to free market economists, you don't need to work for the state, you can start a podcast and work within the free market that you praise so much, they get mad, right?
Right. When you say the non-aggression principle extends to the family, in fact, if it doesn't occur within the family, it can occur nowhere, because the family It's where the non-aggression principle is violated the most outside of war itself, right? Right.
And so when you have all these moral heroes who pat themselves on the back and trumpet their courage in writing articles about the Fed because it violates the non-aggression principle by prosecuting counterfeiters while being the biggest counterfeiter of all, right, and they consider themselves moral heroes for giving 50 bucks to Ron Paul...
When they see somebody actually take on the real roots of violence, which is the violation of the NAP within the home, they get enraged, right?
Because they can't congratulate themselves anymore because there's much more important and vital work to be done than writing articles about the Fed, right?
Right, right.
And they don't want to face their fears of doing it.
I mean... I don't want to either, right?
I'd love to be writing articles about the Fed in many ways, right?
It's safe, it's secure.
I'd love to not take on religion.
It's safe, it's secure, it's well paid.
You get to speak at conferences, right?
You get to be published.
You get donations, more donations even from foundations and so on, right?
Be wonderful in many ways, right?
But unfortunately, religion is an exploitive and brutal lie that is told to children.
And I'm not...
I'm not for fraud, right?
Particularly when it is inflicted upon helpless and dependent children.
Particularly when it frightens and distorts their thinking and psychology for life, right?
Right, right.
So, the fact that you are being attacked by your mother in a house full of people makes...
Complete sense to me in terms of what it is that you're processing.
When we process abuse, if abuse happened within our families, when we process abuse, for me at least, the hardest thing to process was not the abuse itself, but the blind eye that everyone turned, right?
Oh, it's been by far the...
I mean, that is easily the hardest part, right now for me at least, just looking at...
I mean, I, as you know, grew up with 11 plus years of a Catholic school, and they're all about the virtue in their words, right?
Yeah. And not so much with the action.
Well, it's quite the opposite with the actions, right?
And the reason why it's so hard...
Or again, I'm just saying the reason it's so hard for me, or maybe it makes sense to you and to others as well.
But the reason that it's so hard is because the moment that you begin calling people out for the blind eye that they're turning to the actual violence that they can do something about, which is the violence against children, the abuse of children, then what happens is they attack you, right?
Right, right. And so, having escaped a situation of abuse, right, calling people out for their cowardice and hypocrisy, and again, it's not, I don't say cowardice and hypocrisy, but it's what they experience, right? Because it is kind of fundamentally deep down.
It isn't if they go, oh my god, I never thought of that, but of course the NAP extends to the family, and of course that violence I can do something about, and of course that's going to have an effect on society, right?
I mean, even the most Christian, minarchist, libertarian would accept that if crime rates go down, then we need less government, right?
And you'd have to be a complete Neanderthal, clusterfract, frontal lobe-missing, mouth-breathing idiot to not recognize that violence within the family very often translates to criminality, right?
So even if you accepted nothing about the psychology that we talked about here, but simply accepted that violence within the family leads to criminality, and excessive criminality causes increases in the size of government, then it would make great sense to oppose the expansion of the government by promoting peace and the non-aggression principle within the home, right? Yeah.
But they don't want to go there, right?
And the moment that we bring it up, we get attacked, right?
So having come out of a situation of being attacked as children, we then point out that society has empirically done, does almost nothing to protect children.
And I'm not talking about the state, right?
Because, I mean, libertarians are all about spontaneous, voluntary, social solutions, right?
Oh, how are we going to solve the problem of poverty?
Charity. People are voluntarily going to get interested and involved in poverty, right?
And that's how we're going to solve it. We don't need a state, right?
Well, what about the protection of children?
A libertarian who doesn't give to charity is a hypocrite, right?
Because he's saying charity will solve the problem of poverty, but I don't give to charity, right?
Right. And a libertarian who won't...
I don't mean he's got to make his or her life work, but who won't get involved in the protection of children.
Like a libertarian who sees a child being yelled at or hit, who doesn't step in, is a hypocrite, right?
Because he's saying, no, no, no, see...
Voluntary care and concern on the part of non-coerced individuals will solve the problem.
Ooh, but I don't want to get involved in that family situation, right?
Even for five minutes.
So it's hard, right?
Because the moment we focus on how people ignored us being attacked by these parents, The moment we say, this is a, if not the most significant violation of the NAP that's within our control, we can't do anything about wars or foreign aid or the welfare state, but we can do something about this, right?
Even if all we do is provide sympathy and moral clarity, right?
Then we get attacked as adults, right?
For pushing people to act on their values, to actually live what they say.
And people love to say, and they hate to put it into practice.
So when they see someone putting it into practice, they get very angry, right?
And so I don't mean to go, I'm done with my speech.
I just wanted to point out that there's a reason why it's not just you and your mom, right?
But there are people filing in and out who do nothing, which itself is doing something.
It's a conscious decision to do nothing, right?
Right, right.
No, that definitely...
I mean, it totally fits with what I've been processing over the past few weeks about society and their role in my childhood.
Right, right.
Oh, and it also, I mean, of course, gives me some things to, um...
To work on with regards to the ideology of my murderous impulses towards myself, because I think that's something that I've been taking not just too much ownership of, ownership of in general, which is, as you pointed out, wrong. Yeah, I mean, to take a ridiculously extreme example, right?
I mean, if someone...
Forces you to play Russian roulette with a revolver, that doesn't mean that you're suicidal, right?
Right. And if you're in a situation where you genuinely fear that if you go to the school counselor and you say, my mom is doing X, Y, and Z, that you fear that the resulting rage could well be murderous and that you cannot be protected.
It takes a lot for children to not feel protected in society, right?
And it takes a consistent avoidance of focusing on and dealing with child abuse, right?
It was very clear to you by the time you hit 10, 11, and 12 that no one was going to help, right?
Oh, totally. It never at that point crossed my mind that Well, I mean, I'm sure it did, but it wasn't an option for me at that point.
Yeah, I mean, by the time I was, I don't know, 14 or 15, my mom was in the, had been institutionalized, and I was coming to visit.
I mean, the fact that nobody said, hey, you're a kid, do you have any, of course they knew, they knew that I didn't have family, because they would have taken my mother's history and her particulars when she was admitted to the psychiatric hospital, right?
So, The fact that nobody asked, even though I was there every day or every other day for a couple of months, I think.
Hey, we know that you don't have any family here.
What's going on, right? Well, I have three jobs, right?
So it's very clear, and this is just one example of many, many, many.
It's very clear. You know, the fact that we had dozens of friends, and my mother would go, off...
To meet guys she met in the personal ads in the National Enquirer and leave us with like 40 bucks for two weeks that we had to go and scrounge food at friends places, hang around, hoping to get an invite for dinner.
Everybody knew that my mom was gone for weeks and we were young.
Then no one did anything.
No one said anything. And that's fine, right?
I mean... I don't actually feel too much resentment, because now that I've done what I've done, I can see why they didn't do it, right?
Now that I've seen what happens when someone publicly stands up against the evils of abusive parents, fully and completely supports the independence of the adult child, now I've seen what happens, I can understand why they didn't, right?
I just don't want to offer them the comfort of thinking that they have acted with courage when they haven't, right?
It's like, you know, take what you want and pay for it.
If you choose not to get involved, if you choose to avoid standing up for a child that you know is being harmed or is in a dangerous situation, that's fine.
Don't. It's free.
You don't have to, right? It's a free world, right?
But don't expect anyone to call you even remotely ethical ever again, right?
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
That's sort of my opinion about things, right?
Since you and I and hundreds of other people, if not thousands of other people that I've talked to over the course of this conversation, have we ever seen one person who said, my uncle stepped in, my friend's mother stepped in, my teacher stepped in, Took the brunt. Got things sorted out.
Got me the help that I needed.
I can't... I mean...
I don't want to sound jaded or that I'm bending the statistics.
I can't remember one.
I can't...
I'm jogging my mind and I can't remember one either.
And even if there's a couple...
You know, I mean...
When we did all the Ask a Therapist, we got tons and tons of these...
Letters. Now, you could say, of course, well, if people did step in, then those kids don't end up at FDR or whatever, right?
But I've just never heard of it, right?
I don't think it's common, right?
And I think seeing what happens when I stood up for a kid for 40 minutes, an adult kid, seeing the way that society savages you, and again, savage is a dramatic term.
Ooh, they're typing, right?
Um... It's clear, right, the reasons why people don't stand up.
And that's fine. You don't have to stand up to protect children.
Nobody had to...
It was not a violation of the non-aggression principle to not intervene in your childhood, or in mine, or in other people's, right?
Nobody should be forced to do it, right?
Because if you're not the parent who's initiating force or fraud against a child, then it's, you know, not your business, right?
I mean, you don't have to dive into a river to save a drowning child.
It's not immoral, it's not evil to refrain from doing that because you don't want to get your suit wet, right?
Right, but what's enraging, and I think this might be related to what you were just talking to, is that the people who don't dive in to save the drowning child are the same people who boast about how good they are at swimming.
Well, and how all they care about is the safety and protection of children, right?
And then you say, well, there's a kid drowning over there, and they're like, oh, I got someplace to be.
Right.
No, that makes, that's excellent context for what society did and didn't do.
People filing in and out of your house in the dream, right?
Your dad's around, and you're left to fight this vampiric banshee alone, with no help.
And that's the world that we live in, right?
We have to be empirical.
We don't have to be, but otherwise we're just making stuff up, right?
These are the empirical facts of the world that we live in.
That everyone talks about how precious children are, and no one steps in.
Virtually no one steps in when they see a child being abused, right?
That's just the reality, right?
Without prejudice, even without emotion, those are just the facts, right?
So the good thing is that, to me, it's enormous progress that there were people filing in and out of your house in the dream.
It means that you are looking at what you experienced in the context of the society that you live in.
And what that does is it takes the weight off you, right?
Because the basic reality is, Greg, if a hundred adults could not protect you, How on earth could you protect you?
Ooh, just now saying that, I felt a big welling up of the pride you were talking about earlier, about soaring away like this.
Right, it's like if Mike, sorry, if an average guy beats and punches his way through a hundred Mike Tysons and comes to you at the age of four, is it realistic to expect that you will be able to protect is it realistic to expect that you will be able to No, no.
If all the adults, when you were a child, all looked the other way because they didn't want to get involved, because they were scared of your mother, because they didn't want to have the hassle, right?
Basically, because they were scared of your mother, they were scared of your father, right?
And as we've seen recently, right, a vile mother exposed can be a rather dangerous creature, right?
Oh, yes. So if they, if all of these heroic adults, could not or would not lift a finger to help you because they were scared of your mother...
What the hell were you supposed to do at the age of five or ten?
With no independence, with no money, with no security, with no capacity to engage the law, right?
If they were too scared of your mother, these adults with independent means and lawyers and no dependence on your mother, if a hundred of these heroic adults Turned away rather than face what was happening to you.
What chance did you have?
Alright, I'm really seeing this stream as more and more of a gift from my unconscious.
Thank you.
Yeah, I think so.
And it is, to me, it is a huge progression.
At least it was for me. Again, I'm not trying to layer my experiences into yours, but it was a huge progression for me when I began to see what occurred for me as a child in the context of the society that I lived in and the virtues that it preaches.
Right. Exploring that dissonance.
Right. Oh, you see, we're all about public schools because the protection and education of the children It's so important.
I believe the children are our future.
All the songs, right?
And I went through this public school system.
I went to six or seven schools throughout until I graduated from high school in two continents.
Private school, public school.
And not one out of the hundreds of teachers who I was exposed to Not one of them ever said, why are you underachieving?
You're clearly very intelligent, right?
You're reading crime and punishment at the age of 15.
Why is it you're not getting your assignments in on time?
Right? Because, see, we have public schools because we're all about helping the children become educated and safe and secure and happy and providing them a future.
Right? But I came to school and I smelled and I had torn clothes And I never had any homework done.
I was asleep, or sleepy often, right, because I was up all night if my mother was raging.
And all of these heroes, in a system that's explicitly designed to protect and help children, not one of these hundreds of moral heroes who had all the legal authority in the world, right, to intervene, not one of them even asked me what the problem was, or if there was one.
All they did was they gave me C's or B's and said, well, if F had matched ability, you'd be an A +, but, you know, you're just kind of lazy.
Because they're all about helping and protecting the children.
And this is the illness of the world that we live in, right?
Where people love to talk about virtue, and they don't like to actually do it.
Because doing it is hard.
Talking about it is self-congratulatory and pompous and you get to win back on about what a brave, maverick, independent person you are because you believe in the gold standard, right?
Right. But to actually take on the violence that you can do something about, which has been something I've been concerned about since very early on in the podcast series where I started talking about The Invisible Apple, Podcast 7071 or something like that.
That is different, right?
To actually live it, right?
To take the NAP, and when you hear about it being violated about children, to call it evil, and to remind people of voluntary relations, even within the family, that's hard, right?
How extremely? Because that's doing it, right?
Not talking about it.
not blogging about it, right? - Right. - And you don't have to do any of that.
In fact, I would strongly suggest that you don't.
The dream is not saying go and save children.
The dream is saying that what occurred to you occurred within a social context.
Because what that does is it helps to relieve you of responsibility.
Because if none of the 100 or 200 adults who had exposure to this did anything about it, then clearly This darkness is not yours but society's, right?
And you could have done nothing.
Because you couldn't have done anything on your own, and everybody was very clear that you better not bring it to me, right?
Right.
I mean, that relief of responsibility, I just feel it as a huge, huge gift to Stephs.
So, I mean, thank you so much for showing me that.
Well, I hope, and it's important to remember, right?
Because everybody will try and shove it back onto us, right?
Because if they can shove it back onto us, it relieves their own conscience, or rather, it pushes down their bad conscience into the unconscious, which is...
Right? But the moment we say, hey, you know what?
It wasn't my job as a four-year-old to protect myself.
From my parents, right?
We have an extended family around, we had teachers around, we had adults around, many of whom knew about it, none of whom lifted a goddamn finger to even give a shred of help.
So, it's society's fault.
It's the adults fault, it's not mine.
And they don't like you when you say that, right?
Oh no. And I wouldn't say say it to anyone but yourself.
Right. I didn't start taking this stuff on until I was in my 30s.
Because you need time away from abuse before you can handle it without taking it personally, right?
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
For sure. How are you feeling?
A lot of relief.
Relief's the predominant emotion right now.
Excellent. And as far as what we talked about here, was it the most useful stuff?
Was there other stuff that we missed?
Oh, I think especially given the context of having read Lloyd DeMoss right before the nap, I think what we focused on was The nugget of gold in the dream, for sure.
Right. Okay, good.
Well, great. I'm very glad that you brought it up.
I mean, I think it's, you know, there is a kind of collective consciousness that occurs here, right?
And I think your dream was relevant to what has occurred recently, right?
Where we're seeing the response of society to somebody who stands up and clearly points out the immorality of violence against children and the voluntariness of adult relationships, right?
We're seeing what happens, which is that you get a few abusers, Right?
Who contact the media and the abusers within the media who write all of this nonsense.
And a few people who email me about what a terrible cult leader I am.
And we have an enormous number of people who head for the hills, right?
Right. Who leave the abusers in command of the interaction, right?
Right. Because they don't want to get involved.
And that's fine. I mean, you don't have to get involved.
But don't imagine you're doing any good in the world.
In fact, quite the opposite. You are enabling the evil, right?
right the only thing that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing so i think that your dream is we're all experiencing this as a recreation of some stuff that happened when we were younger right And that's what it's designed to do, right?
If you get out of line, we will reinflict what you experienced earlier to get you to go back into line.
Problem is with self-knowledge that doesn't work, right?
Right.
All right.
Well, I don't want to keep dragging the pitchers of truth out of your soul because you've got a lot to work with at the moment.
Is there anything you wanted to add to this aspect of the conversation?
I feel pretty resolved about the chat.
I think about as much has come out as I think is going to come out at the moment.
What about you? Great, I think you did fantastic work and of course the important thing is to keep talking about this with the therapist and And journaling, but, you know, it is important for us to remember.
There's great relief in remembering that although our parents tried to inflict solitude on us, we were not alone.
There were many, many, many people who knew what was going on, if and when we were being abused as children.
And there's great relief in that, paradoxical though it may sound, because it means there was never a hope, right?
I mean, nobody reached out for us and said, let me help you, and we said, no, I want to stay here, right?
Right. So, the fact that there was no hope and there was no solace, and that everyone ignored it anyway, that's a relief, right?
It just meant there was no way out.
The door was locked, nobody was coming to help us, and therefore we had to stay.
It was not a choice. All right.
Well, thank you so much.
I do appreciate that.
You're very welcome. Thank you.
Thank you so much. And, of course, do keep us posted if you like.
about what happens with your therapist.
I will. I'm sorry, go ahead.
Oh, I said I will. Thanks.
Thanks so much. And I do believe we may have time for one more question, comment, issue, problem.
Oh dear. What do you think, Isabella?
Have we stunned everyone? Have they all gone to sleep?
Nighty night, everyone. Isabella has about 3,000 recorded sounds at the moment.
She has little coos, big screams, sighs.
It's all too lovely. All right.
Well, I think then we will wind up with the show for the day.
That's the last question that people have.
So thank you again so much, Greg.
That was great, great, great work.
And thank you again, everyone, so much for your support and your interest and your comments and your questions.
And have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
Please do check out the first in a three-part video series, The Meaning of Life, which I hope that you will find enjoyable.
And I will talk to you guys soon.
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