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Jan. 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:02
1268 Change Versus Truth

How can we change others in relationships?

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well at stuff.
It is, oh, look at that, almost 3 o'clock.
On the 29th of January, 2009, and had a great listener question came rolling in, which is well worth spending a little bit of time on to clarify.
Which is, he says, and rightly so, he says, dude, what are you talking about?
I mean, it's Steph. You say that you can't change people, but at the same time, you suggest being honest and open with them, and being honest and open with them must have, as part of its goal, that must be to affect a change in their behavior.
Because if being open and honest with someone did not affect a change in his or her behavior, there would be no point...
Doing it, then it would be akin to prayer, right?
Which, well, I guess without even the placebo effect.
And that is an excellent question.
He brings up the example that I gave a couple years ago of when I put down a bag of groceries on the carpet.
Christina was kind of snappy at me and we talked about that.
And, you know, did I not want her to change her behavior when I brought up that it was upsetting or hurtful and we talked about it to With the goal or with the attempt of sorting it out.
So, how can you say that we can't change others when honesty, openness, vulnerability, RTR, and all that kind of jazz is designed to change the relationship?
Excellent question. Now, there's two answers.
There is the short one, and then there is the long one.
Guess which one we're going to do in this podcast.
I dare you! Oh, I dare you!
Well, let's just get rid of the short one, and then we'll get to the important one.
The short answer is just the base factual answer, right?
And the base factual answer is we can't change others.
I cannot make Christina do anything, right?
I can't make her think whatever she thinks.
I mean, you can traumatize people or yell at them or beat them up or shoot them or whatever, but you can't actually make people change, right?
You can, through negative or positive stimulus, have an effect on their behavior, but that's It's like advertising.
It may have an influence, but there is no ad that will make someone buy a product.
I mean, if the product is enticing enough and valuable enough, you can't make something.
If such an advertisement existed, there would be no other kinds of commercials.
The first is that there's a factual statement that you can't change other people.
You can make someone type the word spam a lot, but you cannot physically inhabit that person's brain, central cortex, nervous system, and move their fingers.
You can influence or pay or bribe or bully or whatever, but you can't.
So you can't change others.
It's a fundamental thing. But I know that that's not the level at which people are having this question, so let's go into what I talk about with this.
Now, the first thing to understand is...
I always want to go back to UPB, right?
And let's say that Christina snapped at me, and I wanted her to not snap at me because I did not like being snapped at, right?
In other words, I wanted her to change her behavior because what she was doing was making me feel uncomfortable.
And here we have, of course, a completely non-UPB-compliant approach to the truth.
Oh, sorry, two interactions.
It's a non-UPB compliant principle.
If I say to Christina, you must change your behavior because your behavior is making me uncomfortable, is causing a negative or stressful or anxious reaction in me, and therefore you should change your behavior, well, she would rightly come back to me and say,
well, If the principle is that we must change our behavior because our behavior makes other people uncomfortable or anxious or have some sort of negative experience, then your request that I change my behavior makes me feel anxious and therefore you must change your request so that it does not exist.
You must abandon your request because your request that I change is making me anxious.
So here we have, you know, if other people's behavior must change because we feel something negative, then the request that they change is going to make them feel negative, and therefore we have a completely non-UPB compliant interaction, which, you know, I'm not going to step through that, but clearly that doesn't work, right? So it can't be that other people must change their behavior because their behavior makes us feel anxious.
I mean, certainly, certainly, certainly, FDR... Makes people feel anxious and angry and upset, some people, right?
And some parents and so on.
And therefore, they want me to stop doing what I'm doing because it makes them uncomfortable and clearly that is not a reasonable or just request.
So, I think we can all understand that.
Now, the reason, I think, why it is important to...
Avoid this issue where you say to someone, you must change because your behavior is making me feel negative, feel bad, is because that is a turtles all the way down situation.
There is the problem of infinite regression that occurs when other people must change their behavior to manage your anxiety or frustration or anger or fear or whatever, which is that if As is inevitably the case, the underlying condition is not dealt with, then you're going to end up progressively restricting the other person's freedom of self-expression and interaction in order to manage, to continually manage your own anxiety.
So if, let's say, I have a problem with rampant insecurity, low self-esteem or whatever, And Christina is talking with some other guy, and I suddenly feel like, oh my god, she's going to leave me for this other guy.
So then I say, okay, don't talk to that guy, because my feeling of insecurity is making me feel anxious.
And rather than saying, I felt insecure when you talked to that guy, I felt anxious, I don't know why, let's talk about it.
Which would actually help us uncover the root cause, the root condition, the core belief of I'm not worthy.
But instead I say, don't talk to that guy.
And then she talks to some other guy and I feel anxious.
Don't talk to that guy.
Okay, don't talk to young guys.
Don't talk to attractive guys.
Don't talk to guys with full heads of hair.
Whatever it is that I'm going to come up with.
Because I'm not dealing with the root cause, I end up progressively escalating my control over her behavior until she basically ends up living in a kind of dictatorship.
A kind of, you can't do anything because everything you do makes me feel bad.
And now the problem is that it is actually an act, like let's say that I got this insecurity, I don't want Christina to talk to guys.
Sort of restricts her patience roster.
Well, the problem is that...
But controlling other people to manage your own anxiety is itself an act of low self-esteem that further lowers one's own self-esteem because it's self-avoidance, it's avoidance of the truth, it's bullying other people or controlling other people, which in turn makes you feel worse.
This is why we end up with an ever-escalating situation because if the problem is caused by low self-esteem and I control other people or try to in order to manage my own anxiety...
That actually increases my anxiety, so it never stays stable.
That approach of saying other people must change because we feel bad is ever escalating and continually makes the problem worse, right?
It's like the cure for emphysema is more cigarettes, right?
Well, obviously that doesn't work.
And what ends up as we end up going through this whole situation...
Where we progressively control people more and more until they pop out of our lives or we completely break their spirits, in which case we start to feel aggressive towards them because the corpse of their living death is a mute reproach to our bullying and so we end up getting aggressive towards them while they leave us and we end up grabbing onto other people.
It's just a mess because non-UPB compliant stuff is always unstable and tends towards Escalation, exacerbation, increase, and eventual destruction, right?
From the state to religion to controlling other people.
This is the problem, right?
So, when Christina snapped at me, it was not an approach that I was ever going to be willing to take, which was to say, you should not snap at me because I... I don't like it.
I mean, that just doesn't work.
Non-UPB would never work.
In fact, it would start to unravel the marriage right then and there, right?
Until and unless it was reversed.
So, what does it mean?
Well, why is it that I would then sit down and be honest and open and vulnerable and say, I feel upset and I don't know why and what's going on.
Let me figure out what happened there.
It's because...
Sorry, how is it that it's going to affect someone's behavior?
Well... First of all, the goal cannot be to change the other person's behavior.
Because that is assuming a knowledge that you simply don't have up front.
Because if I feel hurt because I think Christina, or I feel like Christina has snapped at me, and this is a pretty subjective thing, right?
If I feel hurt, I don't know if it's because of her.
It could be because of my stuff, right?
I mean, for those of us who grew up with bullying parents, a sort of Firm request can feel like bullying, and we get upset.
It tweaks our defenses, right?
And we don't learn how to free ourselves from that historical reaction if we just tell the other person, don't do that, and they comply, right?
We're then sort of becoming our parents, so to speak, right?
That's not a productive thing.
So, if I were to say to Christina, you snapped at me.
That's bad. I'm not bringing any baggage to the situation.
It's all your fault and therefore the only solution is 100% change on your part and 0% change on my part.
I don't have that knowledge.
This is called humility and truth.
I do not have the knowledge when I'm hurt and upset.
To know, with no shadow of a doubt, that it is entirely because of the other person and I'm bringing nothing to the situation.
In other words, I'm not overreacting to her snapping at me because I was never, ever aggressed against as a child.
I don't have any history or scar tissue around aggression control and so on about being snapped at.
Of course, even if what she did is wrong, maybe it's like 5% wrong, but for me it becomes 90% wrong because of my own history.
It's complex. It's dense, right?
We can't tell for sure why a particular interaction is occurring.
Certainly not down to its roots and depths, right?
I mean, we just can't because, I mean, we talked about this for days to finally figure out what all the roots are.
And I'm not going to pretend to have knowledge that I simply don't have up front.
So that's really important to just not do that.
Now, this all begs the question, and I think this is what this gentleman is getting at, and I'm trying not to avoid it, but rather to put it in context, is that, well, is there not a desire for or an expectation of change?
Well, yeah, of course there is, but I don't have the knowledge at the beginning of a conflict or a problem to know whether or not the change It's required from the other person or from myself.
I mean, don't know.
That's why I say it's not about changing Christina if she's done something to upset me.
I don't know if it's her who needs to change.
I mean, almost always in healthy relationships, it's both parties who need to adjust something or other.
What proportion, to what degree, to what level, who knows, right?
Am I supposed to recognize and deal with some of my past history so that I'm less reactive to being snapped at and don't make such a big deal out of it?
Is Christina supposed to deal with the fact that her dad didn't listen to her mom and her mom would get angry and she mirrored that?
Well, yeah, of course. But I don't know the degree to which change is supposed to occur.
And most importantly, I am not trying to change Christina.
We together are attempting to discover the truth.
Or, more accurately, the truths about the interaction.
So that we can bring what is unconscious to the conscious mind.
So that we can really become free of these kinds of interactions.
Negative or problematic interactions.
Because the truth sets you free.
Controlling other people to manage your own anxiety enslaves them and you.
Them temporarily.
You, if you keep up the habit, permanently.
But if you discover the truth about the interaction, then it is no longer unconscious.
You can be aware of the history that has contributed to it.
You can deal with the past pain and scar tissue so that it actually does not become an issue anymore.
So, I'm not trying to change her.
We are trying to get to the truth so that we can figure out what's really going on so that we become free of that kind of interaction.
That's not about changing her at all.
Will change result from pursuing the truth?
Well, yes. But you don't pursue the truth as a means to achieving change.
Because you don't know what the change is before you know what the truth is.
Or if there's even change that's necessary on both parties or whatever, right?
So the truth is not a trick that you use to get to change.
Because then also you end up manipulative.
You're saying you have knowledge that you don't, which always ends up...
Whenever you claim to have knowledge that you don't have, you always end up being manipulative.
You do, I do, everybody does.
You say that God exists, which you don't know.
In fact, you know that he doesn't.
Then when people begin to ask you for proof, like the agnostics or like the nihilists or whatever, or like the religious, they end up having to be manipulative.
Whenever we claim to have a truth, to know a truth that we do not in fact know, we always end up becoming manipulative.
So you can't aim at Change through the truth, because you will end up not getting to the truth, right?
You aim for the truth. Now, does change result from achieving the truth?
Well, sure. For some people, it does.
For a lot of people, unfortunately, their behavior only changes for the worse when they are exposed to the truth.
But for a few people who have that kind of commitment to integrity, they will end up doing better as a result of The truth, they will end up, you know, through a process of change and challenge and growth and so on, actually dealing with their emotions, they will end up doing better as a result of experiencing the truth.
So, how does this fit together?
We don't aim for truth, but truth is what results.
Sorry, we don't aim for change, but change is what results when we aim at truth.
Well, I mean, this is not so much a matter of faith for me anymore, though it certainly was a little bit more at the beginning, but the truth will change people, right?
The truth changes people. If you keep meditating on the truth, and you keep remaining curious and asking questions about what is, what is right, what is good, what is true, what is virtue, you will change.
You will change. Change is a byproduct of truth, for better or for worse.
In the same way that you cannot aim for healthy lungs, because you can't reach in there and give them a scrub, but you can aim for exercise and no smoking and less pollution.
Those things you can do, right?
If you aim for healthy lungs without aiming at the behavior which produces them, you won't get anywhere, right?
You'll get a mess.
Butter knife in your chest.
Cavity. So, it's trusting and understanding that the truth will bring a change without willpower, right?
With the willpower we have, since willpower can really only be aimed at that which we can affect, right?
There's not much point trying to will a change in the orbit of the moon, right?
Because we can't Change that.
That will simply be to undermine and destroy our sense of willpower.
So we aim to effect that which we can effect.
We cannot effect change.
We cannot make things conscious.
We can only continue to aim at the truth and honesty with ourselves and vulnerability with those around us and all those kinds of good things, right?
We can't effect change in others and we frankly cannot effect change in ourselves.
We can only continue to To focus on the truth and curiosity, not jumping to conclusions, but continuing to explore complex matters.
And that's how change results.
But you can't try to change.
You can't try to change yourself.
You can't try to change others.
You can only continue to act with honesty and integrity and curiosity and courage and openness and vulnerability when it comes to focusing on that which is true.
And truth is a complicated, difficult, and challenging thing.
There is logistical truth, there is emotional truth, there is relationship truth, there is all kinds of complex truths in the world, and we shall never be short of the hot pursuit of truth.
We'll never get there, we'll never get the truth about everything.
Because the acquisition of truth creates the possibilities for new truth, right?
Just that the acquisition of particular skills allows you to go further, right?
Brown belt can lead you to a black belt, possibly.
So... You may be in the situation, this is the last sort of thing I mentioned about this, you may be in the situation where, which is, you know, sadly all too common, where...
Bringing the truth to people causes them to act in a much worse way, right?
Because they are attempting to maintain knowledge which they do not have.
They are attempting to sustain a falsehood.
And therefore they pull out all sorts of emotional tricks and annoying manipulations in order to keep the truth at bay, right?
Whereas a guy...
Who wrote to me, it's like, oh yeah, well, so you don't believe that God exists?
It's like, do you believe that atoms exist?
It's like, well, actually, atoms have now been recorded.
They've been photographed, so to speak.
So, yeah, I do.
And they just switched to something else.
He's just trying the different locks, the different bullshit keys and the different bullshit locks to see if he can get me to cave, right?
It's got nothing to do. It's just manipulative.
He's attempting to sustain a fiction of religiosity, and therefore he has no choice but to be manipulative.
So... Aiming at the truth reduces manipulation, increases honesty, and so on.
So if you're around people, you bring the truth to them, and they begin to act really badly, well, guess what?
That's just another truth.
The truth is that the truth will make these people act badly.
And you can, of course, continue to try to turn them around, but, you know, it's important to have a cut-off point, right?
And... There's not really much to be said about that.
Which is that, say, well, what if the truth has no effect on people or causes them to act badly?
It's like, well, then don't have those people in your life.
That would be my suggestion. Unless you want to be unhappy, manipulative, frustrated, and confused, to say the least, if not worse.
So, yeah, that can definitely happen.
And that is not a fun thing to be around.
But it's just another truth that you gather through honesty.
So to end up with a metaphor, since I haven't used my quota of 600 metaphors a second in this little chat, to end up with a metaphor, let's say that you want people to take your cancer cure, your cure for cancer, right? Well, you have two ways of going about it, right?
One is that you can advertise on cheesy radio shows about how eating...
Sea sponges cures cancer and you've got all this anecdotal evidence and you get a bunch of people to write in who may or may not have had spontaneous remissions while doing what you do or apricot seeds or whatever the hell it is.
You can just lie about it, right?
And then when people ask you for evidence, you get aggressive, you get manipulative, you get...
When they ask for double-blind studies, when they check on the placebo effect or the ratio of your cures relative to spontaneous remissions of cancer and so on...
You get, you know, all kinds of manipulative and annoying, right?
So that's one way that you can get people to do what you want them to do, pay you for some cure.
Now, the second thing that you can do if you want people to take your cancer cure is you can make sure that it is, in fact, a cancer cure.
And by that I mean, you know, the scientific double-blind experiments, controlling for the placebo effect and all this kind of stuff, right?
And once you have a pill that cures cancer, Which is proven in study after study after study, objectively, across cultures, and so on.
And then you let people know.
You say, this is the truth. You don't say, I want you to take my cancer pill.
You say, this pill cures cancer, and here's the proof.
And then you don't have to tell them.
You aim at the truth, and you achieve change.
But if you aim at change, i.e., from not buying my cancer pill to buying my cancer pill...
If you aim at that, then you'll end up being manipulative and falsifying evidence because your goal is to change.
But if you aim at the truth and you find, hey, and you can prove, hey, this pill cures cancer, then people's behavior will change automatically.
Those, at least, who have cancer and want it cured.
Yeah, that will irritate and annoy other people who have bogus cancer cures.
But we already established at the beginning that change should not really be pursued or demanded because of Discomfort.
So, anyway, I hope that that clarifies things.
Thank you so much for your continued attention.
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Thank you so much. I wish you all the best.
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