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April 22, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:04
1338 Depression Part 2: Castration

Why you are depressed.

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well, it's Steph. This is Depression, Part 2.
And if you haven't had a chance to listen to Part 1, I would strongly recommend it.
It is the 23rd of April, 2009.
Now, when I look at psychological phenomenon, I try to take nothing for granted.
I'm very much around the blank slate planet.
In other words, when faced with anti-rationality, why would the response be depression rather than, say...
I don't know, sexual arousal or, I don't know, embarrassment or whatever.
What is the correlation? Because emotions can be anything, right?
They're like your dreams. They really could have developed into any kind of cause and effect response.
So my question is, you know, why would depression be the response to irrationality or anti-rationality rather than Something else,
right? When resources are available and there's an excess of resources, then cooperation is the norm.
So if you're brought up well or you're brought up in a peaceful environment, then cooperation and reason tends to be more along your line, so to speak.
Whereas if you're brought up in an abusive environment, nature simply assumes that resources are scarce and therefore you better be Kind of an asshole, right?
And at least have those tendencies.
And that's why you tend to be either hyper-compliant.
You're going to be in a hierarchy. You're going to be hyper-compliant or hyper-aggressive or whatever.
So, I sort of start with, like, why?
Why would any of this be the case, right?
Rather than trying to explain it ex post facto, but look at it from, like, what adaptive need does this serve?
Yeah. Now, again, this is all just theory, right?
As you understand, this is nothing proven.
This is just ways of looking at it that I have found to be enormously helpful.
To change the ethics of society, to rewrite the ethics of society.
Is to really rewrite society.
Society is the sum of preferred behavior within a geographical region, always imagined to be universal, or at least prescribed that way to children.
To change the ethics of society, to challenge the ethics of society, is to challenge most people's fundamental and foundational reality.
So, people welcome you coming along and rewriting their ethics about as much as airplane manufacturers, if someone has the power to come along and rewrite physics, none of their planes will work and they have to start from scratch.
So, people do not welcome new ethics or challenges to existing ethics.
You know, much like if you have to build a new building on the side of an existing building, you have to tear the existing building down and there's a time of ruin and then there is a time of building.
And nobody wants to live in the time of ruin, right?
They want to live in the time of stability, they want to live in the new ethics, but they don't want to live in the time of ruin.
And that's why people resist.
And, you know, to some degree, from a short-term standpoint, rationally so, they resist anybody who comes along and who openly expresses bewilderment, bafflement, and anger at the contradictions within the society that they live in.
Right? So, when you are told Jesus loves you and Jesus also invented or gave us hell to punish sinners, right?
So, Jesus loves you and he'll throw you and burn forever if you disobey him.
Well, that's kind of fucked up, right?
I mean, that's a real contradiction for a kid, you know?
I love you and if you don't obey me, I'm going to thumbs through your eyeballs forever, right?
I mean, that's not sane and that's not rational.
And you can sort of go on and on, right?
About... The stuff that people are taught as children.
You know, you should listen to your teachers because your teachers are smart and they know stuff and they're this and they're that and they're the other.
And yet, we all experience teachers as incredibly touchy and immature and volatile.
Not all, but most of the teachers.
Or nondescript, or completely uninspiring, or swollen up like a puffer fish with petty power and just as prickly and dangerous to eat uncooked.
So there's all this nonsense that people...
Are taught. And children, of course, see this.
You know, it's bad to steal, but taxation is good, right?
Don't take the other kids' toys, but taxation is good.
Or it's bad to kill, but, you know, nuke those gooks is the way to go, you know, in Southeast Asia in the 60s and 70s, right?
So all of the rules that children...
Our ground into an indignant powder underneath are completely the opposite of what people support in the state, the violence, right?
I mean, if your parents were to read a story of a man who found some drugs in his son's room and then locked him in the basement for five years and regularly beat him up, right?
They would consider that to be horrifying.
But then these very same parents will support drug laws which do precisely the same thing, right?
So there's this insanity in the world.
This Alice in Wonderland, hard not to take as a joke, if it weren't so brutal, life that we live with regards to our relationship to personal morality and institutional morality, such as a church or a state and a school and so on.
And it's all completely mad.
And everybody kind of wants to sail along spouting off moral rules and using moral rules to control and bully children.
And then when those children come back to them with some honest and legitimate questions about those moral rules, the universality of those moral rules, parents and teachers and politicians and priests become mortally and morally offended at this.
So we live in a world of absolute moral insanity.
And in many ways, we are less crazy than we were in the Middle Ages, but unfortunately, we are less crazy, but we have far more capacity to do damage, and therefore the crazy has actually kind of gone up, right?
More people die in a single day than in hundreds or thousands of years of warfare, like in the First World War.
And so our capacity to do damage has gotten so much greater that the insanity that we call morality in society has become more toxic than it was in the past and the only reasons why our lives are not more toxic is because we have capitalism and science like the two empirical objective disciplines and hopefully we can add moral philosophy to that because if we don't we are truly hosed.
So People live in this moral insanity, this moral craziness.
You know, where if you're a kid and you push another kid over and you take his toy, or you just snatch the toy, that's considered to be wrong, bad.
Don't do that. That's wrong.
That's bad. You may be punished. You may be sanctioned.
Time out or whatever. But the very school that you go to is paid for through the initiation or threats thereof of force against your parents.
So, how is it that the huge institutions get to hold guns to everyone's head and force education upon them, which really is just a kind of brain-deadening indoctrination?
So, might makes right in the realm of education, surely one of the most important aspects of human life, but might does not make right if you want a toy in kindergarten.
Because might is wrong, right?
So might is wrong when it comes to a little plastic toy and a little push or a grab.
But might is right when it comes to holding guns to the heads of millions of people in order to numb and shred the brains of their children.
Might then becomes right. But see, nobody wants to talk about this stuff.
It makes people very uncomfortable to talk about these basic moral truths that children understand Innately.
We all understand this stuff innately.
The first time we hear about soldiers, we're like, what?
I'm sorry, what?
You put on a green costume and suddenly you can go and slaughter people and it's...
What? Good?
Get the fuck out of here!
Right? I mean, part of us just goes, oh my fucking god, what kind of insane planet do I live in where I get punished for grabbing a toy, but if you put on a green costume, you get medals, a pension, and a tick-a-tick fucking parade for shooting the shit out of anybody that an asshole in a suit points to.
Well, we all understand that this is a sickness and an insanity.
And it is a sickness really more than an insanity because the moral rules are both recognized and destroyed in the world, right?
Theft is bad. Taxes are good.
Murder is bad. Killing in the name of your country is good.
We understand, right?
This is all just savage moral insanity that we live under.
And people, they really don't want it pointed out, right?
And so, society has, in its infinite wisdom, has developed a series of defenses against people who ask tough questions.
Because we are, you know, Ayn Rand was very much against this social metaphysics stuff, but I actually think it's gotten a bit of a bad reputation in the objectivist circles.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with social metaphysics as long as it's not your only criterion for determining truth from falsehood, right?
I mean, we do have to...
If we see things that are really strange, the first thing we'll do is say to somebody, do you see that?
And that's a helpful and healthy thing, right?
If we're ambivalent or ambiguous about something, it's nice to get other people's feedback on it.
And so we do have...
You know, our senses are prone to error, but other people, if they're honest with us, can really help us...
To see the truth, or at least back us up, right?
So, if we're in the desert and we think we see a lake, and we turn to our guide and we say, oh look, a lake, and they say, no, no, no, boss, it's a mirage, right?
It's not a real lake, it's just, you know, light waves bouncing between different layers of heat in the desert, and the water's not where you think it is, and so on.
Then that's helpful to us, right?
So... We do turn to other people to help validate our thinking, because we can make mistakes, but collectively we can be wiser than we are individually.
Of course, collectively we can be completely insane and retarded, which is unfortunately what is called culture these days, but we can be smarter and wiser and more objective if we are with honest people than if we are alone, and we can also end up in a much worse position in that same situation.
So when we as children first, and I so clearly remember this from my own childhood, so many instances of this, where we are ants to the giants of our elders when we are very young, and we stare up this massive imposing stone and marble statue of society at these Olympic gods telling us the way things are,
the way they should be, The gods who are so certain and so powerful and so arrogant and so dismissive and sometimes so contemptuous and hostile and aggressive to questions that we can form.
And we have almost no choice.
And we say, well, this seems wrong, it feels wrong, it's logically wrong, but everybody completely accepts it.
And... If I ever bring this up, they consider me a bad guy.
And if everyone in society considers me a bad guy, well, there's not a lot I can do in society.
So let me not take that road, right?
We're dependent upon society.
We're sort of raised to be dependent, or we have evolved to be dependent on society for our survival, right?
And that's... Inevitable, right?
So, social metaphysics has some value, but it is also, of course, a great Achilles' heel of the human mind, right?
That we need other people to gain objective truth, but other people can mislead us and attack us, particularly when we're children, and confuse and bewilder us.
They say that boredom is rage spread thin.
I think that depression is outrage spread thinner, but sort of make the case as we go along.
So... When we first ask people, well, how can this be?
One of the reasons why the state once us herded together in these pig pens of state schools and put immature and bullish and rat bastard teachers in charge of us is so that they can show us as kids what happens to those who ask intelligent questions that the teacher can't answer, aggression and humiliation, the tittering laughter of the sheeple children We'll follow that kid, right?
You'll be attacked, humiliated, and so on, if you ask intelligent questions and curious questions and rational questions of the frankly idiot teachers that are put in charge of children.
And the state would only put idiot teachers in charge of children because the humiliation is necessary so that they don't have to humiliate each of us individually.
We can get that lesson from the one or two kids who open their mouth and ask intelligent questions and just get those questions.
The stares, the laughter, the humiliation, what used to be up until quite recently, even when Christina and I were kids, the beatings from teachers.
But now it's more subtle.
Now it's more verbal.
But when you ask those basic questions of your elders, of your parents, of your teachers, of other adults, you open up a huge chasm, which is that they simply can't answer these questions, and they feel very scared, angry, hostile, and frightened.
To be asked these questions because it reminds them of their own history when they were punished or saw people punished for asking basic or intelligent questions.
And they get mad.
They get really angry. Or they shut down or they're emotionally cold or distant or whatever, right?
Lots of different tools and techniques that people have for this kind of nonsense.
And what happens then?
Well... And you can listen to, I think it's podcast 72, How to Control the Human Soul, for more on this if you like.
But basically we end up with this very large problem.
Which is, what on earth are we supposed to do in the face of this kind of hostility?
It's probably the most significant problem you ever had to face as a kid.
Even more so than abusive parents.
Because abusive parents you can get away from eventually, right?
But these kinds of society and these kinds of issues or questions you simply can't, right?
So, if you think back to your own history, when did you first doubt the wisdom and rationality of society?
And what happens when those doubts begin to pass across your mind?
You know, when I was a kid, I learned that we had saved Europe from the Nazis, and I asked about Eastern Europe.
It's like, well, we lost that to the communists.
It's like, well, what was the point of that then?
Right? What's the point of that?
I mean, we got...
We had lectures about gangs, you know, that gangs were really bad.
Teenage gangs, youth gangs, or whatever.
And this was in England.
We got lectures about how bad gangs were, not to join gangs, and hooliganism, and gangs, and gangs, and gangs.
And then we were also told that the school would be incredibly cold because the state unions We're cutting off the supply of coal to protest some limitation on their unjust gains, right?
It's like, wait, what the fuck are you people talking about?
If gangs are bad, aren't you going to talk about how bad the unions are?
It's a violent gang, right?
A gang that relies on violence to get what it wants.
And then, of course, you think, well, but the teachers are a state union, right?
And isn't that a violent gang or a gang that relies on violence to gain unjust benefits from society?
Isn't the whole guy that educational system a gang and you people are lecturing me about joining a gang?
Do you understand? It's just so completely insane the degree to which morality is used to control others and never for the true pursuit of virtue.
And of course, if you point this out, people get really, really, really angry.
In the same way that if you are angry and scared, right?
So a guy jumps you in an alley and he's got a gun and you wrestle the gun away from him, suddenly he's angry and scared, right?
Although, of course, kids never actually get the gun, right?
So you think these questions, or you ask these questions, or you see other children ask these questions, or it may have happened to you later in life.
And what happens then?
Well, these lies can only continue because nobody talks about them, right?
This insanity of what passes for ethics, which is fundamentally class control, but what passes for ethics in society and the evils that society does in the name of virtue can only survive because people don't ask these basic questions.
And it's not just the powers that be, but it's those they've ground down as well, right?
The lower classes also want to avoid these questions because it reminds them of their own humiliation and everything they had to not say when they were kids, right?
Everything they would be attacked or punished for saying or for asking.
And so society flexes and rears up with one mighty muscle to strike you down and basically say, and excuse my French, shut the fuck up.
Shut the fuck up.
Do not drum your impatient intellectual fingers on the shaky table that holds their house of cards, because the whole goddamn thing will come down.
Shut up.
And, in my view, or to my way of thinking...
And again, I don't think any of this is proven, but this is what I have found to be incredibly helpful in my own intellectual pursuits and moral pursuits.
Depression is a way that society, is a way for society to inoculate the truth-tellers.
Depression is a way for society to inoculate itself against growth, change, challenge.
Because it is such a house of cards, right?
And there's three ways to achieve certainty in this world.
And only one of the...
It's truly certain, but there's only three ways to even feel certain in this world.
One is just go along with the majority, you know, and just ride that social, metaphysical, cultural wave and just feel certain that way.
That's number one. Number two is to just be insane and defensive, right?
Because, you know, crazy assholes are always certain, right?
That's kind of what makes them that way.
Or number three, to sort of build your principles from the ground up, as we've been trying to do in this conversation over the past number of years.
That's another way of achieving certainty.
Certainty in a methodology and some pretty solid certainty in conclusions.
And those who built their certainty on going along with the cultural majority, and that doesn't mean always the same, right?
It can be whatever. It could be Wiccans, right?
As opposed to Obama supporters, right?
It could be You know, radical feminists as opposed to deep ecologists.
Well, whatever it is that's in your social sphere, just go along with the majority opinion and get behind it and you feel pretty certain.
You're surrounded by like-minded people.
That's when social metaphysics is the dark side, right?
is a stupid conformity site.
And for those people, when you ask those basic questions about society, when you look at that which is considered to be virtuous in your society, you know, paying your taxes, voting, and so on, national defense, right, which is always just attacking other people, when you question the ethics of that, public education, of, you know, socialized when you question the ethics of that, public education, of, you know, socialized health care, whatever, you question the virtue of I mean, the house of cards, you understand, is people's identities.
It's not culture. Culture exists as a container around which people form their own personalities.
It's like a beaker, a very oddly shaped beaker.
And everybody's water.
They pour themselves into it.
And when you take the beaker away, they literally feel themselves disintegrating.
When you take away the support structures, they literally feel themselves disintegrating.
It is a kind of psychic death.
To go through individuation, right?
And this has been talked about in Freud from Jung, Adler, other psychologists.
This is a pretty well-known phenomenon that there is a kind of bury yourself in order to be resurrected aspect to personal authenticity, to individuation, to thinking and being who you really are, thinking for yourself for the reference to reason, reality, and evidence, rather than just swallowing the fetid shit that gets poured down your throat by culture and society.
So, if you have, like, the first line of defense for society is just petty, stupid humiliation that goes on in the classrooms and at home, right?
If you ask, child of three asks, where's God?
I can't see him. And everybody, ah, ha, ha, ha, what a silly little boy, right?
What a silly little question.
How cute, how naive, right?
So, the first line of defense, which is very humiliating for a young boy or girl who's trying to understand the world and make sense of his senses and so on, So, the first line of defense is just that petty, stupid humiliation that all children, the souls of most children are broken, like the back of a heretic on a medieval wheel.
And then, should the child, dear God, dare to persist in these questions, then, you know, the backup is direct attack, and then humiliation and expulsion, and all the, you know, humiliation of the clan or of the family, all of the... Ape-like tribal bullshit that goes on in the world.
And if the child has been sort of infected by reason, which is how it appears to others, if the child's been infected by reason and can't be cured through humiliation and attack...
Social shaming and so on.
If the child simply cannot let go of these questions, then what happens is that the child is blocked and his forward movement is rejected romantically, it's rejected in terms of status, in terms of business, in terms of money, in terms of education.
And all of these, you know, just decide to shut the fuck up, you know, just get back down, get back in the box.
Don't raise these questions.
Don't bring up these questions, because we feel...
When you do that, we feel insane.
We feel comfortably sane when we're ensconced in the socially metaphysical crap of general conformity, but when you bring these questions up, we feel our house of cards, called our identity, shake and tremble or begin to collapse, and we panic, right?
And we lash out, right?
In the same way that anyone would lash out when clinging to a raft if somebody tries to pull them off in a stormy sea, right?
And so they need to...
Get you to stop doing what you're doing.
And there's a number of ways that they do that if you don't succumb to the initial attacks and humiliations as a kid, right?
And they will find ways to shut you out.
And I think one of the most fundamental ways that they use is depression.
And when you parse it out, and this is, again, it's all just my theories, right?
I mean, you can look at this in your own life, see if it fits.
I found this to be pretty true universally, but this is not to say this is you.
This is just ways that I found just incredibly helpful in my own life trying to deal with this stuff.
The way that they will get you to shut up is to undermine and hopefully kill your capacity for love.
And that may sound strange, but it is true that you can't help people, you can't change the world, you can't help people if you lose the capacity to love.
And this means love-truth, and this also means to love the potential for the pursuit of truth and the achievement of truth in those around you.
Not everyone, obviously, maybe not even many people.
In fact, I would say probably quite a few at this point in the intellectual and moral development of the species.
But if you lose the capacity...
To love both the truth and the potential of mankind, then you are as inoculated as if you had kowtowed that first shotgun to the forehead humiliation that they hit upon you or other kids who asked basic intelligent questions about the world.
If they can get you to give up on your love of the truth, Which is what the teaching of relativism is all about, is to give people to give up their love of the truth and to make everything subjective and make everything appearance-based.
And you know that this is a psychological scar because people attack the truth, right?
They attack any kind of objective truth.
That is a knee-jerk emphasis on the second word, reaction of people to truth, right?
So, if you put forward an objective truth, people will say, there's no objective truth.
Thus declaring an objective truth.
And they're blind to this insanity because it's not designed to find the truth.
It's designed to attack anyone who puts forward an objective truth because an objective truth is the opposite and destroys the fetid foundations of the shit statue of culture.
And it's all too funny for words, right?
I mean, people say this about my approach to ethics, UPB, and it gets all people all kinds of mad, right?
Hostile and weird, right?
Fundamentally. And they do this thing where they say, well, there's no such thing as truth.
This theory fails. And it's like, well, if there's no such thing as truth, then there's no such thing as better or worse or right or wrong behavior.
And therefore, me putting forward this theory is no better or worse than me doing the Macarena or strangling a cat.
It's all equal. A dog has no better direction than he can run, let's say, or a shark has no better direction than he should swim, so when you yell at a shark for swimming north, it makes no sense.
I mean, it's ridiculous. All you're doing is you're saying there is a preferred direction if you yell at a shark for swimming north.
But people do this, right?
So either there is objective truth, in which case use UPB to build something better, Thus, affirming UPB. Or, there's no objective truth, in which case there's no problem putting forward UPB, because it's no better or worse course of behavior, right?
It's like saying, there's no preferred flavor of ice cream, but it's totally evil if you like vanilla.
But that's just crazy, right?
And the purpose is to attack those who have any kind of certainty.
Because certainty undermines and destroys culture, right?
Truth undermines and destroys bigotry, and culture is simply geographical, historical, regional, familial bigotry.
And when people have been really infected with relativism, They recognize, much more so than the absolutists, the danger of objective truth to their, not their belief systems, but to their personalities, to their identities, to their lives.
It is a cancer to them.
And so they will attack it, of course, right?
That's inevitable and tragic, of course.
But I would say that it's probably beyond hope once you've gotten to that point.
But that's, again, just opinions.
So the first thing that people will do, in a more sophisticated way, in intellectual circles, is they will strive like Sisyphus, but with more success, to get you to give up your love of the truth.
To get you to become a cynical, a superior to, and indifferent to the truth.
And then, inevitably, because you are revolted in your soul by the compromise you have made, by the destruction you have experienced, you then become a cancerous acid towards anybody else who has certainty.
Because if you don't accept the pain of this kind of tragedy, you end up reproducing it, just like any other abuser.
So they get you to give up.
Your love of the truth and to actually turn into a hater of the truth, right?
Now, that works for a lot of people, right?
Hence, academia and theology, but it doesn't work for everyone, right?
So what's the backup solution to somebody who has survived the onslaught of attack as a child and who has probably gone underground, as we all do, to survive that kind of situation?
What happens next? Well, if somebody has survived the humiliation and attack and has managed to hang on to their love of truth, the next attack is their love of others, their love of the world, right? Because if somebody loves truth but hates the world, they're no danger to the bigotries of culture.
If somebody loves the truth, but hates the world, or hates people, can't love the truth and hate the world, but loves truth and hates people, they're in no danger, because nobody will want the truth that he or she has.
Because, you know, they hate you, right?
They're not going to talk to you. Right, so in the former case, we have the kind of relativist who engages in society as a cancer against objectivity and reason and evidence.
And in the second case, where you still love the truth but you hate people, you end up as the solitary Nietzschean, living in the woods, bitter cynic, right?
And that is where you love the truth but hate people, and you then pose again, you've been successfully, society has successfully inoculated you against any possibility for real change in society.
And then you're bitter, you're suspicious, you're cynical, you're hostile, you'll still pursue the truth probably, but you'll do it in such a way that nobody will want to get on board, right?
Because if...
I mean, everybody...
To credit the people who defend culture, which is just about everyone, I mean, they're smart, smart, smart, smart little rodents, right?
Because they know a lot more about truth and reason, instinctively, than most philosophers will ever get, conceptually.
Because they know the basic...
Equation. Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
They know it much better than almost all philosophers in the world ever have.
Because reason equals virtue equals happiness is the basic equation of the value of philosophy, right?
And research equals medicine equals health, right?
Anyway... At least the best chance you've got for it, right?
I mean, you may not be happy if you're a philosopher because you might, I don't know, have a chronic ailment of some kind, or you just might be unlucky in love and not find the right person, but it's the best chance you've got, right?
I mean, antibiotics may not cure all of your illnesses, but it's still the first place you go if you have an infection, right?
So... They know.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
So if they wish to discredit somebody who has the truth, all they need to do is to make that person unhappy.
And then whatever truth that that person has, nobody will want.
Because if you want to discredit somebody's diet book, make them really fat, right?
And then nobody will want that diet.
Because they'll say, well, geez, you know, you wrote a diet book, so we think that being thin is good, or at least not being overweight is good, and here you are, 400 pounds, right?
So, if they can make you unhappy, all the truths that you have turn to ashes in your mouth, and that you know.
Right? So you understand, this is why I say that depression is a way of society inoculating itself against...
The change and the challenge of truth and reason and evidence, empiricism, objectivity, reality, is that it will strive as hard as it possibly can to make the truth-tellers as miserable as humanly possible.
And that way, They're either cowed and crushed to begin with and turn against, right?
So if you're a truth teller, you can't ever be indifferent to truth, right?
If you just have that natural instinct for truth and reason and philosophy, I mean, in the same way some people are just...
Tiger Woods is two years old and Johnny Carson sink in putts, right?
He's a natural talent for golf, right?
He worked damn hard, but he's a natural talent, and some people have a natural talent for philosophy.
If you're that guy, you're either totally pro-philosophy and...
Helping the world with reason and evidence as best you can, or you become the sulfuric acid of cancer, right?
Melting away the face of reason.
You're not going to end up anywhere in between, right?
So they're either going to enlist you by making you hate the truth and thus attack it, or they're going to render you inert by making you...
If they can't kill your love of truth, they kill your love of people, thus alienating you from society and keeping you off the grid as far as changing anyone goes.
And, of course, fundamentally, creating an irrationality within you, right?
This is the basic syllogism that we philosophers have a great deal of trouble with, which is...
You can't hate the world for its hatred of truth.
You can't hate people for their hatred of truth because you are a person and you love the truth, right, if you're listening to this, right?
So you can't support the syllogism that people hate the truth if you are a person and you love the truth.
You just have to work hard to stay positive to find other rare souls who keep this flame alight, despite the endless drizzle of humanity's darkness.
So, if they can get you to hate truth, if they can get you to hate the world, or hate people, then great, they're all done with you.
Right now, the one thing that I've done is...
Try it as hard as I can, and not in a fake way, but in a very real way.
Try it as hard as I can to love truth, love the world, love the potential, while at the same time not being a dopey kind of Jesus love, right?
I love your enemies, everybody's great, you know, just be patient, they'll all come around.
No. There is a damn side of evil in the world.
The world is... Run by evil, and we survive as best we can.
We little mice at the feet of the brutal historical dinosaurs, right?
So there is evil, but we love truth, and we love those who love the truth.
And that is the positivity and energy that I have really tried to openly bring to what it is that we're doing in this conversation.
So, if they can make you unhappy, then they're happy, so to speak.
Or at least it's about as happy as they're going to get.
And that really is why you're depressed.
Again, I'm not talking about all forms of depression, but this is a pretty important aspect of depression.
You've got to look at your soul as bigger than your circumstances, because there is a war.
There's a war between good and evil.
It's not just in comic books and other kinds of movies and all that.
There is a war between good and evil, and If you are somebody who's saddened by the world or who's angered by the world and wants to change the world, then you're a threat to the people in it who base their identities on cultural bigotries.
And don't look at everything that you have as simply being generated by your own personal immediate history.
There is a larger battle that's going on, of which you are a part.
I mean, as I've always said, if you want to change the world, be as happy as you can yourself, and you will then become a source of wisdom to those who wish to achieve happiness.
That's how you change the world.
You can't change the world any other way, I promise you.
I promise you. You cannot change the world with politics.
You cannot change the world with gods and ghosts and gremlins and...
You cannot change the world with syllogisms.
You can't change the world with arguments.
You can only change the world by being as happy as possible yourself in a very real and authentic way.
Which will then be a beacon to other people, and 99 out of 100 will attack you for that happiness because it threatens their bigotries, and 1 out of 100 will burst into a flame of joy, seeing such a light that they did not know of, and will then become a light to others, and that's how we spread the truth, right? You spread it through being happy.
So, if you are interested in philosophy and have retained some capacity for a love of the world, which I hope you have, Because we have inherited the flames of truth from those who lit it before us, right?
The baton of those who managed to find their way out through cynicism and hatred and despair and depression to light the flames that we now carry and therefore we want to do what we can to light them for the next generation and the generation after until we do achieve the paradise of reason and evidence and truth in the world, which we will and it will come.
It will absolutely come. It is as inevitable as sunrise and it will not be overly long.
We will not live to see it, but it will not be overly long.
And we do what we can.
We are part of this very thin thread, this very chain of human beings who go back to the dawn of prehistory, who have tried and struggled to keep some reality and reason alight and living in the world.
And depression is society's way of inoculating you from having the capacity to change and help people, particularly the young, to see truth and reason in the world.
Because if you're cynical, if you're bitter, if you're unhappy, then people will say, well, okay, so he's a truth-teller, and that sucks.
Because then, you see, what you become is you become an advertisement against truth.
Because something's got to not be true if reason equals virtue equals happiness, and you're unhappy, then you're either irrational, not virtuous, or some combination of the two.
So if you're not happy, and again, I'm not just talking in terms of our potential to be happy given our relative circumstances, but if they can get you to be bitter and cynical and to turn against the world or to turn against truth, then you are an effective advertisement of how truth is bad.
Right? And then they're happy because, you know, they're culturally successful and in conformity with all the crap that's around us, and therefore they look happier than you, and therefore they must have more reason or more virtue, because reason equals virtue because happiness, right?
So people will then look at you, right?
Better, angry, tense, alone, underachieving, depressed, and not successful in life.
And, uh, that's where you're supposed to be, because that's the negative advertisement for the truth.
That's the, right, if you go this way, right?
This is your brain. On culture, it looks healthier.
This is your brain on truth. It's like, wire's cut.
This is your brain on drugs, like that old commercial.
And so people look at you, and they then look at...
This vacuous, rippled ab beer commercial of cultural bliss or happiness, the empty satisfactions of cultural conformity, and they say, well, shit, that guy looks pretty miserable.
These guys here, they're pretty happy, they're successful, they're popular, they're, you know, whatever, right?
They're tanned, rested, and relaxed, right?
And you're tense and miserable and depressed and unhappy and so on, right?
So you understand that you're a pawn in this war, right?
I'm not saying that every aspect of your unhappiness is part of this cultural war, this war against anti-rationality, but I'm telling you, it's a pretty big and important place to look when it comes to understanding why you're unhappy.
You're unhappy because the world needs you to be unhappy, because cultural bigotries and idiots and fools and exploiters and evil and violent, corrupt men and women need you to be unhappy, otherwise their power vanishes like the mist in a strong-winded morning sun.
They need you to be unhappy.
You are following a cultural script called the truth-tellers are miserable, and that's how we know they are not truth-tellers, because a truth-teller is, by his own definition, supposed to be happy.
Therefore, they will reject you, they will be hostile towards you, they will attempt to corrupt you, they will attempt to bribe you, they will dismiss you, they will scorn you, they will laugh at you, they will attack you, they will mock you, all of the things.
That have happened to you, that have happened to me, that continue to happen to both of us.
That is natural.
That is natural. That is natural.
But don't take it personally.
Don't take it personally.
People who attack you are not attacking you.
They're not attacking you.
People who put you down.
It's got nothing to do with you fundamentally.
They don't even know you. They're just acting out their own reflection of historical crap.
And so when you look at the context of depression, understand, understand that depression is something that is stamped and kicked into you so that nobody will climb out of the cultural bubble.
So I hope that you understand what I'm saying to you.
In Depression Part 3, I can promise you that I will light a fire under you, such as you have maybe not felt before.
That will come tomorrow.
But for today... I just want you to understand that depression is a way of keeping you imprisoned in a little foggy room and rendering you inert and impotent to change the world that slights you and slights reason and slights reality so.
It is designed, and I don't mean consciously, but instinctually, it is designed to set you at war at first with yourself, at second with people, and at third, if all else fails, with reality, right? To call you crazy.
And it is designed to keep you doubting It is designed to keep you little, little, little, little, and to keep you blind to the power that you actually possess.
There is no power that is greater than the power of a truth-teller.
It is atomic.
It is nuclear. And depression is to keep you depleted, right?
It is to keep you inert.
It is to keep you weakened and inward-looking and resentful and doubtful and hostile and exhausted and sleepless and empty.
It is designed to hollow you out in the way that an expert bomb disposer hollows out an atomic weapon.
Do you see? It is designed to keep you far above and away and turned in the opposite direction of the fiery furnace that is your heart.
If you are a truth teller, and if you've gotten this far, I can guarantee you that you are.
Right? It's designed to keep you...
Swollen in empty indignation and cynicism and frustration, and it is designed to get you to give up on the world.
It is designed to give you despair, to infect you with despair and hopelessness and resentment, so that the predations of the evil can continue.
Taxation, violence, war, predation, degradation, abuse, imprisonment, enslavement.
The institutionalized destruction and shredding of children's minds through schools and religion all continue because the truth-tellers fall prey to the inoculation of depression.
And thus are mute in the face of the howling mutterings of a corrupt world.
And do not stand up, but rather sit alone and read books and fall prey sometimes to conspiracy theories and To a loveless,
charmless, largely joyless, resentful, half-quarter, infinitesimally small percentage of a life, the life that you could have, and we'll talk about that in the next episode.
But you understand, society inoculates itself, and by society I mean error, corruption, and evil, inoculates itself against the most powerful illnesses.
And I don't mean to say that you're an illness, but it resists that which can reform it, right?
And so, if you have been singled out for opprobrium, for attack, for hostility, for contempt, for alienation, if you have been singled out, it's because you possess power to change things.
We inoculate children against smallpox, not against a little cold, right?
We buy insurance against cancer, not against stubbing our toes, right?
The degree of your depression is the degree of your power to change the world immeasurably for the better.
The degree of your depression is the degree of your power to join in the fight, to end war, to end violence, to end slavery, to end institutionalized degradation, violence, brutality, hideousness, corruption, torture of every kind.
But the world needs you, desperately wants you.
The bigots and the evil in the world want you to stay small.
To live on a steady diet of asses, piss, and vinegar.
And to be...
To mock yourself with despair, whether gentle or violent.
To roll your eyes at the world.
To retreat into the empty armor of cynicism.
The impotence of despair and cynicism.
Right? Do you understand? Yes.
When you are depressed, you are effectively neutered.
When you hate the world and you are full of despair, you have had your balls handed to you in a jar of formaldehyde.
And you have been singled out because you have the greatest power.
And we'll talk next about how to overcome the gentle grey slide into the ashen nothingness of despair and of resentment and all of the Lilliputian seasiders who tie down all giants and to rise up, to gain strength and power and take your place in the greatest fight ever.
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