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May 28, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:34
1371 The Characteristics of Evil Part 2
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All right, sorry, to continue.
So, to look at the next aspect of corruption and evil and other characteristics, one thing you'll really, really see is a combination of two things, incrementalism and moving the goalposts.
And I'll give you an example from theism, we'll give you an example from history, and I'm sure you'll be able to fill in the rest.
But the example from...
Theism is God exists.
And when you then ask for the proof of God's existence, you are told that God exists in...
Depending on how you're asking the questions, you know, God lives in our hearts, or, you know, for younger kids, God is an old man with a beard on a cloud, or whatever, whatever, right?
But God is in the sky, God is in the heavens, and so on.
And then you ask for more details, and you get these more...
the goalposts move, right?
So when God is presented to little kids, it's Jesus, it's a real person, and then when the kids get older, they're told, well, he's not a real person, he exists...
He exists in the sky, and when you say, okay, well, where?
Okay, well, he exists in our hearts.
It's like, well, where? Okay, well, no, but he exists in another universe, or he exists ontologically, or he exists outside of time, or whatever, right?
So the goalposts simply keep moving, and you'll really see that.
You've got to keep your eye on that, and I lose that myself, right?
So, again, we're all in the same trenches, right?
You've really got to keep your eye out for when the goalposts move.
And the goalposts move in a number of different ways.
One is that when you disprove, so someone says, God exists in the sky, and you say, okay, well, where's the scientific evidence that God exists in the sky?
He says, well, the sky is a metaphor.
He exists in our heads. It's like, okay, but if God exists in our heads, he's a thought, not a god.
No, no, no. He is a god, but he exists in our head.
And why? Because of the ontological proof that if we can conceive of a god, it must be there.
And they say, well, everything has a cause.
And And God caused the universe, but God is courseless.
So you just keep getting, in this whirly gig of crazy-ass fog, the goalposts keep moving.
It's like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
You can never get to the place where when you disprove that argument, the person says, you're right, there is no God.
Or my definition of God is synonymous with non-existence.
So I'm saying existence equals non-existence.
That is a logical problem.
I'm going to no longer support God.
My belief in God, but I'm going to hold it back until I can come.
There's never any place where the person says, this is my argument for the existence of God, and if you disprove this argument, God does not exist.
You can look for this.
Look for the standards.
What is the null hypothesis?
Are the standards of proof and disproof?
And, of course, you see the same thing in statism all the time.
We need the state because there are bad people.
Well, bad people congregated the state.
Okay, well, we need the state because of helping the poor.
Well, the state doesn't help the poor, and given a democracy, the majority of people want to help the poor anyway.
Well, we need the state because of old people.
Same argument. Well, we need the state because of health care.
Same argument. Well, we need the state, right?
Because violence is bad.
Well, the state is predicated on the initiation of violence which you describe as bad, therefore the state is bad, right?
And again and again, there's never a place, it seems, where you actually can knock the argument down and the person says, I withdraw my proposition that statism is good or God exists or whatever, This can also be my bad family is good.
And it's always a moving goalpost.
And the way that it generally happens is you will disprove an argument, and the person will simply substitute a new argument without admitting that the previous argument has been falsified.
So if someone says, this is why I gave up arguing with agnostics, because they're just this kind of foggy nonsense, and determinists as well.
So somebody will say, well, God exists outside of the universe.
And say, well, outside of the universe, A is synonymous with non-existence.
B, there's no proof that there's anything outside the universe, whatever that even means.
And C, even if such a thing were true, you could not describe it as God, but simply as the opposite of that which exists.
You couldn't say it has any characteristics like sentience or omniscience or all, you know, whatever, right?
It's gobbledygook, right?
The only thing you can say about anything outside the universe is absolutely nothing, because nothing to say.
You can't possibly conceive of or describe it in any way.
Therefore, you can't say God exists outside the universe.
But you see, they just change.
And you can listen to my debate with Bill Rush about this if you like.
They just keep changing the definitions, right?
Or they'll concede a point...
Because you forced it in the moment, and then when you move two points later, they'll resurrect that point, right?
So it's just a game of whack-a-mole.
It's completely pointless. They're not interested in the truth.
They're interested in defending a prejudice.
Or, more fundamentally, and this is the tortured relationship that theists and statists and so on have with the truth.
It's completely a tortured relationship.
They simply...
Like, if theists would live on faith...
I'd have a lot more respect for them.
Like if they said, fuck yeah, it's a completely crazy-ass belief.
Absolutely. God is completely defined as that which does not exist.
But He exists.
There's no reason. There's no cause.
There's no argument. It's faith.
Because faith is just belief in what I want to believe in.
They can't sustain that.
They can't do it.
Because that's too obviously crazy.
2 plus 2 equals God is obviously a crazy equation.
So they have to define God as 4, even though God is the opposite of 4 in reality, and that 4 is tangible and empirical and so on, right?
Testable. So if theists were to say, I believe in a God, though God clearly does not exist, They can't sustain that because that's too obviously crazy, so they've got to fog it all up, right?
Of people to say, we need a government because I like the idea of a government.
We need a government because my daddy works for the government.
We need a government because I'm afraid to talk about there not being a government with my friends.
We need a government because I like the initiation of use of force.
We need a government because my mom did drugs and I hate drug users and the government punishes them.
We need a government because, because, because, right?
The government is immoral and it should be there.
It should exist, right? Well, that can't happen, right?
Because people can't consciously support the immoral so they have to keep redefining it, right?
So, theists say it's about faith which is belief without any proof or in the absence of proof and the direct opposition of proof but they can't stay there, right?
They keep spilling over into feeling this absolute need to prove the existence of God.
And that's where I have no respect.
I mean, if it's just crazy bigotry Because it's crazy bigotry, you know, at least you're consistent with crazy bigotry, right?
Absolutely, God does not exist, but I believe in God.
You know, go for it. If you can hold that in your head and stay sane, best of luck to you.
But they just can't leave it alone, right?
And that is a kind of corruption that, in my mind, leads to evil.
And the evil is...
This is a future podcast, I'll just touch on it briefly here, but the evil, of course, is telling...
Metaphysical and epistemological lies to children.
Anyway, we'll get to that.
This isn't around with theism and to some degree statism.
Let's continue.
The historical example, of course, is A good example is Hitler and appeasement in the 1930s, right?
Hitler says, I just need this, right?
Just, you know, give me the Sudetenland and then everything is fine.
Give me the Rhineland and then everything is fine.
I just want the western half of Czechoslovakia and everything is fine.
I'm just going to take the eastern half of Czechoslovakia and everything is fine.
Incrementalism is a fundamental characteristic of evil, right?
He didn't get elected in the early 1930s and then immediately start gassing Jews and homosexuals and gypsies and so on.
It's incremental. It's always, always, always incremental.
Which is why virtue cannot be incremental, right?
Virtue cannot be incremental because evil is incremental.
So... That is another aspect.
The goalposts keep moving and it's incremental.
Whatever is being done in the name of evil.
No parent that I know of who's not just a complete schizophrenic, no parent that I know of or have heard of or read about comes home and just beats up his kid.
Walks in the door, kid comes down, daddy, daddy, punch.
That doesn't happen. The incrementalism that occurs is They need to blame the other person for the evil they want to inflict.
We'll get to projection in just a sec.
That's another characteristic of evil.
But they will look around, right?
Look around. For things to get mad about.
And they will start asking questions.
Did you do your homework? Did you take out the garbage?
Did you clean your room? Did you do this?
Did you do that? And they'll stalk around the house looking for things to complain about.
Or to get mad about. Because they need to believe that justice and discipline and integrity and virtue and honor and common sense and plain dealings and goodness and all that kind of nonsense is on their side when they decide to start assaulting their child.
So they have to find some excuse.
Right, for... And I totally remember this from when I was a kid.
It was just tragic. I mean, it was...
Oh, it was just terrible.
It was just continual.
My mum would be in a bad mood and she'd start stalking around looking for things that were a problem or asking me questions.
And you know they're just questions designed to mess you up, right?
So that is another aspect, is this incrementalism.
Now, as far as the last characteristics that we'll talk about, and it's a little detailed, so I hope you'll forgive me for going into even more gruesome detail and repetition and misspeaking than normal.
But... Really, the most fundamental characteristic, and that which allows evil to survive and flourish in the way that it does, is that evil is fundamentally predicated on the psychological mechanism of projection.
Now, the psychological mechanism of projection is all kinds of complicated, and we've talked about these defenses in prior podcasts way back, I think in the 600s or 700s.
So I won't go into any of that.
You can do a search.
Remember, freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
Sorry, forward slash search.
See? Misspeaking. If you wanted to have a look at those things.
But projection is fundamentally around turning the initiation of force into...
or the initiation of an action into...
A response to an action, right?
So it's about turning the initiation of an action into a response to an action.
So if a guy comes home and he's angry and annoyed and he wants to hit his children to feel better, he can't excuse that to himself.
He can't get away with that in and of himself, right?
So what he needs to do, because that would be so clearly the initiation of aggression that it would be morally unsustainable to him, right?
Because... Evil thrives upon the illusion of virtue.
Even when evil is cynical about the virtues that it proclaims, what happens is they say, well, we need to evade Iraq for a variety of geopolitical strategic reasons, but we can't explain that to the common people, so we'll just tell them that they're going to get nuked.
They'll believe that, and they'll praise us, and we're doing the right thing no matter what, in the same way that When I was a kid, my dentist told me that sugar fairies danced on my teeth and cracked them.
I had to brush them away with my...
Whatever, right? I mean, it's a lie.
It's the noble lie, right? For the right reasons.
And Plato's noble lie.
So anyway. So they'll always do that.
So a guy who wants to come home and beat up his kids, he's not going to be able to believe that.
Or his wife, or whatever.
He's not going to be able to... If he just comes home and clocks them...
He's obviously evil to himself.
He can't... There's no excuse, right?
He can't sustain that.
So, what he needs to do is to then perceive his aggression not as an initiation but as a response.
And in order to do that, he needs the practice or faculty or habit of projection.
And so...
He'll come home and he'll be silly and short-tempered and bad and his children and his wife will become shy and quiet and a little fearful and then he will get upset because no one's talking to him.
I work hard all day. I come home.
I expect a little contact, a little conversation, a little interaction.
I'm not just a wallet, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
He will create the situation and then respond as if the situation was inflicted upon him.
That's what I mean when I say take the initiation of aggression and turn it into a response.
So clearly, to take Iraq again, Iraq was the initiation of aggression, the invasion of Iraq.
But it was portrayed, and we don't know to what degree we believe, but it certainly was portrayed as...
A response to aggression, right?
To the massive military might of Saddam Hussein against the poor, beleaguered, disarmed United States, right?
And that's important to understand.
Because in order to victimize, you have to first feel like a victim.
You have to first put yourself in the role of victim.
There's a guy from Tom Surley.
We'll make his children and his wife frightened.
They will not want to interact with him and then he will complain that people don't want to interact with him and they're taking him for granted.
So, right, he victimizes by frightening people and then he can play the role of the victim which allows him to be aggressive as a response to an injustice that he himself has created, right?
I know, sorry. Play it back slowly, blah, blah, blah.
Even I, through these sentences, are like, yeah, I think that makes sense.
Yeah, okay, that's good. Pulled it off.
It happened. I threw the jig-for-puzzle in the air, into the windstorm, and it came down, fully assembled.
It's magic.
Magic. So, we also can look at, again, to go back to our mustachioed, Satan-head, Hitler...
We can understand that Hitler perceived that Germany was encircled and had been historically aggressed against and that Germany was a victim and therefore needed to attack other countries that were about to attack it and his living room and so on.
So that I think is important.
Hitler had to feel like a victim in order to victimize others.
And he had to feel that the Jews were running some international conspiracy against the planet so that he could feel like a victim and aggress against the Jews, right?
Whereas, of course, it was the initiation of aggression against the Jews that was actually occurring on the part of Nazism.
So, this is why, of course...
These imaginary enemies need to be invented so that what is actually the initiation of force can be portrayed as a response to the injustice on the part of another.
And the same thing will occur, of course, when the...
A man comes home, he's in a bad mood, and he wants to pick on his kids.
He might look at something that would not normally trouble him, like a bunch of toys on the floor, and suddenly he escalates within his own mind.
Suddenly he seizes upon something that is irritating in the moment.
He turns it into a principle, which is now just for him to act against.
So he sees a bunch of toys on the floor, and suddenly it's not like, well, there are some toys on the floor, which is really the only fact of the situation.
Suddenly becomes this whole epic Bohemian Rhapsody EP narrative about how there are always toys on the floor.
You kids never clean up for yourself.
You take me for granted.
Your mother is tired. I've been working all day.
You treat this place like a hotel.
You know, this escalation, right?
So suddenly the children are the aggressors.
Why? Because there are some toys on the floor and you make up this whole mythology about how the children are selfish and taking advantage of you and never lift a finger to help.
And you tell yourself all of these escalating lies in order to aggress against your children and to perceive that you are responding to a genuine injustice, right?
And that's, of course, part of the no-win situation.
It's part of the no-win. Because it's always something that people will find, right?
And I remember I went out with a woman in my 20s and early 30s.
And we lived together.
And she was constantly upset and angry about...
Me being messy, right?
And I'm not particularly messy.
I'm certainly not anal, but I'm not particularly messy.
I'll definitely... And, you know, ask Christina if you see her up here at the barbecue.
I'm not particularly messy, but I'm certainly not as neat as some, and I'm certainly far neater than many.
And I'll definitely sort of...
I like to sort of think of myself, like, I'll go and do stuff, but I have a broom tied behind me, right?
So I'll make some crumbs, but I'll wipe them up, and I'll try and clear up after myself.
And I try not to let those things accumulate.
But for this woman, my messiness was a constant problem because she was so devoted to having a neat and tidy blah blah blah, right?
And then a couple of months after we broke up, I had to go to...
She was still and I think is still living in the place where we live together.
I had to go and pick up some stuff of mine that she had.
And I went in...
And the general living area was not too, too bad.
She had a roommate. But oh my god.
Oh my god. The door to her bedroom, I guess formerly our bedroom, but her bedroom was open.
And sweet mother of all that's holy, it was an unbelievable pigsty.
Like clothes all over the floor and coffee cups by the bed and just junk, right?
Just a complete and total mess, right?
And my jaw just dropped, right?
And I really was just...
I started my Lamaze curled into a ball in my usual way.
And I turned to her and I was about to say, I can't believe it.
I can't believe that you nagged me for 18 months or whatever it was about me being messy and the door to your room is open and it's a complete pigsty, right?
I was going to open my mouth and say that.
But I didn't. And the reason I didn't, of course, was that I knew that she would say, I was neat, but now that you've left me and you've messed up my life, I'm so depressed that I can't, whatever, right?
It's your fault, right? It was your fault when the place was messy.
It was your responsibility to keep it tidy.
Tidiness is a huge value for me.
But when I don't live up to my own values, like when you don't live up to my values, it's your fault.
And when I don't live up to my values, it's your fault, right?
But what it did was, you know, of course, I took that to To therapy, and I basically had a good old chat with my therapist about that, and it was very helpful, right?
And she sort of helped me to understand that this woman was, in a very real way, was trying to control my, quote, messy tendencies because of her own messy tendencies, and, you know, it got all kinds of complicated things. And, of course, when things get that complicated, the great thing to do is hit the eject button catapult.
Get out! So...
Oh, let me just see what the GPS is telling me.
Keep left! I can do that.
It's like... Noam Chomsky's at the wheel, don't you think?
So, that, I think, is something that's important to recognize, too, that...
When you're in a situation where you're being reframed as an aggressor or an initiator, then you know that you're in the presence of corruption and possibly evil.
And the line between corruption and evil we'll talk about another time.
It's complicated, right?
Corruption is a necessary but not always sufficient prerequisite for evil, right?
Like... Sex is a necessary but not sufficient prerequisite for a baby.
That aspect of things is important to keep your eye out.
When you get into a debate with someone and the goalposts keep changing, you can't ever get anything resolved, and then the person complains that you are being aggressive and evasive, well, then you know you're in the presence of this, right? Of somebody who is using philosophy to justify a bigotry.
And they're trying to plant this in you, right?
Because... People who act with the knowledge of virtue in order to subvert and bypass virtue, to use the cloak of virtue for their own immoral actions, the fundamental thing to understand about evil people is, and I don't know, I've never really been very uncomfortable in my own skin, even in the past, and so it's hard for me to really grasp this, but I think it's really important to try and get into this mindset.
I've been struggling to do this for the last couple of months, and I'm not getting very far, but I'll tell you at least the parameters of what I'm trying to do.
And that is to...
When I've confronted evil people in my life, you do see this crack in the defenses if you push hard enough, or gently enough, usually is the case, maybe, where the crack opens and you see the slaughterhouse of their internals, right? You see the dead bodies strewn around the basement of their self.
And you see the rotting sampalker that is their honest experience of themselves.
And so I think it's really important to try and get that and sort of understand it.
And really sort of work on that understanding of just how horrible it is to be...
An evil person, right?
To be a nasty, corrupt, vicious, horrible little person, it's really ugly.
It's really stressful.
It's really horrible. Maintaining any kind of fiction is an extraordinary exhaustion on the soul.
And that is something really to keep your eyes peeled about, right?
When you're around these...
Trying to get the whiff of that kind of stink is really, really important to understand and to get a handle on.
Because if you can't understand just how utterly unpleasant, ugly, vile, stinky, nasty...
It's like a hair shirt on the sole, right?
It's just you're constantly itchy in your bone marrow and you're constantly discontented and frustrated and angry and upset and self-righteous and everything is manipulation and attack and X, Y, and Z, right?
I mean, if you can't get that, and it's really hard for me to get the hang of that.
I mean, it's not like I've been a perfect person or anything like that, but I've never done the kind of wrong which is unrecoverable, if that makes any sense.
Sorry, enforcer, say?
And so because Evil people live in this fog of self-justification and fundamental irrationality or anti-rationality.
It's really stressful.
It's really stressful because reality keeps opposing what you believe, right?
And I don't just mean metaphysical reality, but moral reality as well, right?
So... To talk about, I don't know, I'm just making things up, right?
I mean, I've read a few things that people say about me that's kind of negative.
Not much, but... I mean, not that there's not a lot out there, but I just...
Who's got time, right? But if...
You know, let's say, right?
So... If I... Don't admit that I'm wrong, then I'm...
Like, if someone thinks that I'm wrong, but I don't admit it, or whatever, then I'm...
You know, I can't admit that I'm wrong.
I never... I can't admit that I'm wrong.
If I do admit that I'm wrong, then it's just a strategy to maintain my credibility because I've been cornered.
Right? Or, you know, there was a woman who was on last Sunday's show.
Yeah, last Sunday's show. And I... I said that my goal was to help her connect with her family.
Right now, in other situations, that hasn't been my goal.
People will say, oh, well, that's just because, you know, the media, whatever, he got caught, and so now he's changed his tune, and blah, blah, blah, right?
As opposed to the more simple explanation, which is that she was not in physical danger of violence, right?
It's a little different, right?
There was no history of physical violence in the household other than one incident which her father apologized for, much to his credit, so it's a different kind of situation, right?
So, that I think is important, right?
So, if I take media interviews, it's because I'm a media whore.
And if I then stop taking media interviews, it's because I've been caught by the media and I don't want to...
I don't want to be caught by the media anymore, so I'm running away from...
So if I run towards the media, I'm a media whore, and if I stop interacting with the media, then it's because the media has gotten the better of me, and I'm running away like a coward.
You understand, right? No matter what happens, the illusions and the fiction has to be maintained.
So this constant invention of...
For want of a better word, explanations, is a real strain.
It's a real strain on people.
If you don't have that in your life, it's really hard to imagine what a debilitating and exhausting situation that is a constant fight or flight mechanism that is constantly being activated is.
It is really, really stressful and exhausting and makes people very uncomfortable because they're always on the lookout for new things that they need to, quote, explain, right?
I mean, this thing that occurs, right?
Worship God and God will shower you with blessings, right?
And then your dog gets hit by a car, you get cancer, right?
It's like, oh, well, God works in mysterious ways and it's a test, right?
Or, you know, it's a test of faith, or we don't know what God has planned for us, or you did something wrong, right?
So, America is a virtuous nation because God is Christian and loves God, and so on.
But then America, some natural disaster which is supposedly under God's control, hits America, right?
Katrina or something. And then, well, there was a lesbian in New Orleans, and that's why.
You are making predictions.
Those predictions fail to come true because they're irrational.
And therefore, you have to make up new explanations.
And then you have to hide from yourself the fact that these new, quote, explanations are utterly at odds with your previous predictions and explanations.
And that is a real strain.
Keeping all of that stuff floating around in your head, keeping it away from each other, and the constant stress...
Of having new information come in that you're going to need to explain is really, really stressful.
It is exhausting, right?
I mean, you're in a constant state of morbid excitement is what they're used to.
And that's not necrophilia in the way that you might think.
But morbid excitement is a great way of understanding that.
You're in a state of morbid stimulation.
And that is, I mean, you see Hitler giving his speeches.
I mean, to take another extreme case, you see Hitler giving his speeches.
And, I mean, he's like wild, right?
There's a constant state that really believes that he's going to be attacked, right?
And, of course, for him, I mean, and I think this is a pretty accurate theory, right?
Infant swaddling. With the attendant, complete entrapment of the baby and lice.
It's one of the things that gave him such a fundamental visceral fear of being encircled and claustrophobia and that Jews were lice and so on.
Because as a baby, he would have been swaddled so tightly he couldn't move and lice would crawl throughout his face and hair in his swaddles and so on.
So that's all pretty grim stuff.
But that state of morbid excitement is really important.
And that, you see this occurring all the time, right?
So, people who are pro-government, right, they constantly have problems, right?
Because they think, oh, the government will solve the problem of poverty.
They get all excited and enthusiastic about it.
And then, of course, the government utterly fails.
To solve the problem of poverty.
And they have to avoid that and come up with some new explanation as to why the government didn't dwell, they didn't have enough resources, capitalists are too greedy, people are too selfish, we need reforms, and so on.
So it's important to understand that this is what continually happens with people who have irrational beliefs.
Or, if they have these irrational paranoias, And then they feel that if there is an improvement in the situation, that it is their rational paranoias that have changed things, right?
This fantasy that, I guess it's a kind of quantum physics fantasy, that the observation changes the outcome, right?
So, you know, let's say that some, I don't know, you're a racist, right?
And some black family moves into the neighborhood and you set up close-circuit cameras on your house watching their property because you think they're going to do all these bad things.
And then they don't do any bad things because they're just another family.
And you say, aha, it's because of my, right?
It's because of my cameras pointed at their house.
That's why they know I'm watching them and that's why they haven't done it.
It's fantasy of cause and effect.
That you constantly must resist the examination of, right?
And that's really tough.
That's really tough to work with.
And this fevered, And this fevered, Dostoevskian world of the constant invention of contradictory theories in order to sustain an irrational thesis is really, really hideous, right?
So, for instance, people will say, again, not to pick on the theists, right, but it's just the easy examples, right?
People will say, well, I believe in God because there are rational reasons to believe in God.
However, that, of course, is not the reality of how their belief in God came about, right?
This is important.
So people say, I believe in God because there's rational reasons or evidence or whatever, right?
And at least atheists and scientists and rationalists have gotten theists to the point where they're hiding God out in a place where Timex watches cannot reach and sensual, rational reality cannot penetrate.
At least we've got them to hide God in the nuttiness of the opposite of reality, right?
And not, you know, in the old days it was...
You know, on a mountaintop!
And Moses goes up, right?
At least we've pushed God out to this crazy opposite world, right?
And you understand, right?
Psychologically, when people say God exists outside the universe, what they mean is that outside the universe is the opposite of rationality, consistency, and so on.
And the idea, of course, does exist in their mind.
It's in the unconscious, right?
And so what they're basically saying is, my unconscious is the opposite of rationality, and that's where God goes, right?
I myself am the opposite of...
It's a projection of the unconscious onto that which is outside reality, right?
I think you can understand that, right?
That which is the opposite of reality.
So, that I think is really important to understand what a stressful and horrible existence it is to have to sustain a thesis.
And if you have, you know, let's pick on parents, right?
Or bad parents. If you've got a bad parent and you have this thesis that she loves you, right?
But he or she keep doing crappy things, right?
To you. Well, it's just his way.
He's not good at expressing his love.
It's just his way. He's doing the best that he can.
You have this thesis called love, and then you have this evidence of crappy behavior over and over again, nasty or abusive or whatever, or even just boring, cold, and alienated behavior.
So you have this thesis called love, but you have this reality, which is not love, right?
And that is really, really stressful to maintain.
Oh, but she loves me, loves me, right?
And then it's like, well, what about this behavior?
What about this behavior? What about this behavior, right?
Empiricism is constantly opposing.
The reality is constantly opposing your thesis, right?
And gods and politicians and states and parents and all of this sort of stuff.
It's really, really stressful to constantly feel...
Beaten down by reality, and it creates a situation of permanent resentment, rage, helplessness fundamentally deep down, terror, right, deep down that you're wasting your life in the massive ingestion of an eternal error, and aggression, right?
Because you can't get mad at reality, right?
So you can, I mean, that's too obviously crazy, right?
Shaking your, so you say, God lives in this tree, and you talk to the tree, and the tree doesn't reply to you, and therefore, like it's not, don't start forming words, and therefore you get really angry at the tree, and you cut it down, right?
That would be too obviously crazy.
So reality keeps knocking you down, but you can't get mad at reality, because it's too obviously nutty.
So what you have to do, Is you have to find people who can be the reality stand-in for you.
And this is what philosophers are for people.
All too many people, right? We are just the scapegoats, right?
Reality keeps destroying my thesis, right?
That God exists and so on. But I can't get mad at reality because that's too obviously crazy.
so I'm going to get mad at those who respect reality or who are aligned with reality, who are tempted to have their thoughts mirror reality because they provoke even more anxiety.
Because reality is not insistent.
Reality doesn't argue that there is no God.
There's just no God.
Reality doesn't argue with you about statism.
It just constantly causes statism to fail because violence achieves the opposite of what you want.
But people will tell you there's...
Now, reality doesn't tell you there's no God.
There just is no God. But people will tell you that there is no God.
Reality won't argue with you.
People will. And so, if you get mad at people, they then become a stand-in for the reality that is constantly undermining and corrupting your...
Your false beliefs, right?
So it's a lot easier to get mad at an individual than it is to get mad at reality that stubbornly refuses to produce virtue and evil people or, you know, God from an empty sky or...
Effective solutions to complex issues through the application of status violence, right?
Reality stubbornly refuses to give you support or gives you constant counter-evidence for your fantastical and insane beliefs, but you can't get mad at reality, so you'll just get mad at those who identify that.
And that's the constant state of stress and struggle.
And that's why these people end up as these terrible social metaphysicians, right?
So I hope that makes some sense.
I hope that you will try and remind yourself and me from time to time about how these characteristics and how really to help avoid people like this in your life.
Because there's no... You can't save them, right?
They are the opposite of salvation.
Because you can't save those who are attempting to damn others.
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