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June 17, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:36
1395 Failure, Opposition, Desire

Do we desire the failure of those we oppose?

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Hey everybody, it's Steph. Sunday, the 14th-ish of June 2009.
I hope you're doing most excellently.
So I was mulling over this morning something which I thought might be of interest to you.
And I hope that you will find it interesting, but this is what I was thinking.
In any life, but let's talk about me, my life.
I don't care what you say anymore, this is my life.
In any life where you take, or in my life, where I've taken a radical departure from social norms, there exists, of course, a kind of war.
And I think for me, largely, it's been an unconscious war.
And I don't want it to be an unconscious war, because I think that really has costs.
And I'm talking about the grisly little ailments that I've had over the past, really since I went full-time, On FDR, nothing major but just grisly little annoying ailments.
You know, tight muscles or a...
I got a planter's wart, which I've never had before.
Just little ailments have been kind of continual since I went full-time.
And I've been sort of trying to mull it over over the last month or two what has been going on.
And of course, it could just be coincidence.
I've had... Really fantastic health, so these minor little things are not the end of the world.
They could have just clustered together, but again, just in case they haven't, or in case there is a psychosomatic component, I was mulling this over, and I thought it would be interesting enough to share, and hopefully it will be of help to you.
It's certainly been very helpful to me, and so if I can share the goodness, I will...
So, when I took a very oppositional, oppositional is not quite the right word, a stance that innately opposed the ruling ethic of the day.
And I think about this in particular in my teenage years and shortly thereafter.
You know, when I got into objectivism and I ditched relativism and subjectivism and deism and agnosticism and nihilism and all of those modern plagues.
When I did all of that, I set myself up in...
And not...
I should say...
It's not factual, but it certainly is psychological.
That I set myself up to be in a win-lose situation with just about everyone else around me.
I think that's really, really important.
I really sense this is critical to my long-term physical and mental health, so I'll go over my thinking on it and You can let me know what you think.
So if you say this is the path to happiness, of course for us, reason and virtue.
Virtue is rational principles in action.
If you say that you are going to take that approach, then automatically what's happening is you are Making the claim that those who do the opposite will be unhappy.
If I say X will make us happy and you do the opposite of X, then clearly I do not expect for you to be happy.
In fact, I would expect you to be unhappy, right?
So if I'm a coach and I say not smoking a pack a day is pretty essential for healthy, quality lungs, and you smoke a pack a day, I'm going to be kind of proven wrong if your lungs are clear and healthy and you win the race, right? Like if the chain smokers win the race, then the theory that not smoking is good for lungs and running is proven false, right?
And if the non-smokers don't win the race or hack up phlegm every 10 feet, then that is proven false, right?
So when you have a theory about a preferable and particularly a universally preferable course of action, you set yourself up with the immediate prediction That those who do the opposite will achieve the opposite results.
If I say that way is north, then those who go the opposite should be heading south, right?
If those who go the opposite turn out to be heading north, then I was completely wrong up front, right?
So when you set yourself up an ideal, particularly an ethical ideal, which is substantially associated with or really defined by virtue and happiness, then The opposite is...
and those who do the opposite or pursue the opposite should, by your theory, end up not happy, not productive, not positive, and it may take a long time, of course, right?
Similarly, if you say gentleness, compassion, firmness, strength, courage, and all that, that these are loving behaviors which are both loving and illicit love in others, then Those who do the opposite of these actions should not have love in their lives, right? Love is the involuntary response to virtue.
If we ourselves are virtuous, then people who are good, who conform with the virtue that you propose, should have positive regard towards those who are virtuous and those Who do not live that way?
They should have a negative response to those who are defined as virtuous, right?
So if I say, for instance, that voluntarism in the family is the essence of voluntarios, is the prerequisite for voluntarism within society, then those Who accept voluntarism within the family should be positively disposed to that philosophy, and those who reject it should be negatively.
So I think we sort of understand how all of that works.
And if I say voluntarism within the family is a moral courage that is required for mature adult love, in other words, you can't be a tool for corrupt or nasty people if such is your family and expect to be loved as an adult, Then those who accept the doctrine that voluntarism within the family is the prerequisite for voluntarism and virtue in life,
those people who reject that should, by that theory, not have great and deep love in their life.
So... I'm not going to be repetitive.
I'm sure you understand that, right?
So this is very interesting to me.
I've really been thinking about this.
Solidly, over the last week or two, that everyone who is, in a sense, damned by, I'll use the loose term and say my philosophy,
though of course I genuinely believe it is philosophy in an objective sense, but those who are damned by my philosophy Are going to be heavily invested in my failure.
And again, this is not about me.
My philosophy doesn't damn anyone, obviously.
It doesn't have magical gypsy voodoo powers.
But there is a fundamental, powerful, and significant conflict that is going on.
So, when I took the rote of...
Rational objectivity, science, self-knowledge, therapy, dedication to empiricism, and moral absolutism, when I took that path, that was in opposition to almost everyone that I knew at the time.
My friends, my family, extended family, teachers, acquaintances, co-workers.
I mean, we all know how that goes, right?
And since I say that these are the paths to happiness, then the inner representations of those people in my mind...
Are going to be considerably activated in a negative and hostile way if I continue to achieve success.
So I know for sure that there are people from my past who are quite convinced that I'm going to go crazy.
That I'm going to become...
You know, weird and creepy and megalomaniacal and dictatorial and, you know, all this kind of stuff.
And... The fact that that's not happening...
Quite the opposite, right?
The fact that it's not happening is discomforting for people.
Right? And I'm not clear...
I mean, I don't sit there and...
I shouldn't say that. I rarely sit and think about the necessity of failure in other people for my thesis to be true.
It would be irresponsible to never think of it.
Because you have to look at the null hypothesis, right?
Reason plus virtue equals happiness.
And if somebody is finding a way to be genuinely happy without being either rational or virtuous, you have to look at that, right?
So you have to look at the people who are being irrational and non-virtuous and seeing, well, are they happy?
It would be irresponsible to put forward a thesis like that and not look at the opposite, right?
And, of course, as I've said before, I am heavily invested in my thesis, obviously, which, you know, is not to say that I'm not...
I would be happy to overturn it should counter-evidence present itself.
But, without a doubt, it would be dishonest for me to say I'm neutral about my life's work.
Of course, it would be false.
It would be a lie. That doesn't mean I won't correct myself.
But, I do need to look at...
The opposing principles and see whether they lead to the happiness for which I say my principles lead to.
All roads do not lead to Rome.
All principles cannot lead to happiness.
Principles and the opposite of those principles cannot lead to the same place.
North and South, barring a circumnavigable globe, cannot lead to the same place.
So, I have to sort of look at those who hold opposite beliefs from my own history.
And, of course, I prefer it.
I mean, obviously, I would prefer it if they had not held these opposite beliefs or had been open to reason and evidence.
But, to be perfectly honest, given that they do hold these opposing beliefs, it is not my preference But it is an inevitable expectation that they will not achieve happiness.
Right? That they will not achieve virtue, joy, love, and so on in their lives.
I mean, I'm trying to be really honest here, but without putting it in a way that is too startling.
But if I'm invested in the success of my principles...
I am necessarily invested in the failure of opposing principles.
Which doesn't mean I sit there, ooh, I want people to fail.
I would much rather that...
If you're like a lung doctor, to go back to the smoking analogy...
If you're like a lung doctor, and you would rather...
If you really genuinely believe and have ample evidence that smoking is dangerous and bad for you...
You would rather people not smoke.
But if they do smoke, it is your expectation that...
They will be sicker than if they do not smoke, because that is the thesis that you have put forward, right?
It doesn't mean you're going to manipulate the data.
It doesn't mean that you want people to be sick, but it is your expectation that they will be, right?
And in the same way, it's not like I want people to be unhappy or loveless or full of hatred and Hostility and confusion and failure.
It's not that I want that.
But I do have to track the null hypothesis and see whether or not this has worked.
And I haven't really done much of that.
I sort of noted it in passing, but I have not really done that very much at all.
And I think that's not a good idea.
I mean, I'm so focused on...
Developing this philosophy and communicating with people who are also interested in philosophy and building the conversation and so on.
I've been so invested in that that I haven't really had much time or thought or energy to pour into these matters.
And since it is such an important thing, To track those with opposite beliefs as part of the confirmation of your beliefs, I should have.
And it definitely was a flaw and a failing of mine.
I don't like to look at that stuff very much, but I think it's to my detriment that I don't, and I think it's also had some negative consequences.
And the reason is this.
I genuinely believe that those who have anti-rational values are more invested in the failure of those with rational values than those with rational values are in the failure of those with anti-rational values.
Let me just repeat that again because I think this is really important to understand.
It certainly was for me and hopefully it will be for you.
Those with rational values are not nearly as invested in the failure of those with anti-rational values as those with anti-rational values are in the failure of those with rational values.
The reason being, clearly, that if you have rational values and you have reason and you have virtue, you get the happiness.
And if you get the happiness, then you don't You don't need for other people to be unhappy.
The theory needs other people to be unhappy, right?
The theory needs, right?
My theories require that those who are anti-rational do not achieve consistent virtue and happiness and love and joy and all those kinds of good things.
That is a demand of the theory.
That's inevitable.
Not much can be done about that, but I haven't really done much to try again.
So if you are rational and virtuous and therefore happy, all other things being equal, then you have the happiness.
You have the love in your life. You have the joy in your life.
You have the satisfaction of meaningful and virtuous labors in whatever field you work in.
And so you have a very largely satisfying and productive and joyful existence.
So thinking about whether those with opposite values are unhappy...
It's not really that compelling.
But, on the other hand, if you have anti-rational values, and from herein I'm just going to talk as if the philosophy that I and many, many others have talked about, I'm just going to talk about it as if it's true.
This is the transition point where I go from theory to practice.
But if you are anti-rational, If you are immature, if you project, if you are abusive, if you are manipulative, if you are vain, if you are greedy, if you are destructive, if you are a user of people, if you are false self invested to the hilt, well then, You will get progressively more unhappy.
Now, you will be happier, in a sense, for a time, than those who achieve rational values.
Because we all start off like drug addicts, right?
And the addiction is to irrationality, the irrationality force fed to us by our culture.
So we all start off drug addicts, and those who are rational quit the drugs, which is a multi-year process.
It's a multi-year process.
And during that multi-year process, those who are quitting the drugs seem less happy than those who are staying on the drugs, right?
For obvious reasons.
Hi, sweetness! So, for a time, there is the sacrifice of happiness to achieve true reason and virtue.
And those who are comfortably nestled in the wet and oily bosom of conformity, and that doesn't mean conformity to yuppie stuff, it can be conformity to punk stuff, right?
But those who are nestled within the oily, stewy bosom of conformity, those people will appear happier.
In the short run, right?
because they are not fighting society, they're not fighting their own history, they're not fighting their own instincts to turn them to a more rational and happier place.
But obviously the people who do quit the drugs, who do put down the drink, who do control their addictions in whatever shape or form, who do drop their addictions, who do control their addictions in whatever shape or form, who do drop their addictions, they're but far happier in the long run.
And, of course, there's this gamble That people take, right?
They say, no, it's not an addiction, it's health.
And quitting this drug of anti-rationality is a destructive and unhealthy addiction.
And so, if I stay on this drug of anti-rationality, I will be happy and productive and successful and loved and loving.
And you will be narcissistic and crazy and vain and megalomaniacal and controlling, right?
That the pursuit of reason and virtue It's going to make you crazy, while the pursuit of anti-rationality, cowardice, and attack will make you happy.
And, of course, if what I and so many others believe is true, then while there is a significant hit in terms of happiness when you attempt to wrestle out of the grip of the ghosts of delusions, Alright, I'm going to have to yell the rest of it.
Sorry, just one sec.
Let me just adjust. Her sun hat here.
Let's take that off. There we go.
Much, much better. I finally found a way to wire the cord so she's not constantly yanking the microphone out of my hand.
It's delicioso. So if you take what I would call, of course, the cowardly route of hanging out in the...
anti-rational planet, then you get this growing dread as time goes along and your life becomes less and less happy and the person who's quit the drug of anti-rationality and focused on the health regimen of rationality, evidence, empiricism, virtue and the resulting happiness, you get progressively more anxious.
And you have to, of course, believe that the happiness of the person with the opposing values is a lie.
It's not real. It's not.
It's imagined, right?
It's desperate. You have to start making up all this stuff.
Or if there is increasing evidence of happiness on the part of the virtuous, if you are not virtuous, if there is increasing evidence of happiness on the part of the virtuous, then you have to imagine that Well, okay, they may believe that they're happy, but...
Hello, sweetness. You okay?
I think they're happy cries.
I really do. So you have to believe that they only imagine that they're happy.
And if this continues and continues and their life gets happier and happier, then you have to believe that imminent...
Collapse is just around the corner.
Sorry, that's a little redundant.
Alright, I'll put a pause on.
Hang on. Alright, there we go.
I have given her a thumb and all is well.
Mine, that is. Ow, teeth.
Not yet, but close.
Right, so... You're going to be progressively more and more invested in the failure of those with opposite values if you have anti-rational values.
Because the perspective is so much different for those people than it is for me, which is not to say that it's the opposite, but the growing fear of the person who remains addicted to the drug That he has taken the wrong course and the fear, of course, of humiliation, of having to go to the person who quit and say, you know, you were right to quit this drug.
I'm sorry that I mocked you.
I need your help. That's an abasement or a humiliation, at least a perceived humiliation, that people who stay on the drugs, they just almost never do it.
Especially if you've attacked and mocked people who quit the drug.
It would take a staggering degree of maturity and strength and courage to go to the person you've mocked and say, Man, crap.
I'm so sorry. You were right.
I need to become more rational.
I need to get off this drug.
But, of course, theoretically it could happen, but practically I'd put zero money on it as a possibility.
Of course, it's within the realm of physical possibility, but psychologically I would say it's pretty damn impossible.
So this is sort of what I'm spending a long time getting to, and I really wanted to put this in context.
I appreciate your patience, but this is really what I'm getting to.
There are a lot of people in my head who are desperate for me to fail.
And that remains an unconscious aspect of my life, and that's not good.
That's seriously not good.
To have this war within my head or aspects of my history, people within my head, parts of my ecosystem that are desperate for me to fail and fail bad.
And the more I have seemingly succeeded, the greater and more destructive my failure needs to be in order to satisfy the hostility of those who mocked and opposed what I stood for.
And Why I think it's coming out more strongly now is the greater my success, and, you know, please, I'm not talking about FDR in particular, but, you know, I... A loving marriage, right?
My brother gave me almost nothing for my marriage because he said that he was certain it wasn't going to last, right?
So the fact that my marriage has lasted going into its seventh year and we're happier now even than we've ever been and we're never going to part and it's more and more in love every day.
The fact that That is the reality.
It's troublesome, right? Because people would say, oh, that Steph, you know, he can't have a successful relationship because of X, Y, and Z, right?
Vain or narcissistic or manipulative, whatever people would make up, right?
The fact that I have a joyfully happy and loving marriage is a problem for that thesis, right?
That because of my values, sustainable love is impossible for me.
That's... Oh, the people who say, well, yes, but Steph can't be a good parent because he's dictatorial, he can't stand dissent, whatever, right?
I mean, they'll probably hang on to that for a little while longer because Isabella's so young, but I can tell you now, I am exactly the father that I want to be.
And I'm very happy and proud to some degree of the work and patience and affection that I bring to my role as a dad.
And I'm not worried about that collapsing or changing tomorrow.
I'm joyful and completely besotted by my daughter, madly in love with her, and so that's another problem.
I think it's hard, probably, for a lot of people not to feel that FDR is a pretty sweet gig, and a lot of times it is, right?
There are huge challenges to FDR, but it is a fantastic way to spend your life.
Philosophy, the dissemination of truth and virtue and reason, It's a fantastic way to spend your life.
Are you bored, sweetums?
Let's go touch a tree.
She likes to bark.
Rough.
Baby kicks.
There we go.
Got a nice tree to eat. I'm actually letting her eat it.
Because this is the face which...
nothing. Nothing can go in your mouth anymore.
Because you want to touch everything.
Sorry about this.
It's just a little hard to find the pause button.
She's on my chest in this knuckly.
Alright, let's keep moving. Come, sweet dumbs!
Off we go. Oh, let's go touch some leaves.
You like the pine needles.
Let's go touch some pine needles.
You like that texture, don't you, sweet dumbs?
There we go. She likes grass as well.
And hemp. Anyway.
So, that's another particular problem, right?
Or people would say, well, Steph, you know, if they didn't know anything, oh, he doesn't want children because he doesn't want to share Christina because he's whatever.
They just make up whatever they want, right?
And so the fact that I have a kid, I have a loving wife, I have the career of my dreams, I have...
I mean, there's great life.
And also the fact that I'm 42, right?
And the fact that I took a lot of hits in my 20s, and even more so in my mid-30s, to shuck off the irrationalities of cultural and personal histories, people, I think, were like, oh, you know, he's kind of staggering from thing to thing, and this didn't work, and that didn't work, and so they say, aha, you see, rationality, it doesn't, you know, his version of rationality, whatever people say, it doesn't pay off, it doesn't work.
Failure, failure, failure, right?
So, the fact that I have achieved...
Okay, maybe it won't sustain itself, right?
Maybe FDR won't sustain or whatever, right?
Maybe something will happen or something that I can't imagine, picture or whatever, right?
Maybe it won't sustain. Maybe I'll have to go back to working in the business world or whatever.
Maybe I'll get a paper route or maybe I'll, I don't know, be a lap dancer or something, right?
A bad one. Or maybe I'll go work in a donut shop, right?
But still, I had achieved this, right?
And this is a damn hard thing to achieve.
So I will always have that pride, no matter what happens, though of course I genuinely don't believe that FDR will ever go south.
So the fact that I'm mostly getting older, and that my life keeps getting better and better, that's really tough.
For people who are invested in my failure.
And of course, this isn't about me, right?
Fundamentally, this is really...
I'm sort of extending this as a way of looking at this as a possibility in your own life, right?
I mean, if you have separated from friends because your friends are unpleasant, difficult, anti-rational, immature, abusive, manipulative, evasive, whatever, right?
If you have separated from your friends for these reasons, then, by golly, your friends are going to be heavily invested in your failure.
Oh, he's just, you know, he, she's become so judgmental, so, you know, he got into this cult and he won't listen to people.
They come up with all these negative things, and of course they believe that these are bad ways to live, and therefore you're going to be unhappy.
Oh, he's going to wake up one day, he's going to notice that he's all alone, and he's going to look back, and he's going to regret, and he's going to come crawling back, and we're going to do X, Y, and Z, all this kind of stuff, right?
All of that is, I guarantee you, that is what is going on in people's heads.
And they will look upon the struggles and the challenges That you are experiencing in your pursuit of truth and reason against almost all historical tendencies, both personal and cultural and religious and political and philosophical.
They will look upon your struggles and they will say, aha, you see, it is destructive.
This philosophy that they have gotten addicted to, this cult nonsense, it is destructive and they will be heavily invested in that and they will use that as a great excuse to continue To float along down the anti-rational stream to the waterfall of misery that awaits them.
And every failure that you have will be greeted with triumph by those who have opposing values.
And their great dread and their great fear, and I would say deep down their deep certainty, is that They are taking the cowardly route of avoidance and evasion.
And they are mocking you for something that they desperately wish they had the courage to do themselves.
And their great fear is that you are going to, in a sense, hit bottom and bounce far higher than they can even imagine.
That after having struggled and sweated and trembled and vomited to give up the drug...
That you will have a life of purpose and reason and joy and love and intimacy and honesty and openness and virtue.
And that it will be too late for them.
That because they invested themselves so heavily in opposing the path that you were on, that they will not be able to return to the fork in the road and take a better path, a higher path.
That it's not going to be possible that they will be stuck In the shit that they have wandered into, or propelled themselves into, really.
And that is their great fear, and thus they will greet every perceived failure of yours with triumph.
And they will greet every success that you have with skepticism and scorn and hatred and hostility.
And if you are happy, you are faking it.
And if you are sad, it is real.
Or it is self-pity.
Or it is some other...
Because there's a whole language of emotionality that manipulators use.
That if you're sad, it's just self-pity.
That if you're happy, you're manic.
If you're affectionate, you are stalking.
If you're in love, it is just hormones.
Everything is reduced to something petty and empty.
And all of your positive feelings will be put into that category.
And all of your negative feelings...
We'll be transubstantiated into something that vindicates the theory that disaster awaits you.
And as time goes by, and I think this is really why it's sort of popping up more and more in my head at the moment, as time goes by, the desperate need for you to fail will become increasingly hysterical on the part of those who have not opposed you fundamentally, they've opposed you Real, true, honest values, but they personalize it into opposing you, right?
As if by opposing you, they can oppose reality, right?
So it's this fantasy that if you fail, the truth fails, which of course is not the case at all.
So people end up Really heavily invested in your failure.
And the more that you succeed, the more this clamor of people will surround you and increase in noise.
And I did not hear it within myself, but it's important.
The more that you succeed and the more that they fail, the greater their anxiety will be.
And the greater the anxiety that you have or the fear of retribution that you will have in your mind.
And of the people that I really had the most intense philosophical...
I'm not going to get into names or any really identifying characteristics.
But the people that I had the greatest clashes with in my teens, philosophically, I've been thinking about them over the past few days and saying, well, how did it work out?
Well, one of them... Ended up in a loveless marriage that was so full of negativity and hostility that he ended up dumping garbage on his wife one morning and kicking in a door.
He got arrested and ended up in jail and anger management for spousal abuse.
So that was not so good.
And his, well, it doesn't really matter.
Another one got his lengthy marriage.
His wife had an affair relatively recently, and he just laughed it off.
Well, that's no good.
That's not happiness. Another one.
Never rose above the rank of junior, junior, junior person at work.
Never dated.
Never You know, he's still basically doing the same things that he was doing when he was 16.
You know, playing cards, playing Dungeons and Dragons.
I just did not move ahead in his life.
And this fellow was more in tune with me as far as philosophy went, but as far as psychology he was entirely oppositional to the idea of therapy and vulnerability and self-knowledge and so on.
And, gosh, I've lost track of a lot of the other people.
But these are the couple, and there's more, but I sort of don't want to bore you with all these details.
But looking at this, yeah, absolutely, they seem to be doing a lot better when we were younger and I was going through the wrenching transition of quitting irrationality.
But as time has gone on, it has not panned out well for them at all.
Oh, I know another one. I just went into a year-long depression and knew about Christina's pregnancy but never contacted us about it.
Sent a very oblique apology.
But that did not work out very well.
And the friends of Christina's, I mean, it's all similar kind of stuff.
But the people who opposed the...
Reason and evidence and self-knowledge approach to life that we both pursued independently and then much more powerfully together.
They've just not done well.
Not happy, not productive, not virtuous in very difficult, ugly, unpleasant, horrible life situations.
And so...
You know, my whole goal, right, I can tell you this now, my whole goal with FDR has been to shorten the amount of time it took for me to get to real reason by any means possible.
You know, I will yell, I will cry, I will joke, I will laugh, I will cajole, I will aggress or assert, I will do anything to help people To get as fast along this process as possible.
Because if the process takes 20 years, as it did for me, for most people, then 20 years and tens of thousands of dollars in therapy, and tens of thousands of dollars in books, and 30,000 hours of study, if it takes that long, then not many people are going to be very happy or rational.
And that's important.
I mean, that's an important confirmation of the theory.
That rationality and anti-rationality should not both end up with love, because they're too fundamental and too ethically based a set of principles to end up in the same place.
And it really does seem to be the case, but as I become more successful, and by that I do not mean the dollars that I get from FDR or anything like that, but I mean the increased happiness, that there is a growing cacophony Of hostility and fear and anger and so on within my mind from those who are heavily invested.
Not in my material success or failure, but in my happiness.
And I think that as I have achieved more and more of what it is that I want in life, that anxiety has been, right, the fear of imminent retribution or the hostility of those who are invested in that has increased as well.
And I have not been cognizant of it.
I don't think it's ever really crossed my mind that much.
I can't think it's crossed my mind at all.
But it is something that is, I think, very important for me to meditate on.
And I'm not sure what to do about it yet.
If you've had any thoughts, please let me know.
But that's, I think, a big area of a mission.
And it's not conscious a mission, but it's something that I've really been thinking about over the last couple of days.
And I hope that it's of use to you.
And please let me know what you think.
I look forward to your donations, as always.
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