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June 18, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:42
1396 Philosophy, Dislike, Opposition

aaaaa - achievement panic!

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You, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. I'm Steph. Oh, dear God.
Podcast 4800. Who else are you expecting?
So, this morning I was watching A little bit of 60 Minutes, which I think was a rerun.
That was a rerun. And I hadn't watched this part before.
It was about some woman who was a restaurant owner and a cook and a chef.
And I got my achievement panic, which I thought I would describe with you.
Maybe it happens to you sometimes as well.
Achievement panic goes something like this.
Oh my God! This woman founded her first restaurant at 25.
She's written eight cookbooks.
She is behind or key to the whole slow food movement.
She's on TV. She's doing talk shows.
She's... What am I doing?
Why am I doing these things?
I should be doing these things for the sake of philosophy.
And this, that, or the other.
So, I have these moments, right?
I should be doing more.
Why aren't I working more? Why aren't I pushing more to get things out and go to a TV show and so on, right?
And I start down this whole road of achievement panic.
And then I sort of, right?
I catch myself. And I think, oh, come on.
You know how this is going to play out.
Because most people really don't like you, Steph.
Right? That's very important.
I shouldn't laugh. Although it is a little...
It actually is pretty funny. But I think that's kind of important to remember that.
For me, at least. Right?
And, you know, maybe this is true for you, too.
I suspect it is if you're into philosophy.
But... The...
The reality is that...
The majority of people really don't like me, right?
The majority of people think that I'm, you know, bad or dangerous or crazy or whatever, right?
Pitiful or, you know, all of this kind of stuff.
Most people really no likey WCF. And I think that's really important for me to remember.
That helps dilute some of the achievement panic, right?
I didn't like the morality of the plays in theatre school and they didn't like me there.
I didn't like the majority of the ethics breached in graduate school and they didn't like me there.
People liked me in business as long as I was a productive Typist slash manager, right?
As long as I was writing profitable code and architecture and managing projects through to a profitable conclusion, people liked me when I began to question the ethics of a broad swath of board-level business decisions.
People no likey, right?
And this pattern is pretty...
Consistent throughout my life and I would bet that if you look at your own life You're not Mr.
Popularity or Miss Popularity either, and I think there's some very important, if not bloody obvious, reasons for that.
But it's easy to forget, and then to feel bewildered as to why people with fundamentally non-controversial opinions like, we should eat fresher food, do very well, and people with unpopular opinions like, live your values, do...
Very badly, right?
We just really disliked.
People just really don't like us.
I was, I guess, circling the libertarian movement for a while, and then they didn't like me.
I mean, I swear to God, if it wasn't for you people and my wife and my daughter, I'd feel that there was something really wrong with me.
But the people who I really respect, and for objective reasons...
People who are struggling to really live their values in the face of what feels like almost overwhelming opposition.
You people, and most importantly my wife, my daughter, though of course that's fairly primal at the moment, and of course myself and my values.
Those people I respect and those people I have contiguous, positive, warm relations with.
And so it's not like...
I mean, I don't think...
I mean, obviously I think that I'm very likable in many ways.
And I'm pretty open, pretty honest, pretty self-critical, pretty honest about my own shortcomings and pretty sympathetic towards others.
I think these are all, you know, reasonably admirable traits and traits which people should like.
But, of course...
It's not important, the theory.
The important thing is the empirical evidence.
And the empirical evidence is that most people really don't like me.
And they probably don't like you very much either.
Yeah, I know. It's tragic, sweet dubs.
It makes no sense because you love your daddles.
Yeah, you do, sweet dubs. In your own, primal, needy way.
So I think it's just important to remember that we're not liked.
Come and eat them. It's a nice treat for you.
We're just not liked.
You know, it's interesting, by the by, because I'm walking with Isabella.
She's actually, I think, getting less interested in just being walked.
Because before, it was, you know, thrilling for her, you know, just to be outside, because she was a winter baby, so didn't really get to see much of outside.
Except malls, I suppose. Not really outside.
Actually, not outside at all.
But now, she's not as interested in just being walked around, because I think she kind of, you know, Daddy, you've been there, done that, know that.
So I'm trying to give them more interesting things to look at and do while we're walking.
And why are we not liked?
Well, it is my...
Strong, if not downright certain, opinion that people are mostly frauds.
And they talk about virtue and ethics, but they don't want to actually do it, right?
Because doing it is really difficult, but nobody wants to think of themselves as bad.
This is the paradox and the problem that, unfortunately...
Philosophers and mystics have left us with, right?
Which is that everybody wants to be good, and everybody believes that they're good, but when you actually say, here's how to be good in practice in the moment, They run screaming, right?
And because they know that unconsciously that they're frauds, they get very...
Like, you know, like somebody who's embezzling from the company doesn't like it when a really competent and unafraid and assertive accountant comes along.
Because they know the accountant's going to find it, right?
How good does the murderer feel, to take an extreme and not exactly accurate example, how does the average murderer feel when Hercule Poirot comes on the scene, right?
Well, not good because he is perceptive, relentless, unafraid and morally certain, right?
I mean, so.
So, how do these people feel when this kind of detective comes on the scene?
How does the counterfeiter feel when the man skilled at detecting counterfeit comes onto the scene and attempts to exchange notes with him?
He feels anxious. He feels hostile because he knows that he's a fraud.
He knows that he's a killer.
He knows that he is an embezzler.
And he knows that the perceptive eyes are on the scene.
So there's a lot of hostility.
Now the people who are being embezzled, right, the people who are afraid of killers, the victims, they feel great relief when the detective comes on the scene.
And I don't mean me. I mean you and I, right?
When the detective comes on the scene, they feel some relief.
But the vast majority of people are frauds and exploiters.
And so...
They feel anxious and hostile when the real deal comes on the scene, right?
Christians, while they're muttering to themselves about the spiritless God that they claim to believe in, they all feel pretty secure and confident, right?
But when a resolute incompetent atheist comes on the scene, they feel hostile, right?
Because suddenly they're revealed as silly frightened superstitious mystics.
Right, who are not? What's the line from a movie I saw recently?
Have you found Jesus? I didn't even know he was missing.
So that, I think, is an important thing to remember.
That, you know, we're bringing light to the kitchen.
And the cockroaches know like you so much, right?
And so this unpopularity thing is really important to remember when you feel stuck or futile or boxed in or rejected or alone or whatever, that people, you know, what do they want to do?
They want to believe that they're good.
They want to have all of the fruits of self-esteem that come from believing that they're good, but they don't want to actually have the real emotional challenges of being.
To take an example from the libertarian community, they say that patriotism is really not valid.
Your country is not good just because it is your country.
Your country is good because it follows particular virtues.
And you should only have allegiance to your country to the degree with which its government follows those particular virtues in the Constitution or the Bill of Rights or whatever.
And if your country were to deviate from those virtues, Then you should reject and oppose the authority, right?
So that is...
I mean, I would agree with that to a large degree, except that, of course, a government is inherently immoral through its initiation of force, so there is no way that its action can ever be moral, which is not to say that all governments are equal, right?
But, like, a pickpocket is still immoral, but not morally equivalent to a mass murderer, right?
So... Libertarians have that belief, right?
That there is no virtue inherent in authority and we are not obligated to obey respect and love and revere an authority simply because we are born there, but we should only adhere to that authority to the degree with which it is virtuous and we should reject and oppose it and dissociate ourselves from it in situations where the authority is not virtuous.
Well, let's take that principle and apply it to the family, right?
That is the principle, right?
So we do not owe moral or financial or temporal allegiance to an authority called the government simply because we are born into it.
Well, gosh, what could that be the same as?
We do not owe respect and authority.
Sorry, we do not owe moral respect, financial cash or time to an authority simply because we are born into it, i.e.
a family, right? We're simply born into a family.
The degree to which authority is practiced in a virtuous manner is the degree to which we should respect it as a moral authority.
And that, of course, is, I think, entirely just.
The degree to which our parents are virtuous and moral and courageous and honorable is the degree to which we should respect and love them.
Not just our parents.
That's a general principle, right?
And so the same principle applies to both.
If the authority is acting in an unjust and immoral and destructive manner, then we should dissociate ourselves from it, remove our allegiance and depose it where possible.
Well, if our parents act in a destructive and abusive and immoral manner, we should remove our allegiance and depose them where possible.
There is no social contract that most libertarians would respect in terms of the state.
In other words, simply being born somewhere does not create an allegiance to the authority that is present.
And the same thing is true, of course, with regards to the family.
Can we do anything about the government?
Well, no, of course not, fundamentally.
Can we do something about the unjust authorities within our own lives?
Our bosses are parents if they are unjust.
Yeah, of course we can. Of course we can, right?
So here is an example of people who claim allegiance to a particular set of values, which I would agree with to a large degree.
And I say, well, applying ethics...
Hi, sweetness, you okay?
Darling! Applying your ethics to situations where you cannot affect change is to really disown and disarm the value of ethics.
And so we should always, in order for ethics to be considered at all valuable, useful and practical, we should really first and foremost apply them to situations that we are able to affect change within, have some influence over, right?
And so when I take the universal principles that libertarians apply to the state and I apply them to the family, I suddenly become an asshole culty guy, right?
And why? Because I'm saying, well, if you want to practice these values, here you go, right?
If you want to practice these values, here we go, right?
You know, it's like if I... If a guy writes a book about how orcs should diet and take better care of their teeth and he's overweight with halitosis, then you might want to say, well, if dieting and taking good care of your teeth is such a value, why are you worrying about orcs, which you can't control or affect, or in fact don't even exist like the government, and why aren't you dieting and applying better hygiene to yourself, right?
It is actually, to me, a disavowal and rejection of morality to be dedicated to it only in realms which you clearly can have no effect whatsoever in.
And to pour all of your energies into pursuing a theoretical set of ethics that you can never implement at all in your life.
And then when somebody says, no wait, you missed something very important, which is the family, and you can apply, and your social circle...
You can apply, in fact, you really should apply these principles to this situation.
Darling, let's go find a bush.
Here. Fundle some leaves, my darling.
Sorry about these interruptions.
Think of them as commercials for the next generation.
So... That's the counterfeit detection machine, which is what philosophy is, which is what action in your personal life is with regards to your values.
There are no greater opponents to a set of ethics than those who steadfastly pursue them in the abstract and hysterically reject them and angrily reject them in the real, in the present.
They discredit not just their ethics, but ethics in general by resolutely opposing the actual enactment of their values, right?
It's not just their values that they discredit its values as a whole.
And that is a...
A real problem, and this is why people get so hostile to RTR, UPB, and all the stuff that we talk about here, right?
This is why, when I put forward that test for the Ron Paul supporters, that if they had the ability to turn an evil institution towards good, that they should start with the mafia.
They should start with that which is closer.
They should infiltrate and join criminal gangs and do All of that, right?
Because they have this ability. And if they can't do it there, forget about doing it with the government.
And if they can do it there, fantastic.
I will eat my words. I will join their course.
I will throw all of my intellectual energy and minor celebrity status behind what it is that they're doing.
And we'll apologize for being completely wrong.
And we'll honor and respect them for doing something which I was not able to even imagine was possible or able to be done.
But, of course, none of them wanted to do that.
And why? Because they know that they can't do it.
They know that it's just a self-management fantasy.
That they believe that the government can be turned to virtue.
So, people dislike it when you expose them.
When you expose their pompous illusions about their own virtues.
When you give them something actionable and practical to do with their supposedly highest values, they either look at you with...
Creepy hostility or they scorn and dismiss you or they will paint particular portraits of you that are silly or unflattering or whatever, right?
Because it's easier to do that than to actually say why we can turn the government around as an evil institution but not the local crime gang.
Much easier, right? Much less profit in crime than there is in government, right?
So it should be easier to turn them towards virtue.
Or, you know, there's a minority of people and those are the people who are still listening to this.
The minority of people will look at that as You know, a fearful possibility, as I did when I first began to really think of implementing my values in my personal life.
It's a fearful, terrifying, really exciting possibility to be able to take the values out of the clouds and put them into the ground, right?
To take the wheels off, to take the tires off the abstract wheels of a non-existent store and put them on your jalopy and take them for a spin, right?
That's very exciting and it's very terrifying.
And, of course, you can only speak credibly against the government if you have rejected unjust and immoral authority within your own life.
Then you have the right.
You have earned the right to speak with credibility about the evils of the state.
But if you haven't, if you steadfastly reject Questioning or criticizing or rejecting persistently unjust authority within your own life, no matter where it is, then you don't have the right to talk about rejecting the immoral authority of the state.
Because you have not done that which you claim to be virtuous where you can actually do it.
You only... It's like the government passing a law where it has no jurisdiction.
Like Lincoln, right? I'll free the slaves where I have no authority, but I will not free the slaves where I do have authority.
Well, of course, that's just saying that the slaves should not be freed.
It's all just a bunch of nonsense.
So, I just sort of wanted to point that out, that people really dislike it when you...
When they're spinning their wheels and you give them some traction, they really dislike it because the purpose is to spin their wheels, to have the false self self-praise of believing yourself to be virtuous, but without actually letting the true self work the levers of real virtue in the real world.
The hypocrisies and the pomposity and the self-righteousness and the self-praise and the self-patting on the back that all goes along with the dedication to abstract virtue.
People don't like it when you actually say, oh, here's how to do it in the real world.
And so you get disliked.
And the fact that we have as big a community as we do speaks well, I think speaks enormously well, to the possibilities of what we can do.
But it really can't grow any faster than it does.
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