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July 14, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:17
1413 How Often Am I Good?

A brief history of my ups and downs...

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. It is the 6th month anniversary of Birth Von Isabella Cakes.
And we are out for eye walk because the weather has suddenly decided to remind itself that it is in fact June and not Ragnarok.
So, this is, I just did a video called Happiness Part 1.
And I am now going to do a preview.
And I don't know if this is ever going to be published or if it's of interest to people, but just in case it is.
This is a preview or a warm-up or a practice for Happiness Part 2.
So the question that laid me low starting 1999 for almost two years was a question that I did not really Have any conscious knowledge of at the time,
but a question which became more and more important as I sort of wound my way through therapy and the conscious recognition of this question ended up propelling me to this new life after some time, this new life of Free Domain Radio.
And the question was this, and it wasn't even in therapy, but in some time afterwards that I really began to understand the question.
The question was this. It was, how often am I good?
And it's really a very fundamental question.
How often am I good?
And since we don't want to talk about me, but you, let's ask you.
How often... Are you good?
And by good I don't mean refrain from evil, right?
When we say, how assiduously do you pursue health?
We're not asking, how often do you snip off your own fingers, right?
How often are you good?
What percentage of the day are you achieving your highest values in practice?
And after I, let's get back to me, after I had spent many, many years pursuing virtue in the abstract, learning all about the immorality of the state, the false history that I had been given in school,
the Corruption of relativism and postmodernism, the need for that clean, hard-lined Randian Aristotelian logic.
When I had gone through all of this for many, many years, studying history and to some degree psychology, but in particular philosophy, the question arose, you know, like one of those worms in dune and swallowed me.
How often am I good? How has this knowledge affected me?
Affected my life? Affected my decisions?
It's a very, very important question.
Really, after the theory, it's the most important question because it is the practice.
Without the practice, the theory merely remains discredited, because it is portrayed as useless and merely academic in the worst sense of the word.
And my answer was: not much.
Not much. My gut sense was maybe.
Maybe 1%.
You know, if I'm in some heated argument or in some argument that I would...
You know, really attempt to act on my values and stand firm for what I believed in.
But those things didn't come along too often.
And there were many times in the business world, of course, where I would hold my arguments back.
Because I didn't want to freak people out.
But it was not a very good...
Ratio, right?
To say the least, it was not a very good ratio of theory to practice.
I felt I knew the theory very well, and what had come out of that was about 1%, probably erring on the side of generosity, was about 1% of really being good, achieving my highest values.
And there were significant ways in which I was not achieving my highest values at all.
Quite the opposite. I was in a not quite abusive but definitely not virtuous romantic relationship.
I was involved in business relationships with people who I growingly began to realize to cut myself some reasonable slack were immoral.
My friendships were not based on practical virtue and it really didn't inform my life much at all.
And why was that? Well, because it was all about things that I could not control.
Right? The virtue that I had studied was all about things that I could not control.
And this is sort of the illusion of Atlas Shrugged.
With Atlas Shrugged, the virtue is all about this fantasy that John Galt can sit down for two hours or three hours with people and can change the world by causing them to all give up their careers and families and so on and go on strike or release their careers.
It's not going to happen.
It's a fantasy, right?
Since it is an interesting idea and no one's even tried to pursue it, it remains squarely in the realm of fiction slash science fiction, probably closer to mere fantasy.
And that's the only way C. Ayn Rand had the problem of how do you put virtue into practice, and the only thing she could come up with was convincing industrialists to go on strike.
Well, that's because it's hard to see exactly how her virtues were consistently enacted in her personal life.
because she was not a fan of psychology.
So, this is always the question for the ethicist, right?
And particularly for the libertarian, the free marketer, the Austrian economist.
It's like, how do you put this shit into practice?
How do you gain the genuine and authentic certainty that arises From practice rather than theory.
And of course that has been my...
That has been my question.
Or the question that consumed me in the late 90s.
Just waving to some kid on the slide.
How do you do this stuff?
Now of course my encouragement...
Slash chastisement of academics is to say, if you believe in the free market, quit the state protected union and the state protected tenure and wade out into the free market and find your true value.
Right? As you consistently urge others to do.
Right? To pursue the free market.
This is a way you can live your values, right?
But, of course, they are not going to live their values, and this is why their values don't transmit, right?
Because you have to live your values in order to convince others.
I mean, I think I live my values fairly well, and I still have a tough time convincing others.
Imagine if I wasn't living my values, I would just be immediately dismissed as a hypocrite and would achieve no traction whatsoever.
As free market economists don't do, right?
There's a reason that the free market economists consistently lose out to the statist economists, because, I mean the academics, because their actions completely belie their values.
And so everyone gets that unconsciously.
It's all just a posturing idiot nonsense, right?
If the people most trained in the free market completely reject the free market while urging other people to accept it, I mean, it's really a cosmic joke.
You could not design a group more specifically to discredit the ideas of the free market.
If the world's most trained dentist never goes to a dentist...
Well, anyway, I think we understand, right?
It's a con. It's a con!
So... When you have this, you know, Ron Paul slash libertarian slash constitutionalist slash minarchist slash minor elite statist philosophy, how do you put it into practice?
Well, Rand did, in my opinion, go a long way towards this in that As a consequence of following their values politically and economically,
Hank Riordan ended up ditching his wife and his family as irrational parasites or anti-rational parasites.
And yet, that was not what started the ball rolling.
That occurred near the end of the book.
It's very cinematic to me.
near the end of the book that occurred as a consequence of him pursuing his values professionally, politically, and so on.
Whereas I put that scene at the beginning of the book and say that's the first step.
And I say that everything else flows from that.
Right? Because, I mean, this is the problem with Rand's evil characters, right?
I believe in evil, of course, right?
But her evil characters are just that way.
What's the difference between Daphne and James Taggart?
He's pudgy, she's not.
It's ridiculous, right?
There was no...
What turned him into such a...
Nasty little sociopath.
Well, there's no explanation.
Because if she were to dig into that explanation and to get some realistic psychology behind it, then he would have been raped or beaten as a child or verbally abused in the extreme.
And then she would have to say, well, the cure for this is not John Galt rolling around convincing industrialists to throw up their clipboards, but rather To improve the parenting that is in the world.
That is the only way that it can be solved.
But that would not appeal to her grandiose view or romantic view of how the world should be saved.
There's no particular prescriptions for action that come out of Atlas Shrugged.
Like most very grand philosophical solutions, all it does is invite you to be a breathless spectator To the imagined actions of others.
Which is very sad.
Whereas I put you, or at least my philosophy, the way I approach fixing the world, puts you as the protagonist in your own land of Shrugged.
Shrug off evil, shrug off incompetence, shrug off anti-rationality, shrug off abuse, shrug off dysfunction, shrug off corruption.
Well, you don't need to convince industrialists to do it.
You don't need to be the brain-spanning genius of the ages, though I do believe that you are.
You don't need that. You can simply look at your own personal relationships and build a protective nest of secure rationality for your children, for the next generation, for those who come after or those who travel with, if you're not photocopy inclined.
And that is what the great struggle was for me, was to say, well, even if I want it, To increase this 1% of virtuous action, how could I do it?
Well, when I was younger, it was around, oh, I'll found a political party and start to work on the political, in the political arena.
I had all these speeches worked out in my head.
I actually wrote a manifesto.
And I really... I did genuinely believe, but I ran out of...
The interest level was low, of course, and I had to work for a living, and it was hard to get anything moving.
We had some meetings, but the people who came to the meetings were not people that I particularly found to be excellent building blocks of the new world.
So I sort of let that fade out.
But I could not figure out how to become, how to practice virtue in my life.
Because my idea of virtue was so grand in my life.
It was dismembering political institutions.
It was smashing organized religion.
It was Carving a fiery channel towards the new joy of empirical rationality.
It was all so grandiose, and I got that.
I mean, partly out of the helplessness of rationality that I experienced, right?
Which we all experience, I think.
And partly out of...
Well, these were the examples that I had been given of how we achieve freedom.
It is to use reason to smash anti-rational institutions.
But it never works, right?
So, because... When you work to apply rational principles or to inculcate rational principles in those around you, you understand the helplessness that you have in this area and the lack of interest that most people have in the realm of rationality.
And what happens then is you jump back from that scalding helplessness And you retreat into a realm of fantasy with people like Howard Rourke and John Galton.
All the other people who argue that the rationalization of cultural institutions, statism, religion, mostly statism, that the rationalization of cultural institutions will result from The stern, persistent and educated application of reason and evidence.
When, of course, it just doesn't.
And because it doesn't, the solutions, such as they are, tend to be entirely grandiose, untestable, and unworkable, from John Galt to Ron Paul.
Someone's going to stride in with enough talent, charisma, ambition and money to change and will cheer and be on the right side.
You know, it's a spectator sport.
Changing the world is a spectator sport.
Which is sad.
And because everyone gets that A, it's not going to work and B, you're not even participating in it, not working fundamentally.
You know, resentment and helplessness and desperate hope and anger and, of course, particular rage towards anyone who comes along and points it out.
Which, I mean, I understand.
I really do. I mean, I paid a lot of money to a therapist to help me to work through that feeling of helplessness.
Well, not just that, but one of the main things.
So I do understand it.
It is a completely horrible thing to realize that the salvation to the world comes not from external genius or energy or movements or money or intelligence or charisma or any kind of magical intervention, but the solution to the world's ills is Your personal relationships.
It seems weird.
It seems completely counterintuitive.
We're trying to change the world.
What does my mother matter?
Well, she does.
If your mother's anti-rational and won't listen to reason, won't look at evidence, hostile and abusive, then yeah, it matters.
Because you can't convince others.
If you're not convinced yourself, and you're not convinced yourself if you avoid the only place where you can apply your philosophy, which is in your life.
If you consistently avoid applying your philosophy in your life, how the hell do you expect to have other people be your guinea pigs for you when you steadfastly reduce the medicine that you consistently prescribe to others?
Never going to work. And of course, if your mother's anti-rational, she's going to consistently mess up with your head, and she's going to consistently mess up with your relationships, and she's going to consistently mess up your children.
And your children won't believe you either about the values of rationality, because they're going to see that you kowtow and appease an anti-rational monster in your life.
And so you will simply be a hypocrite, and they will scorn your values as well.
Hey, I wish there were another way.
But in a way, it's a relief that there isn't.
Because if there were another easier way, and we still had failed for centuries, if not millennia, then we never would be able to succeed, right?
The harder it is, the greater our chances.
So, it is a relief, in an odd kind of way.
Let me check in the car reflection.
Hello, darling! She's hanging on.
She's got this pink highlighter she loves to hold, and she hangs onto it with the death grip of the ages, like Charlton Heston with a smoking gun.
So that was what pointed me away from the grandiose abstractions that really are an emotional reaction to helplessness and towards an abandonment.
towards an abandonment, away from political...
globe-spanning, philosophical delusions of grandeur and towards lifting a weight within reach.
It's very easy to lift a thousand pounds in your head.
You can even sweat, pretend to sweat if you want to.
It's very easy to do that.
It's much harder to lift a weight that you can actually reach.
And the real purpose of FDR is to have you actually exercise and develop strength by lifting weights that you can reach.
Not changing the world, which you can't do.
Not toasting the government, which you can't do.
Not changing the minds of irrational people, because you can't.
There's no mind to change. But to apply your values to your own life, to your own relationships.
And that's the only way to up this percentage.
Because, in many ways, I wasn't even in the positive.
Because I claimed to have these rational values, and I did have them, but I did not exercise them.
And appeased and accepted irrationality and anti-rationality within my life.
And the result of that was that I was actually in the negatives.
Because, I mean, in the realm of having an effect on others, because I was simply discrediting my values.
Discrediting reason. If I say that I'm against drugs, and I consistently smoke drugs, then people are going to walk away with the idea that anybody who claims to be against drugs is simply a hypocritical drug user.
It's a cover, right?
And so anybody in the future who claims to be against drugs, people would just roll their eyes and say, oh, yeah, well, we know what you're up to at 4.20 in the afternoon, right?
So I was shredding virtue because I feared implementing it, but I could not let go of the abstracts.
I could not say, this is a really fundamental question of ethics, It's that if people could not hear me but could only see me, what would they think my values were?
If people could only see me and could not hear me, if they could only see my actions or hear my actions spoken and could not hear my protestations and my abstractions, what would they understand my values to be?
If I could not tell anybody what I believed, but I could only show them what I did, how would they derive my values?
What values would they derive from mere empiricism?
And for me, it was not good, right?
It was really not good. How are you doing, sweet Dems?
I'm getting a little tired, but just heading home.
People would not believe that I was a paragon, on a virtue dedicated to reason and objectivity and empiricism, because they would see the people I was surrounded with and appeased and accepted, some of whom were imposed upon me through accident of birth, and some of whom I chose through idiocy of penis.
But it would not be.
Okay.
Very much in accordance with the values.
In fact, it would be quite anti-values.
Anti the values. And yet I would not let go of these values.
At some point, we have to stop talking and look at what we are doing and say, well, you know what, those are my real values.
But we don't like to do that.
Because it's easier to talk than it is to do, of course, right?
But it's really painful.
I mean, if you say you're quitting smoking but don't quit, it doesn't have any effect.
On your health, right?
In fact, it's even worse, because you then have the stress of hypocrisy.
At least a committed smoker goes down into the grave, coughing up smoke like a downed fighter plane.
But at least he didn't stress himself with imagining he wanted to, or should, or could, or would, or was about to, or should have five minutes ago, quit.
Not hitting the gas and the brakes at the same time, right?
and the brakes are disconnected.
So that to me is the fundamental question is, well, in how much of your life are you actually meeting your stated and highest values?
Honesty, integrity, courage, a rejection of anti-rationality, a rejection of mysticism, a rejection of those who advocate violence.
Because you can't reject those who actually use violence against you.
I mean, in the moment, right?
If the cop pulls you over, I mean, what are you going to do?
Shoot yourself? Of course not.
You pay. In taxes, you pay.
You can't reject those who actually use violence against you.
You can, but you won't be around in the debate for very long.
But you can reject those who advocate violence against you if they won't listen to reason or change their ways.
And that's integrity to your values.
Now, of course, the opposite of 1% is 100%, right?
In terms of values and achievement, you can't.
You can't. If I'm working out at the gym, am I being virtuous or not?
No, not really. I mean, I'm in accordance with some APA values around health and stretching and all that kind of stuff and strength.
But no, I'm not. I'm not fighting the good fight.
In this, I'm not fighting the good fight by walking.
I think that I'm fighting the good fight by being as honest and self-critical as possible about what I have failed to achieve in the past.
And of course, I'm not at 100% now.
I would not imagine for a moment that I was.
There are times when I reach 100% for consistent.
In some of the listener calls, I reach 100% for an hour or two.
And in my general approach to FDR, I'm I mean, 100% being as close to real honesty and integrity as you can be, encouragement and helping others to gain the truth and be set free to be more virtuous, helping them out of the prison of illusion.
That's as close as I'm going to get.
And that's as satisfying as it's ever going to be to me.
That's perfectly satisfying. In the general way that I've approached FDR, I think I'm pretty good.
In my life as a whole, I think it's more than two-thirds, maybe three-quarters of the time I act in accordance with my values, which is not bad.
Which is not bad.
Maybe it could be 80%.
It's hard to say. I just have to really review it.
But the reality is it's a lot better than the negatives or the 1% that I was talking about earlier.
Oh, almost home sweetums.
Just hang in there, stay awake just a little bit.
He's getting very nappy. And, of course, this is something that if reason equals virtue equals happiness, Then, if we are only acting on our highest values 1% of the time, then we're not going to achieve happiness more than 1% of the time.
I mean, if you have a diet that you only follow three days out of the year, or three and a half days out of the year, then you're not going to lose any weight.
In fact, you're going to gain weight, right?
So when people say, "Well, I've listened to a lot of podcasts and I'm still not happy," the answer is the traction of personal decisions in your life is not there.
The rubber is not hitting the road.
You're spinning your wheels three feet above the ground or three light years above the ground.
And that's, uh, that's very sad.
And that's, uh, You're not going to live forever.
At some point, you're either going to do it or you're not.
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