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July 27, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:34
1419 Ego Death?

Must we bury ourselves in order to be resurrected?

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Hi everybody, hope you're doing well. It's Steph and Izzy Cakes.
It is, I think, the 23rd of July 2009, and these are a few amateur, unprofessional, not a psychologist, not a therapist, just my personal opinions about certain aspects of thinking that I thought you might be interested in.
And a listener posted on the board and said, This death of the ego thing.
What's up with that? And I think it was a great question.
And I've touched on it in a few podcasts way back in the shifting sands of time.
Or perhaps as far as my opinions go, the shifty sands of time.
To be determined. But I thought it was worth talking about, because there has been some minor and non-clarifications about the way in which I use the term true self and false self, and they're pretty standard, but I thought I might as well define them as I see them, and hopefully that will be of use to you.
The false self conforms to bullying irrationalities, and the true self conforms to reason and evidence.
That's really all it comes down to.
The true self is... That which survives, if not flourishes, by subjecting itself to reason and evidence.
Science is the true self of mankind and philosophy, ultimately.
And the degree to which we have to submit ourselves to the irrational and almost always enforced absolutes of others is the degree to which we are subjected to the false self.
The cooperation of tribalism, or the cooperation that tribalism requires, not all human survival other than bare minimum pittance, requires some form of cooperation.
And the need for cooperation gives the tribe a great deal of power over the individual.
If you need the tribe for protection and for food and for hunting, and if you're a woman, you need the tribe for protection while you're pregnant and during the early days of child raising, then the tribe has a fair amount of power, of course, over you.
And can enforce its whims upon you in return for protection, right?
So the tribe sort of becomes a little bit like, you know, the mafia guy who comes leaning up to your bar and says, yeah, a nice bar.
Be a shame if something, you know, happened to it.
Or the guy who offers to watch your car when you know that if you don't pay him, the only person...
Who will be harming your car is the person who is claiming to offer protection.
So that is something else that's important.
So the tribe has a lot of power.
Oh, for the individual. Sweet Dums, you cannot eat the keys at all times.
You must eat something else.
She just loves my keys, and I love to give them to her because, I mean, they're clean, right?
I wipe them down, but I don't want her to eat them all the time.
But unfortunately, when I give her the keys, she eats them.
So we're doing a bit of a wrestle at the moment, which is fine.
So, for example, right, to take a sort of typical example, there's a more modern example than sort of mere tribalism, is that somebody grows up in a religious community, and in order to maintain his standing within that community, he needs to subject his natural inclination towards reason and evidence to belief in superstitious nonsense, right, like religion.
And that's a pretty humiliating thing to do, right?
And the way that we survive that humiliation is we make it a value, right?
Loving God, getting along, going along, being virtuous, getting to heaven, piety, fealty, faith, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We turn it all into a virtue.
That's how... We survive the humiliation of being controlled in this bullying kind of way and forced to spout Jewish zombie-style nonsense.
You know, we have to sort of believe that it's virtue, because if we act as if it's just power, then we don't do a very convincing job and we don't gain the benefits, right?
Those who inflict the false self on others, and it needs to be inflicted.
It's not natural. But those who inflict the false self on others are very good at figuring out if you're faking it.
Right? They are the O'Briens of 1984, and they're very good at figuring out when you're faking it.
And so they will...
Mess you up if you do, right?
So you really have to go whole hog.
You have to believe it, really believe it, in order for it to work in that way.
And so the false self does not coexist with the true self, with your accurate perceptions of reality in that sense.
What it does is it displaces it, right?
And for survival reasons, right?
If that which is a greater danger to you is the hostility or rejection of your tribe relative to other dangers you might be facing then you will conform to the tribe and you will reject reality because the reality is if you reject the tribe you won't survive or you won't reproduce right so those who and reproduction is really what it comes down to from a biological standpoint so if you reject the irrational absolutes of bullied irrationalities of the tribe then you can't mate and so that those who simply won't give up on that Who won't give up their empiricism,
who won't give up their reason, those people simply don't survive to reproduce.
Which is why tribes tend to keep a very tight hold over women, right?
Particularly in the context of religion and so on.
Go to church to meet women.
That's fine. They're not fools, these people.
They are very, very smart. If only they could use it for the power of good, as we strive to here.
So... I don't have any leaves in there, do you see?
So that is the sort of dichotomy, right?
And the growth of mankind has been, in my opinion, fundamentally reaching out towards the true self, right?
To reality. To reason, to evidence.
Away from bullied, false self compliance with the irrational absolutes of the tribe.
And it is a very, very scary and frightening and enraging thing to pursue, because you provoke, in my experience, you provoke in people their conformity.
You provoke the humiliation of their conformity when you point out that it's both erroneous and...
Unnecessary, right? So the degree to which you flourish as a good man and woman is the degree to which those who believe that is impossible deep down will resent you and get mad.
You know, we've all read this.
The design rant wasn't particularly wrong in this arena, in my opinion.
So, the false self...
Is that which arises out of a fear, fundamentally in the way that I formulate it, it arises out of a fear of dying or of not reproducing, which, you know, biologically is sort of the same thing deep down.
And so it arises out of fear, and children are naturally empirical and rational.
I can say this with more confidence now that I have a daughter, but children are naturally, and she's very empirical and very rational.
And rational may not be quite the right word, but...
Let's just stick with empirical.
She does not doubt her senses.
She does not doubt that reality exists.
She does not doubt that food is objective.
She does not doubt this, that, and the other.
She does not doubt that there appear to be snakes in her crib whenever we put her in because she just doesn't like going there.
But she's very empirical.
And so why would you give up reason and evidence?
Which is so simple, right?
It's such a simple life to live with reason and evidence.
You don't have to manipulate stuff.
You don't have to say, you know, like the Catholic nonsense that they make up, right?
It's the 19th century. So the wages of sin is death.
So human beings only die because human beings have sinned.
But the Virgin Mary couldn't have sinned because she was perfect and therefore she did not die.
She ascended bodily to heaven where she lives, right?
Of course, all this stuff is ridiculously complicated and entirely made up.
And that's a lot of work to figure out that kind of nonsense and to keep it straight and make it even vaguely believable and so on.
So that's a really complicated life, right?
Sustaining the belief in gods and ghosts and gremlins and angels and demons.
They're just not there.
It's all just complete bullshit.
That's a lot of work. So why would you want to take on that ridiculous work of keeping 12,000 mental plates spinning on sticks in your brain?
Well, because the alternative is death or ostracism, right?
It's two sides of the same coin, one personal, the other biological.
So the false self arises out of a fear of death or ostracism.
We'll just say death, but I mean ostracism as well.
It's either personal or biological death, personal or genetic death.
And that's why when you start to lift the lid of the false self, people get very tense, upset, angry, afraid, lash out, self-attack, right?
They get messed up, like you're pushing their hand into a kind of destructive, flesh-eating static.
That's a good image. They're back, right?
And that's because the false self arises out of a kind of terrorism, a kind of terrorism against reality and reason.
And so, that's why I talked about the Invisible Apple in FDR 72 so many years ago.
Because it is a kind of crossroads.
And we choose the false self, or rather the false self is inflicted upon us, because the alternative is death.
ostracism.
And so when we confront the false self, we really have to go back to that crossroads.
To say, well, why do I believe all this stuff that is false?
Why do I believe all this stuff that is nonsense?
That's really painful to go back to.
It's emotionally very, very difficult.
Very difficult. Because you're going back to a kind of self-annihilation.
I mean, we can't be free as people until we are free as individuals.
We can't be free as individuals as long as we're addicted or fearful of or enmeshed in superstition, bigotry, culture, religion, fantasy, statism.
And... So that's why I talk about this distinction, right?
So when you go back to...
When you recognize the false self, then you go back to its origins, right?
Because you want to overthrow it.
You want to regain a simple and direct contact with the reason and reality.
But to go back is to go back to a time of betrayal and attack.
To go back to that moment at the table with the invisible apple.
When you... Are told things that are false.
And you know what will happen if you don't believe them or if you question them.
You will be attacked. And we're biologically programmed to not do that.
Because to do that is to die.
Again, I'm not saying children get killed if they question Jesus.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that genetically we don't take that chance.
Nature has... We did out those who were willing to take that chance.
Right. So...
Sorry, Dawkins talks about this too.
People who questioned their parents were weeded out.
Children who questioned their parents or acted against their wishes in many ways would be weeded out because the parents would say, don't eat the red berries because they're poisonous.
Kids that didn't listen would die, right?
But there are other things that this power is less benevolently or beneficently used for.
And so, again, this is all just my thoughts, my experience, nothing true in it, right?
I mean, this is just a way of looking at it.
It's my way of looking at it, again.
It may mean absolutely nothing to you, but my experience was that resurrection requires burial.
wrote in a poem when I was 19 or 20, I believe that we must bury ourselves in order to become resurrected I mean that is a mere metaphor It doesn't mean anything.
But if it's true...
Human beings are either naturally drawn towards irrationality and hate reason and evidence, which explains the world as it stands and as it stood for all of history.
And it stands better now than it ever did before in history.
But... Either human beings are naturally drawn to irrationality, superstition, conformity, anger, attack, immaturity, or it's inflicted.
And I believe it's inflicted.
I really do. I really do.
And we can go into more of the evidence behind that another time, perhaps.
But there's really strong evidence that it is.
And... If that is the case, then we have to figure out why.
And this is sort of one explanation as to why people end up this way, right?
And why they don't start this way, but why it's inflicted upon them.
Human beings to me are naturally reasonable and evidence-based and sense-based.
So, when it comes to looking And what happens when we overturn the false self?
Well, it's ripping a huge band-aid off an open wound.
This goes back to the wound as to why we would choose irrational conformity over the simplicity and clarity of reason and evidence, which is what we're born with.
No Cartesian demon doubts with Isabella about breast milk, right?
It is what it is.
Object constancy she's getting, for sure.
Seven months now. She knows all of this stuff.
It's natural. It's empirical.
Why would we give it up?
Why would we give up that which is natural to us?
When she's hungry, she cries for mommy or daddy.
She doesn't get on her knees and pray for manna from heaven.
She knows the simple cause and effect of reality.
The simple, clear, direct, empirical, material reality she lives in.
Not a lot of complication and confusion.
If we mime her giving food, she doesn't feel full.
Not that we have, but if we did, right?
So why would we give up on that which is so natural to us?
Well, because we fear death or ostracism, death or rejection or banishment.
Which is another reason why I know the DRO theory will work so well.
Banishment is... We're programmed to avoid banishment as species, right?
That's why it'll work so well.
topic for another time well a topic we've already done and so
When we go back and we sort of undo the scar tissue or we look at the scar tissue of the false self, then we face the emotions that provoked the false self to begin with, which is fear, a fear of dying or being ostracized.
And that's why it feels like dying, because it is a fear of death that originally provoked this kind of crazy conformity.
Crazy with regards to reality, not with regards to survival, right?
Crazy with regards to reality, not with regards to survival.
This is the important distinction.
The false self is a very necessary aspect of human survival.
Imagine, for those who had brutal and irrational parents, imagine if you hadn't been able to conform.
So it's not an enemy of life or anything.
It is, okay, well, fuck, we live in water, so we'll grow gills, right?
It's adaptive. It's just that we don't want to adapt to that when we don't have to, right?
So when we become adults and we can have voluntary relations, then we don't want to have that crazy, fearful adaptation, right?
And I'm not, I mean, obviously I'm talking about people who have abusive families, but it happens in school, even if you didn't have an abusive family.
It happens in school, it happens sometimes in your peer group, it happens lots of places.
Sports teams.
And so it really does feel like dying to go back and uproot the false self.
It causes a re-experiencing of the emotions which led rise to dissociated emotions.
Crazed, fearful Stockholm Syndrome conformity.
Hello, darling. Here, appeasement.
Or as we call it in our household, accusement.
Have my keys, darling. So, that's why I talk about it feeling like a kind of death.
And, you know, God, we'd hope it would be a very hard thing.
Damn, we'd hope that it would be a very hard thing to recover the simplicity of reason and evidence from the chaos of fearful and bullied conformity.
Because damn on, damn on toast, if it wasn't a really hard thing, would it make any sense whatsoever?
2,500 years after Socrates, we were still fighting the same goddamn battle.
Of course it's an incredibly tough thing to do.
We should fall on our knees and thank the great God of logic, reason and evidence, the Holy Trinity, that it should be so damn hard.
Because if it was really easy and it hadn't been done for two and a half centuries, there'd be no hope.
There'll be no hope, right? It has to be this hard.
It has to be this hard.
Otherwise, it would make no sense as to why we still live in an irrational world and universe and why it's taken so many thousands of years to get the first faint glimmerings of reason and evidence as common coinage in the mental toolbox of mankind.
So it is to my eternal relief that it is so hard.
To be simply reasonable and virtuous.
And why it is so emotionally difficult to go back and take that other fork in the road, away from conformity, towards reason.
The degree of difficulty is the degree of hope for the future.
In harshness there is massive optimism.
In the despair of the moment, there is massive optimism for the future of the species.
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