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July 29, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:48
1421 Two Parties, One Insight

I woke up thinking about two parties I gave 20 years ago...

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Hey everybody, it's Steph. It is Saturday, the 25th of July, I think, and I'm out for a walk with Darebelly Cakes, and as you might be able to hear, it's raining quite a bit.
She is in a nice snuggly, and we have a nice umbrella, and we are going to walk in the woods a little, because Daddy It has a mission sense that basic reality like torrential downpours cannot seem to overturn, for better or for worse.
So this is some reminiscences that I hope will be of use to you.
I don't know about you, but I have, on occasion, Though I certainly would not say continually, or maybe not even that often.
But there certainly are occasions upon which I have to fight a rather virulent dislike of the world.
And I will talk about something that popped into my mind.
It wasn't last night, but the night before.
I fell asleep relatively easily.
I woke up at like 3. I fell asleep around 12.30 or 1.
I woke around 3.00.
And I wasn't particularly stressed, or that I can recall.
But I couldn't get back to sleep.
And... The mind is a strange and wondrous place to be one of the inhabitants in.
Because what was going through my mind was...
Things that I have not thought of, yea, in a quarter century or so.
And... It was two parties that I held that were going through my mind the other night when I couldn't sleep, and I couldn't figure out why.
Why, why, why, why, why was I thinking about these two parties that I held?
And one of them was when I was 16, I think.
I was in high school.
And this is after my mother had moved to BC, and my brother and I were, you know, struggling to make it as...
A solo wolf children, Lord of the Flies situation.
And we both had a couple of jobs with roommates and all that kind of, and we're making it work.
And... I had a party!
And that wasn't a big one for having parties, but I did have a party, and it was very well attended.
And... The cops came by like three times, because I guess people in the apartment building called the cops.
Now, there were never any drugs at my parties that I can recall, and there was some alcohol, but not a huge amount.
And... The music, I was always, you know, concerned about.
I mean, you know, concerned about the neighbors sort of thing.
Not concerned just about the neighbors calling the cops, but, you know, people got to get up in the morning and so on, so I kept the music pretty quiet.
But I guess it was just the laughter and general sounds of merriment and so on.
And the cops came by three times.
And each time...
The first two times, they knocked on the door and said, keep it down.
The third time, they came back.
And this was, like, before 11.30 at night, for sure.
They came back. And actually, they didn't knock on the door.
I opened the door to say goodbye to someone.
And there's a cop standing there in the hallway.
And he said, you know, we're getting deluged with noise complaints.
But I'm standing here and...
Doesn't seem loud to me, so I wasn't even going to knock, he said, which I thought was relatively decent of him.
And I couldn't figure out why I was thinking about this party from, like, 25 years ago.
And I didn't particularly enjoy hosting parties, because when you're in an apartment, there's always this concern about noise and damage and so on, right?
So... But I did it, right?
Because you go to parties, you go to host parties, right?
That's the deal. And I sort of did it.
I enjoyed the hospitality side of it, I just didn't enjoy the potential legal side of it, I suppose.
So, another time, a couple of years later, I had a party.
I played Dr.
Treves in The Elephant Man on stage, and...
An amateur production.
And I held the cast party at the apartment I was sharing with a friend of mine who was a biology major.
And again, like twice the cops came by and it wasn't really that loud, but people calling the cops and so on, right?
And I kept thinking to myself, why, oh why, oh why would I be...
I'd be thinking about these parties from those decades ago.
What kind of sense does that make?
And I think after some tossing and turning, I did finally figure it out.
And maybe you've had a similar experience, I don't know.
And it came with a sort of flash of anger for me.
And I'll tell you the thoughts, you know, these are just my thoughts about it.
I'll tell you my thoughts about it and hopefully they'll make some sense to you and this isn't just a completely personal bugaboo that occurred just for me.
What do you think of the range we dumped?
It really is coming down. I do have an umbrella.
We are not drowning.
So and this is the first time she's really been out in hard rain so I'm really enjoying her excitement.
So this is why I think I was thinking about And I'll just talk about the first party, right?
So, this is an apartment that I lived in from when I was 11 until I went to go and work up in northern Ontario as this gold panner dude.
And I came back because I'd had three months in the bush and one month in town.
Then I would come back and sort of sleep on the floor.
On some cushions when I was sort of back, because my brother was still renting the place.
I mean, when I was 11, I was still, you know, getting screamed at and beaten up by my mom.
And then, when I was...
I swear, if anybody ever checks the chronology, they're going to find lots of discrepancies, but this is to my best recollection.
The memory is part theater and part fact, and I think there's enough facts here to make it worthwhile.
I know all of this stuff happened, but I can't honestly remember the chronology.
It's all a bit of a dissociated blur at the time.
It was during this time that my mother began to no longer be able to hold a job, and then she stayed in bed for a week or two at a time, and I just had to bring her tea and try and get her to eat something and go back to school, and we started to get the eviction notices, and I got my first job, all this kind of stuff, right? Wow, that is some low branches.
I guess they're heavy with the rain.
Well, let's see.
Maybe we can make our way through.
Yes, we can. Good girl.
Action child. So, there was, you know, screamings and violence and beatings and so on going on in this very apartment for years.
Oh, darling, you can't have the umbrella.
I'm so sorry. Actually, you can hold the handle.
You can hold the handle.
But you cannot eat it.
I'd give you the keys, but it's too loud to hear if you drop them, and we do not want to drop them in the woods and then go back to the car.
So, the flash of anger occurred for me when I thought the following.
I thought, holy shit!
So my neighbors, the neighbors in the apartment building, never once called the police When they heard a child being assaulted and beaten up and screamed at and things smashing and all of those things,
right? When they never heard an obviously deranged and violent woman terrorizing a child, which was a lot louder, I can guarantee you, than any party that I had a few years later.
But they heard all of this And they did not call the police.
Not once. Not once.
Oh, but one night, you see, when they hear the sounds of laughter and music coming from said apartment, the police department is deluged with calls about the bad stuff occurring in said apartment.
Do you know how mind-blowing that is for me?
Do you know just how mind-blowing that is for me?
And how, when you think about things like that, it's just so hard not to, you know, virulently despise the world.
Eh, not the world.
The people in it. And that's what I was thinking about.
And I've been sort of turning this over in my mind, and I have some thoughts about it that hopefully are useful.
But, you know, let me know if you've had situations like this in your life where nobody picks up the goddamn phone to protect you from a violent person, abuser, parent.
But, boy, you have some laughter and some fun and some friends over, and suddenly, you know, the entire squadron of cops is falling down around your neck.
And I mean, I thought, well, of course they could hear, right?
It was much louder. The aggression against me as a child was much louder than a party, for sure.
But nobody called the cops, right?
I said, well, maybe they were afraid of my mom, which I can understand, right?
She was a vengeful person who could nurse a grudge until it grew a beard, right?
If that were the case, they could have called anonymously and nobody would have known and all this kind of stuff, right?
You understand that aspect of things.
And for sure, they were comfortable calling the cops when they heard the sounds of a party, just not when they heard the sounds of sort of abuse.
And when I go back in my mind, it's that line from the Tragically Hip song, My baby, she don't know me when I'm thinking about those years.
When I go back in my mind to those years, and I try to sort of picture myself or any other sort of reasonable moral person, In that sort of situation, environment, the behavior of the adults is just so incomprehensible to me.
It's so incomprehensible to me.
The number of adults who directly knew that my brother and I were living without any parental supervision, you know, at a relatively tender age, was literally in the dozens.
Literally in the dozens. Now, you could say, well, but, you know, maybe these were sort of low-rent people, it was a rent-controlled apartment, and so, you know, maybe these people were, I don't know, you could say not quality because they were poor or whatever.
I wouldn't argue that in particular, but even if you did...
There were certainly many people...
I didn't just have friends among the poor people.
There were middle-class, upper-middle-class kids that I knew whose parents were perfectly aware of the home situation.
So I was sort of thinking, well, if there were some kids on my street, or young men, you could say, on my street who, you know, who I knew there were no parents and they were, you know, struggling to make ends meet...
I mean...
You always have this thought of this fantasy, right?
I guess it's a fantasy. Maybe it's not now.
But you have this thought of this fantasy, right, that...
that people are going to kind of get together.
You know, spontaneous organization of charity for the Lost Boys in Tom and Echo, which is the name of the apartment building.
You sort of have this thought that there's going to be this, you know, people are going to bring you some food or get you in touch with social services or, you know, just make sure...
That you're doing okay.
You're getting by. You know, you've got food, right?
I mean, my mom would leave us to take off to various places.
She had personal ads in newspapers pre-internet, right?
She would take off to go.
She went to Houston for two weeks and left us with like 30 bucks or something like that.
We ran out of money in the first couple of days.
We were young. We had to hang out at friends' places hoping to be invited for dinner.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, right?
But there are no parents!
Right? And everybody knew this!
And I just think, good lord, if I knew something like that was going on in my neighborhood, I can't imagine not doing anything.
Like I just...
That is a huge spider on my head.
Alright, sorry. I simply can't imagine not doing anything.
Like, what are people thinking?
And this, of course, is why the welfare state, to me, is just a complete lie, because if people don't care about the immediate poor, a helpless independent, then the idea that they somehow support the abstract welfare state and so on is nonsense, right?
And... So it wasn't just a matter of, you know, poor people equals bullies equals...
Let's head back, babycakes, just in case you're getting a little muggy.
Yeah. You okay, sweetness?
It's a little muggy.
It's Florida weather.
Yeah, babycakes.
Yeah.
Sorry, I went a little bit too far, I think.
So I can't process that, like how that can go unnoticed.
Why people wouldn't call, right?
I mean, nobody ever even asked us how we were doing or what was going on or what was the status at home or where our mother was or whether we had food or whether we got to see a dentist or whether we had any money or how the rent was being paid or, you know, just basic human consideration slash compassion for, you know, two boys slash young men dealing with what was obviously an incredibly difficult situation.
I say, well, but people didn't, maybe they didn't know, but they knew enough to call the cops when their interests were negatively affected, right?
When they heard laughter and music coming from the place, then they called the cops, right?
Many, many of them called the cops, but when they heard a child being beaten and yelled at and things thrown, then they didn't call.
I can't process that.
I just have such an enormous difficulty.
And I try not to dissolve just into loathsome hatred to the planet.
I think that's not a reasonable response.
I can certainly feel it emotionally, but I don't think that's far enough to go.
And certainly it is deplorable for people to act it that way, but still not enough.
Another reason I'm not willing to blame the poor is, of course, when I would go to visit my mother after she was institutionalized, I mean, everybody at the mental institution, which is, you know, a state-run agency with close ties to social services and student welfare and emancipation lawyers and so on, right? All of whom could have actually helped us to deal with this situation in a more proactive and positive way.
Well, I mean, they knew she had kids.
They knew there were no other relatives around.
They knew the father was not around, because they do an interview, I'm sure, when, right?
Get medical records and so on.
So they knew that there were no relatives around to speak of.
They knew that she had kids, and she was in there for some months in the institution, some weeks or months.
It feels like months, but I can't be sure, of course, it's so long ago.
And it was a strange enough time that...
My memory is not precise.
My memory tends to be precise around moments, but I can remember the uniforms, I can remember the color of the walls, I can remember playing ping-pong while waiting for my mother with a woman who was extraordinarily stressed by me beating her at ping-pong, and I remember the color of her hair and shape of her face, but I don't remember the length of time.
That's something that is not a key aspect of my memory.
But they all knew that, and of course my doctor knew that, because he also treated my mother, and I think he was the one who got her institutionalized or committed.
And the doctor did not do anything, and the social services didn't do anything, and the psychiatrists at the hospital didn't do anything, or the social workers, or the psychologists, or anybody else, for that matter.
So it wasn't just...
You know, poor people who didn't call because it was low rent.
It wasn't public housing, but it was subsidized.
Rent controlled, sorry. Not subsidized, but rent controlled.
So it wasn't just people who didn't know any better, who didn't know blah blah blah blah blah, right?
And they certainly knew enough to call the cops when they found the noise level of happiness unpleasant for them.
But the noise level of unhappiness prompted no such intervention for years.
Have one party and everybody calls the cops, right?
So, I'm sort of trying to differentiate this, right?
Because for sure, it's different here, right?
And I'm not saying it's the only place where it's different, but it certainly is different here, in that when people talk about their suffering, I mean, there is a real outpouring of warmth and empathy and generosity and so on, and it really is a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful thing to see.
Sorry. Sorry about your ears.
It's not the most technically cogent, or perhaps even emotionally cogent podcast, but I still wanted to talk about it.
So, it's amazing.
I sat here, it's like 2pm or whatever.
It literally looks like it's 7 or 8pm.
It's so overcast and raining.
So, here it's different, right?
And I was sort of thinking, well, what is the thing?
And... As a parent, I can certainly see that Isabella is born, you know, gentle and affectionate and warm and so on, right?
I mean, she's not caring in a way, right, because she's still so young, but definitely loves to be held and is affectionate and so on, and I think that that will be a good basis for empathy.
So, I'll just put out some other thoughts.
I'm not saying any of this is proven, but there is some thoughts that I had about it, and I want to sort of get them down before they evaporated in my post-40 brain.
But, um...
I don't think you can have ethics without empathy.
I don't think that you can have ethics without empathy.
Empathy doesn't always mean sympathy, as I've talked about before.
But you can't have ethics without empathy.
You can't have empathy without self-knowledge.
You certainly can't have empathy if you're dissociated through prior trauma.
You can only then have manipulation and projection and the invention of standards for the efficacy of the moment without any principles that you will surrender to.
Once you surrender to trauma, you cannot surrender to principles and you lose control over your life thereby.
A guy running away from the bear Can't figure out which way is north and go that way, right?
He's just trying to escape, right?
So you can't have a straight-line principled approach to life if you're just running away from yourself and your history and your traumas and so on, right?
And this is why if people do bring up personal history issues that are getting in the way of their virtue, I say, yay, right?
Of course, no therapist, no psychologist, and don't do any of that stuff.
But I think the cause and effect, philosophical feedback, is really essential to help people get on the road to self-knowledge, right?
Self-knowledge is the first commandment.
Know thyself is the first commandment of Socrates 2,500 years ago.
It's as relevant now. You can't be good without empathy, and you can't have empathy without empathy for yourself.
You can't have empathy for others without empathy for yourself.
And all of that requires Either a non-traumatic history or the processing and overcoming of trauma in your history so that you can feel rich and warm and deeply within and for yourself and therefore you can feel universality, you can have principles, you can recognize that we all have feelings and preferences and there's a common humanity that comes out of self-empathy and a recognition of the depth of others.
And that's why you can't be rational until you know yourself.
You can't have principles until you truly understand yourself and your own history and can have overcome the emotional barriers that get in the way of reason and evidence.
Again, that's not something I do here, but I point out these things and send people off to people who are trained to help.
I was thinking that there are two kinds of people in the world, to use a very broad categorization.
Let's just make sure no spiders on the baby.
Excellent. We're almost back at the car.
There are those who will work to reawaken their humanity and whether that humanity is diminished by family or culture or priest or school or what, for most people it seems to be pretty badly cracked if not shattered.
And there are those people who will do the work to recover their own humanity and their own depth and their own empathy and their own capacity for sympathy and deep feeling.
And those people can become wise.
Wisdom is empathy and universality, in my humble opinion.
Because you can have universality without empathy.
Like 2 plus 2 is 4, theory of relativity.
It's universal, but there's no empathy in it.
You can have empathy without universality, which is sympathy for people, but without the moral clarity of the principles that examine and condemn the abuses that so often get people into that state.
But when you put empathy plus universality, then you get a little thing I call UPB, right?
And people who have trouble with these things have trouble with UPB, in my experience.
So, and that's why I focus so much on self-knowledge, right?
Or I should say with the participation of the listeners, right?
Because it's what people want to talk about is the barriers to self-empathy, the barriers to self-knowledge which allows you to tunnel through the sky tissue of prior traumas to the broad and high mountains of universality of principle and universality of empathy.
Because without empathy, you can't recognize the universality of the human condition, and then the universal principles of philosophy won't really mean that much to you.
I mean, they may mean something in an abstract way.
But I think this is why UPP is a kind of click thing that people get, right?
Once you get it, you won't lose it, but it really feels like running in circles before you get it.
And I would say that's because of the problems that we all have with things like empathy and The universality of emotional experience and connectivity with others.
So, I actually did not end up getting back to bed after 3 o'clock in the morning.
I kind of got up and paced and thought and so on, right?
And I hope that that's been sort of useful and it's just amazing to me how this stuff sort of comes to my brain, right?
I mean, I just get to hear these podcasts first in a way, right?
But why I would sort of wake up In the middle of the night and think about two parties I've literally given no thought to for a quarter century, why I would end up thinking about these two parties, what they revealed about the coldness of people who don't work on reawakening their own empathy.
And because they don't have empathy and they don't have principles, they end up being manipulative and cold and all that kind of stuff, which seems to be a hell of a lot, if not the damn majority of the population.
And that the work that we're doing to reignite the deep fires of our own hearts is such essential work.
It's such essential work.
The problem with people, with the world, is not that people don't accept principles, but they don't feel them all the way to their marrow spreading deeply within themselves and to the marrow hearts and minds of others.
And if The problem of ethics is a problem fundamentally of self-empathy because through self-empathy we get empathy through others.
We connect those two, we get the universality of principles.
If the fundamental problem is self-empathy, then the lack of self-empathy arises from trauma because it certainly is not natural to the species.
Isabella is very self-empathetic.
She's born that way.
Ten days of being born, when we put her into a car seat too tight, she told us in no uncertain terms that she felt bad and we needed to fix it, and we did.
Then, of course, we're going to face a lot of resistance when we start talking about self-empathy and universality and self-knowledge and all of that kind of stuff.
It's going to provoke a lot of hostility because when you start talking to people about the necessity of self-knowledge and self-empathy, You start to push them, not you, but logic, starts to push them up against whatever it was in their own histories that diminished or shattered their self-empathy, which is painful and scary to deal with.
And as with, I think, Wendy and Sally in RTR, a lot of people will then view the aggression as coming from you and will react in a, it could be a sort of nasty way, because The whole, in most of our hearts caused by prior trauma, to look at that is a very scary thing to do.
It's a very scary thing to do.
Everybody's very intelligent, everybody's a genius, and people get it very quickly.
They either react with a kind of fearful excitement, which was certainly my experience when I began to understand this stuff to begin with, or they go the other way.
So I think it should not be entirely shocking that there's, you know, some hostility floating around and so on, right?
That's sort of inevitable.
But I hope that that gives you some sense of why it's so important to have empathy for yourself, to have self-knowledge.
To start not with a knowledge of ethics, but with a knowledge of your own history and your own self and your own thoughts and your own feelings.
Because without that, We really can only gain an arid and empty intellectual understanding of principles.
And we don't, I think, fundamentally feel them deep down, which is where they have the most power in the world.
Thank you so much for listening. I hope you're having a wonderful week.
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