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Aug. 3, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:11
1428 The Agony of Loneliness - A Conversation

Ice shrouds solitude...

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Hello. Hello.
Hello. How's it going?
Okay, yes. How's the sound?
The sound is not too bad.
Not too bad at all. Okay.
So, what can I do for you?
You said that you were feeling isolated, lonely, if I remember.
Do you want to read what you... Wrote to me, or do you want to just talk about it?
I could read a part, I guess.
Let me just open it up. Yes, I'll read.
It's almost a year since my degree.
I've been living alone in a room and had little human contact.
I had started a major at college but quit because I was having too much trouble due to depression and exhaustion.
Both symptoms of depression and tiredness have diminished over the course of the past half year I've been in therapy.
And I've been having a small part-time job of delivering mail.
Currently, I think I have the energy and desire to do more with my life, to go back to school, get involved in the FDR community, make some real-life friends at possible, etc.
However, I feel strong sadness, anger and some fear when considering this.
I think resentment together with some bitterness or skepticism are predominant.
The thoughts that go along with this is that people are trustworthy or worthy of my time presence and effort.
Right, right.
And of course you know I'm no therapist, but I thought that some philosophical feedback might be useful.
Have you had opportunity maybe through school or through other means to speak to a counselor or a therapist?
Yes, I've been in therapy for half year now.
And how's that been going?
It's been going good in the sense of, well, as you know, I come from a violent household.
You've spoken to my brother.
Yes. And because of that I had really a lot of anxiety and trouble getting the normal things in life going and therapy has been helpful in the sense that it has lowered the anxiety a lot.
I feel more confident in taking initiative and getting things done.
But I have emotional resistance to start doing more.
I've been isolating myself from other people.
In the city that I live now, I don't know anyone and I really don't have any, not many friends left.
I know some people online and well, that's not much and I wanted to get more involved in the FDR community but It hasn't really come off it.
I just feel some emotional resistance to those things that I think I really want to do.
Right. And what are the things that you really want to do?
You mentioned that you were in school and that you stopped that for a while because you were feeling too many symptoms of depression.
Is that right? Yes.
So what are the things that you really want to do?
I would like to start another major again in college.
I'm not yet very sure what I'd like to do because before that I was studying philosophy and because of FDR I dropped out there as well.
It would be ideal if in the future there's something that I could be doing with philosophy but at the moment I don't know what and what I'd like to, if I get back in school, to learn some skills and things that might be helpful for that.
And the other thing is, well, I think participating on FDR boards because it's the only kind of philosophical community that I know of.
It's hard to just meet people who are interested in philosophy.
So that's something I'd like to do as well.
Sure, sure. Okay.
Now, can you tell me...
I mean, I'm happy to ask questions.
I'm also happy to listen.
I do have some questions, though.
If you have more that you wanted to talk about, I'm certainly happy to listen.
No, questions would be okay.
Okay. In your culture...
I mean, you're over in the Scandinavian side of things, as far as I understand it.
So, in your culture, to what degree...
Is there sympathy towards people who went through the kind of violence that you went through as a child?
And the reason I ask that is that if I suffered from leukemia as a child, and I met someone, and let's say I suffered for many years, And that obviously would be a defining characteristic of who I had become, right? It would not define who I had become, but it would be a defining characteristic or influence over who I became.
And so when I met someone new, I'm not saying that I would talk about that childhood illness right away, but as I got to know that person, it would be weird to To not talk about it, right? If they wanted to get to know who I am, then that would be a key part of my history, that I had battled this illness for many years as a child.
Does that make sense?
Sure. And so if I did start dating or meet someone who I was interested in becoming friends with, Then I would bring that up.
Now, of course, if I brought up, you know, well, one of the things, you know, I battled this illness for many years as a child, which had this and this effect on me, I think just about everyone would show real sympathy for that, right?
Yes. Right?
Oh, that was terrible. My gosh.
I mean, what happened and how did it work and how did you feel?
And it would be...
It would be...
There would be an enormous amount of solicitude and sympathy and kindness over that, right?
Sure. Now, the reason that I'm bringing that up is that things are very different when we talk about childhood violence, right?
Mm-hmm. So, what's your culture's attitude or what do you think will happen if you start to get to know someone and then you talk about or bring up or mention the violence you experienced as a child, which had a very large impact on shaping who you are?
What do you think the reaction would be?
The average person, I think, they would not want to know it.
Right, so what do you think would happen if you brought that up?
I think they would slowly shy away from me.
Go on, and why do you think so?
Because I do think they would want to talk more about that or just know consciously that they have a person before them who suffered these things.
Sorry, could you just say that last part again?
That they don't want consciously to have someone in front of them that they know of who has suffered these things.
Why do you think? I mean, I'm not saying you're wrong.
I actually quite agree with you, but I want to make sure that I understand what your thinking is about this.
Because I think that has something to do, in my opinion, right?
It has something to do with your isolation.
Why do you think they would not want to know someone who would experience these things?
It might make them think about their own parents or their own upbringing or culture.
Well, if I tell them that I wasn't helped by people who know I was in trouble, then that would also make them feel less comfortable about the culture that they live in.
Right, right.
I mean, I agree with you, which doesn't mean that it's true.
It just means that we happen to agree.
And I'd like to add one other thing as well, which I think might be of interest to you, about why people might shy away from someone who talked about these issues.
I don't know anyone who looks in the mirror and says, I lack empathy, I'm not as kind as I think I am, and all that kind of stuff.
People generally will think that they're nice and kind and caring and so on, right?
And it's always struck me as very strange, very, very strange, even from when I was a kid.
That if I were attacked by some bacteria or some virus or if my flesh turned against me in some cancerous or leukemia style way that people would have a great deal of sympathy for what I had experienced as a child.
In other words, if I were attacked by bacteria or a virus or my own cells there would be a great deal of sympathy.
However, If I'm attacked by my family, if I'm attacked not by bacteria but by a human being, for some reason people's sympathy reverses, right? And rather than showing sympathy, which to me would be the only logical response, they would show a great deal of tension or hostility or coldness or withdrawal or something like that, right?
Yes. And it's the strangest thing in the world.
And, you know, when I started FDR, I really didn't think that this was going to be controversial.
I genuinely didn't think that it was going to be controversial.
I must say, ah, the stuff that happened to me was like, you know, 30, 25 or 30 years ago and 40 years ago, 35 years ago.
So, you know, things have changed or whatever, right?
Yeah. But, and if I'd been, you know, I lived in Africa briefly, if I had been attacked by a lion, or if I'd been surfing and been bitten by a shark, people would have a great deal of sympathy for me.
But for some reason, if you're attacked by a human being as a child, or if you're exposed to human violence as a child, People just completely freak out.
And they don't show the basic empathy.
Not everyone, but most people.
They don't show the basic empathy that you would reasonably expect.
In fact, I would say that if somebody was...
You know, was sick from a virus or something like that as a kid for many years that you would have a great deal of sympathy but if somebody was actually attacked by a parent or exposed to violence from a parent for many years I would think you would have a lot more sympathy because That's not inevitable.
There's a human choice in that on the part of the parent, right?
Assuming the parent isn't just crazy-ass schizophrenic or whatever, right?
But you would think that people would have much more sympathy to the victims of human violence than they would even for the victims of accidental medical ailments, right?
But they don't.
And I think you're right when people look at...
They may look at their own history.
They may look at their own culture.
But I think another thing that's really important is that they don't want to see themselves in that light.
Because everybody says, well, I'm a nice person, I'm a good person, and so on.
But if they end up not showing sympathy towards feeling cold or irritated or angry or whatever, Towards someone who had experienced violence from people as a child.
I think it holds up a mirror to their own coldness, to their own, where their heart is sort of dead.
And I think that they really, they're shying away from the knowledge about themselves, the lack of compassion and empathy that they have to the greatest victims in the world.
The greatest victims in the world are the victims, are the child victims of adult violence or abuse.
Because that's a moral choice that the parents are making rather than, you know, I had some genetic defect which has caused some ailment in me, right?
I mean, that's a terrible and horrifying tragedy.
Some kid gets leukemia. It's hideous.
It's horrible. And we have great sympathy for that child.
But it just seems to me logical that we should have much more sympathy Towards children who've been exposed to a large amount of violence rather than treating them like lepers.
And when you treat a victim of child violence or a child victim of adult violence like a leper, it's hard to look at yourself in the mirror and think of yourself as...
You know, like even a basically good person, if that makes any sense?
because you're kind of withholding sympathy and moral clarity from someone who desperately needs it, right?
Does that make any sense?
Yes, it does. And so, it's not that they don't want to talk to you, it's that they don't want to see who they are when they're talking to a victim of violence.
I mean, it's hard not to take it personally, right?
But violence against another human being is almost never, ever personal, right?
The violence that you experienced as a child, well, it wasn't directed against you, as in you.
And that's impossible, right?
Because if we say, I just, I mean, let's talk about myself, right?
I'm not going to tell you your experience, but I'll share with you what I've figured out about my own experience.
That the violence that was perpetrated against me at home and in school, I had a boarding school where caning was the discipline method, the violence that was perpetrated against me as a child was not personal to the violence that was perpetrated against me as a child was not personal to me in any And the reason that I know that is that that's axiomatic.
It's almost by definition.
Because violence is the act of erasing another human being.
It is an act of dominance.
It arises from an unbearable tension, a contradiction within the thinking, the ethics, the self-image, the experience and the actions.
All these things contradict each other.
And you end up acting against your values or having the impulse to.
The tension grows and you feel like you're losing control.
And then you try to regain control by attacking a helpless human being.
It's pitiful. It's contemptible.
It's cowardly. It's base.
It's vile. It's evil.
And it's violence.
And by definition, violence is impersonal.
Why? Because if the violence...
If somebody has an impulse towards violence towards me, then, by definition, they lack empathy towards me.
In other words, it can never be about me, because if it's about me, they have empathy towards me, or some understanding of who I am, and that's the antidote to violence, right?
Empathy is the opposite.
In order to attack someone in the flesh, we have to kill them in our mind already, and we have to view them as an object rather than as a human being.
Because if we genuinely experienced, let's say if we aggress against children, if we genuinely experience that child's terror and rage and helplessness and frustration, Then we wouldn't do it in the first place, right? Violence is always impersonal.
It's never about the person that you're aggressing against.
And one of the things that can be hard when you come from a history of violence is the feeling that it was about you at all.
About you as an individual, about you as a person at all.
And the way that I try to work through this, and I know I'm talking a lot, and I'll shut up in a minute or two, but these are just sort of thoughts that I think might be helpful in terms of, right, there's a kind of horrible black chasm moat that is carved around victims of violence, which I think you are experiencing, and I think these thoughts may help.
But it is really, really important to recognize that the violence that you experienced as a child was not about you.
I mean, of course your parents would say, it's about you, right?
Like, you know, my mom would say to me, I'm, you know, in one way or another she'd say, I'm hitting you because you left a glass of water on the table and now there's a little white ring where the condensation...
Hit the lacquer, right?
So she'd say, well, I'm hitting you because of this.
But then, of course, other times I would do something which would be, quote, even worse, and I wouldn't get hit at all.
And so...
The violence is not about you.
It never was, according to the way that I look at it.
Because if there was anything about you in the interaction...
Then the violence would not have occurred, because empathy would have been present.
And of course, it wasn't just me that my mother was violent towards.
She was violent towards my brother, she was violent towards other people, whoever.
And then she was, you know, craven and bootlicking with people who had power, right?
What Churchill said about the Germans, they're either at your feet or at your throat.
There's nothing in between, right?
And so what I found to be very helpful in terms of overcoming loneliness or solitude or the feeling of being like a social leper because of my history with violence was to recognize that the violence or the abuse, it had nothing to do with me.
You could have exchanged me with any other person.
Child, and the results would have been the same, right?
And would you say that would be true with your family, that if it had been not you, but some other girl, that things would have been any different at all?
No, I don't think so.
Right. Right.
And I think that's really important, that it just, it happened at you, you could say it happened to you, But it didn't happen because of you.
Right? I mean, it's the difference between some guy who chain smokes who gets lung cancer and some guy who just gets one of those rare lung cancers that have nothing to do with smoking or any other kind of problem that way.
Right? One person is causal and the other person is not.
And our parents...
Those abusive parents, if we had them, always wanted us to believe that we were the cause of their violence and abuse.
But it's not true.
Because then the violence that we have experienced is no longer a guilty secret.
Because I think other people have the desire to recoil from stories of childhood violence because they don't want to see, as you say, their culture, maybe their own history and their own coldness in this matter.
But it has a lot to do with how we bring it up.
Right? So, I mean, I've mentioned this before, but when I first met Christina and she asked me, I think, on her second date about my family, I said, man...
I had some really bad luck in the family I got born into.
I was not a lucky child with the family I was born into.
Does that sort of make any sense?
That's a very different way of looking at and experiencing childhood abuse than what most people generally experience or communicate it about.
Does that make any sense?
It does. When I think of it, At first, when I was realizing the situation that I was in, there were a few persons I could, let's say, complain to.
I was presenting it as something very personal and perhaps something I was compliant in or I had certain guilt in it.
And right now, there's just more distance and if I bring it up, it's usually more Well, as you said, that I had bad luck with my parents and that sort of just happened to me.
Right, so if someone does ask you or if the topic comes up, how do you explain or how do you bring up your childhood experiences in this area?
People don't ask me.
If you bring it up, like if somebody says, you know, well, tell me what your life is like, or whatever it is that people will talk about, how do you bring that topic up, or the topic of the violence you experienced up?
I would say that...
That I had pretty difficult parents and that it was more because of their own histories and that my mother was mentally not very stable and my father has some complications as well and that there was some emotional, physical violence but when I realized I could get out of there, I just did.
And how do you feel when you say that to someone?
What is your emotional experience of saying that?
A bit sad.
Go on. It's just...
Well, it's just an unpleasant topic, and for me, just to think that I come from this place, it's just a bit sad.
But I don't think there's much more to that than just that.
Okay.
Now, you said, if I remember rightly, you said, I had some quite difficult parents.
Yeah.
Now, that doesn't strike me as a very accurate statement.
I could be wrong, right?
It's just the way that it strikes me.
So, you know, take it with all the grains of salt of the world.
But that doesn't strike me as a very accurate statement.
You have a dangerous balance?
Well, and let me throw out some possibilities, right, of what might be wrong with the statement or what might not be complete about the statement.
So, I used to be a cross-country runner, and when I was a cross-country runner, if it rained a lot, the course would be very difficult, right?
But there was no moral element there and the course wasn't attacking me, right?
It would just suck my shoes off from time to time, right?
So I think we want to have a phrase that is specific to the situation and can't really as easily be applied to other things.
So if you say very difficult, parents, then very difficult could be applied to other things, you know, like advanced calculus or quantum physics or doing the splits or something like that, right?
Tantric yoga, you know, whatever.
These are things that are very difficult, but there's no moral element in it, right?
So I don't think that's particularly accurate.
And when you say very dangerous, well, a lion is very dangerous, right?
I mean, too much sunlight can be very dangerous if you don't wear sunscreen, right?
Skateboarding can be dangerous.
Skiing can be very dangerous if you're not careful, right?
But none of these have any moral elements, right?
Right. And the reason that I'm bringing this up is that what I have found, and again, this may just be me, but what I have found is that if I avoid something in a topic, it is much more likely that the other person is going to take my cue and avoid it as well.
If I'm not 100% clear, that doesn't mean right.
That just means 100% clear about my thoughts about it.
If I hedge my language, or avoid a topic, or minimize something, or use language that is not specific or appropriate to the situation, what I'm saying is, I don't want to talk about it.
And what the other person then hears is, oh, that person doesn't want to talk about it, so I'm going to help them out by avoiding the topic as well.
Does that make any sense?
Yes. Very interesting observation, really.
Well, the correct thing would be that my parents were evil.
Well, I certainly think that If you initiate violence against children, that's about as evil as you can get, right?
I mean, to my way of thinking, right?
Because in UPB, the initiation of force is defined by a lack of ability to avoid, and children have no ability to avoid, almost no ability to avoid parental violence, and certainly not in the long run.
So, at least according to the ethical theory that I have worked out, yeah, there's no bigger evil than aggression against children because there's no avoidability, right?
So, I would say, yeah, your parents were evil.
And... I don't know the degree to which...
This is my theory, and I would stand by this very strongly.
I would stand by this to the end.
But the real question is, what do you think?
Is that something that you accept?
Because if you say, well, my parents were mentally unstable, then it is not a moral judgment, right?
I mean, that's almost like...
My father was not a wrestler because he was 98 pounds.
He did not have the physical capacity, right?
But your parents weren't mentally unstable enough to the point where they couldn't hold jobs and pay rent and pay taxes and so on, right?
Mm-hmm. So I guess I'm trying to figure out what your perspective is about your childhood, because if you're avoiding something about your own childhood within yourself, it's going to give people a big excuse to avoid it when you talk about it, and that's going to reproduce something from your childhood, which is the feeling that people won't help you and are cold and so on, right?
And you may be right, but I want to give you every opportunity possible to find those people who are going to be sympathetic, if that makes any sense.
Yes. So, what do you believe in your heart of hearts about your parents and your childhood?
I'm pretty sure they had a choice in what they did.
Yeah, the actions in past and present, yeah, I would say those are evil.
And let's just go back, and I respect the fairness of your statements, right?
I'm pretty sure that, right?
I respect that fairness.
But it's still testable to some degree, right?
I think we do want to have some certainty.
This is why I always tell people to go and talk to their parents if they're not in physical danger, right?
Because it's really important to get that clarity.
So when you say that you're pretty sure that your parents had a choice, how would you be able to get to a greater degree of certainty about that?
Well, compare directions in public and in private, and perhaps also how they talk about themselves, about what happened with others,
or if you ask them, that they totally change the fact that they're trying to Take away the responsibility from what they did.
Right, right, okay.
And also, do they hold values?
There's two other things that I think those are great, and there are two other things that would be helpful, I think.
The first is, do they hold values in opposition to their actions in private?
In other words, would they publicly say at a dinner party or wherever, right?
Would they publicly say that violence against children is good?
Or would they not say that and they would say, well, it's important to treat children well or blah blah blah, right?
No, I heard them say that it's important to treat your children well.
Right, so they publicly protest particular values and then privately they act in opposition, right?
Yes. And that, of course, is hypocrisy, right?
So it's not that they lack knowledge.
They have that knowledge because they protest it publicly.
They just act in opposition to that knowledge in private, right?
And the other thing that I have found to be particularly helpful is this.
When you were a child...
Certain standards of behavior, if we want to put it that way, it's not a bad way to put it, certain standards of behavior were acceptable or not acceptable according to certain principles.
Your parents would say certain principles.
So, for instance, in my childhood, I was not allowed to say, I didn't think that was the rule or I didn't know that was the rule or I didn't understand that that was the rule.
I did the best I could, but the knowledge that I had, I was never allowed to use that as an excuse.
And... If the moral rules are inflicted upon children, and if certain excuses are not acceptable for children, then parents can't use those excuses later as adults, when the children grow up and talk to them about the history, right?
Right, so when I was a kid, I was not allowed to say, I forgot.
I don't remember, right?
So if I was supposed to, you know, bring something or whatever, if I said, if I forgot to bring it, then my mother would get angry.
And if I said, well, I didn't remember or I forgot, my mother would just get more angry, right?
And so then when I talked to my mother about this history, my mother said, I don't remember.
I don't recall, right?
And I said, well, I wasn't allowed to use that excuse, so you're not allowed to use it either, so let's keep going.
But she would simply just keep claiming that she did not remember.
And so if she would attack me when I was a six- or seven-year-old child for not remembering, and yet use that defense as an adult, then that's not the same as being innocent at all, right? And I'll sort of give you an example, a sort of metaphor that might help.
I'll use my favorite counterfeit money metaphor.
So if I give you $500 and I'm a counterfeiter and I know that that money is no good, right?
And I get something from you, and then...
So yeah, I give you the $500, you give me some good.
And then I want to return the good.
I don't like it or whatever. And you say, okay, I will give you back the same $500 that you gave me.
And I say, no, no, no, I want different $500.
Because I know the money is counterfeit.
It's no good. Then I can't claim that I didn't know.
Later, right? Because I've asked for something different, right?
And so when the excuses that are not allowed to children are then claimed as adults, well, we did the best we could, or we forgot, or it was stressful, or whatever, right?
These things are usually not allowed for children in abusive households.
These are not excuses that children are allowed.
If parents use those excuses, then they're manipulating, right?
And did that occur when you had your conversations with your parents?
Thank you.
Yes, for sure. So that would be another indication, right?
So they publicly professed one set of values while privately acting out others.
They did not act out these abuses in public where they could be caught, and they used all of the excuses That you were not allowed to use as a child.
That to me...
I don't know how to make it more about ethics than that.
If that makes any sense.
And I'm totally open to other...
I mean, I obviously have other things that I've talked about.
I've had other things that I've talked about.
But these are just the ones that have sort of come up right now.
I'm totally happy if these aren't good ways to differentiate accidents from ethics.
Gee, can you mute?
Yeah. Right.
I mean, is that fair?
No, it's fair. It's fair.
And can you think, like, so when you say, I'm fairly certain, is there another way to be more certain, or is there something else that needs to be done to gain more certainty?
Or is that enough and you just sort of need to keep working on the certainty?
I think that's enough.
Right, so if you're certain, then if you say, I had the terrible luck to be born to evil parents, and you say that directly and straight on, then what you're doing is you're removing the then what you're doing is you're removing the easy out for other people to avoid the basic topic.
And I think that's going to get you I think that's going to make it much more likely that you're going to find people who will actually give you some sympathy.
But if you're avoiding the topic, other people will be very happy to avoid that topic as well.
But if you don't avoid the topic, it's going to be much harder for people to edit, if that makes any sense.
It does.
Yeah.
Because if it's your shame, you're going to be isolated, right?
Because if there is evil in the interaction, it either falls on one party, both parties, right?
It has to fall on either one party or both parties if there's evil in the interaction, right?
Right, so if you and I are both thieves and I steal something and then you steal it from me and I steal it back, then we're both kind of nasty people, right?
And so we're both that way.
But if I'm home and some guy breaks into my house and slaps me around the head with a fish, then I'm clearly not initiating violence and I'm not evil in the interaction.
All of the evil falls on him, right?
And if there's violence in the household directed against children, then, I mean, to my way of thinking, the evil falls entirely on the parents.
If they're hiding it, if they're not, you know, truly crazy mentally ill, but if they're truly crazy mentally ill, like schizophrenic or whatever, which is unlikely because schizophrenia usually kicks in in the late teens, early 20s, so people usually aren't parents by then, right?
If one parent is truly mentally ill, then the responsibility falls on the other parent to solve the problem, right?
If one parent is a drunk and violent person, the responsibility then falls on the other person, even if we accept parent A is not in control of his or her behavior, then parent B is.
And if both parents are crazy, schizophrenic, nuts, brain diseased or whatever, then it's the extended family.
It's the community, right?
You see, the moral responsibility radiates outwards like ripples in a pond.
It never radiates inwards towards the children.
Never, never, never radiates inwards towards the children.
It always radiates outwards to the parents, to the extended family, to the teachers, to the...
The doctors, to the priests, to whoever might have any idea, the friends, the relatives, the neighbors who might hear the violence occurring, or probably do, right?
The moral responsibility for violence against children consistently always and forevermore radiates outwards away from the children.
It never, ever slops back in towards the children, right?
Does that make any sense?
And if you understand and accept that, then it's just bad fracking luck, right?
You got born to a nice family, I got born in the mafia.
Good for you, sucks for me.
You're not responsible for being born into a good family.
No pride accumulates to you for that.
I'm not responsible for having been born into a shitty family.
no guilt and shame accrues to me for that.
And there is a lot of guilt and shame around child abuse because lots of people know about it and nobody seems to do a goddamn thing about it.
Thank you.
Or a few people.
So there is a great degree of social shame, which you talked about earlier, about this.
Which is, how the hell did you get to be an adult with this level of violence within the family without anybody doing anything?
What does that say, as you say, about my culture and about my society and so on?
But I think the really essential thing...
your moral clarity.
Because if you're morally clear about your history and about your parents, that lowers the chances that other people will be able to evade that, right?
So, I've talked for a while, while but I want to know what you think about what it is that I'm saying and whether this has any impact on the isolation that you're experiencing.
I actually think it has some impact.
When you were talking about more responsibility of my parents, I began feeling more relief and I think that's something I need to become a bit more clearer.
I felt a bit anxious about Saying to someone else who was asking to just say they were evil and what I'm afraid of is that the word evil would mean very much to them or it would be something manipulative and they would start discussing what is evil and what the parents allowed to do or not but I don't know if that would be the case.
Right, so you feel that if you say, my parents were evil, that other people might get all confused or frustrated or freaked out or they'd say, well, what do you mean evil?
Evil doesn't exist or whatever, right?
Yeah. And do you know what I call that?
I call that, my friend, efficiency.
Because if someone doesn't get that people can be evil, right, then they're relativistic, they're confused, they're foggy, they're, you know, citizens of Switzerland, they're, you know, citizens of Switzerland, right?
right, as we talk about here. They're foggy, they're vague, they're incorporeal or non-existent in a fundamental way to my way of thinking.
And those people can't help you.
In fact, they can only confuse and hurt you.
Because they don't want to take a moral stand about anything in their life.
They're going to chip away at your moral certainty.
Right?
And they can only do you harm.
And so if you say, well, I had the bad luck to be born into a really nasty group of people.
And they say, oh, that's terrible.
Parents are all with saints. You must be a bad child.
Well, I call that efficiency because then it's like, bye-bye.
Mm-hmm. Whereas if somebody does accept that evil exists and the aggression against children is fundamentally its definition and that no parents can be considered,
no parents or extended family, like any child who makes it to adulthood without parental intervention is surrounded by some pretty nasty folk, then if people do accept that evil can occur and that children can be left behind or left in the dens of these predators,
then I think those are the people that you want in your life.
Not because you want to spend the rest of your life talking about your childhood, but rather just because you don't want to be managing other people's messed up insecurities, right?
Because that's not good, right?
You don't want to do that in the future, if that makes any sense.
It does. You want people who get it, right?
Right. Another question I had with this was how to deal with it in school or at work because to some degree I can't choose with what kind of people I will be living.
But I think it takes some of the anxiety away that I have to manage others or that I'm responsible to how they react to me when I'm being that honest.
Right, so go on, tell me a little more about that.
I want to make sure I follow what you're saying.
Um, normally I would be afraid how others would react, well people I don't know I work with or something else, how they would react to what I would say about childhood or something else.
If I'm straight forward and I just want to see what they really think, then I don't have to worry about what the outcome is.
Does that make sense? It does, it does, but I think you were saying something about work, is that right?
in what context do you mean these in what context you mean well in some way I have the idea the idea that most people wouldn't care much or none empathetic and all that and
I just feel some resentment towards having to work with such people.
Right, right.
Right, and of course, you don't owe anybody any kind of truth about any of this, right?
Oh, of course. Right, so, I mean, boundaries are very important in this context, right?
Nobody... You don't owe anybody any truth about your history, or any honesty about your history.
You can avoid whatever you want, right?
Because, I mean, it's not appropriate in...
In a work setting, usually it's not appropriate to talk.
I mean, in my opinion, it's not appropriate to talk about this stuff.
But I think the moral clarity for you is really, really important.
Because then you won't be separated or alienated from your own experience, if that makes any sense.
Loneliness starts, to my way of thinking, loneliness starts with separation from the self.
Right?
It is when we are separated and alienated from ourselves that we end up separated and alienated from other people.
Right?
If we feel close to our own natures, to our own experience, to our own histories, and intimacy with the self is certainty about our histories, I mean, we all have done this merry-go-round where we, you know, if we suffered from these abuses in the past, we make excuses for people and then we get angry.
And then we try to forgive and then we get frustrated.
And then we try to forget the past and then we end up dissociated.
And we keep going round and round, right?
And when we're in that situation, or when we're going through that process, we are distant and separate from ourself.
And that is going to lead us to be distant and separate from other people.
If we have a great deal of contradictions within our own thoughts about our own history, then we're going to want to avoid people because we simply don't know how to present ourselves.
We don't know who it is we're putting forward.
We don't know how to describe our experience.
We don't know how to explain who we are.
And so we're a fog bank in search of a hug.
We can't connect with others because we can't connect with ourselves.
And if you at least have moral clarity and sympathy, because without the moral clarity, you cannot get the sympathy.
Right. Right.
If you are hedging about whether your parents were morally responsible for the violence you suffered, then you can't have any sympathy for yourself in a fundamental way.
If you are certain about the ethical nature of your experience and your parents' actions, then you can have undiluted, unrestrained sympathy for yourself.
Right?
Like, if I think, gosh, I thought I was sick for quite a while as a child, but I'm not sure if it was a dream or something I read, then I'm not going to know whether I should actually have sympathy for myself because I'm not sure whether what happened was real.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Right? I'm just going to check in to make sure you can still hear me.
Are you there? I'm here.
Okay, right, so if I don't know whether what I suffered as a child was real or not, I won't be able to give myself sympathy because I'll be forever trying to figure out whether it was real or not, if that makes any sense.
And if your moral judgment of your parents remains...
Remains muddied and unclear and subjective and maybe this and maybe that you won't be able to have sympathy for yourself which means you end up carrying a load of the evil that occurred which means that you're gonna feel kind of toxic you're gonna feel like you can't explain yourself to people and you're going to be reaching out to other people for validation of your own experience which I can guarantee you they will almost never give you which I mean I think is a terrible tragedy but that's the world that we have to live with right That's why I keep pounding and pounding and pounding on moral clarity about child abuse.
Because when we accept that evil was done to us, if evil was done to us, when we accept that we can relax into sympathy and authenticity and wholeness and self-forgiveness and self-care and self-tenderness and self-sympathy.
And we can become, we can burst into the light of a moral beacon for others because we have accepted the certainty of the immorality of that which was done to us.
But it is the moral certainty that unlocks the sympathy of the world.
And the self-intimacy and the self-care which then allows you to be close to others.
Because you can't be close to others when you're hiding things from yourself.
You can't hug people when you're locked in your own room.
You can't be close to others when you're hiding things from yourself.
And so we have to fight this war.
And this war is tragic and absolutely necessary for the species to progress.
And the war is this. Everybody wants to pretend that nothing happened if violence was done to us as children.
Why? Because they feel guilty.
Or maybe, as you say, they have their own history, or they don't want to know their own coldness in the face of an adult child crying out for sympathy.
And so everybody wants us to shut up and stay confused.
To sit in a room and not bring the toxic reality of this all too prevalent history into the world because it makes other people feel uncomfortable to recognize what is going on in all too many households.
So everybody wants us to shut up and gnaw our own fingernails in our own rooms and to fight ourselves and to worry at ourselves and to show no sympathy for ourselves but to chase our own tails and Like manic spinning dogs between responsibility and evasion.
Responsibility for others and evasion of that.
And all too many people will spend their whole lives doing that and some people will even make that confusion a profession and become post-modernist professors or whatever, right?
But that's the war and it's a very powerful war.
It's the war between hiding the truth and speaking the truth.
Everybody wants us to hide the truth about our histories so that they don't feel bad about the society that they live in or about themselves.
And our parents in particular have trained us if they were abusive to hide that abuse from the world because that's what they do.
That's what abusive people do. They isolate.
They have to. And I know it's a horrible thing to face up to and to have to do But what I said to myself, if this is of any help to you, what I said to myself was this.
I said, okay, well, the world doesn't want me to speak.
Because the world doesn't want to feel bad.
Because, you know, most people don't do anything about child abuse, which is why it continues.
You know, they'll tear up at Whitney Houston songs about children who are precious and blah, blah, blah, blah, but they won't actually do anything when they see somebody harming a child or hear somebody harming a child.
I said, well, I am going to speak the truth and I'm sorry that it makes people uncomfortable.
I really am. I really am sorry that it makes people uncomfortable when I bring up these basic moral facts.
But fundamentally the reason that I do it is, well obviously consistency with my own values.
I wish people had done it when I was younger and so it would be silly for me not to do it now.
Hypocritical for me not to do it now.
But because speaking these truths makes the next generation safer, right?
Makes the children who are and the children to come just a tiny little bit safer.
Just a tiny little bit safer.
And I think that's why it's worth doing it.
I mean for your own comfort and certainty as well But It remedies an ill that we suffered from So greatly which is the avoidance of this stuff Fundamentally It was not your fault of course that your parents
It was not your fault that nobody in your neighborhood or neighborhood Immediate family or extended family or your teachers or friends or parents' friends or whoever or parents' friends that nobody saw fit to intervene and to act on the basis and on the certain knowledge which many people I'm sure had on what you were suffering.
It's not your fault at all that you were born into a pretty shitty planet of avoidance of the suffering of children.
Wasn't your fault that your parents were violent?
Wasn't your fault that people didn't do anything?
And you have every right, in my strong opinion, you have every right to be angry about the degree to which you were fed to the wolves for the sake of other people's fears and concerns and cowardice in terms of protecting children.
But we ended up with this world Because people didn't speak up about their own histories in the past and took shame upon themselves and conformed to the avoidance of society as a whole.
That's why we ended up with the childhoods we ended up with.
So somebody's got to break the cycle.
It may be you. It may not be.
I'm just saying this is a motive.
There's certainly no commandment.
It's something that I've taken on, but that's not for everyone.
But I think the key thing is just to recognize that The evil that was done, and I believe that the evil was done consistently, the evil that radiated outwards to society as a whole who did not step in to protect you, none of it lands on you.
And you can speak evil, you can identify evil without becoming infected by it.
In fact, to not identify it is to become infected by it.
And so I think to speak evil, The moral clarity about what happened.
I had the bad luck to be born to evil parents.
Terrible, terrible luck.
Nobody thinks I was born in some crap hole country in Africa because I was bad in a past life.
And nobody sane thinks that, right?
Just, well, I had the bad luck to be born in Africa.
Sucks to me, me. I ended up becoming a child soldier at the age of seven.
Not because I was bad, but because it was a shitty environment, and it was just bad luck.
And that's the same thing.
And I know it's fighting a lot of history of people saying, well, it was your fault, you did it, you were bad, or whatever, but it's not true.
But I think the solitude is something that arises out of a lack of moral clarity, and the resulting guilt and lack of self-empathy.
And that's, if I were in your shoes, I mean, obviously you can talk about all of this with your therapist, these are just my thoughts, right?
But that's where I would start, is having the gentleness and certainty about the evil that was done unto me.
It's just bad luck.
And does that make any sense in you?
Is that useful at all? Again, I'm just telling you my thoughts about the issue.
I think it's very useful.
I'm feeling more relieved now and I'll listen to it again.
One question I had was about the nightmares I had.
Is this one of the results of having a lack of more clarity and empathy for myself?
I can't say for sure, I can only talk about my own experience, that when I was working through this issue of moral clarity, which took a long time, hopefully it doesn't take as long if there's a resource like FTR around for other people, but I had very violent dreams when I was going through this process.
Very violent dreams.
And I actually had very violent daydreams while I was going through this process of moral clarity.
Because anger... Righteous anger arises from moral clarity.
And when we are arguing ourselves in and out of moral clarity, it frustrates that part of us that knows that it was evil and that part of us can get very angry.
And that certainly did result in very violent dreams and images even in my waking life for a couple of months while I was going through this.
I think this was late 99, early 2000.
So, yeah, I mean, I can't say for sure, of course.
I don't know if anyone can, but I would certainly, you know, throw yourself into this moral clarity.
Practice the statements.
Right? Work on the arguments.
Write down all the arguments as to why your parents were morally responsible for what they did.
Write down the arguments against, fine, right?
But, you know, really come to a conclusion.
Right? And work on that conclusion and act as if it's true.
And if it turns out not to be true or whatever, which I don't think will be the case, but you can always realign or recalibrate yourself.
But I would really focus on this moral clarity and sympathy for yourself.
Just say, this week I'm going to accept that what was done to me was evil.
And the people who did it were evil.
Not because they did it once, but because they did it continuously over many, many years.
And you just commit yourself to that and say, this week I'm going to accept that that's true and just see what happens to your dreams and to your mental state.
There's nothing wrong with taking something on.
I did this early on in the determinist debate.
I said, okay, let me accept that determinism is true this week.
I'm not so weak and feeble that I'm going to suddenly become a determinist just because I tried the hat on, right?
And I tried it on, I think for a week or two.
I worked on accepting that it was just true and saw what happened.
So, I would just say, accept that it's true.
God, I believe it's true.
Completely. 150%.
But that doesn't mean anything, because the important thing is for you to accept that it's true.
But just say, it's true.
Give yourself the moral clarity.
Give yourself the resulting sympathy.
And see what happens to your mental state, and to your dreams, and to your emotions.
To your happiness, to your confidence, to your security.
Just try it. They do this with bowel problems, right?
Sorry to get so gross, but they say, try not eating this, right?
We can't tell for sure.
Try not eating this for two weeks and see what happens.
They say with the baby, right?
if your baby is very hyper, try eating less sugar for two weeks if you're breastfeeding and see what happens.
And I would just say try...
Cutting out moral ambiguity and relativism for two weeks and see what happens.
happens.
And I would be shocked if your dreams did not become calmer.
Does that sound like a plan?
Yes, it's a good plan.
I'll try it. Alright.
And is there anything else that you want?
I mean, we've been talking for quite a while, and I don't want to give you too much to absorb at once, but...
Is there anything else that you had as a yearning burning just now?
No, I think this was most important, so thank you very much.
You're very, very welcome. I will send you a copy of this.
I think it would be very helpful for the general stream.
We certainly didn't use any names, but you can, unless you have an opinion now, if you could listen to it, let me know what you think.
Okay. All right.
Thank you so much, and I will talk to you soon.
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