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Sept. 28, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:08:07
1470 Self-Esteem

Some philosophical thoughts on the theory and practice of self-esteem.

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
September the 30th, Pinch Pinch, the last day of the...
And I hope you're doing most excellently.
Had an excellent question or request from a listener about a podcast topic or a podcast on the magic of self-esteem.
And I think it's a great, great, great question.
And I cannot believe...
I cannot believe, my friends, that I have never talked about this before.
But... I'm sure I have.
More obliquely. So let's give a consciously oblique podcast on the topic of self-esteem.
So, let's look at the two words.
Self, obviously. Personal identity.
And esteem is a judgment.
I hold someone in low esteem.
I hold someone in high esteem. He is an esteemed colleague.
It is a form of judgment.
And esteem means positive, good judgment.
And that is so fundamental.
Fundamentally, I'm sure you were all aware of this, but let's start with precision.
It is your judgment about yourself.
He has low self-esteem means he has a negative judgment of himself.
He has high self-esteem means that he has a positive judgment of himself.
That is tidied up.
So, in my opinion, the fundamental question around self-esteem A question which carves right down the heart of philosophy and other forms of disciplines of self-knowledge and so on.
The fundamental question around self-esteem is, is it voluntary or is it involuntary?
Is it voluntary or is it involuntary?
And this may sound like a silly distinction, but it's really, really, really essential.
A lot of the self-esteem movement that kind of came out of objectivism, out of the works of Nathaniel Brandon in the 1960s, a lot of the self-esteem movement has changed from its original thing, right?
Nathaniel Brandon was very much around self-esteem.
It's the judgment that you have of yourself, and you have to earn it through virtuous action.
You can't just will it.
It's like the way that we talk about love here.
It's an involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
The involuntary nature of it is really, really important.
I've always stressed that and I will continue to stress the involuntary nature of our emotions is really, really, really important.
And so self-esteem was originally, you know, do good to feel good, right?
Be virtuous to feel happy.
Earn your self-esteem the same way that you would earn money, the same way that you would earn love.
You earn Self-esteem through virtuous action.
And it's involuntary. It's not under our control.
And that's really an essential aspect.
The only way that you can control it is through cause, not through effect.
Since it is an effect, you can only control the effect by controlling the cause.
It's like eating, weight gain or weight loss.
If you want to affect your weight, thinking that you're thin is not going to do anything.
The only thing that you can do to affect your weight, which is sort of an objective and involuntary result of the cause of eating and exercise and other things.
Forms of choice around how your lifestyle is going to be.
We recognize that if you're fat, saying I'm thin, willing yourself to think of yourself as thin is a futile exercise because you can't.
And in fact, if you do that route, you're actually probably either going to stay the same or gain weight because you'll think you can manage the effect, which you can't.
You can only manage the cause, which is eating and exercise and a few other factors, genetics and so on.
So the question, we understand in weight management that there is an involuntary aspect to it.
In fact, it's fundamentally involuntary in that if you perform certain actions, you will either gain or lose weight.
So if you perform actions like eating cheesecakes and sitting on the couch, then you will likely gain weight.
If you perform actions like eating celery, going for a walk, switching to skim milk, or all the junk that you have to do when you're over 40 to maintain your weight because your metabolism drops 10% a decade, Then you will maintain or lose your weight.
So we understand that our body acts involuntarily based upon what we put into it.
And there's no point trying to put something into it that is against our purpose and then saying, well, I'm going to have the purpose anyway.
There's no point saying, I want to lose weight, feeding lots of cheesecake, sitting on the couch, and then saying, I'm getting thinner.
I mean, you could do that, but that would be deranged.
And in the same way, it's my particular view...
I'm not saying any of this is proven, but it's my particular view that our self-esteem is like our body fat, right?
I mean, we perform certain actions and we will gain the results of self-esteem.
We perform other actions and we will gain the results of negative self-esteem.
And unfortunately, the self-esteem movement was kind of hijacked in the 70s, as all decent good things so often are.
It was hijacked in the 70s.
Which was to say, well, if we...
Because the original thing was, if we do certain things, then we will be happier.
Or, you know, we will have higher self-esteem.
If we act nobly, honestly, courageously, decently, whatever, right?
With honor and virtue.
We'll be happy. We'll have a good view of herself.
And like everything that the state touches, and this really happened in public education, the self-esteem movement...
Got completely perverted and reversed so that the feeling of happiness and good regard for yourself, which comes out of virtuous actions, it was sort of perverted into the teachers saying, you're great, you know, regardless of what happened.
And being so sort of sensitive and tender to the child's, you know, quote, self-esteem that you just couldn't say anything negative and use sort of constant praise.
I mean, I'm parodying a little bit, but not by very much.
And so it was shifting from involuntary, an involuntary response to chosen actions, particularly around virtue.
It was changed to a voluntary thing which you could be convinced of without the cause of virtue and integrity.
And what that does is bad money pushes out good.
Corruption pushes out virtue.
Falsehood pushes out integrity, particularly when force is involved, as in statism.
Well, actually, generally only when force is involved, but it can for a short term occur, even in a free market situation.
But what happened was...
objectively required to gain your good self-esteem, which is to act with courage and, you know, with self-honesty, self-RTO, all the good stuff that we talk about here.
That was bypassed.
And it was like, well, you can just get the effects without all the difficult stuff of So it's like if you had a diet which said, well, if I say three times into the mirror every morning, I'm thin, I will lose weight, even if I don't change anything else about my lifestyle, then what people are going to flock to that, easy, cheap, dumb solution, non-solution, and they're not going to do the hard work of changing their lifestyle and eating less or better and exercising more or differently or whatever.
So, this manipulation of effect, or the idea that the effect that can only derive from an objective cause can be manipulated like anything in your mind, is the constant lie of particular kinds of parasites and scam artists in the world, a lot of which cluster around the school system, right?
And it weakens children, right?
To be told that you're great weakens children.
And there has been some backlash events in the last sort of 10 years or so, Which is like the parents getting exasperated when it's like, well, everybody who plays baseball gets a trophy.
And there's no winner or losers and so on.
And I'm not a big one into the sort of winner or loser thing, so unfortunately they're not focusing on the right aspect of it, as is almost always the case.
But at least there's been some backlash against this idea that you just sort of tell kids that they're great.
Stuart Smalley, which was, I think, a character on Saturday Night Live, Al Franken created the character, you know, this gayish guy who was trembling over an emotional catastrophe like a high-wire act in a lightning storm every week.
And he had that, you know, I'm strong enough, I'm smart enough, and gosh darn it, people just like me.
And he had this sort of goofy grin and he was always dating rageaholics and so on.
And it always collapsed over him, right?
So he had these personal mantras that he would talk about in...
It's true as well.
It saves his family.
It was a movie, I think. With the girl from Sex, Lies, and Videotape.
Anyway. I know entirely too much about this nonsense.
But... And this was funny because he would have these mantras that would do nothing to affect his life and they would always collapse in on themselves.
Why? Because it's a fundamental recognition of the fact that, you know, a chunky person saying I'm thin into the mirror does nothing to lose weight for him.
So you can't manage the effect.
So this is the fundamental question I think that, I mean, I'm not saying I have any objective or scientific answers.
I believe very strongly that this is the case based on my own experience and the experience of those I've known in my life.
That you can't manage the effects.
The effects of something are not manipulatable.
I don't even know if that's a word I keep using.
You can't manipulate the effects.
You can choose to affect the causes and that will have a sort of domino effect down to the effect of high or low self-esteem.
But I think that's the most fundamental question and we'll do a little bit of a series on this.
But it's the most fundamental question about self-esteem is can you convince yourself of it regardless of the cause or can you only apply yourself to altering the input because you can't affect the output like food.
Or exercise. You alter the input of your caloric intake and your metabolism and you can affect your weight.
But you can't affect your weight irrespective of the input.
And I think that's the most fundamental question to be asked about self-esteem.
I come down entirely squarely on the you can only manage the cause, you cannot manage the effect directly.
And you can choose whether or not you want to jump off a bridge, but once you've jumped, you can't choose to float.
And so with self-esteem, that's the fundamental question.
Do you think that self-esteem...
Is something that we choose, like just choose to be happy, choose to like yourself or whatever, or is it our involuntary response to particular acts that we can take?
If self-esteem is a form of love, and I believe that it is.
In fact, I would say it's the first form of love.
If self-esteem is a form of love, then self-esteem falls into the category of love, which means self-esteem is our involuntary response to virtue, if we are virtuous.
Or you could say self-esteem is our involuntary response either way, because self-esteem can be positive or negative, you can love yourself, or you can hate yourself.
And so self-esteem as a form of love falls into the category of involuntary response to virtue, which means you can control the virtue, but you can't control the results of being virtuous or not virtuous, one of which will be either self-love if you're virtuous, or self-hatred if you are corrupt and evil and vile and whatever, manipulative, I mean, in the extreme.
So, that's a sort of very brief introduction.
We'll pick this up more, and I hope that you'll find this of use.
And please let me know if you do find this of use.
Thanks so much. Bye. All right, so let's check along with part two of self-esteem.
So, this difference between that which is choosable and that which is not is really, really essential.
I've sort of been a little bit down talking about the stuff which is choosable or the effects of which you can control.
But that's not altogether a bad thing.
And so we can understand when we differentiate influence over others that there are different degrees of influence and possibilities for altering other people's perceptions.
So, I mean, to take a simple example, if the Surgeon General And massive amounts of scientific evidence prove that smoking is bad for you, dangerous for you, then a number of people will quit smoking who didn't otherwise.
Now, of course, in a sense, just telling someone to quit smoking with no evidence is just bullying them, so we provide the evidence and hope for the best.
We can't fundamentally control other people's behavior that way.
Note, please, this does not apply to husbands, but for the gen pop, we'll just talk in more general terms.
Now, there are times when I have, for instance, had a great deal, someone has influenced my way of doing things a great deal, and this is particularly true in the realm I took a course on classical music appreciation and I just found that my enjoyment of classical music went up considerably.
It's still not hugely high, but it did go up considerably from where it was before.
I really do enjoy classical music, but I consider it more background music.
It doesn't have, to me, the oomph and energy and funkadelic Nature of some more modern forms of music.
It doesn't, you know, sort of hit the solar plexus, kind of make your backbone slip.
But I do enjoy it, particularly for certain kinds of writing, because it's lyric-free for the most part, or if there are lyrics, I can't understand them.
So that has really changed my appreciation of art.
After going through a series of art gallery tours and so on, my appreciation of art has changed, though quite the obverse is true.
I prefer modern music to classical music.
Music, and I prefer classical art to modern art, so we'll figure that out at some point.
Anyway, so I've had a number of people, and of course the thoughts of others have a huge influence over me, or I should say the arguments and evidence of others have a huge influence over me.
And so there is a kind of input there that can directly affect an output.
But we understand, I mean fundamentally we understand, that there's a difference between somebody saying to me, Here's some of the details and complexities of classical music, and here's where it came from, and here's where it performed, and what it meant at the time, and raise my appreciation that way.
So that actually changes the way that I will behave or act in terms of the music that I choose to listen to.
That's one side. On the other side, we have someone who tries to convince me that gravity is not real.
Gravity is not a factor.
Gravity does not, quote, exist as a relation between objects and masks.
In the former case, somebody can make the case and have an alter, alter my effects, the effects, alter my behavior.
But in the latter case, somebody tells me gravity is invalid, it's not going to alter my behavior other than I will take several steps backwards, trying not to make any sudden moves.
So we understand that there's a real difference between physics and aesthetics, right?
And that to me is really important.
Somebody cannot convince me That determinism is valid.
Somebody cannot convince me that logic is invalid.
Someone cannot convince me that I do not exist.
Somebody cannot convince me that they do not exist.
Nobody can convince me that language has no meaning.
Like all the stuff we've talked about a number of times before.
Nobody can convince me that I'm inhabiting the manipulated world of some Cartesian demon overlord.
Because my wife would take that person down easily.
So, to me, there are a number of There's arguments or approaches within philosophy that are as absolute as physics, because the arguments against them are self-detonating, right?
So, reality exists, people exist, logic is valid, empiricism is valid, that which imposes logic and empiricism is invalid.
These are axioms as basic as physics.
Why? Because they are derived from physics, right?
The reason we have concepts is because there's such a thing as atoms that share properties, and therefore...
Since trees share the same kind of atoms, which have the same kind of properties, we can have concepts, and concepts are derived from atoms.
All of the physical laws, non-contradiction, identification, and absolutes, and all that, they are derived from the objective behavior of matter.
So, to me, philosophy, in its essence, is as absolute as physics.
And this is something that's quite a shock to a lot of people when I make this claim or make this argument.
It short-circuits them.
You can almost see the loop back It's like their eyes turn into those back-and-forth old-timey Cylon dudes, you know, that little red-eyed cyclops that looks like he's just going back and forth.
Pong, in a Cylon brain.
Because they're simply against everything that they've ever been told.
Now, since basic laws of philosophy are derived from, identified with, and is absolute as the basic laws of philosophy, and since the basic virtues, such as integrity and since the basic virtues, such as integrity and honesty and courage,
which is a subset of honesty in that it requires courage to be honest sometimes, these aspects of virtue are as iron and as absolute as philosophy.
The scientific method.
The scientific method is how we consistently interact with and understand the behavior of matter and energy.
And so, since the scientific method is a slave to physics, and physics is absolute and objective, the scientific method is absolute and objective, which doesn't mean people don't make mistakes and blah blah blah, but as a system, as a theory, it's absolute and objective, in that Tests will always trump theory.
Always, always, always. Your theory is invalid if the tests do not match.
And that doesn't mean people make mistakes on tests, of course, right?
But we're talking about the theory, not the practice.
And it's the same as true of virtue.
Virtue is the scientific method of philosophy.
Sorry, that's not quite right.
Virtue is the adherence to the absolutes of philosophy.
And, I mean, fundamentally being honesty.
And so, we would not say that the scientific method is mere opinion and can be easily manipulated.
Or should be easily manipulated or just exist.
I mean, you could say that, but you're not a scientist then.
You're just an idiot, right?
Or a corrupt fool moron state sucking toady.
And in the same way, we can say that virtue, which is the application...
of philosophy, just as the scientific method is the application of science, we can't say that it is completely subjective.
Consistency with an objective rule cannot be subjective.
Nutrition, the science or the discipline of healthy eating, what you put into your mouth can't be completely subjective if The methodology of nutrition is objective, and since it deals with matter and energy and biology, then it is objective.
Again, does it mean that people don't eat badly?
No, of course. It means that they sometimes will.
It means that sometimes it's unclear.
But again, we're talking about the methodology, not every detail of its implementation.
So... When we look at it this way, we see that self-esteem is the shadow caused by objective actions.
Shadow is sort of the wrong way of putting it, but it is the mere effect.
You can't have matter without the effect of gravity, and you can't have actions without the effect of positive or negative self-esteem.
When we're talking about the realm of...
Virtue in particular, not just stuff in general.
Walking to the mall is not virtue or non-virtue, just as chewing a candy bar is not science or non-science.
So these are the ways in which we approach the absolutism of self-esteem and understand that it is dependent upon the objective reality of external matter and that we cannot control its cause and effects.
Sorry, we cannot control its effects.
We can only conform to the causes.
Now, there is a huge species of Carnatus.
In fact, the argument could perhaps be made that they are the only species of Carnatus And what these people do is they say, I can give you management of the effects.
I can manipulate the effects, not the cause.
I can manipulate the effects, and you don't have to worry about the cause.
And these kinds of people are in a plague and a curse upon humanity.
And they go all the way from con artists who will sell you magic powders to help you lose weight or I don't know.
Maybe hypnosis to quit smoking.
I don't know if that stuff works or not, whether it's scientifically tested.
I sort of doubt it, but I'm not an expert on it.
Yes, I am an expert on so little, so very, very little.
I'm an expert mostly on expertise.
Anyway. All the way up to...
People who say that you can manage the effects of poverty by giving people money.
Poverty is not a cause.
Poverty is an effect, and the cause is a lack of money.
Of course, poverty is an effect of many, many, many complex things, and it is not a lack of money.
There's this fantasy that if you give a poor person money, he's going to go and do wonderful things and go to school and be happy and healthy, and the only thing standing between himself and And all of these wonderful effects is simply a tragic lack of money.
You give the money and you're all set.
Which is nonsense. And the welfare state has proven that over and over again.
And it's taken all the complexity of dealing with the problem of poverty, which private charities know quite well.
It's taken all the complexity of dealing with poverty and reduced it to a simple manage the effect.
Give poor people money and you no longer have poverty, which has proven to be a complete problem.
Disaster. And there's a huge species out there of people who say, I'm going to tweak the effect.
I have direct control over the effect.
The effect is not a domino, you know, sort of strike down from the cores, but I can make that last domino move and I don't have to knock the first domino and set up everything and so on.
I'm going to make things easy for you.
I'm going to make things easy for you.
And that is a true curse and plague upon humanity.
Statism and religion are fundamentally around managing effects rather than dealing with the complexity and challenge of causes.
One of the reasons that people get a little irate at this conversation is because we say that you can't manage the effects.
You can only manage the causes.
So if you want happiness, you can't just sort of be positive, be happy, smile, and you'll feel happy, and so on.
This is all ridiculous nonsense.
I mean, again, it may work in the short run, just as you can effectively cut down on drug use in the short run by making it illegal, and you can effectively bring down the numbers of people in poverty in the short run by giving people money.
But it does not work. Statism and religion are to happiness, as drugs is to happiness.
It simply is a way of pretending you can manage the effects while in fact exacerbating the causes.
And what people want to do is they want to, like if they want to con you, what they want to do is they want to move, this is really, really important, they want to move the unchosen or the unchoosable into the realm of the chosen or the choosable.
They want to move things from aesthetics to something like physics.
And in so doing, they have to move physics into the realm of aesthetics.
So if people want to control you, what they want to do is they want to invent a sort of universe where they can control the cause and effect.
Right? So... Nobody would reasonably say your happiness depends upon the irrational opinions of other people.
And if you can get irrational, crazy, manipulative people to approve of you, you will be happy.
And we would all recognize that it's in fact a recipe for unhappiness.
And that's a tough thing to sell, right?
But if you say...
Happiness is Jesus' love, and I can tell you how Jesus will, you know, I can tell you what to do so that Jesus will love you, then this is exactly the situation that you've set up.
But you've added in this universe, this imaginary fantasy absolute called Jesus, which doesn't exist, right?
Who doesn't exist? Or God, or whatever.
Or the collective, or universal, common good, or whatever.
You invent this thing, which has no voice of its own, and therefore you voice...
You voice this thing, because it has no voice of its own, right?
Somebody tells you God exists, say, shush, okay, I'm going to listen to God.
I'm not going to listen to you anymore, because I want to get it directly from the source, right?
So I'm going to sit here, shut up, Mr.
Priest, I'm going to sit here and listen for God.
Of course, there is no God, and so you will hear nothing.
The priest has to keep talking in order to cover up that there is no God.
And so we would never say happiness depends upon the approval of crazy, irrational, manipulative people and giving them money, right?
We recognize that that's exploitive.
And, I mean, this is one reason, just by the by, it's one reason why I'm consistently saying, when I approve of people, that my approval means nothing.
Or when I praise people, that it must be annoying to be praised, and in a way, by me, particularly parents, because I'm such a new parent.
But I've constantly...
I want to really strongly reinforce that my good or bad opinion is not what people should be guiding themselves by.
Not that I really think anyone does, but I just want to constantly reinforce that, for this very reason.
That we all understand that...
There is no such thing as being able to consistently be happy by following crazy people's opinions.
And because of that, we understand that Inventing a deity whose, quote, approval is channeled by the priest is ridiculous, right?
In the same way that we understand that being forced to be good is not being good.
Being forced to be virtuous is not being virtuous.
And then we have the government force everyone to be virtuous in terms of charity and succor and aid and so on.
And then we say, well, that's virtuous, right?
And we understand that a guy forcing you at gunpoint to give to charity is not a virtuous thing, but then we turn that into the welfare state and suddenly it becomes a virtuous thing.
And that is something that...
You invent this other thing that erases the objectivity and rationality of the situation.
It throws a huge warped kaleidoscopic lens into the view of the situation.
Isabella! Isabella! Isabella! Isabella! Isabella! Isabella! Isabella!
So when you can make both cause and effect imaginary, then you really are in an amazingly exploitive and destructive but fiscally productive for the exploiters, universe.
It's sort of like Dungeons and Dragons or some alternate universe where you can make up all the rules.
Well, if people depend upon those rules and you can make them up and there's never any way to test cause and effect.
Did your wish spell really work?
Well, the Dungeon Master will tell you, or not.
But there's no real way to know the truth and falsehood of any of these things.
And that's where people want to get you.
That's particularly in religion.
We can see this very clearly. That's where people want to get you.
Drag you into this universe where everything is opinion.
Nothing is physics. Nothing is absolute.
Everything is opinion, but it's an absolute opinion.
And that is where self-esteem just gets completely shredded.
And this is the case with the school in particular as well, right?
So the good opinion of the teacher is something that is very important to you, and this occurs, of course, all the way through university, the good opinion of the professor or the thesis advisor or whatever.
The good opinion of the teacher is very, very important to you, but the teacher has no objective criteria by which to establish a good or bad opinion other than It's not really objective, but it's obedience, right?
Conformity, spouting back what the teacher wants to hear and so on.
But it's not objective, right?
Because the teacher is in a situation, particularly in public school, where virtue is completely absent from the equation because everybody's forced to be there.
So we understand that you then just are going to end up with your happiness, your self-esteem, being dependent upon the irrational opinions of other people, which is never going to work.
And for me, a big goal has been to get the standards of self-esteem, of virtue, honor, honesty, and dignity back into your control, not from the irrational control of others.
Alright, I'd better stop. Isabella's getting a little...
We're almost home from the drive, so I'm just going to take care of her.
And we will pick this up next round.
Thank you for listening. Hey everybody, it's Steph.
This is part three of the Tad-O-Snippet-O-Ramas on self-esteem.
And I wanted to talk about the sort of most fundamental superstition, or the most fundamental difference between superstition and philosophy.
And it is really the difference between magic and empiricism.
In the realm of superstition, in the realm of religion, there's this idea that we can will Effects, irregardless of causes.
And God, of course, is a kind of effect as well, which we will, irregardless of the causes.
Because there is no cause for God, God does not exist, and therefore willing, a deity is, well, it's entirely made up.
And it's this lack of empiricism and this placement of the essence of truth, the world, and reality in the mind of others that is so fundamentally crippling to philosophy.
Philosophy, like science, is an acceptance of the basic axiom that we must control causes because we cannot control effects in the absence of causes.
We can't control the effects, right?
Whether we plant crops.
We cannot control whether crops will be grown without planting, right?
So con men, as I mentioned, are constantly trying to move effects into the realm of willpower so they can sell you stuff which obviously will never work.
Now the issue around this I would strongly suggest that's most fundamental to philosophy is the question of virtue.
Virtue and self-esteem to me are highly linked because self-esteem is our response to our objective actions.
And fundamentally the reason that I put all of this involuntary stuff into the definitions of love and other things that we work with here is because If love is a voluntary response to other people's actions, then we should just be able to will loving somebody who is evil or unpleasant or corrupt or false or manipulative or a liar or whatever, right?
So we should just be able to will that.
And, of course, a huge amount of corruption in this world is designed to say that you should will your love for people, and if you do not love them, then it is a failing of yours, right?
And this rests upon, fundamentally in religion, of course, this rests upon you must love God, and if you fail to love God, that is because you are a sinner, a blasphemer, and so on.
So it's the idea that you should be able to will the effects of a particular cause, and if you don't or can't, you are deficient and bad, right?
Say, Emperor's New Clothes kind of thing.
I think we understand this is fairly standard, that you should love your family regardless of their behavior.
And if you fail to love them, it's because you are a bad person.
You are cold, you are mean, you are judgmental, you are...
Whatever, right? Intolerance and all this kind of stuff.
You should love your country.
And if you don't love your country, then you are bad, non-patriotic, whatever it is you want to say.
So it's not that, let's just say your parents, it's not that your parents have to earn your love through virtuous behavior.
It is rather that you must love your parents regardless of their behavior.
And if you don't love your parents, just as if you don't love God or your country or your collective or whatever, Then you are a bad and deficient person and must fix this error.
Just as if you don't love Jesus or if you despair about the virtue of a deity who allows terrible things to happen, that's because you are doing something wrong.
And you must fix it.
You owe me the results of virtue.
And this is, of course, identified very strongly or synonymous with the question of taxation.
Because if there was a group called We could call them the government or we could call them Stan's gang or whatever.
If there was a group who actually was able to protect our property and solve the problems of poverty and was the most efficient and productive way to secure regional defense or whatever, if such a group did exist, we would pay them, right? We would be happy to give them our money if they, you know, Guaranteed that we'd always get the best health care and dealt with issues around making sure nobody was ever on drugs or these kinds of things, right?
We would do this. We would pay these people.
And the government, of course, is the attempt, and a very successful one, is the successful attempt to earn the fruits of voluntarism, i.e.
the transfer of resources, without actually having to achieve the virtue of productivity and efficiency and so on.
And that's why it's always portrayed as a voluntary interaction, and the force is always denied, right?
It has to be, otherwise the whole con doesn't work.
And of course you are obligated to provide the fruits to government, the fruits of labor and your time and all that to government, because it's kind of like a contract, right?
You owe the government, because the government does all these wonderful things.
And if you don't think the government does all these wonderful things, why then clearly you want the poor to die in the streets and all this kind of stuff, right?
So again, you owe somebody the effects of virtue and efficiency and competence and voluntarism.
And if you fail to pay them the effects of virtue, then you are bad.
This is the fundamental con that goes on over and over in the world.
And a philosophy is an enemy to people.
Who are involved in this kind of con, particularly those who are running the con.
Philosophy is a real enemy to these people in the same way that science is a real enemy to religion.
Because philosophy says, I really don't care what your words say.
I really don't care. We're looking to look for evidence and things like that.
And at a more extreme level, of course, a ridiculous level, a parasitical and destructive level.
We see this with sort of faith healing and so on, or the idea that if you have a sickness that...
And, you know, I'm sure there's some truth in this around certain stresses, but, you know, that Jesus can heal you of illness and so on, right?
It's the effects of being a doctor without actually the cause of doing any science or trying to figure anything out.
People always want these effects without the cause.
Just as counterfeiters want the effects of productivity without the cause of labor.
So, in all these ways, we can see that there's this focus, continual focus, on convincing people that you are owed the effects of virtue, or productivity, or efficiency, or whatever.
You're owed these effects. And people who don't pay these are bad or wrong or whatever.
And this is something that we see continually in the world, and I think it's really, really important to understand this, because in the realm of self-esteem, it's very important.
And self-esteem, of course, is that aspect, or the key aspect of happiness, that we can actually do something about.
So we should really focus on that, as opposed to end the Fed, right?
So if we understand that emotions are effects of causes, and the causes are What other people do to us and what we do in the world.
So I have particular effects from bad things that occurred in my childhood.
I have a tendency towards over-excitement in a variety of areas, and we could go on through the list, but I have an effect, which is the way that my brain was structured based on my childhood experiences.
And so those emotions are not fundamentally under my control.
I mean, I can do a lot to ameliorate the negative effects of my history, and that's all good.
It's good stuff to do, right? Therapy and meditation and yoga and relaxation and exercises, and a general acceptance that my brain has to some degree been structured physically by my experiences, and I can't change that fundamentally.
I can manage some of the effects, but I can't change the fundamental cause.
And this is not just to say that they're bad things.
I mean, they're great and wonderful things.
My brain has been physically changed by having a daughter, a delightful daughter.
These feelings are not fundamentally under our control.
We can manage some of the effects, but those feelings are fundamentally not under our control.
The feelings that happen when we have stuff inflicted on us, or even good stuff by others, right?
Somebody mugs you, then you're going to have stress and discomfort and upset for quite some time because Of that mugging and you can't magically wish that away, although there's lots of people who think that you should or could.
I just don't think it's possible. It doesn't mean you can't deal with the effects, but it's sort of like this.
Like if somebody kidnaps you and ties you up and force feeds you cheesecakes for a year and you end up gaining 100 or 200 pounds, then when you get out you can go on a diet, right?
And that's a good thing to do, right?
But you can't be As if you weren't kidnapped and force-fed cheesecakes for a year.
You just can't be that person.
But that doesn't mean that you can't diet and become healthier.
You may even end up healthier in the long run than if you'd never been kidnapped because you learn more about diet and exercise and so on.
But you can't ever be that person who was never kidnapped.
You can deal with the effects and sometimes you can even end up with more positive things that we would never choose to become more knowledgeable about nutrition by being kidnapped and forced to have cheesecake.
Unless we really like cheesecake. So you understand that Those things, we can manage the effects, but we can't manage the impacts, if that makes any sense.
So, the same thing is true when it comes to self-esteem.
We can manage the effects of self-esteem and remind ourselves that we do hard work and do good things even if people dislike us and so on.
And that, I think, is useful, but we fundamentally cannot manage the impact that other people Or even our own actions have upon our own a happiness and confidence and self-esteem.
That is a fundamental thing that I will continue to argue, because if that's not true, then we don't need empiricism, we don't need logic, we don't need virtue, we don't need any of these things.
We just need to take that Stuart Smalley approach and say, you know, gosh darn it, people just like me and we don't have to be good people.
We simply have to be convincing salespeople of our own preferences to ourselves or maybe even to others, right?
So I think that's a fundamental aspect that is really, really misunderstood and underestimated.
In fact, you could say, misunderstood in the realm of philosophy and self-knowledge.
Now, there are two general solutions that aren't really solutions at all.
In fact, they're the opposite of solutions that people will provide to those who suffer from self-esteem problems.
I mean, we're not talking sort of medication and so on, although that's sort of part of one of these solutions.
But what they will tell you if you suffer from low self-esteem is they will tell you to think better of yourself, In some way, whether that's through religion, or throwing yourself into some external cause, or just smiling, or being thankful for what you've got, you know, all this kind of stuff, right?
They will tell you to think better of yourself.
Just be happy, think better of yourself, oppa, whatever, right?
Which is to say that you can manage the effects without having to change the causes, right?
That you can manage the output, or you can control, directly control the output called self-love.
Without having to change the input called virtuous or non-virtuous actions, good or evil actions.
So that's sort of one thing that they will do.
Or the other thing that they will do, and this, of course, is the foundation of a massive chunk of the modern economy.
Well, I guess maybe not just the modern economy, but you really do see it quite a lot now.
And that is that people would give you solutions to the problem of self-esteem that have nothing to do with the causes, right?
So people will say, well, you see, you're not happy because you're overweight.
So, you know, eat kudia or, you know, take this diet or lose the weight or do something, and then you'll be happier.
I mean, I think that Brooke Shields at the moment is on some completely deranged ad campaign around taking some medication that has some potentially fairly significant side effects.
Take some medication to thicken your eyelashes because, boy, don't you know, if your eyelashes are thicker, dear God in heaven, will you ever be a happier person?
You don't have to worry about courage and virtue and nobility and all the challenging things of philosophical goodness.
You just have to Thicken the protein strands sticking out of your eyes.
Sticking out of your eyelids.
So, of course, when you look at ads in this way, and I think it's important to be aware of the corrosive nature of advertising, which fundamentally I don't blame on the advertisers, right?
It's supply and demand. I blame upon everybody who raises children to not value virtue, but rather to value other inconsequential things like sportsability or cool clothes or Cool gadgets, or what your parents do, or how much money you have, or where you went to vacation, or whether you have a horse, you know, all this kind of crap.
I swear to God, you could feed the planet if you got rid of the vanity economy.
It's really too tragic for words to see what it does to the happiness and virtue of the world.
But there's, you know, as I say in The God of Atheists, there is deep gold in every gap between truth and illusion.
And if you can convince people, oh, I will jump right back into this, my baby be up.
Sorry, to continue.
We're back in the car. So, the question is, of course, why would we end up with this susceptibility to this con of managing the effects, not the cause?
Well, because cause and effect is reversed in us.
A reversal of cause and effect is so often inflicted upon us when we're children.
I'm not talking about all families, but I'm talking about particular kinds of dysfunctional families here, which must be prevalent enough, if this theory holds, because the con is prevalent enough.
It is fascinating to me to see, as a parent for the first time, the degree to which empiricism precedes everything.
Empiricism precedes everything.
Empiricism precedes identity.
Empiricism precedes attachment.
Empiricism precedes love.
Empiricism precedes Language, empiricism, precedes everything.
My daughter was exploring the world, exploring textures, exploring sights and sounds when she was born.
You know, babies, when you stick your tongue out a newborn baby, the newborn baby will often stick her tongue back, which makes no sense.
How does she know that it's a tongue that you're sticking out?
It makes no sense at all.
She just came out of the womb.
How could she know? So, empiricism.
Sorry, that's a bit more innate than empirical, but it certainly is as a result of empirical stimuli.
Like, you put your tongue out and the baby will put his or her tongue back out at you.
Empiricism precedes everything.
Isabella can't say a word yet.
She's struggling a little bit with words like up.
But she can't say a word yet.
But she knows cause and effect.
She can switch on light switches and make them go and be fascinated with the lights on and off.
She can find things that have been hidden under other things.
She's got object constancy.
She knows the map of the house.
She knows where all the forbidden things are and how to barrel at high speed towards them.
So, she has all of this before she has language.
And it's hard to really imagine what identity is without language.
So, before she really even has...
She has a personality, but she doesn't really have an identity in that she can't describe anything to herself or herself to anything or herself to herself.
So, I mean, she's not in a place where she can interpret or extrapolate or conceptualize.
So, she doesn't really have an identity as far as I would understand it.
So, empiricism precedes everything, which really helps me to understand the degree to which destructive concepts like the state and religion utterly corrupt and attack the human mind, seeing how rabidly empirical she is.
She's a far better philosopher than I, far better philosopher than I, at the age of nine and a half months.
So, empiricism is everything that I can see.
And, of course, my job as a parent is to facilitate that empiricism, to not get in the way of that empiricism and all of the concepts that will eventually, sooner rather than later, I think, come out of that empiricism.
Now, unfortunately, in many families, the child becomes more afraid or concerned about the reactions of those around him compared to the exploration of the world.
Children, like all animals, I guess, are drawn towards pleasure and recoil from danger or threat or unhappiness or negative stimuli, fear.
Now, if I was yelling at or hitting my daughter, then her focus would shift from the world to me, because especially if it was her curiosity and her insatiable curiosity to explore the world that caused her to incur my wrath,
then her exploration of the world would be curtailed, certainly reduced, and she would be more focused upon My reactions rather than her own curiosity.
She would become fundamentally and perfectly rationally, though tragically, other directed.
She would focus on my reactions rather than her reactions or her feelings.
And It's one thing to be angry at a child.
This, of course, will always happen from time to time.
But it's quite another thing to say to that child, you have made me angry.
I'm angry because you have done something bad or you're bad or something like that.
Those two are two very different things.
I mean, I can get angry at people and I know that it's not The other person, usually, that I'm angry at.
I mean, certainly within my own family, right?
I mean, after when Isabella was about, I don't know, four or five months old, and this had been...
It had been tough to get out of the house in the late fall.
Christina was very pregnant. So basically, I'd been in the house for six or seven months without being able to go for a walk, really.
And the days were really nice, and...
When the day started becoming really nice, I think sort of mid to late April, I was just desperate to get out for a walk.
I mean, I'm a very active person and I was definitely feeling cooped up, housebound.
And Isabella, I took Isabella, got her all bundled up, and we were going out for the walk, and she started crying when I put her into a carriage, and so I couldn't go for the walk, and I was really frustrated.
Was it her fault? Of course it wasn't her fault, even any way, shape, or form.
It was a frustrating circumstance, because I was really climbing the walls, and I wanted to go, and this happened a number of times, and a number of times, like half a dozen times, tried to go for a walk, and I was unable to go for a walk, because Isabella was... Not happy to be in her carriage, in a car seat in a carriage.
Now, of course, there's nobody who would say that's Isabella's fault.
It's a frustrating situation, for sure.
But, you know, so I understood my own frustration.
I understood that it wasn't her fault.
But if, as she got older, when I got angry at her, I would tell her, either explicitly or implicitly, tell her that it was her fault that I was angry, that she had caused my anger.
It's kind of a reversal of cause and effect, right?
And to be the source of another person's anger is definitely not...
Good for self-esteem. I mean, if you think that person is good.
To be the cause of a bad person's anger is actually good for your self-esteem because it means that you're doing something that bad people don't like, which means, to some degree, you're doing good.
Not always necessarily, right?
Two mafia bosses in competition, but it's not a bad yardstick or rule of thumb.
So, If a child then has to focus on the reactions of the parent rather than the exploration of the world, and if those reactions which are negative or destructive or abusive or whatever, just problematic or dysfunctional, Then they're kind of random.
And the patterns really can't be...
Right? People who are abusive or people who are destructive or dysfunctional actively avoid patterns.
They actively resist patterns because the moment that there's a pattern, there's a rule.
And they don't want to have rules because they want to act out.
And acting out is to break rules.
APA, UPB, you name it.
So bad people don't want to have rules.
They're impossible to figure out.
The whole point is that they're impossible to figure out.
They don't conform to patterns because pattern would then raise expectations of consistency.
And as soon as you have consistency expectations, you can't act out in destructive ways, or at least you can be called out more legitimately for not acting out in that way.
So when a child is then forced to focus on random negative stimuli that come from random dysfunctional people, parents, caregivers, this could be siblings as well, but of course it traces up the tree to the parents fundamentally, because the siblings are not responsible in the same way that parents are, unless the siblings are very much older.
And so when the child is there to focus on this, then of course their primary focus is on an irrational mind rather than a rational world, right?
I have to focus on what is going to trigger an attack or a withdrawal of affection or a punishment from an irrational mind rather than a rational universe.
So the idea of being ruled over by an irrational mind Which is foundational to religion, must come out of these kinds of households, in my opinion.
It has to. I mean, where else could it conceivably come from?
from.
It's such a ridiculous concept, deities, that it must have emotional resonance in some manner.
Sorry, there was a guy cruising through the red of the lights and I was just wondering what he was up to.
And, of course, when you focus on an irrational mind, objective rational reality kind of becomes your enemy, which is why people teaching their children about religion often have so much of a problem with science.
It's fundamentally not about God versus Einstein, right?
It's about abuse versus empiricism.
Whatever. I mean, you sort of understand.
So, this idea that we focus on Out of fear, really, fundamentally, and anxiety, we focus on a random irrational mind that dominates our thoughts rather than exploring the world, keeps us actively from exploring the world, especially if exploring the world and its empiricism raises the ire of the irrational authority, the aggressive authority, then you actually become fearful and hostile of empiricism as a source of danger.
Curiosity, persistence, all of the virtues become a source of danger for you in a dysfunctional situation like this.
So, whenever people bring up science or rationality or whatever, you become anxious, and hostile, and intense, and upset, and fearful, and all that kind of stuff, because it re-fooes, so to speak, if this is the situation that you came from.
So you don't want to have these thoughts floating around, because they create anxiety and a feeling of imminent danger and dread.
So this issue around managing the effects, which is irrational.
Managing effects is always irrational, the very idea, and almost always in a human sense what you're managing is irrational.
that comes about When we have to work to try and manage crazy people who have authority over us in our life, whether it's if it's our parents or if it's a priest or teachers or whoever, right? It could be elder siblings.
And when we focus on managing other people's opinions and perspectives, Then everything becomes subjective, right?
That which gains us safety or that which gives us value, whether it's the kiss or the cudgelling of somebody who has authority over us, everything becomes subjective.
That which gains us value or robs us of value in reward and punishment is other people's opinions.
So everything becomes subjective and objectivity actually becomes our enemy because objectivity reveals The bullying that we're actually subjected to.
Science reveals the irrational, prejudicial, superstitious basity of religion.
Philosophy reveals the tyranny of majority rule, which is in fact just minority rule.
And we become fearful of logic and we become opposed to it because it reveals our humiliation and we bear our humiliation.
Simon the Boxer attempted control over other people's perceptions in order to gain us a kind of security, gain us, quote, love, resources, and have us avoid punishment.
So the reason why this is also important with regards to self-esteem is that there's this big divide in the world.
And there's a very few people on one side and there's a huge number of people on the other side.
And the very few people who are on the one side are those people who know that we are empirical in our core and at our origins and throughout our lives.
And because we are empirical, We do not judge what we or others say.
We judge fundamentally what we or others do.
And there's lots of people who will tell you, no, no, no, judge what they say rather than what they do.
You know, it's the, you should take a cliche, it's the abusive parent who says, I love you, right?
We listen to what they say, not what they do.
They want you to listen to what they say, not regard what they do.
Philosophers and scientists and empiricists want you to not listen to what they say, but rather what they do.
Man is judged by his actions, not by his words.
So, in terms of self-esteem, we look at this divide, and we say there are those on the one side who say that what is called our judgment of ourselves, or what used to be called colloquially the conscience, which I've argued in a premium podcast is UPB,
the operation of UPB within our mind, there are those who accept that We absorb, like a sponge thrown into the ocean, we absorb the empiricism of our actions, our own actions.
Inadvertently, unconsciously, inescapably, we cannot avoid that, which is why we work to change our actions, not to change our opinions, because fundamentally, we cannot change our opinion about ourselves after the fact.
With one exception, which is if we have an unjustly negative opinion of herself, which has been inherited from somebody else's unjust opinion of us, a caregiver or a priest or teacher or whatever.
We can alter that, but we alter that with appeal to empiricism.
When I was a kid, my brother used to call me fatty.
All the time, all the time.
It was a crazy thing, because I wasn't an overweight kid, and I never really was overweight.
I've never really been overweight in my life.
And so I threw that out of my head because I just, you know, I looked in the mirror, I stepped on the scale or whatever, and I wasn't overweight, so it didn't make any sense.
And this is how we deal with people's unjust negative opinions of us, right?
So somebody says, you're selfish.
Well, ask them to define the term, figure out how it applies to you and not to them, and how it is not selfish to simply call someone selfish because you're angry, and so and so and so.
This is why we appeal to empiricism in UPB when it comes to shucking off.
Shuck you. A negative opinion of ourselves that is unjust that we have inherited from somebody else who's been able to inflicted on us through the forced association to some degree of family or school or religion or whatever.
Just to clarify, the first association is simply that we are inadvertently attached to our family.
It doesn't mean that it's bad. I mean, Isabella can't leave us.
But, of course, I hope to parent so that she never wants it.
Well, until she's older.
There are those who believe or who accept the reality that we process our own choices, evasions, decisions, integrity, courage, honor, dignity, reserve, passion, commitment, virtue, and goodness. We process all of that based on our actual actions, not on our intentions or our thoughts before or what we wish we'd said or what we wish we'd done or what we promised to do next time.
But we judge ourselves based on our empirical actions, because empiricism precedes essence, precedes personality, precedes language, precedes everything.
We start with empiricism.
That's how we fundamentally work with the world.
And so the empiricism of our own actions is what results in self-esteem.
And the wise and the honorable and the decent accept That basic reality.
That self-esteem is the mere effect of our empirical and objective and UPP-compliant judgment of our own actions.
So if we hit someone saying, don't hit, then we record ourselves as a hypocrite in that moment.
And again, we can all be hypocritical.
We're talking perfection.
We're talking trends, right?
I mean, you can be healthy and have a cold, right?
But you can't be healthy...
And have stage 4 cancer, right?
So there's a difference between these things, right?
So we're not talking about perfection, we're just talking about general trends.
If we chase after people based on mere appearance and sexual lust, despite the lack of quality that may be inherent in that person's personality, then we record ourselves as shallow.
If we say we dislike violence and then call for government programs after the coercion of statism is revealed to us, if we cling to those opinions, then again, you know, hypocrite, and so this is all recorded for us.
This is inadvertent, right?
You can tell yourself that smoking is good for you, your body knows different.
You can tell yourself you're not a hypocrite, but your conscience knows different, if you are.
We can make up all the justifications we want for why we have done bad or terrible things.
But without humility, apology, and restitution, we are simply recorded by our conscience as vile.
And all the more vile because of making excuses.
If we've genuinely wronged someone, and the person comes to us holding their hood in their hands, and we spit in their face by saying, well, I guess I'm sorry you're hurt.
I didn't know you were so sensitive, right?
If we add insult to injury...
Then our conscience reveals us or marks us down as kind of a bastard, right?
A selfish, cold son of a bitch, right?
And we like to say, oh, well, I can tell myself different, or they deserve it, or they, you know, I can't believe they're that whiny, or how pathetic, or we can make up anything that we want, but that's just calling cigarettes good for you after you smoke.
It doesn't have any effect.
Other than it will make sure that you keep smoking, right?
That's the horribly deleterious effect of making up these kinds of excuses.
It doesn't affect our basic empirical understanding or acceptance of who we actually are.
But what it does is it almost guarantees that we will continue to do the bad things that we are justifying to ourselves to begin with, but we'll continue to do them and probably exacerbate them.
If we spread lies, if we spread rumors, if we reveal secrets in order to carry favor, then we are revealed as, you know, kind of toadies to power and untrustworthy and so on to ourselves.
And then we can say, well, you know, everybody does it.
It's harmless. What does it really matter?
This person doesn't keep my secrets.
We can make up all these excuses.
But all we're doing is like a diabetic who eats a chocolate cake saying chocolate isn't bad for me.
But the body knows different and will put you into a diabetic coma or something and get really sick.
You can have an allergy to strawberries.
You can eat strawberries and say strawberries are good for you.
Your body knows different. The words are meaningless because the empiricism of the body's reactions is all.
And human beings are fundamentally allergic to evil.
And it is very bad for us, because it forces us to make up contradictory lies, it shatters the integrity of our identities, causes us to hide from ourselves, and therefore makes us completely inaccessible to others and others inaccessible to us.
It creates an absolute chasm and canyon of loneliness and horror and a desire to re-inflict the horror that we continue to inflict on ourselves, on others, and turns us from.
Payonees to parasite, right?
And so, as regards to self-esteem, I would say, in my admittedly amateur opinion, I would say that self-esteem is the empirical acceptance,
involuntary empirical acceptance of our own actions, followed by An empirical acceptance, involuntary, of what we do or what we tell ourselves with regards to our own actions.
That's why you can't alter self-esteem except by altering your actions.
If you've wronged someone, you cannot regain self-esteem by continuing to put them down or avoiding the issue.
That is all recorded.
Everything is recorded. Everything is recorded in the conscience.
Everything is recorded. This is why the idea of a God who watches everything you do is so compelling to people because it reflects a basic psychological reality that we remember everything.
And we are fundamentally UPB compliant entities.
We recall everything.
We forgive nothing in ourselves that we have not made restitution for.
And if we accumulate enough lies and evasions, we become allergic to virtue, to love.
To the world, and sadly, most tragically, to our very selves.
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