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Dec. 12, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:58
1526 None Left Behind!

Something I am very proud about.

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Hi everybody, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's November 30th, 2009.
Just on my way to the gym.
Quarter to three in the afternoon.
And I wanted to talk a little bit about something that I'm happy about and proud of, I suppose, with regards to Freedom in Radio and this conversation as a whole.
And that is...
I've always found it moving, though crazy, that the Marines have this...
No man gets left behind, even if it's a body.
We go back. I don't know how true it is, but that's what they always portray in the movies, that you don't get left behind.
And when I was younger, I read a science fiction story about a guy...
I think it was a guy who was... He became convinced that his apartment building was a rocket ship and people were living in there and they were going to be taken off for observation and probably experimentation by some alien race.
And he realized that the rocket ship was about to take off and he darted off out of the apartment building just as it shook itself loose of its foundations and started jetting off as he felt it was about to start jetting off into the sky.
But what actually happened was It was the entire city block.
So he ran out into the street and the whole city block lifted up.
And I thought it was a good story.
It sort of stayed with me. But I think it stayed with me not because it was a great story, but because it had something of resonance that I really liked.
And I'll tell you what it is.
For some reason I've been thinking about friends that I had when I was younger.
And where they've ended up.
I don't really...
I'm not really in contact with anyone that I knew anymore as a teenager.
I did have some friends who lasted into my 30s, but a variety of just strange and sad situations, aggressive and weird situations.
You know, the usual sundering of fragmentary relations under the...
The sky-smashing weight of philosophy did its usual work.
And you're not alone in that, I'm not alone in that, but it's one of the reasons why philosophy is so hard to spread, is that human relations, for the most part, seem to be thinner than wet and decayed tissue paper.
One slight weight and they crumble.
And I've been thinking about Where they ended up, and some of them have done okay, right?
One guy is an architect.
I think another guy is a professor.
Two of my friends became professors.
Actually, I think three, but one of them I only knew through soccer games.
But, you know, the incredibly thick and hard sedimentary layers of class remain solid.
So one of the guys who became a professor, he only had one tortured relationship when he was younger, and he also used to push pins through the ball of his thumb.
He used to get really, really drunk.
He was really dysfunctional, and as a professor, he's like a single guy.
All he does is work. He's never had a relationship.
That, to me, seems like a life without appendages.
Actually, a life without appendages, you can still have relationships.
It seems to me less than half a life to not have love.
Human love. People love.
Carbon-based love in your life.
And so he, to me, never quite escaped the loneliness and dysfunction of whatever had happened to him when he was growing up.
Same thing's true of another guy I used to play Dungeons& Dragons with.
He ended up moving to England. He's an accountant and never had relations and never has and never will.
Another guy is a computer guy, doesn't date, never has, never will.
I think he still plays Dungeons& Dragons.
He's in his 40s. A guy became an architect, got married, but not a good marriage at all, at all, in my opinion.
And they didn't break through the barrier of dysfunction, of fundamentally dysfunctional families or environments.
They may have achieved some material and some professional success, but they have not Entered into loving and happy relationships.
There's something still, to me, fundamentally broken or smashed up in them.
And I've just been thinking about this phenomenon of can you escape?
Can you escape? Can you get out of the cage if you were born in a cage?
Can you ever, ever, ever get out?
I mean, I think I'm out.
I think that of the people that I knew growing up, and many of them I did keep in touch with for quite some time after high school, I mean, I certainly wouldn't want to trade my life for anybody else's.
So, in that sense, I think I can say with some degree of certainty that I am the most successful in terms of just achieving real happiness.
I mean, a wonderful relationship, a great family, a meaningful and amazing life that I have talking with Yao.
And I think I've not escaped in that I'd never be the person that never went through this kind of traumatic history.
But I think I've squeezed, you know, like when you're a student and you've still got a scrap of toothpaste in that tube and you're jumping up and down in it with the leg of an elephant, wastebasket with a bowling ball in your hand.
I think that I've squeezed as much joy as I can and I think it's a considerable amount of joy that I experience.
I think I've squeezed as much joy as I can out of This history that I was born with.
I can see how my daughter is and I'll never be that.
I'll never be that level of calm and so on.
But it's certainly not a bad second place and if I hadn't done the work then my daughter wouldn't have the advantages that she has of a peaceful and happy and affectionate and loving upbringing.
So I don't think that I'm out In that you can't ever really get out.
But I think that...
Sorry, let me rephrase that.
I don't think I've healed like I was never hurt, but I think I've healed stronger than if I'd never been hurt.
Because a lot of the people that I know who grew up with non-dysfunctional, non-abusive families, they don't...
I mean, they seem to me to lack an essential kind of humility and humanity.
I think you really have to be pushed down pretty hard and been in extremities of distress.
It seems to help. For some people, it really seems to help.
In terms of developing empathy and sympathy and so on.
Like I never had anybody from a functional household when they heard about my history provide any sympathy or curiosity.
They just didn't want to know about it because the randomness of our accidental upbringings is not of great comfort to people who consider themselves successful on their own merit when a lot of it had to do with their family environment.
So I think that there's a kind of humanity and humility that's missing from people Who have these sort of functional upbringings because they're not taught about the good fortune that they have.
And I certainly won't do this when Isabella is younger, but when she gets older, I do want to tell her, look, you had the great good fortune to be born to a happy, loving, affectionate, rational family, and you are an unfortunate, at least small minority when it comes to that, and so the world will be full of people who had it much worse than you.
And I think it's really important to remember just how lucky you are, and to have that humility and to have that sympathy for people.
You happen to get fed in the land of the starving.
That doesn't make you better or wiser.
It just makes you luckier. And if you can share that good fortune with others, so much the better.
And so I think I found a way out.
I feel like I'm out of the cage.
And I feel like I'm healed stronger.
You know, like you fall into a vat of radioactive liquid and you don't want to do it, but at least you get superpowers on the other side if you work it right.
And one of the things that I'm happiest about With this conversation is the fact that you don't have to be left behind.
As the world generally gets more functional and better, so many people are getting left behind.
You can have people raised in methods similar to the Egyptians 5,000 years ago.
And they get left behind.
They get left behind. They enter into this subclass world, this small and dark and self-referential world that knows of this other world but has nothing to do with it.
You know, may watch this world on TV, may hear tales of this more functional world, and may even mouth the platitudes of that more functional world.
Does not have anything to do with that world, fundamentally.
And I think that's really tragic.
That's really tragic. When I used to go to karaoke, a bunch of...
Many years ago, I used to go to karaoke once every week or two, and I had a lot of fun.
And there were people there.
I didn't really know much about them.
And then, unfortunately, through a friend who went, he got to know them, and then I got to know them.
And it was just like, okay, I don't really enjoy this as much anymore because there's too much dysfunction and so on.
But... Those people, they're not going to break through.
They're not going to break through to a different kind of world, to a different kind of life, to a more peaceful and happy and rational and secure.
They're in the cage. They are the cage.
They've grown into the bars.
They were trapped by the bars, now they've become the bars, and possibly ensnaring others as well.
And so many people get left behind in the general progress of the world.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about this in Outliers, about one guy who poisoned his professor and still ended up graduating with honors and running the Manhattan Project and another guy who simply had trouble getting to a class in time when the class switched because he had trouble getting a ride and his car broke down and he couldn't even negotiate anything to do with getting a different time or getting a ride or anything like that and he ended up not getting any kind of degree and bombing out of school and so on.
And so he's left behind.
Whereas the guy who actually tried to murder his own professor gets a PhD and gets a hit because he comes from a rich family with power and connections.
So many people just get left behind as the world moves forward.
Which means that the world doesn't really move forward yet.
So there are these three categories, right?
The people who are born in healthy environments.
The people who are born in unhealthy environments.
Now, the people who are born in healthy environments very rarely go into the unhealthy environments to get people out.
They very rarely go back in time to get people out, to break people out.
If you're not born in a dungeon, you don't go into the dungeon and dig around the sarcophagi.
Of petty environments and smashed dreams to find the living bodies to bring to the surface.
So those who are born healthy move up, move on, and often, generally, will stay healthy.
Unless afflicted with a particular curse like great beauty which attracts predators, or great wealth perhaps.
Those who are born in unhealthy environments, well, there's two kinds.
The kinds who make it out and the kinds who don't, and the latter are by far the majority.
Now, the kind who make it out tend to be on a one-way rocket ship to a new galaxy, and they do not want to look back to the sewage planet that they slithered and jetted away from.
They don't want to look back.
They escape like a wolf fleeing a wolf trap, perhaps by chewing off his leg.
And, in a sense, you have to cut off empathy to escape dysfunction.
Empathy for those who have sympathy, for sure.
Empathy, probably not, but sympathy for those who have harmed you.
You have to cut that off in order to get away.
Because when you escape, In dysfunctional environments, you upset those who hurt you.
You upset those who are staying in the dysfunctional environments, and you have to cut off sympathy for that pain in order to save yourself and escape the sewage planet to the sunnier worlds that float above, like moons.
And so those who get out do so so often at the price of sympathy, of humanity.
Because they have to cut off their empathy for those they're leaving behind.
Otherwise they can't get out.
Their sympathy will then be used as a hook to keep them as a weight, as an anchor to keep them back down in among the seaweed sludge of the petty and violent, manipulative and dysfunctional.
And I think there are very few of us who forge these rocket ships from our bones, it would seem, Who escape the sewage planet of the underworld.
And pettiness is the pettiness and blame and collectivism and no identity and you're responsible for what I do and I'm not responsible for what you do, all the manipulations of UPB shattering self, aggrandizing pomposity and pettiness.
Those of us who get out, well, We break out through the earth from the dungeons below and all we want to do is run up the cliffs until our legs fall off.
Right? Until we reach and become the very sunlight we have yearned for for so many years.
The last thing we want to do is go back.
And I'm very conscious of the reality That were it not for luck and the labor of those who came before, I would have been left behind.
I would have been left behind to wallow about in the muck and sewage and savagery and emptiness and pettiness and nothingness of false self-delusional destructive dysfunction.
I would have been left behind Like a fish, when everyone races to the shore on new lakes, I would have played alone drifting in the seaweed, to no purpose, no end, with no future.
I was very close to being left behind, as everyone I knew was left behind, no matter if they are material success, in the realm of the soul, in the realm of the heart, in the realm of depth, in the realm of character, in the realm of virtue. They were left behind.
They did not make it out. And society has not come back to get them.
And the funny thing is that when I thought...
When I left that world...
Which was...
Oh, I guess around...
11 or 12 years ago now, when I left that world...
And I could only leave it by...
Defoeing, there may be other ways, but that's the only way I could figure it out.
That's the only way it could work for me.
When I separated from my mother, and my father at the time, and my brother shortly after, I thought, I really thought that I was going to join a new world.
I was going to, sorry, I was going to go and join the existing world of healthy people.
Like, I was breaking my way out, I was out of prison, so I'm going to join all the people who weren't in prison, and hunky-dory...
Bingo bango, but that's not what happened.
What happened was, I could not join the normal people.
I wasn't going from broken to normal.
If you fix your shattered self, you go from broken to superhuman.
You just do. Like, I could not get the people who love the free market to join me in the free market.
I couldn't. I couldn't get them to do it.
And all the people who loved the free market and all worked in academic or state positions or whatever or state-supported positions, I couldn't get them to join me in the free market.
and they actually had no respect for me being in the free market.
And I found that they...
Lived in this world of normalcy by taking pride, as I mentioned, in that which is accidental, i.e.
their more fortunate upbringings, and by fundamentally ignoring the effects of suffering on those around them, by not noticing that their world is not built on, but among, and to some degree on, the souls of the shattered.
Right? Who... Is the guy who has the repetitive damask job of welding together the steel frames of the cars that these man-gods drive?
Well, it's the people who've been so broken by bad parenting that all they can do, the best they can manage, is to weld a car together.
Or serve them french fries.
or brew them coffee, or dig holes in the ground and fill them up with condominiums and malls.
Who are the security guards that patrol their universities Those who in another life with another family could have been the professors that they guard with what's left of the empty remnants of their souls.
Their world is built on the souls of the shattered.
And they don't see it.
They don't see it. They think, well, the security guard obviously isn't that ambitious, probably kind of lazy, might have a drinking problem, but I have been hardworking, and I have been, right, focused, and I have triumphed, and I have overcome, so my life is better than his.
Well, what happens if you switch parents?
What happens if you switch parents?
Well, you get a different life.
You get a different life.
And they don't see that. You know, like white people don't see, you know, if you're an accented Mexican in the States.
They don't. It's built on that too, right?
Built on the underclass of the paperless laborers.
So I couldn't escape From prison to freedom, because once you escape from prison, you realize that those who've never been in prison are just in a different prison, a prison of illusion, a prison where they don't see prisons, which is a prison.
Because it rejects reality.
The rejection of reality puts you in a cage.
And I sort of realized that there was no getting out of prison into the free city, the shining city of normalcy.
That the new world that must be built can only be built by the toughened hands of those who get out of prison.
And I couldn't flee from prison to a free world.
I tried for many years, but I couldn't flee from prison to a free world.
Because there was no free world.
There were people in prison, and there were people imprisoned by their avoidance of the reality of prisons and the fortunes of their own circumstances, the random fortunes of their own circumstances.
I couldn't break out to a free world.
And I realized that the only world that can be built that's worth anything is built by the bones and the hands of those who are out of prison.
And if you figure out how to pick your luck and get out of prison, and you tell everyone, People notice.
If you just escape, society can kind of pretend it didn't happen and everybody sits where they are.
But if you have a tunnel and you don't, you have the audacity not to just run into the woods or run into the city and lose yourself in the anonymous shuffle of the everyday.
But if you build a tunnel and build lights and build snack shops en route and provide maps, And remind everyone that there are no locks on these doors.
Well, then you put together a very tough cadre of people.
A very tough, and I think you're one of them, a very tough cadre of people.
And I say that no one who wants to come need be left behind.
No one who wants to come need be left behind.
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