All Episodes
Previous Next
April 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:26
1647 Shyness - A Vindication

It is not shame, but a medal.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Steph. This is the podcast on shyness.
There's a thread on the message board about this, and I really do appreciate people bringing these just fantastic topics up.
I wanted to talk about shyness.
It's something that I struggled with so, so much when I was a kid.
I was a terrifically, terrifically shy kid, and I hated the word.
Shyness, and I still do.
It's so staggeringly inaccurate, and so staggeringly condescending.
I wasn't shy.
I was terrified.
Shy is just one of these cutesy little stupid words that is applied to people to inflict a kind of self-attack on them, and so to exacerbate the very problem that is trying to be supposedly solved in the identification.
But I always hated the word shyness.
Shy. Oh, he's so cute.
Oh, he's so shy. You see a little boy, you know, a little girl, hiding behind the mama's legs.
Oh, he's shy. No, you're weird.
I see this with Izzy. She's a fantastic, fantastic judge of character, in my opinion.
She really is. Just great.
Um... She's not shy.
She's not even cautious. There was a very friendly girl the other day who was doing pirouettes and somersaults on the lawn.
And Isabella ran right up and almost gave her a hug because she was such a friendly girl.
And we chatted for a bit. She was really nice.
She was about six or seven, I think.
And there are other people that she says hi to after a short pause.
But then there are people who are just kind of odd.
Strange. Strange. And Izzy doesn't...
She just regards them.
She's not frightened, but she just regards them.
She doesn't smile. She doesn't wave.
Just because they have an odd manner to them.
And I can sense that.
She can sense it. And these people say, oh, she's shy.
And that's, oh, that's annoying.
And I do bite my tongue, because there's no point with this kind of conflict.
But part of me wants to say, no, she's not shy.
You're off-putting. You know, but they want to say that she's shy, right?
It's easier for them to say the child is shy rather than there's something that I'm doing that's off-putting to the child.
But they have to inflict it on the child.
The child has a cutesy sort of difficulty, and it's nothing that they're doing.
Shyness is something that always bothered me, because it is a dismissal of history, it is a dismissal of wisdom, it is a dismissal of the nature of society as it stands, and it is a contemptuous diminution of the genuine problems that people have in society.
The society that we live in.
Now, to me, there are two causes of shyness, and the two are not unrelated.
These are all just my theories, of course.
You can take them for what they're worth, as always.
There are two main causes of shyness.
The first is, of course, trauma being attacked.
And being attacked in the family, being attacked by caregivers, being attacked by priests, perhaps being attacked by teachers verbally, or, you know, in some places, particularly in the south of the U.S., still physically.
It's being attacked.
Being attacked makes you very frightened.
And remember, attacks...
They're always random.
If they're not random, they're not attacks, you understand?
There are no rules in a dictatorship.
There are no rules in abusive families.
If there are attacks, they are by definition random.
And also, if you've been in an abusive household, if you are in a good mood, and your caregiver, your parent, is...
If you're not in a good mood, then you're actually attacked for being in a good mood.
Talk about a contradiction, eh?
To be happy invites attack in certain situations.
But not in others. It's random, I understand.
It's random, random, random, always random.
And because of randomness brings paralysis.
This is something that is known with rats and electric shocks, yet still remains baffling to many about human beings.
Random attacks brings paralysis.
Because there's no way to rationally plan for and avoid problems.
So rational attacks bring paralysis, and the paralysis is maintained by a chronic state of fear.
It may be just below the surface, it may be right up on the surface, but it's chronic.
And that chronic state of fear that arises from random attacks we call cute little shyness with its dimpled cheeks and Pillsbury Doughboy belly that everybody just wants to tickle because it's just so gosh darn shy.
It's not cute. The effects of trauma are not cute.
The effects of abuse are not cute.
So that's one cause.
Now another cause of shyness is quality.
Another cause of shyness is wisdom.
It's seeing the world for what it is, as it stands.
And that's something that's a little harder to see.
You see, the terrible wisdom that comes from being abused is not about your abuser.
I talked about this before, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
the terrible wisdom that comes to us victims is not about our abusers, but about society as a whole that turns a blind eye to those abusers.
You know, it just struck me so many times you hear these lifeboat scenarios, you know, like some guy seeing a kid drown and should he X, Y, and Z.
That to me is all just such nonsense as if the ethical issues in society have anything to do with some child drowning that you can see or can't see.
How about some child getting yelled at or hit that you can see and hear?
How about that?
As... A way of gauging the moral realities of society and how things actually work in the world.
Well, of course, nobody wants to talk about that.
It's all these hanging from flagpoles things that people want to talk about.
Not, will you stand up for a child being harmed in your environment?
Never! Everybody wants to make morality something distant, something out there, not in your life, something that you will never encounter, like who to eat in a lifeboat, what to do if you're hanging off a flagpole, things you'll never encounter.
That keeps morality at a safe distance, you see.
It keeps ethics and integrity at a safe distance, which is where The rulers want it to stay.
and the cowards wish it to remain.
And so when you're harmed as a child you get that people can harm children obviously You get that your caregivers are dangerous.
And you get that nobody will help you.
Nobody will even notice it.
Nobody will talk about it. It becomes a great unseen and unknown.
And this gives you, if you let it, if you don't avoid it, if you open yourself up to the true horror of the abuse, which is not the abuse, but the silence that surrounds it, like a black hole that eats up the very sunlight.
Well, then you understand the nature of society, which is that there are abusers and there are colluders, right?
There are abusers and there are enablers.
There are abusers and there are appeasers.
And only now are emerging, from the inky electric depths of the internet, the opposite of these two cowardly and brutalizing classes, the philosophers, i.e.
us. And when you get this wisdom about society, then you become somebody of knowledge, somebody of wisdom, somebody of quality, somebody of depths, somebody of discernment, of insight.
It should be insight, I think.
And you get that you live in a world of aggression and hypocrisy and cowardice and deceit and a great turning away from the victims that no friendly hand reaches out to help up the hurt child.
Everybody steps over the body, whistling.
Your body, my body.
And that's the reality of the world.
It's not the reality of the future, but it's the sad reality of the present and an even greater reality in the past.
At least we have emerged and evolved as a society and as a race and as a species to the point where we can even begin to To look at the evils among us.
That's massive progress.
Where we are is massive progress.
But it is a far, far cry from either A, where we need to be as a society to have a peaceful and happy world, or B, within 12 light years of our stated values.
So if you want to understand your own shyness, or you want to understand the shyness of somebody else, you can do the following.
You can imagine that you wake up one day, Out of nowhere.
In the middle of the Amazonian jungle.
And you are with a group of pygmies.
Or a group of, let's forget pygmies.
They're just tall, face-painted, bones through the nose, truly primitive tribe.
You're just in the midst of this tribe.
And they're really aggressive with each other.
They yell, they're violent, they're dangerous, and they're very primitive.
And you don't know what the hell is considered acceptable within this society, what is considered polite, what is considered okay, what is considered aggressive.
And you watch them, you know, They grab you, they march you back to camp, and you watch them.
You're trying to figure out why they're attacking each other.
Why do they yell? Why do they thwack each other on the side of the head with rocks from time to time?
You don't know. It doesn't make any sense.
There's no pattern. But they occasionally will thwack you, hit you, or something.
It causes you to taste that metallic blood in your mouth.
You don't know. You don't know.
What is going to get you a caress?
What is going to get you some food?
What is going to get you cudgeled?
What is going to get you possibly killed?
You don't know. And you have to stay in this society, and you don't speak the language, and you can't figure out the rules, and you're constantly afraid of attack.
That would be a situation of chronic terror, of chronic hyper alertness, hyper observation, hyper vigilance.
And that, my friends, is what we call shyness.
Isn't that cute? So cute.
Now, it's the fear of living in a world with no rules but endless punishment.
Or rules that are the exact opposite of that which is stated.
And if you point out that they're the exact opposite of that which is stated, you are attacked even more.
So you have to pretend to go along with these rules that are constantly changing.
And constantly shifting. Constantly changing.
And constantly shifting. Violence is bad for private citizens.
Violence is good for public servants.
Murder is evil in peacetime.
Murder is virtuous in war.
I mean, you can go on and on, right?
As I talk about in real-time relationships.
When your master's If you want you to tell them something, then truth is a virtue.
When you have information that your masters need to know, who broke that?
Who hit who? Where has X gone?
Then virtue. You must tell the truth.
Virtue is honesty, and honesty is virtue.
Ah, but you see, then when you have an argument that your masters do not like, then politeness becomes a virtue.
Or when you say something that might embarrass Your masters.
Why? That's terrible.
You see then, politeness and holding your tongue and speaking respectfully and don't talk back, that becomes a virtue.
When you have information that your masters want or need, honesty serves their interests When you have information or arguments that your masters do not want or fear, then honesty becomes a vice.
You can't figure out this shit when you're a kid.
You can't. You can't.
It would be madness to even try.
In fact, it genuinely would be madness.
So you have to give up.
You have to silence yourself.
You have to erase yourself.
And you have to just kind of go along with your head down, hoping that you don't get too many blows and possibly even a few caresses along the way.
That's social adaptability, right?
And that's shyness, my friends.
That's shyness. A world of brutalized, power-hungry, power-serving, self-aggrandizing, pompous, contradictory, violent, unpredictable, quote, rules which you can't possibly live by and you can't possibly avoid.
And that's what I mean when I say that shyness results from quality, from the quality of an individual, from A deep and perceptive soul who understands what society as it stands is.
A dangerous group of besuited apes.
And that's why I hate the word shyness.
Thank you.
Shyness is the cutesy phrase to describe the reality of the situation.
And the reality of the situation Is that we live among fragile, touchy, dangerous, pompous, self-praising, hair-trigger, aggressive, violent apes.
And as humans among apes, we have to be cautious.
I remind myself of this all the time.
I mean, I'm a pretty positive and happy and, I think, quite benevolent person.
But I have to remind myself.
I get swept up in the power of philosophy and I have to remind myself.
I was asked by Daniel Mackler what my limitations were.
Well, my limitations are that I forget all of this stuff, right?
And also, people are pretty nice.
If you don't cross them, people can be pretty nice.
I chat with people about our kids when I'm out and see other parents.
They're pretty nice. My neighbors, they're nice people.
But anything of any substance or reality comes up and BAM! Off peel the human faces, out come the simian masks.
And it's dangerous.
It's a dangerous world for the clear-eyed, because the clearer we see, the more the madness of others feel to themselves, and they lash out.
They lash out, because they're broken and they're primitive.
I love the world.
I love the world, and I love the potential of society, and I'm even finding a lot more peace with humanity as it is these days, for reasons we can get into another time.
So I'm not trying to depress you, really.
I'm trying to validate the shyness and the caution that you feel in the world, about the world, amongst your fellow citizens.
You know, there's a teaching program going on I think it's in New York.
I'll check if people are interested.
And they're trying to teach philosophy to children.
And the way that they do it, and these are professors of philosophy who've designed this whole course, and people well-trained in philosophy, at least modern philosophy, such as it is, And what they do is they go to kids, they get the kids to read this book called The Giving Tree, which I read to my nieces many years ago, and I can't remember exactly how it goes, but it's something like this.
Kid is a, his best friend is a tree, the giving tree, and the tree gives him shade in the summer, and it gives him fruit in the fall, and it gives him A place to hang a swing and he can climb it.
Gives, gives, gives. The kid gets older and he needs wood for fire and chops off the limbs.
And he gets older and he needs wood for a house.
He chops off the trunk and he hacks it all up and makes his tree.
And finally, of course, the tree is dead.
The tree is just a stump. Which he sits on.
And this is the giving tree. He so loves this boy, you see, that it gives up his very life so that he can have a nice house.
And they ask the kids, what do you think of this story?
And they call this philosophy.
This Oprah excrement is what do you feel about the giving tree?
Ah! Oh, it's so sad.
It's so sad, my friends.
Oh, it's so pitiful.
You want to get kids' attentions in school?
You know what you do is you say to them, you know you're not here by choice, right?
You know, you have to be here.
You have to be here.
And your parents have to pay for this, or your parents...
There are guys in blue costumes who show up to your parents' house with guns drawn and shoot them if they don't let them take them off to jail.
Right, so this is an interesting question.
This whole building that you're in, this whole structure, all these textbooks, your teacher and everyone, they're all here by force!
So, obviously, society thinks that violence is a very good thing, yet you're told never to use violence yourselves.
Discuss! Well, that, to me, would be teaching children philosophy.
I wonder if that curriculum will be adopted by state schools any time soon.
I think not.
But it would be interesting.
But no, you have to talk about your feelings about a fairy tale.
No, see, that's not philosophy.
It's not even literary criticism.
It's not analysis.
It's just verbal chaotic blarp.
I mean, what the hell's the point of talking about your feelings when you don't even know how to think?
Garbage in, garbage out.
Anyway. But this is the state of society that we're in, right?
Talking about your feelings about an altruistic tree is considered the legacy of Socrates, because that's what he died for.
So we could talk about our emotions about imaginary plants, And of course it is a story with no answer.
There is no answer to the Giving Tree because it's not real.
It's not even imaginary. It's complete nonsense.
So there's no answer. And that's why they like it.
Because it tells you that philosophy has no answer and it's just about talking shit to no purpose and no conclusion.
Oh great! Now the kids have been inoculated against philosophy until they find the meat and bones of philosophy on the internet through us.
And begin to work out the primary muscle of manhood and womanhood, which is reason and courage and virtue and strength.
But this is the world that we live in, and once you understand the world that we live in, and if you were to point this out to these people, what the hell has this got to do with philosophy?
How about saying to these kids, how do you know the difference between true and false?
How do you know? How do you know?
Let's say I have an invisible spider on my head.
How do you know if it's there or not? You can start with something non-ethical.
You can start with some basic epistemology.
How do you know that you're not in a different world than you dream every night?
Kids can have that conversation.
They love to have that conversation.
What a stimulating and exciting thing that would be for them to understand the difference between a contradictory imaginary fantasy and objective and empirical reality.
Fantastic! Ah, but you can't talk about that, you see, because that leads to questions of God.
And if philosophy deals with questions of God, the parents of the children, who are religious, will deal with the philosopher post-haste.
Because we must never allow a breath of truth into our children's lungs, you see, unless it is the truth that they must work for their masters.
Well, that's not a truth.
Not that they must, but that they will.
That is the truth.
So shyness arises from a legitimate...your shyness arises from a legitimate anxiety and fear about the hostility that the sudden magnesium flare of philosophy that it will startle and provoke to attack The simians who surround you.
And we have to tread lightly, and we have to be careful, and that is why we need that little virtue called courage, and that is why the honor of those in the future who won't be able to imagine the 2001 Space Odyssey montage, at the beginning at least that we're living in.
Shyness is legitimate fear that results from true knowledge about the world.
It's not a problem any more than feeling fear while bleeding in shock-infested waters is shyness.
Any more than being rubbed with a nice honey-glazed mayonnaise in a bear pit and feeling rank terror is an imaginary, self-perpetuated, self-inflicted, and self-sustained state.
Now, no, we would not call someone fearful in those circumstances.
We would not call them shy.
We would say, yeah, I get it.
That is a pretty wise evaluation.
That is a pretty accurate evaluation of the situation.
Can't say is to blame you.
Think of one of the first people who began to doubt the existence of God, and who nurtured those doubts in the midst of the savage inquisition of medieval Catholicism.
They had to bite their tongue and they had to nod and go along with others for fear of being burned at the stake, tortured, mutilated.
We say, ah, these first original thinkers, these first thinkers, well, they were just shy, you see, just shy.
Anne Frank, ah, just shy, just seemed to mysteriously hold herself back.
From the German kids in the Hitler Youth, she was shy.
I know these are extreme examples, and I'm not saying that we face any of these kinds of dangers.
We don't. We don't.
Which is why we can have this conversation.
I'm not saying that we face these dangers, but we face legitimate dangers.
Social attack is hardwired into us as a fatal Well, whether we like it or not, the disapproval, the anger, the rejection of those around us,
based on our questioning of cultural norms, is hardwired into human beings who are tribal animals and who cannot survive alone, particularly, cannot reproduce alone, which is the most important thing, and cannot raise children alone.
We can't survive because we need to sleep, and we can't sleep in trees.
So we need people to watch over us while we sleep.
And the fear of social rejection is hard-wired into us.
Because when it occurred in the past, it was fatal.
Almost always. And so, of course, we don't face the dangers of the guy bleeding in the shark tank, and we don't face the dangers of Anne Frank, of course not.
But the nervous system response is sort of indistinguishable.
It's like saying to someone in a dream, if you could...
Don't worry, the monster is not real.
Well, the whole point is that the nervous system is responding to the monster as if it's real in the dream.
That's why it's called a nightmare.
And so shyness...
Shyness arises from knowledge.
Shyness arises from philosophy.
Shyness arises from originality.
Shyness arises from reason.
Shyness arises from empiricism.
Shyness is the shadow that shields the truth that you carry.
And wisely so.
And we fear social rejection as we fear death.
Separation from the herd historically was death for humanity, and we carry all those same habits, genes, neural pathways, parasympathetic nervous system reflexes, all are the same.
And that's what I mean when I say shyness results from trauma and shown us results from quality.
And trauma and quality are intensely entwined.
I have not met a human being with a brain in his head who has not gone through some very hard times.
And if he didn't go through those hard times as a kid, I'll tell you this, he goes through those hard times because he has a brain in his head.
Shyness is essentially a medal.
Thank you.
It's a mark of honor.
If you desert in a useless war, you have to hide.
You have to scurry, you have to slither, you have to be a mouse among the mountains of prejudice.
If you had sympathies for blacks during the time of slavery, you had to hide it.
Because you have to hide quality in a time of prejudice.
And we live in a far more rational time than has ever existed before in many ways.
But the world is still so far from reason that we have to hide thought and evidence.
Like smuggled goods.
Like Jews in Nazi Germany.
We have to hide them.
We have to hide ourselves.
And, you see, shyness is...
Such a representation of quality because we can't abandon the truth, which is why we need to hide it.
If you weren't hiding any Jews in Nazi Germany, you didn't have any anxiety about it, right?
You weren't shy about sharing the reality of your life.
But it's when you were doing something noble and heroic and helping people being persecuted, aha, then you needed to hide.
You see? This is what I mean when I say it's a medal.
You have to hide quality.
You have to hide truth in a time of lies.
And look, I mean, we all know We all know what society considers quality.
Oh, come on, we've all seen it when we were growing up.
This is no secret.
It's not even close to a secret.
Sigh. We all know the hierarchy, right?
So when I was growing up, let's just talk about when I came to Canada.
When I came to Don Mills.
Don Mills Collegiate Institute.
I started at Greenland at grade 6.
I was in grade 8 in Whitby. I pushed back two grades when I came to Canada.
But, hey, at least my family did nothing to reverse that.
But, Greg, his name was.
Greg T. Now works as a phone ad salesman for the Yellow Pages, I think.
But Greg T., It was kind of the pinnacle of that which was considered great when I was in high school.
And the guy was a cruel and vacuous idiot.
And he was always saying harsh things to people.
He walked up to a girl from Oh, I mean, I don't know where she was from, but she was from some very repressed, I assume, Islamic culture.
And he walked up to her with a nut and bolt, and he said to this girl, he walked up to her with a nut and bolt in his hand, and he said, Hey, name, you want a screw?
Everybody laughed and laughed, because, you know...
Her shock and shame and horror was...
Oh, man, that was funny.
Oh, gosh. Walked up to another kid and said, You smell like shit.
Ha! That's so funny.
He's such a funny guy. Girls all thought he was cool because he was handsome.
Right? One girl, Catherine, turned around because he was...
I don't know, dipping her pigtails in ink or something.
And he turned around and he took his magic marker out and he drew on her face.
Ah! Everybody laughed and laughed because, you know, that's pretty fucking funny.
I spent a night at his house once because I took over his paper route for a while when he was on vacation.
He was never a friend of mine, I will say that, but I really needed the money, as you know.
And so I think I was 15.
I think my mom had just gone, and I needed some money, and he had a paper route that I could earn some extra bucks by doing his paper route in the morning.
So I stayed at his house one night, and...
He gave me some cookies, no plate or whatever, right?
And I ate the cookies. I tried to, you know, keep my hand under my chin or whatever, but a few crumbs landed on the carpet.
He turned all kinds of cold and weird, and he said to me, you need to pick those up.
That is a mess. You need to pick those crumbs up.
And suddenly I'm dealing with some Sergeant Major slithery creepy.
So I picked them up. So I picked them up.
And this guy was, you know, pretty much at the top of the food chain when it came to society.
I met him years later.
Ah, we're going to talk about that another time.
Ah, who cares? We'll just go back to the story.
Sorry to switch mics. So, this is the hierarchy that we're in.
This guy is at the top, and the pretty people are at the top, and the athletes are at the top, and the rich kids are at the top.
There were two kids in my high school whose dad, I think, was way up there in the Toronto Stock Exchange, and they had money coming out of their earlobes.
They showed up in the most amazing cars, and they had these wild parties.
I went to their house once, because we were in the same theater group together.
And it just went on forever, forever.
And these people were at the top because they had money, you see.
They had money. And other people had musical talent, or even that was not considered too cool.
But it was all about the externalities.
It was all about who was pretty.
And it's all about who had money.
And it was all about whose parents were successful.
And it was all about who was harsh and who was dangerous and who was nasty.
And that was the society that had bred us.
That's where we were. That's where we were.
And there was always the endless contempt of the teachers, whose products we were, but who constantly scolded us for our shallowness.
Without ever questioning why, after having been in school with them for almost a decade, we still remain this shallow.
Well, it was our fault, you see.
Nothing to do with society, nothing to do with the values of the world we lived in, or the lack of values.
The taller guy always wins the election, right?
They wonder why we're shallow.
It's how democracy works, for Christ's sake.
And there were fights. A friend of mine, Jamie...
Long dead. He died and was beheaded in a terrible motorcycle accident.
Why? Because he had a death wish from the moment that I met him, and he taught me a lot about psychology, though not directly.
And he, many moons ago, people long dead, but he got into a disagreement of some kind with a guy named Sam, who was a monster of an Armenian fellow who pretty much had to start shaving the back of his knuckles and fingers when he was about 13 or so.
Just one of these giants. Andre the Giants among boys.
And Jamie got into a conflict and there was going to be a fight, you see, and the whole school was ablaze and alive with the fervor of murder and everybody was excited because somebody might lose a tooth or break a hand or break an arm or cut a lip and that there might be a smashing of the face and everybody was around and egging them on and you've got to fight and you can't back down now.
I wasn't. I was just horrified by the whole thing.
I didn't go. And it was considered a mark of honor that he had to, like a Roman gladiator, wander into the meat fist of this man monster for the entertainment and excitement of others.
We were all decadent by the time we were Thirteen or fourteen who needed that kind of drug of violence to stimulate our decayed systems.
Terrible, terrible.
And this is the Lord of the Flies lives that we led.
Because you understand the etymology of the word is clear.
Shyness. Shyness means to shy away from, to recoil from, to avert your eyes from a danger or a horror or that which is sickening to any sensitive and deep soul.
Horses shy away from things in the road that can harm them.
Shyness is a medal because you shy away from that which is ugly and unpleasant.
But you cannot get away because we are social animals.
You can't get away and you can't join into this monster-borg madness of society.
And so you are shy.
You flit around the edges. You flit around the periphery.
You cannot join. You cannot leave.
You cannot erase.
You cannot exit. That's what I mean when I say it is a mark of nobility to shy away from that which is mad, and that which is evil, and that which is dysfunctional, and that which is destructive.
I think there is a step above shyness, which we're moving towards, which is to engage.
Do not self-attack for not wanting to witness the truth of the world, for shying away from the horror of society.
I think that there is a step above it, which is to engage people And to try to find those who have the same imprint of future humanity on their foreheads, those of us who are dropped like accidental bungees from the airplanes of the future among these savages,
▲
Export Selection