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May 4, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:11
1654 Despair

How to find your way out...

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Oh, hi everybody, it's Steph. This is a little chat about hatefulness.
Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.
Let us have a little conversation about that.
I think it's well worthwhile. There have been a couple of posts on the board lately about the question of hatefulness and despair and giving up and so on.
I completely sympathize.
I really, really, really do.
There is a lot of hatred in the world.
And... There are three courses of action that I've tried to take in my life, and only one of them has really been successful in terms of the pursuit of happiness.
And I will talk about them and the pluses and minuses of each of these three paths, and maybe it will give you some clarity.
There will be some use in my hard-bitten, hard-won, deep-scarred experience for you.
The three paths are To avoid, to forgive, or to fight.
To avoid, to forgive, or to fight.
And very briefly put, the avoidance is, you know, you have your values as kind of like a hobby, and maybe they're philosophical or rational or objectivist or empirical or libertarian or whatever.
But you have your values kind of like a hobby, right?
You read about them, you blog about them.
But you don't act on them.
Your philosophy is your bitch mistress, frankly.
And that's one approach that you can take, and I've certainly taken that approach for many years.
And if my unconscious had not erupted in full revolt, I'm sure I would still be slithering my way through that maze of empty compromise.
Yay! Verily, even as we speak.
Now, The second is to forgive the world, and I think that's a very interesting challenge, and it's something that we talked about just in the Sunday show, the May 2nd Sunday show, 2010.
Forgiveness is something for which you will receive great praise in this world, because forgiveness helps you avoid the fighting with people, with the world.
And forgiveness is where you say, well, they know not, forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.
They have their own histories, they're full of fear, and they act out, and they're, you know, but I forgive them, and I rise above this in deep, wise, beatific, buddhistic understanding, and all is well, and all is good, and life is slow progress, and so on. There's a bit in...
Sorry, somebody's slowing to a stop for a green light right ahead of me on a near highway.
Most odd. Anyway, in a show called Damages, the actor played by the guy who played Sam Malone on Cheers, Ted Danson.
He gets a murderer after him, and he's with a Buddhistic guy, and he says, Ah, you have had a jackal fastened onto you, and you must find an X, Y, and Z. And it's sort of just like a fact of nature.
There's no anger, there's no fighting back, you accept it, that there is a jackal in your life, and we must find a way to rise above it, and to find a way to forgive and love your enemies, and all this kind of stuff.
Right, so there's the...
The flee, the forgive, the fight, if we can go with the triple F methodology.
And the fight is very different.
And the fight is what I do and what I will do until probably 12 minutes before my dying breath.
It is the fight. Now, the fight requires you to abandon a good deal of what are, to me, mythologies and preconceptions and, fundamentally, errors.
Now, there is this belief-fantasy perception that we're all human, that humanity means the same thing for everyone.
And I don't find it to be the case at all.
I just don't think it's true at all.
There are different psycho classes, There are, in a sense, different slices of human history all jumbled together in the world.
There are people who are raised with brutal Stone Age violence, and there are people who are raised with reason and compassion and sensitivity and so on.
And the physical result is interspecies predation.
It's interspecies predation.
This is very important to understand.
clearly, empirically, the greatest predator that we have to fear is mankind.
All of us, right?
We're thrown in jail for non-payment of taxes, we can get conscripted and thrown into withering hellfires of bullets pretty much at any time.
Laws that we don't even know about can wrap like a boa constrictor noose around our neck, and all of these things can occur.
We're not going to get raped by a lion, but we can get raped by a human being, whether you're a man or a woman.
We would scarcely call a squirrel a thief, even if he steals our watch, but we can be stolen from by others at any time.
We can be physically attacked.
I mean, if you're a woman walking around downtown or any place where you don't feel particularly safe, which for all too many women is all too many places, you are not afraid of a bear coming out of the woodwork, so to speak, or a shark jumping up from the sewers.
You are afraid of your fellow man.
When I was a kid in school, I was not afraid of wolves or foxes or even mosquitoes or anything like that.
I was afraid of my fellow man.
When I worked up north, we were deep in the woods.
I had virtually no fear of bears.
We would see the occasional one, but I had no real fear of bears.
However, when I was working in the bush one day and felt something poke in my back and turned it around, there was a native Canadian, First Nations, what you would call an Indian, standing there with a shotgun pointed at my chest.
And that was a startling moment, to say the least.
And, of course, I was much more concerned about something like that than a bear, who is probably more frightened of me than I am of the bear.
Particularly since I hadn't bathed in a while.
So, that is the reality of the situation that, you know, 300 million people were slaughtered by other human beings just in terms of democide, in terms of government attack upon own citizens, even exclusive of war.
That's the reality of the situation that we live in, that human predators are that which we have the most fear from.
There's nothing else that is more dangerous to us.
...than other human beings.
Because they're very well fucking camouflaged, right?
That therein lies the challenge.
They're very well camouflaged.
They look like you and I. They're Dick Cheney in a suit.
Even Robert McNamara, right?
A guy who... He fell for the falsification of the Gulf of Tompkins incident when there was no actual firing upon US vessels.
He started a whole war which slaughtered millions of people.
He's the Goebbels of US foreign policy.
He's a nice-looking, civilized man in a suit with a good education.
This is a monster who can slaughter more people in a single stroke of his pen than probably all predators throughout history have ever taken down human beings.
And that is the tragic and destructive reality of the situation, that the world is dangerous because of human predators.
The soulless, the virulent, the violent, the cold, the calculating, the sociopathic, the psychopathic, the murderous, the suicidal, the drunken, the abusive, the addicted.
I mean, we live in a clusterfrag of violent human aggression and dysfunction.
That is just the reality of where we are.
And I simply can't...
Hey, I'd love to get to philosophy, to the philosophy of forgiveness as a virtue.
Boy, I would love it.
It's not about my personal preference.
Philosophy is not about what I like.
It's not about what I want.
It's not about what I prefer.
It's about what is true.
And the truth, of course, is that you really can't have...
A value in this life and also value the opposite.
I mean, that's insane, right?
That's double-think. And the reality in this life is that if forgiveness is a virtue, then non-forgiveness is a vice.
And since all abuse is committed by those who are not forgiving of others, then abuse must be the opposite of forgiveness.
And to forgive abuse is to say that forgiveness and its opposite are both valuable.
And that is...
Insane, of course, and cowardly, and understandably so.
I mean, it's a very scary thing to take up arms against a sea of evils.
It is scary, and my only preference would be that people say, I'm too scared.
I'm too scared. I'm not going to do it.
But, of course, all that people do, ex post facto reasoning, is they make of their cowardice a virtue, and through that they entrap the future in the bottomless wells of their own Fears and failures.
So, to me, much though I would love to forgive and much though in many ways I was very comfortable with and I was okay with, in the moment, hiding.
Fall, flight, forgiveness, and fight.
I was okay with hiding and keeping my values as a personal preference.
It just didn't last.
I mean, I continued to pursue these values, and eventually my unconscious kind of threw up all over my life, and I couldn't stand to be where I was anymore, and I simply could not continue.
Again, much though it would have been pleasant to do so, and much though in many ways it was pleasant and profitable to do so, I couldn't do it.
So, when you are disgusted and revolted by the world, I think it's really, really important to remember that all of these lies that we hear about, you know, we are all one, human beings are human beings, and all this, that, and all this Nonsense that we're all the same under the skin.
Oh, no, no, no, no.
We're not the same under the skin.
I mean, if we're all the same under the skin, then you could basically marry anybody and anybody you could fall in love with.
But, you know, choice and consequences and virtue and courage and integrity and philosophy and all of these good things and ability and heroism, well, they're all very real.
And... People are not the same.
People aren't even different.
You understand? People aren't even different.
A lion and a zebra are not just different.
They're oppositional. If the zebra lives, the lion dies.
Right? And that is...
That is not just a difference.
Yeah, they're both animals, but their interests are completely opposite.
Their interests are completely and totally opposite.
You and your cancer cells are both human cells, but your interests are completely opposite.
You are with the living so much, not with the cancer cells, which will be, unfortunately, all too often with the dying for you.
You and the hungry shark are both animals.
You are not the same.
You are not even different.
You are in rank opposition.
And if people don't understand that, then that just takes an astounding amount of ignoring of facts in order to miss that reality.
That's just an astounding thing to avoid.
Now, disgust is a very challenging emotion, and I understand it.
I, Lord knows, have swilled more than my fair share of that vile, quaffing brew.
So, I do understand it.
And the way that I've been able to, to a large degree, overcome the problem of disgust, of revulsion, is to recognize that there are just a bunch of slithery Philosophically based predators in the world.
And they're not going to change their nature.
They're not going to change their tune.
They're not going to change their approach.
They are what they are.
And it is a very successful...
Biological survival strategy.
I mean, the people who are working for the government are doing a hell of a lot better than the people who are working for the private sector.
Now, yeah, there are cancer that can overwhelm and cause everything to collapse and so on, but that's not how people think, right?
As Cain said, in the long run, we're all dead.
People are just looking forward to, just looking to get whatever they can get in the moment.
And if that means collapsing, selling off their children's future, well, that doesn't It doesn't matter.
I mean, you're never going to tell Bill Clinton that the government is a bad thing.
You're just not. I mean, it's great for him.
He got power. He got chicks.
All of his interns had to wear the presidential knee pads.
He gets a fortune.
He gets to fly all over the world with his charities.
He's an important guy.
He gets on tour. I mean, you're just never going to convince this guy that the government is a bad thing because he's like, even if I agree with you philosophically, fundamentally, it's been really great for me.
And if you go with the flow, it's understandable.
He's not going to regret that use of power.
He's going to say he used it for good, he did the best he could, he's at least done something with his life, unlike those who just write blogs and complain, like all these arguments that you would get.
That would be, you know, he's getting some real good done, and even if you disagree with his use in politics, he's gotten a lot of good done afterwards with his charity work and so on, right?
There are predators in the world, and they prey upon people through propaganda, through indoctrination, through setting up the invisible fence of slave-on-slave attack.
That's how they profit from the world.
And they don't want the world to change.
The last thing they want is for the world to change.
I mean, think of some, I hate to use the cliché, but some fat, dysfunctional ex-military guy who works for the post office, who's abrasive and ugly and lazy and all that, right?
I mean, emotionally ugly.
What the hell would he have to do with wanting to privatize anything?
Why on earth would he want to privatize anything?
What possible benefit would there be for him in privatizing anything?
I mean, he'd get fired. And in a privatization, people would be unlikely to take over his pension, so he'd be kicked out on his ass.
Why would he ever want to change that or fight against that system?
And people in the public sector are in general much more incompetent than the people in the private sector because if they were more competent, they would go so completely mental with not being able to get anything done or wasting their time and lives that they would have left the public sector.
So the people in the public sector are by definition much less competent, much less able, much less productive.
than people in the private sector.
And listen, I'm going to say that with some authority, because I worked with both the public and the private sector, and I saw the fundamental and significant differences between the two.
And that's just the reality of the situation.
So the less competent are making twice the money.
They're like less than half as competent and they're making twice the money.
In other words, they're getting four times the productivity per competence factor than people in the private sector.
Four times the pay relative to effort.
An almost infinite amount of security relative to the private sector.
They have less than zero interest.
They would fight you tooth and nail for privatization.
But the way that they would fight you is through ideology.
You understand, right? The way that they would fight you is through ideology, not anything else.
And that is really, really important to understand.
You can hate a tiger for hunting you through the bush or whatever, right?
And you can do that.
And I can understand that. Fight or flight will make you pretty emotionally intense about the tiger hunting you through the bush.
But the tiger is just pursuing its own self-interest.
Now, the tiger does not use moral justification for its predation upon you.
And that is the vile part, is the degree to which the immoral, the amoral, the downright evil understand the power of morality far more than the virtuous, right?
The evil in the world totally understands that you train people in virtue when they're young, you own them for life because people so desperately want to be good.
It's all the virtuous people in the world who try to come up with every single fucking exception to a virtuous rule that could ever be imagined in order to paralyze virtue, right?
So it's all the moralists who are like, well, what about somebody hanging from a flagpole who needs to kick in?
What about some starving guy who's going to eat a banana?
Are you going to throw him in jail? All of the, quote, good people in the world Are coming up with every reason why morality doesn't work and all the evil people are like, hey, that's great.
We know it does work and that's why we own the brains of children.
So we teach them that obedience to the state is virtuous and we protect and we're good and we help the poor so that they can't ever escape.
The net noose of morality.
I mean, this is the sad and pitiful thing, right?
That evil people really understand the power of morality and all that good people and thoughtful people want to do is find exceptions to the rule and collapse the power of morality.
And it's disgusting and it's vile, but the level that human beings are at is mere animal resource maximization, right?
Mere animal resource maximization.
They are Morally indistinguishable from intestinal parasites, right?
And tigers and so on, right?
All they're doing, like all animals, is using whatever resources they can in their environment to maximize their resource consumption.
That's all they're doing. And that's monkeys will, you know, stack crates to get bananas that are hung from a hook.
That's what they do.
Sea otters will pound an anemone with rocks to open it up.
And gulls will drop eggs or seashells on rocks to open them up because they're using their environment to maximize their resource consumption.
That's what they do, right?
And human beings use their environment to maximize their resource consumption.
And instead of boxes or rocks or whatever else animals are using, the environment that gains people the most resource maximization is morality.
Is morality.
Using morality is the best way to maximize your resources because it sets up internal self-attack for disobedience.
And internal self-attack for disobedience means you do not need a whip hand or at least you need a very weak whip hand in order to keep people in line.
And that's just something to understand.
This to me does not mean forgiveness.
I mean, you don't sit there and seize with rage about the mosquito that stung you, right?
I mean, you can, but the mosquito's just doing what the mosquito does, right?
But it's different with human beings who are using morality to prey upon others.
And this is, you know, it's chilling and it's hideous and it's vile and it's disgusting, but it's fundamentally amoral.
We are simply designed to utilize our environment to maximize our resource consumption.
And the state is the environment, and the way that the state is used to maximize the resource consumption of the incompetent is to use the argument from morality.
To protect, to help, to secure, to aid, to all that sort of...
We know all that shit, right?
So that's all they're doing.
It's like this. It's like one monkey is attacking another monkey with a hardcover book of ethics that someone left lying around in the jungle.
It picks up a hardcover book of ethics and pounds the other monkey over the head with it.
And that's what the monkey is doing.
And that's what human beings are doing.
They're picking up a book of ethics and clubbing us on the head with it in order to maximize their victories, their resource consumption, to gain mastery over New things, new money, new power, whatever, right?
They're just banging us on the head with a book of ethics.
Now, the monkey in the jungle doesn't care that it's a book of ethics.
He just cares that it's something solid he can use to whack another monkey on the head with.
So, it's the use of ethics in a completely amoral manner.
And this is what it is with human beings.
They will simply try whatever strategies they can to get you to give them shit, voluntarily.
Taxes, obedience, whatever, your kids to public school, whatever.
And they rely on guilt and they rely on insecurity and they rely on cowardice and fear and betrayal and so on, right?
So people don't fight against public school because they're like, oh, so you don't want the poor to be educated.
Oh, no, I guess I do. Right?
Well, you don't want the poor to be educated.
It's simply a way of maintaining the power structure of public school.
It's nothing to do with interest in the education of the poor.
Everybody understands that the public school does quite the opposite of educate the poor.
It destroys the poor.
It destroys the minds of the poor.
But these are just sounds, like magic spells, right?
You know, every culture has a mythology called magic, right?
Where you speak words, abracadabra, I want to reach out and tax you, right?
You speak words, and magically things move, right?
Fireballs erupt from your fingertips, and kazazz down the Dungeons& Dragons hallway into the berserkers.
So, every culture has this belief that the magic of spells changes reality, creates magical force fields, stops this, moves that, voodoo, curses, whatever.
And it's all perfectly accurate.
You just have to substitute morality for magic.
That the mere Action of flapping your breathing hole in a certain way gets people to hand over their children to 13 years to a bunch of assholes to indoctrinate them against the parents' and the children's own self-interest.
That's magic, baby.
That's powerful voodoo.
That is deep, deep, deep mojo.
And that is magic.
And that is what magic describes, is the power of morality.
Magic describes the ability of religion to move billions and billions of dollars around the world.
I curse you with the voodoo of original sin.
Now pay me money to cure you and promise you an imaginary thing called heaven.
I mean, this is magic, right?
It's voodoo. It's nonsense.
But it's the power of morality.
And it's people's belief in magic that creates the sorcerers.
And it's people's belief in surface bullshit morality that creates the state.
And so, I think we can all understand, and it is disgusting in a certain way, but people are using morality in the same way that the sea otters use the rock.
It is just the best tool available to get to the innards of an enemy, of the sea urchin.
Urchin, I think, is the urchin.
And that is, yeah, it's kind of vile, it's kind of disgusting, but people aren't doing it because it's evil and they're rubbing their mustaches in bu'aha.
They're just doing it because it works.
And the reason that it works is all on the receiving end, right?
It's not on the delivery end, right?
You can't force people to believe in a morality that they don't like, that they don't need, that they don't want.
And the reason that people believe the magic spells of governmental manipulation are virtue is because most of them are parents.
And if not parents, they've been raised by somebody.
And within families, there are almost an infinite number of magic spells that use morality to control behavior.
You owe your parents respect.
Why? Right?
So, it's all, as I've always said, it all begins with the family.
Parents, in the absence of a rational morality for which prior philosophers should be dug up and flayed alive if they weren't already dead, but in the absence of a rational morality, I shouldn't say there's some forgiveness because pre-internet blah blah blah, but In the absence of irrational morality,
parents have little choice, not no choice, but most parents have little choice but to revert to bullying and intimidation and threats of the withdrawal of affection and guilting and frightening and, you know, all of that sort of stuff in order to To get children to comply.
And of course, parents don't say the truth.
I don't know what the hell right and wrong is, but I know that we've kind of got to obey society, so do this, or I'm going to yell at you or withdraw affection or hit you.
I don't know what the hell right is, because then it doesn't work.
Magic is only magic with morality.
When it becomes pragmatism, it loses its morality.
It loses its magic.
And it just becomes brute force, and then with brute force, you can't internalize it, right?
Morality is the perfect tool for self-attack.
I mean, if you just walk up and beat someone, they're going to get really angry at you, and they're not going to beat themselves up later, mentally, right?
I mean, maybe they're careless or whatever if they're doing something stupid, but...
But morality is necessary to internalize self-attack.
If you don't feel immoral, if you don't feel bad, if you don't feel evil, if you don't feel selfish or careless or inconsiderate, those are all things that are necessary for you to attack yourself.
Without morality, there's no self-attack.
And if you can't get your slaves to self-attack, then the cost of ownership is really high.
So you understand that where slaves are easier and cheaper to maintain, Tribes get more and more powerful, because they have to expend fewer and fewer of their martial resources in controlling their slaves, and therefore, they can expend those resources in attacking and conquering other people, right? So, those tribes that invented morality and thus transferred external attack to self-attack in their slaves became, martially, militarily, more powerful.
If you only need one guide for a hundred slaves because they're too busy self-abusing themselves because of moral edicts propagandized into their brains when they were children, then you need very few resources to control your slaves.
And therefore, you only need one guy to guard 100 slaves, whereas some other group needs 10 guards or 50 guards to guard 100 slaves.
Well, you have that many more soldiers available for the battlefield.
You will take them over, and then you will manage their slaves through propaganda and morality, right?
So, it evolves so that everybody, like the most successful societies are those that have successfully used morality to create self-attack of the slaves and lower the total cost of ownership of human farming, right?
And this is all primeval.
No matter how sophisticated our technology and how witty and erudite our sleazy artists are, this is primeval.
And is it disgusting?
Well, yeah, I guess so.
I mean, it's disgusting that maggots eat dead skunks.
But that's just doing what they're doing to maximize the resources in their environment.
So, I hope that this helps.
Yeah, it has to be fought.
It has to be fought. Of course it has to be fought.
We have to wrestle philosophy back from those who have invented it as a tool of control, manipulation, abuse, and ownership.
Yeah, we have to wrestle that back.
Of course we have to. Because society really can't progress in any fundamental way until that occurs.
Is it disgusting? Yeah, it is disgusting.
But it is inevitable in the absence of philosophy that this amoral resource maximization that utilizes pseudo-philosophy as a form of human ownership and control, it's inevitable that that's going to develop to its highest form.
And the only thing that I can say that is valuable about that is that Bullshit is a good fertilizer for real plants, right?
So the fact that the ruling classes have so indoctrinated philosophical concepts as a means of ownership means that their power is pretty weak.
It's pretty... Tentative.
It's tremulous.
Because integrity and virtue and consistency and logic, these are all things that are used to control and abuse the slaves.
And if a philosopher comes along and hooks into that, as we're doing, then...
It can change quite rapidly.
And so I hope that that gives you some hope.
It's the degree to which bullshit philosophy has been spread on the ground.
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