All Episodes
Previous Next
July 21, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:20
1702 Social Anxiety
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi, y'all.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well. So a topic came up on the board recently, and thanks everybody so much for posting such great, great, smart, insightful, and curious stuff on the board.
It's a real pleasure to read. My favorite place on the internet, dare I say.
And the topic was social anxiety.
Now, this is, of course, a nonsense amateur take on the topic.
No particularly clear answers.
Certainly no definitive ones. But here's some perspectives that I found helpful in dealing with my own social anxiety.
As a kid, I was very, very shy.
Very shy indeed.
And it took a lot of work to overcome that and to find a way.
The opposite of extreme introversion and shyness is extroversion and attention-seeking and being the life of the party, the jokester, and so on.
Those two sides are the same.
Coin. And I swung between those two extremes when I was a kid, into my teenage years, until I settled into something, I guess, a little more stable as I got older.
So I've had some significant experience with social anxiety.
And I can tell you what worked for me.
And I generalize this as a tentative theory.
I mean, I think that it's got the status of Possibly true.
There's certainly some strong evidence for it, so I'll lay out the claim, and you can see whether it fits your circumstances at all.
I think that the root of social anxiety is a fundamental disbelief in the mythologies of the society, and this is not something that is arrived at by people philosophically, at least not originally, because children are not exactly philosophers, although they're better philosophers than almost all adults.
But if you don't believe in the prevailing myths of your society, then you are in a situation of danger.
Because the myths of society are enforced by the aggression of individuals, particularly individuals in power.
So, when I was a kid, one of the first...
Dromides or shibboleths or culture-fueled fantasies that eluded me.
I mean, I tried to hang on to it.
I really did. It was like, you know, when you start to misgrab a wet bar of soap in the shower and it just ends up, you're chasing it all over the place and it falls on the floor with a loud bang.
Well, that was with me.
I struggled and grappled.
To hang on to the idea of society as a virtuous entity.
Society as it was, and to a large degree as it is.
Society is a virtuous entity.
Now, I mean, this is no news to anyone, so I'll just touch on it briefly.
Of course, the degree of violence and abuse that I experienced in the home was never acknowledged by anybody.
And even now, I mean, at the age of 43, I still occasionally will run into people from my youth, and nothing is ever...
Acknowledged that it's a big thing that is avoided.
And so for me...
I think children are born empiricists.
We're just natural that way when we're kids.
We're born empiricists. And so I don't really care what society says.
I certainly didn't as a kid.
Anyone can say anything.
I mean, if society is all keen on what it says rather than what it does, then why was I never allowed to say, oh, no, no, I passed the test.
No, no, no, I had to prove my knowledge by actually taking the test.
And I think most, I mean, certainly most people who listen to this show are, you know, not to kiss your frontal lobes or anything, but pretty damn smart.
And with that extra couple of layers of intelligence, and intelligence is asymptotic.
It's not linear. It's not like twice as intelligent is not twice as intelligent.
An extra 20 points in IQ is multiple times the processing.
And so, if people have been treated cruelly in society, and this is just about everybody, because...
I mean, you may have had cruel parents.
If you've had a priest, it was by definition pretty damn cruel to your brain, if not your emotions.
And you probably went to public school.
Most people do. Or maybe you went to a private boarding school like I did, which was a pretty hideous place to be.
So, if you're treated cruelly by society, by your authority figures—teachers, parents, priests— Then it's pretty hard to believe the virtue of society.
Because not only are you not receiving sympathy for the ill treatment that you've received or are receiving, but I think what's even worse is it's actually inflicted by the authority figures themselves and, And certainly, as was the case with me, the negative effects of terrible caregiving, of abusive parenting, were ascribed to personal faults or flaws within me.
So, I mean, the fact that my clothes were raggedy, I had holes in them that I smelled, that I was hungry a lot, that I had to wash my hair with soap, I was itchy a lot, and my mom would cut my hair occasionally with pinking shears.
It was wretched.
But of course, nobody said, poor kid, he's not well cared for.
Pretty much people said, the kid doesn't take care.
Of himself. What's wrong with him?
You know, it's the pig pen thing, right?
From Peanuts.
Probably a reference lost on the younger folks, but he's a smelly kid, and the kids are all like, oh, stay away from pig pen, he's smelly, as if he just prefers dirt, as opposed to where are his parents and what choices are they making.
And this can take multiple forms, right?
So maybe you just don't believe in the admonition from parents or teachers or priests to respect other children.
Well, you treat it with respect by your parents.
Do parents respect children?
Do priests respect children? Do teachers respect children?
Of course not. Of course not.
And so you just, you have the intelligence to notice that this is all bullshit.
And that puts you in a very dangerous position, right?
To penetrate the bullshit of the tribe's ethical delusions is a pretty dangerous thing.
It's a very dangerous thing in society because it is an invitation to aggression.
And it's a peculiar kind of hysterical aggression that arises when you ask people to live by the virtues that A, they claim to possess, that B, they claim are universal, and C, which they have inflicted upon you as a child.
As a child. So, as a kid, there was zero tolerance for bullying, right?
I mean, if I had pulled one-tenth of one percent of the crap my mother pulled on me at school, oh, the hammer would have fallen down pretty damn hard on me.
If I'd screamed and throw things and hit kids, then I would have been severely punished and then expelled.
And I guess these days, you'd probably end up with some criminal charges.
Especially in the States. And that would have happened if I was six years old or seven years old.
But my mother, who then was in her late 30s, early 40s, Nobody sanctioned her at all.
So the adults can act in ways...
And nobody sanctions them at all.
Nobody criticizes. Nobody even expresses sympathy for the victims.
But if a child of six or seven does one-tenth of one percent of the bad behavior of an adult, the child is severely punished and expelled.
The ethical judgment and the moral retaliations of society come tumbling down on that little fern like a mudslide of infinite...
Repercussions. But when parents do it, nobody says anything, because parents have power and children don't, right?
So, zero tolerance for bullying is only for the children, you see.
It's not for the parents.
There's not zero tolerance for the parents, right?
So, a kid bullies another kid.
The teachers don't go visit the parents and say, where's he learning this from?
You need to not do whatever you're doing that's causing this behavior, right?
Because parents have power. Parents can make your life difficult.
Parents can I'd sue you or whatever if you're a teacher and do something like that.
But the children can't.
So children are punished not because there's any objective moral standard.
And surely our morals for children should be far more relaxed than they are for adults, for parents, right?
I mean, clearly it would be insane to hold a six or seven-year-old to an infinitely higher or even remotely higher moral standard than you would a 30 or 40-year-old adult.
I mean, that would be insane.
But that's exactly what happens, right?
Is that everybody gangs up and bullies down on the kids, and the adults who are complicit in the aggression, in fact, are the causes of the aggression at home, walk off scot-free.
And if anyone even attempts to bring the parents into it, then they will be attacked and punished.
Of course, right? I mean, that's inevitable.
And so if you pierce this kind of stuff, if you pierce through this veil of sanctimonious bullshit that lies at the core of society's supposed ethical standards, well, you're outside the pale, my friend.
You are in a dangerous and volatile environment or situation.
And I sometimes imagine what I would have done.
So when an authority figure said, you smell, you need to start using deodorant and so on, if I'd have said...
You know, we're out of money for soap.
I don't have enough to eat.
There's lots of violence at home with threats of eviction.
What would have happened? Well, there would have been great resentment at me bringing this up.
And there would have been maybe a little bit of sympathy, but nothing would have happened.
Nothing. Because people don't like to take on the parents.
Abusive parents. Of course not.
It's better to let the children just continue to suffer.
And go around praising yourself for being a good person.
Well, not me. That's a lesson I learned.
I said to myself, when I was young, if I ever achieved any kind of provenance, I was never going to turn my back on victims of abuse.
Never. And it could be costly.
As we all know, we've done it.
And so, when you have this gleam of awareness in your eyes, when you have this searchlight of truth-telling beaming out and blinding the mole eyes of the self-blinded, then you are a marked man.
You are a marked woman. Because you have your finger on the button that detonates society.
And everybody knows this, and everybody's avoiding it, and everybody's anxious.
This can occur if you simply stop believing in ghosts, goblins, Santa Clauses, Easter bunnies, and gods.
You can ask four questions or three questions, and in public, right?
Because I'm always encouraged to ask questions if you don't understand something.
You ask three or four questions of the priest in public, and the priest will be very quickly humiliated and proven to have no answers.
And what will he do? He will lash out at the child.
And it will start as mockery, as it's trying to get the other kids to laugh at the child for his supposedly foolish questions.
If the child persists, there will be anger.
There will be admonitions for more faith, right?
And your kid will say, well, I was told not to just believe things without a reason.
I'm supposed to think about these things, and I was told to ask questions that they don't understand.
Are you saying that there are no answers?
Is that what faith means?
Just believe things that there are no answers to?
If that don't make sense. How long will it take for the priest to attack the child?
In the people who've sat down with parents and said, well, you praised and punished me for virtuous and unvirtuous behavior as a child, so perhaps now you'd like to step me through your ethical reasoning, which parents don't possess.
And it's certainly no crime that they don't possess it.
Good heavens. Philosophers have woefully let parents down in not working out rational philosophy.
But it certainly is bad for parents who've told their children to be honest, And not to fake knowledge for them to pretend that they have ethical reasoning when they in fact don't.
To continue to pretend that.
So the question that I... The question I asked myself...
Asked myself...
About my social anxiety was...
I think it's really important to ensure...
That the feelings you're experiencing are yours!
Are yours! Are yours!
So, to give an example, it's a usual one, it's my usual one, but it's appropriate to this in particular.
If I'm a counterfeiter, and I'm handing you over a counterfeit bill, and you start to examine it, and then you pause, and then you run it in front of your counterfeit detection machine, and then you look at it again, hold it up to the light, as you continue To do that, I am going to grow more and more anxious and hostile and fearful.
And I am going to try, one of my basic camouflage routines is I'm going to try to either distract you or if you get closer to create some negative experience for you so that you will stop what you're doing.
So, for instance, if I were a counterfeiter and I thought that you were getting ready to detect my counterfeit bill, what I would do is I would shout fire.
Or I would pretend to faint or have some wretched coughing fit or I'd stick my hands in my mouth and throw up or something like that.
So that you would experience something distracting and unpleasant so that you would stop checking for my counterfeit bill.
It's a crude example, but this is what people do.
So my question is, to people who are experiencing social anxiety, is it even your feeling?
And I understand this. Feelings are an ecosystem of the tribe.
Feelings are an ecosystem of the tribe.
That's really, really important to understand.
Emotions are collective endeavors.
Emotions are collective endeavors.
So, some creepy guy who stalks women was, you know, the likely and cliched psychological scenario is that he was really bullied against by his mother.
So, he experiences a great fear of women and anger towards women.
And so, if he doesn't deal with it, he may end up with a strong desire to provoke fear in women, to reproduce his own feelings In others, to reproduce his own unexamined feelings, which we do not examine, we reproduce in others.
If we don't deal with our own abuse, we have a much higher likelihood to abuse others.
And so it's really, really important to not assume self-ownership of your emotions, but to look for the circumstances.
Which may be provoking them.
Look for the circumstances which may be provoking them.
So to take an example, if you're a woman walking down a dark alley, and you hear footsteps and heavy breathing coming up behind you, you don't say, I'm having a causeless anxiety attack.
You say, geez, I wonder who the hell is creeping up behind me, or not so creeping up behind me.
If you're in an airplane and it suddenly drops 500 feet, then you don't sit there and say, I'm having a causeless anxiety attack.
You say, I hope I don't crash.
Shit, that scared the hell out of me.
So you look for the circumstances.
Our feelings... How do I put this?
Our feelings are very little entirely self-generated.
Our feelings are very little entirely self-generated.
So, if I'm walking in the woods and I feel a sting on my arm, I don't just assume that my skin is attacking itself.
I will look for what the hell bug is biting me.
If I stand in poison ivy, I don't wonder why my skin is itchy later.
I don't say, oh my god, my skin is mysteriously attacking itself.
No. When I stand in poison ivy, Most of our sensations are not self-generated.
I'm driving in the car. There's a little air conditioning in my face.
It's warm in here. I'm seating a little bit far forward.
Bit of a strain on my lower back.
I shift around. These are all environmental or circumstantial experiences.
Now, it certainly is true that some of our feelings are more self-generated, like hunger, like tiredness, right?
These and these have to do with the passage of time, but they're much more self-generated.
It's not everything. But with my own emotions, when I'm experiencing an emotion, it's not the last place I look, but it definitely is the first place to look, which is to say, whose feeling is this?
Whose feeling is this?
I think that social anxiety is a bit of a Christ thing, where you take on the sins of the world as if they are yours.
If you have been wronged by the world to the point where you don't believe the pious moral self-congratulations of the world, if you have seen through the machine to the petty wizard behind, if you don't believe the social myths that everybody floats along patting themselves on the back for achieving, then you have a massive counterfeit detection machine and you make everybody around you anxious.
And they work to contain that.
They work to contain that.
They work to shut you up.
They work to keep you quiet.
They work to keep you doubting.
They work to keep yourself attacking.
They work to keep you slapping yourself so that you feel down and you feel insecure and you feel what is wrong with me.
They work to transfer their discomfort to you.
So that you will spend your time managing your discomfort and feeling that you're somehow wrong, rather than opening your mouth and saying those terrible words, those most terrible two words that any culture can ever hear.
The words, I doubt.
I doubt.
Followed by, prove it.
Or, explain it.
Or, justify it.
Or, reason it out.
These words, these questions, these culture-destroying questions, these fantasy-illusion-pious-virtue-destroying sentences are always on the verge of tumbling out your lips.
Always. These dead bodies of old questions will come tumbling out of your mouth.
Like a man attempting to immigrate by climbing into the wheel well of an airplane, it opens, the body falls.
And these questions open. Everybody knows, they smell, they sense that these questions are always on the verge of tumbling out of your mouth.
These bodies of old, dead, unasked, terrifying, counterfeit detection questions are always tumbling out.
You have bodies in your mouth.
You have eaten but not swallowed the dead.
And everybody has to keep your mouth shut.
And you don't have to believe me in any of this, of course.
This is just my theory.
It's certainly what was true for me.
And I was right in many ways.
But there's an easy way to find out if the feeling is yours or if the feeling is not yours.
If the feeling is yours or if the feeling is not yours.
There's an easy way. There's an easy way to check.
In general, this is a general principle.
If you want to find out whether the feeling is yours.
So if I'm feeling a generalized anxiety, then it shouldn't have anything to do with anything specific.
So if I'm feeling just generalized anxiety for an internally generated state, some general pile-up of perhaps hypocrisy or evasion or self-avoidance that has built up over many years, then it won't be very specific.
It won't be a specific phobia.
I particularly am not a big fan of spiders.
So I don't feel spider anxiety when I'm not around spiders.
That's how I know it's a spider anxiety and not a generalized anxiety disorder.
Say with hide or snakes or whatever it is, the rats, the Winston Smith thing, whatever it is that gets you good.
And so there's a test.
And the test is exposure.
So if my theory is correct, that the reason that you may be feeling social anxiety is because everyone's terrified because you're a truth teller, That you're going to rip the false selves off the crucifixes of their own selves or non-selves.
If everyone's terrified of the truth that you can tell, and that's the main course or a central course of your social anxiety, there's a great way to test it, which is just to ask the questions and speak the truth.
Ask the questions. What is truth?
What is reality? What is virtue?
What is goodness? How do you know?
Prove it. Help me to understand.
To ask the questions that everybody already pompously declares that they have the ultimate answers to, to ask those questions.
And if you feel a spike in anxiety when you even consider asking those around you, friends, family, authority figures, teachers, if you even have a spike in anxiety whenever you even imagine opening your mouth and asking these questions, then bang!
We found it! If you can, with no increase in anxiety, ask these questions, then it's not the case.
You need to look elsewhere.
But if when you contemplate asking people these basic questions about truth, virtue, and reality, if you experience a terrifying spike, then it is their anxiety, their fear, their fear of and rage towards these basic questions of virtue, which they have faked and counterfeited their answers to.
It is their fear of these questions that you are experiencing.
▲
Export Selection