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Sept. 13, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
16:45
1746 Freedomain Radio Barbecue Thoughts, September 2010

Some of my impressions of the 2010 Freedomain Radio listener barbecue, as well as some thoughts about context and history.

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Yeah, so everybody was just up for...
I guess some people were up for five days at the 2010 FDR BBQ. And I just wanted to put down a few of my thoughts before they escape into the great void of one's mid-40s.
Oh my goodness, I'm going to be 44 this year.
Ah, well. Good life, good year.
So, there were some interesting things that I noticed during the barbecue.
The one thing that I found most interesting, which I sort of want to say up front, was the degree to which it's so telling, the difference between people who've been in the conversation for a while and people who haven't.
There was obviously people who've been...
Pretty heavily involved in philosophy and FDR and therapy and so on since very close to the beginning, coming up to five years ago.
So four years or so, they've been sort of involved in this approach to self-knowledge and truth and reason and evidence and philosophy and so on.
And it's really interesting and telling and...
Oh, frankly, gratifying to see just what can be achieved in a relatively short period of time.
You know, when I was younger, I read this Thomas Covenant series by Stephen R. Donaldson.
I thought they were very good.
And one of the things that I remember being quite telling...
Was that destruction was so much easier than creation in these books, right?
So stuff that would take years and years to put together would be destroyed by Lord Fowl, you know, because, you know, if you name your kid Fowl, he's just going to end up as a bad guy in a fantasy novel.
It's sad but true.
Name is destiny.
That's determinism.
But it really struck me that...
Destruction was so much easier than creation.
And so people who have had, I mean, some of the people who've been around for a long time, a long time, had pretty wretched childhoods, and even into their 20s, and sometimes even older, just bad, bad stuff.
And what was really great to see was just how much can be achieved, despite decades of destruction, how much can be achieved so that you can be whole and stronger and better and faster and able to leap tall buildings how much can be achieved so that you can be whole and stronger and better and faster and able to In just a couple of years.
It's amazing.
I mean, this neuroplasticity of the brain, its ability to rewire itself, It's really astounding.
So seeing people who've never been in relationships, being in loving relationships, seeing a number of couples who met through philosophy, through FDR, sitting and...
Holding hands and affectionate and happy and I just, I mean, it's a beautiful thing.
It's an absolutely beautiful thing.
I mean, the couples who've come out of FDR, I just think it's fantastic and wonderful and electrically delightful to coin a phrase that makes little sense.
So it was really great to see that and to see the self-expression and contentment and spontaneity of the people who have been around in this conversation for a while.
And, you know, contrasting it, and I don't think it's any problem in saying this, it means contrasting it with people who are just starting out.
And that is a real challenge.
Seeing the precision of the language of the people who've been around for a while is really important.
So one guy was talking about his childhood, and he can't feel, and he was talking about his childhood where he was...
I'm humiliated and attacked for expressing emotions.
And then he says, I have this inability to express emotions.
And, I mean, philosophy, of course, says that precision is the first thing.
Precision is the key.
And so, it's not an inability, right?
I mean, it's not an inability.
It's the result of trauma.
It's the result of being attacked for emotions as a child.
You end up emotion-averse.
But it's not like you have an inability.
Like I have an inability to do ballet because I've never studied it and I have no flexibility and so on.
And I'm old for a ballet guy.
So I have an inability to do ballet.
I have an inability to speak Mandarin because I've never studied it.
That's very different than being avoidant of something that is natural and spontaneous and pleasurable and human and good because you were attacked for it.
I mean, if you have these experiments where they randomly shock chickens for pecking at food, some chickens, I think, end up starving to death rather than submit to another electric shock, even though the shocks are relatively mild.
that's the kind of aversion training that goes on.
If the chickens have gone through this kind of electrified aversion training, we don't say, well, they have this strange inability to, they just have a weird inability to eat food.
It's like, no, no, no, they don't have an inability, they've had aversion training to eating food.
So, it's really just focusing on that kind of precision and truth and honesty about history that is so important.
So, we talked about that.
We also talked about the question of context when it comes to judging.
moral judgments on On people.
Because when we get older, we do have context.
And it's a good and wise and healthy and mature thing to have context, right?
So, if I'm talking about my mom, or my mom had a wretched childhood herself, and so there's this context there.
She was a highly intelligent woman in a sort of cusp of feminism society and so on.
And so there's that context.
But the problem with context that you're talking about is context tends to diminish emotion.
So if I get mad at my mom for how she treated me, my intellectual defense is to wrap the whole thing in a neat bow of context and say, well...
But if I understand my mom, then, you know, context and history and cycle of this, that and the other, right?
But that tends to make me feel that it's immature to be angry, right?
So context can be a great intellectual defense against the emotional truth of your experience.
And I think context is also something that...
Because, I mean, this guy was saying, well, how do I get in touch with my emotions?
And, of course, I don't know, right?
I mean, obviously, therapy is the process by which you would do that.
But the philosophical aspect of it is the truth of the experience.
Emotions are the actual truth of the experience, not the judgment later about the experience.
And the truth... of one's experience when one is a child is that one experiences stuff prior to and independent of the context that we understand later in life, right?
So, when I was two or three or four years old, I mean, the things that happened to me did not happen to me with the knowledge that my mother was once a child with a Jewish heritage in Nazi Germany during a terrible war, So, I didn't have that context as a child.
I didn't have the context as a child.
And so, my original emotional experience of my childhood was independent of context.
It was completely unrelated to the context of my family's history, all of which I learned about later.
And which had nothing to do with my original experience.
So the emotions are the original experience.
So that is the truth.
That's not the whole truth of the family situation, but it certainly is the emotional truth of our initial experiences around childhood.
That context is not part...
Context is something we have later that tends to really interfere with our emotional experience.
And I would actually go further than say not just that it interferes with our emotional experience, but rather context is used to avoid our emotional experience.
But here's another very interesting and challenging aspect of context.
You know, why does virtue always get its ass kicked?
Well, goodness and virtue always gets its ass kicked.
We, historically, have always gotten our asses kicked because there's one very simple reason.
And this is changing over time, little bit by little bit.
But the very simple reason that virtue always gets its ass kicked is because virtue...
Deals with nuance and context.
So what I've just talked about is context.
If somebody says, I have an inability to...
Process my emotions.
The context is, no, it's not an inability because you have to look at the context of having been aggressed against as a child whenever you expressed emotion.
So that's the context.
So virtue and forgiveness of self and to some degree others is around context and nuance and a rejection of knee-jerk absolutes.
Of knee-jerk absolutes.
But the reality of how things get fixed in the world is very simple, which is you pay back coin for coin.
You pay back coin for coin.
If someone pays you $500 for something, and it turns out that the money that they gave you was counterfeit, and the only way that you can get your money back is to give that same person $500 back for something else.
You have a friend go and buy it from him for $500 or whatever, right?
So somebody buys an iPad from you, gives you $500 of counterfeit currency, well, the only way that you can get it back is to give that counterfeit currency to a friend of yours, have him go and get the iPad back by giving the only way that you can get it back is to give that counterfeit currency to a friend of yours, Thank you.
Now, of course, he's going to think it's real $500, so he's up $500.
But that's how virtue wins in the world, is if somebody gives you good money, you don't give them back counterfeit money.
Somebody gives you honest coin, you give them back...
Honest coin. And if somebody gives you the counterfeit currency, then by God, you give them back.
Counterfeit currency.
You don't give good coin for shit coin.
That's a basic reality.
Don't give good coin for bad coin.
Now, context...
It's good coin. Context is good coin.
So when I'm talking to someone, if they bring up something painful where they've been a victim, I'll say, well, here's the moral reality of it.
Here's the moral and epistemological reality of the situation.
And that is good coin, I think.
That is good coin. But if somebody pays me in bad coin, I don't give them good coin back.
I just give them bad coin back.
So let me tell you what I mean.
I withhold context for those who appreciate and utilize context or who allow context.
So, for example, there is a context to my mother's behavior and context has value.
Now, clearly, clearly, clearly, clearly, an adult has far greater capacity for moral action than a tot, a little child, two, three, four, five years old.
Clearly, clearly, clearly.
So, who I choose to apply context to...
is relative to their application of context to me.
So my mother, when I was a kid, if I did something that she disapproved of or got angry about or punished me for or raged at me for or hit me for, I would have a reason for doing it.
I wouldn't just sort of do things for the sake of getting a beating.
I mean, I would have some reason for making my choice.
So when my mother would demand why I did X, Y, and Z, I would say, well, I thought or I wanted or she's like, don't think!
And then their punishment would ensue.
And so when I was four or five years old, no context was granted to me.
Not a shred, not a spindle, not an atom of context was granted to me by my mother.
Same thing with the priest, same thing with the teachers.
I had a, I think grade seven, I had a science test and then the whole night my mom was typing on this loud clattery electric typewriter like four feet from my Head in my room.
In my room. My mother was typing all night.
Couldn't get her to sleep. I asked her to move once.
She got really enraged. She's smoking like a chimney and typing away in my room while I'm trying to sleep.
Loud, loud, loud.
Now, I mean, I thought, you know, I dragged myself bleary-eyed and exhausted into my test.
And I looked at the teacher and I thought, geez, you know, I should really say to this teacher, look, my mom was typing by my head all night.
I've got no blah, blah, blah.
But I knew what would happen.
I knew what would happen. I knew exactly what would happen.
What would happen is the teacher would say, I'm sorry, that's not my concern.
I'm sorry, that's not my business.
I'm sorry, but you still have to take the test.
I'm sorry, but I can't verify that.
I'm sorry, but, but, but, right?
There was no context for that.
When my mother was going through a series of meltdowns, my brother had such trouble studying that he did badly on his tests, and he was then told to take a year off.
From university. And he got doctor's notes.
He got some notes from the psychiatrist who committed my mother and said, this is what was going on.
This is the context. Please let me come back to school.
And the school administrators wrote back and said, well, you should have just adjusted your course load.
No context. No context.
I can't remember a single time when a person in authority granted me the benevolence of con-fucking-text.
I can't remember a time where context...
And I was graded according to exactly the same yardstick as other children who could actually study at home.
Understand? There was no context.
Everybody knew, but there was no context for how I was judged as a child.
By my parents?
I mean, my peers, sorry, by those in authority.
My peers I can understand, right?
So I come to school smelly and in old clothing because we have no soap, I have no social skills, and...
I have no clean clothes and no laundry money.
Well, I can understand my peers saying, you know, saying to me, you smell bad or you stink or whatever.
I can understand that because, you know, they don't know really.
I guess it's not that hard to figure out, but they don't know.
But people in authority, adults, I literally cannot remember a single time where I was granted the get out of jail free card called Context.
And so, I don't grant context back to my mom because she never granted it to me.
I'm not going to grant it to her at the age of 40 when she didn't grant it to me at the age of 4.
I'm not going to repay false coin with good coin.
I'm just not going to do it. And that's another thing that came out of these conversations this weekend was around this question of context.
Anyway, it was quite a bit about context, but I just wanted to talk about How much fun, how pleasurable it is to see the just fantastic and amazing progress that people who've really dug in and done this work are reaping.
I mean, it's just fantastic.
And we had lots of great conversations about that.
And for the people starting out, I hope that it gives you a sense of where you can get to.
It is a truly beautiful place.
And I thank everyone so much for taking the time to come up.
And I hope that you will all come up again and more.
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