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Oct. 3, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:15
1760 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 3 October 2010

I'beeya no like, the myth of human nature, and two listeners stop a mother from beating her child.

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Time Text
Hello, everybody. It is the 3rd of October 2010, just after 2pm.
We have gone backwards in time to make sure that we pick the worst possible stocks.
So, it is a slightly earlier time, 2pm Eastern Standard Time.
We've moved back a little because people in Europe are having a tough time staying up.
And this way, instead of using me to help get to sleep at night, they can use me to help for their late afternoon nap.
And I think that's very much a step forward in terms of the show's somnambulistic effects.
So, nothing particularly major to add this morning.
I'm gearing up for my talk in Philadelphia on Saturday morning at 10am.
I've done now three rehearsals for my big-time Libertopia speech, and I just did my first rehearsal for the Drexel speech.
I might post those in the Donator section in case anybody wants to see the before and after shots, the studio versions and the live versions, or I guess the other way around.
It's sort of interesting this week.
A boy in the neighborhood, we'll just call him Bob.
A boy in the neighborhood, he's pretty rough.
And he's not mean, he's just kind of careless.
And a little dangerous because of that carelessness.
Like he just runs full tilt to people.
He does have a bit of an invasive habit.
Like he's on his scooter and he'll come screeching up to kids and stop like two inches from them.
It's kind of invasive. It's not quite the same as being directly aggressive, but it's very invasive.
And he's been playing around with Isabella, and his sister's also been over, and we've been nice to him, and he's a nice kid in many ways, but he's definitely one of the kids that I'm constantly, like, I can't leave Isabella with him around, because he's just careless in the way that he handles himself and his various very fast toys.
Anyway, so this boy was coming up the street with another girl Who Isabella does like.
And she said, you know, big hug, then this girl's name.
And then she looked up at me and she said, no like, Bob.
And I thought, how fascinating.
How fascinating that is.
That at 22 months...
She is able to process somebody who is problematic.
Let's just sort of put it that way.
And this boy is, I think he's seven or eight years old.
And I thought, how fascinating that is, that she can process that.
Now, you could say, well, she's getting it from, you know, my feelings about him.
But I don't think that's really true.
She has so many feelings that are opposed to my preferences that I don't really think that she's just absorbing everything.
I just thought how fascinating it was to view and identify somebody and have a negative reaction to somebody who was problematic, to another kid who was problematic.
And that's the only person she's ever said it to, and it's the only person who's really been problematic with interactions with Isabella.
And I just thought, so she's really zeroed in on this boy's A character, as it stands at the moment, and really identified something very important about him and communicated it.
And I just thought how fascinating that is.
And I was thinking, well, if that's something that we all know that young, if that's something that we all know that young, well, how do we lose that?
Because one of the things that's really true for most adults is that most of us have a complete inability to self-protect with regards to dysfunctional people.
It's very hard for people even to see dysfunctional behavior, let alone set boundaries to it.
Think of the dating scene, think of the message boards that you go to.
I mean, Free Domain Radio, I had to tell you, just by the by, it's a freaking beautiful message board.
I mean, it really is.
I have had some necessity to go to other message boards recently for various unimportant reasons.
And, oh my goodness, Free Domain Radio message board.
I mean, I see people apologize.
I see people self-correct.
I see some flashes, but I think that's healthy and natural.
These are very important topics.
But I just wanted to sort of compliment everybody who participates on the message board.
I mean, it really is, as far as I've ever seen on the internet, it is the most civilized and productive space to have conversations with.
And I know that there are some people who've been around for a long time and some people who are newbies, and there's sometimes a bit of a gap that way.
But man, oh man, oh man alive, is it ever a civilized place to be on the internet compared to I mean, to me, this is like an energetic dinner party.
Yeah, yeah, voices can get raised a little bit sometimes, but everybody stays within the civilized bounds.
And I just wanted to sort of point that out, that that's something I'm...
I'd say I'm proud of it, though, of course, it's not really my doing, per se, but I'm very proud...
To have that community on the Freedom Aid radio server.
I'm very proud to have that community on the server.
And I just wanted to extend my immense compliments to everybody for the stellar, you know, maturity and consideration, and yet integrity and courage and standing up for your beliefs in a non-destructive way.
I just think it's fantastic. I just really wanted to point that out and to thank everybody for that.
But I was thinking about how all of this gets scrubbed out of us.
I'll just throw two or three ideas out there very quickly because this is really your show, so I want to get your feedback on this or on whatever else you've got on your mind.
But I was thinking for myself, I found that when I had a problem with another child when I was a kid, almost invariably and inevitably, the adults...
Overrode my issues, right?
So if I had a particular issue with either another kid or even another adult, I don't like so-and-so, I don't like such-and-such a person.
Because my dislike was inconvenient or perhaps even embarrassing to the adults in my life, I was always told that I should be nice, that it wasn't a big deal, that I must have provoked them that he's not a bad kid or that person is not a bad person and I should be more open-hearted and I should forgive and not hold grudges.
Like I was always told that my dislike of people was wrong.
Was wrong.
And it wasn't just wrong like the capital of Ecuador is Paris wrong.
It was wrong like original sin, you're bad, wrong.
Like, your dislike of this person is evidence of narrow-mindedness, is evidence of a judgmental and prejudicial nature, is evidence of being small-minded, is evidence of holding grudges, is evidence of not being able to forgive, holding onto my anger, not being able to let go of my resentment.
I mean, it wasn't, of course, phrased in that way, but that was definitely the impression that I got.
And I just thought how often it is That our preferences for people are overwritten as children.
I don't like this kid.
Well, you have to sit next to him because he's next to you in the alphabet.
I mean, it was crazy just how much my preferences or dislikes of people were consistently overwritten and, in a sense, shouted down from a moral standpoint.
And I think, gosh...
How would the world look if our dislikes of people were respected?
And that doesn't mean that my dislike of people is always right or anything like that, but to at least have that curiosity.
And, I mean, I asked Isabella, why?
Why? Why don't you like him?
Why are you embarrassing daddy? No.
Why don't you like him?
And she couldn't exactly say.
She said a few things, but it was a bit of a random word perhaps.
And I said, no play?
And she said, no play.
No play, Bob. Okay, we won't play.
And so Bob came up and I said, she doesn't want to play just now.
And we walked past and we went on to the park.
And it would have been a little bit more awkward if there had been other kids that she wanted to play with and so on.
But I'm not going to have her play with somebody that she doesn't want to play with or doesn't like in the moment.
It may change the next time she sees him, although I don't think that's the case.
But I just thought, gosh, what an important thing that at the age of 22 months she saw somebody she didn't like.
She expressed her dislike of him and she didn't want to play with him.
And that to me was perfectly fine.
And I just think, gosh!
How much better the world would be if this light were left switched on rather than continually being shot out by defensive adults.
This light of judgment in children.
This light of differentiating people they like from people they don't like.
I don't want to kiss grandma.
She has bad breath. Go kiss her.
She's your grandma, right? Just override the challenge.
And I think that's a very important thing that I've just spent a lot of this week mulling over.
The degree to which our preferences are just eliminated or diminished.
I don't want to study math.
You have to study math. I don't want to study French.
I'm never going to need French for what it is I want to do in my life.
You have to study French. You must study French.
I don't want to go to school.
You must go to school. I don't want to go to church.
You must go to church. I don't like playing with my brother.
Play with your brother because it's convenient for me as a parent that you play with your brother.
Gosh, just think of it.
Think of how many of your preferences as a child get overridden and shouted down by the teachers and the priests and the parents of those around you.
I can't remember a single time where anybody ever asked me as a child why I liked or did not like a certain thing.
I didn't want to go, like when I was in boarding school there was a guy named Stephen.
I sort of palled around a bit, but he was very aggressive.
And my mom wanted to, I think she wanted to go out with some guy and she wanted to send me over to this guy's house for a week and I really didn't want to go.
I mean, he was this kind of guy.
He used to build these little guns made of curtain rods or blocks of wood and he would set up these clothespins and stretch elastics out to the end and he would go around trying to shoot Insects and bees and flies and spiders and caterpillars and all.
He wanted to shoot them with the rubber band.
I really didn't like that very much.
And he was a pretty scary and a little crazy and aggressive kid.
But I had to go because my mom wanted to go somewhere.
So I just had to go to this guy's house for a week.
You know, when I was, I think, 12 or 13, my mom wanted to go to Germany for the summer, and so she sent my brother to my aunt's place in England, and she sent me to stay.
With this couple, the grandparents of a friend of mine from school, I didn't know them.
I have no idea what arrangement was made that I stayed there for the whole summer in this very tiny little apartment.
The old woman was ill.
I mean, not doing well at all.
And it was just a miserable summer.
But there was no chance for me to ask for something else or to go someplace else.
I just had to go there for the summer.
I mean, the preferences didn't matter.
I mean, if I wanted to stay in England rather than move to Canada, the preferences don't matter.
So I was just really thinking about that.
About the degree to which Children's preferences with regards to people in particular are respected as important, not necessarily acquiesce to everything a child wants, I mean, because you don't teach a child anything about negotiation at that point.
But it is really fascinating to me just how much preference gets scrubbed out of children.
I mean, my daughter is astonishingly preference-based.
She has a preference about just about everything, right?
So like over the last week or two, I'm not allowed to wear glasses.
I'm not allowed to drink coffee.
I'm not allowed to eat.
I'm also not allowed to be hungry.
Because these and about a thousand other things interfere with playing with Isabella.
So it's just very important that I don't have any of these things.
I'm actually allowed to drive her as long as we're going to the river or to the park or to the mall.
Then I'm allowed to drive her but not if we're going anywhere else.
I'm allowed to go to one or two stores when we go out but not three or four.
I mean she just has so many preferences that she is continually talking about.
And which, you know, if I can conceivably and reasonably accommodate them, I will, because that's, you know, I think that's a reasonable thing to do.
But so many preferences.
And she's not even two yet.
I mean, these preferences started when she was 18, 15 to 18 months old.
And they're continual.
What she likes, what she doesn't like.
And she's, you know, very, very informs us what she doesn't like.
She doesn't like going to bed.
She doesn't like going to sleep.
She's never tired. Be a no tired.
Not tired, actually. She's getting not tired.
So many preferences all the time.
And preference is really our identity.
And it's hard to think how a human being can grow up having their preferences continually overridden and still actually have a personality at the end of it.
And I just thought that was very interesting.
So when we're talking about dysfunctional institutions, I mean people aren't even allowed to see dysfunctional people in their environment as children because it's inconvenient for everyone else, right?
If grandma has bad breath and is scary, And the kid doesn't want to kiss her, that's embarrassing for people, right?
Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
And the last thing I wanted to point out before we go to the phones is how amazingly impressionable children are.
Oh my god, I really didn't know.
As powerful as it is.
I'll just give you one tiny example.
So Isabella likes to play in the sink.
And the playing in the sink goes in various stages, right?
She'll stand by the sink, she'll sit with her feet in the sink, and then we end up with her completely in the sink.
And she loves playing with, you know, making bubbles and all that kind of stuff.
Anyway, so she was filling up a cup, and she was drinking from it, and then she gave the cup to me to drink.
And after a couple of times of drinking it, I spat in...
We have two sinks in the kitchen, right?
She was sitting in one, and I spat the water into the other sink.
And she immediately took a swig of water, and she stood up, you know, diaper dripping, soap bubbles everywhere.
And she leaned over, and she spat into the other sink.
Didn't spit on the floor, didn't swallow, didn't spit into her own...
Water, which she does when she's bathing.
I should take a drink of water and spit into her own water.
But she spat into the other sink.
And for the next half hour that we were playing in the sink, every time she took a drink, she spat into the other sink.
That's completely arbitrary where you spit, whether you swallow or not.
But because once I spat into that other sink, that is what she did.
That's how impressionable and how imprintable she is with arbitrary standards.
And I just thought, oh my God.
I mean, that's just one little arbitrary thing.
How immensely powerful and permanent the impressions are that would be repetitively and morally and aggressively maintained against children.
I mean, this is culture, right?
It's just the impression of irrationality upon tender and helpless minds.
But I found it just fascinating that she would take that completely arbitrary thing and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it with no knowledge of why.
But that's just how impressionable and mimicky children are.
I just thought that was very interesting. So, if you want to talk about anything, feel free.
I thought it might be interesting to talk about the degree to which your preferences may or may not have been undermined or dismissed as kids, but I'm certainly happy if anybody has any questions to put into, either into the chat room or to talk.
You can just tell James P. that you want to call, or we can call phones if you need to, or you can be in the chat room and you can listen live there.
Just while we're waiting, somebody has said, do you think we are naturally meant to be monogamous, polygamous, or does each person have his or her own preference?
Well, I think that's a very interesting question.
And this is an upcoming podcast topic, so I'll keep it very brief here.
But you've got to be really, really careful When talking about something like, what are human beings naturally?
Because there's this thing called human nature.
And whenever you talk about any change in society, six million unthinking people will load up their cannons with the big black cannonballs called human nature and fire them at your argument, thinking that it's going to hit something or even that they're going to leave the cannon.
But they don't. There is...
No such thing as human nature.
I mean, there are biological needs that we have.
So it has to be something specific to human beings.
So you say, well, human beings, it's human nature to want sex.
No, it's not, because just about every animal and plant and bee and fish want sex.
That's not human. It's human nature to be aggressive.
No, it's not human nature to be aggressive, because what do we say about pacifists?
Are they not human? So you have a big problem when you're talking about human nature, because you have to find something that is universal.
And not arbitrary.
So beware, beware, beware.
I'm not talking about you, but in general, beware the argument from human nature, right?
So whenever we talk about no government, well, it's human nature to want to dominate others.
So if you get rid of a government, you'll just have another government.
No, that's not human nature because there are lots of people who don't want to dominate others and who actually would find it very abhorrent to be put into a position of dominating others.
So I think that's really, you have to be very careful when you're talking about human nature.
The one thing I will say about human nature is that it's extremely adaptable.
One of the reasons that we're so successful as a species is that we adapt on the fly.
We adapt on the fly.
For most animals, it takes significant numbers, hundreds or thousands of generations to adapt.
But for human beings, we can adapt to various societies.
I mean, just think of the variety of societies around the world.
And just about everyone adapts successfully to their society.
So we're incredibly adaptable.
If we've been born as black children in the Serengeti, we'd be in that society.
If we've been born as Muslim women in Afghanistan, God help us, then we would adapt to that society.
Human beings are incredibly adaptable.
So are human beings naturally monogamous or naturally polygamous?
Well, I think it's fairly clear that children who are abused tend to be promiscuous.
Tend to be. It's not all.
As adults, right? And so promiscuity is highly correlated to childhood abuse.
Does that mean it's human nature to be promiscuous or polygamous or whatever?
Well, it depends on whether you were abused as a child, to a large degree.
I mean, nobody's going to say that's an open and shut case, but is it human nature to want to take mind-altering poisonous substances?
No, it's not. But it is strongly correlated with childhood sexual abuse, which means if you are abused as a child, then dysfunctional behaviors will become more natural to you, to the point where you'll lose about 20 years of your lifespan.
Child abuse is a virus that takes off 20 years of people's lifespan.
More so, I think, than cancer.
But we hear a lot about cancer, and not so much about child abuse, because cancer is not a moral problem.
And so... So I think you want to be careful about human nature.
It is very complicated.
I think that human nature should be free to develop.
Each personality should be free to develop without violence, verbal or physical or sexual, aggression as a child.
And then once we have a world where the vast majority of people are raised in a peaceful and respectful and non-violent manner, it would be very interesting to see what human nature is like.
But right now, you can't really tell.
So think of Chinese foot bonding.
They would take these young girls in China, and this only petered out in the early part of the 20th century, even up until Mao's revolution after the Second World War.
It was still going on in certain parts of rural China.
They'd take these women's feet and they would bind them in these incredibly painful poses and the toes would end up wrapped around, curled into, mashed up into the heel.
It was an excruciating, extraordinarily brutal and ugly process.
So if you just looked at all these adults, and you'd say, well, the human foot naturally curls in on itself, right?
The toes naturally curl in and go into the heel.
The foot bones, you know, they've fragmented and cracked and broken.
That's the natural state of the human female foot.
Well, no, it's not the natural state of the human female foot.
That's the natural state of the human female foot when you put incredible, blinding, agonizing pressure on it for years when it's developing.
So the natural foot is that which develops free from coercive violence.
And I would talk about human nature as being that which develops free of coercion, control, tyranny, despotism, abuse, and violence.
And we're a long way from seeing what the hell that looks like.
So I'd be really careful about talking about human nature.
It's really, really tough because we just have so few examples of people who are raised in a truly peaceful manner.
So I just wanted to point that out.
Ah, you say human nature.
Well, it's human nature to own slaves.
Well, until not, right?
Until it's not, right? Then suddenly it's different, right?
A quote from Emma Goldman, somebody put into the chat room, highly appropriate.
Poor human nature. What horrible crimes have been committed?
In thy name, every fool, from king to policeman, from the flat-headed person to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature.
The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature.
And you don't want to make your own decisions in life based on what you think human nature is, because that is just looking for the sort of democracy of the gene pool to vote approvingly on what it is you want to do.
So my question, somebody says, my question is, if I'm able to improve my self-esteem and reduce my jealousy, would I be happier in a monogamous relationship or with polygamous relationships?
I have done a podcast on polygamy, so my thoughts are already there.
You can look that up.
But no, I think that monogamy is the way to go.
So that's...
That's my completely arbitrary opinion that is followed up somewhere, I think, on polygamy.
Oh, yeah, I think there's one in the, sorry, there's one in the donator section.
I mean, yeah, look, if you love someone, then, I mean, you don't want to share them, right?
I mean, you don't.
I mean, fundamentally, I don't want to share my wife.
I want my wife to sleep half the week with me and half the week with some other guy because I love spending every moment with her.
In the same way that I don't just want someone else to raise my daughter because I love spending time with Isabella.
I mean, I just love spending time with my wife and she loves spending time with me, so that's what we do.
I don't want to ship her off for half the week.
I don't want to, every two weeks of every month, have her go live with somebody else.
I want her to spend time with me.
She wants me to spend time with her.
Oh yeah, I've got a podcast on vampires, which again, I think that vampires are metaphors for a certain kind of sociopathy, so I would definitely look at that.
The Twilight series review, I think it's in there for sure.
I've done a movie review of the first Twilight movie, so you might want to check that out.
It's my thoughts on vampirism. I just finished a A movie review of American Psycho, which I would highly recommend.
You may want to skip over the violin scenes as I did, but it's still very interesting, I think.
Don't forget to pick up your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch application.
FDRURL.com forward slash Apple is where you can pick it up.
I hope you will. It's a great, great application.
I've been using it all weekend, and it's really, really cool.
So I hope that you will check it out.
A listener did it. I don't know if his name's up and around, but you can get it in the application.
A listener did it. I mean, I gave some little bits of feedback here and there, but I certainly didn't code it.
Unfortunately, you can't code it in VB5. All right, Greg, you may be up.
Yo. Hello.
Hello. Hey.
You wait until you're on to adjust your seating in your mic.
I think that's always very exciting.
Now that I'm going to talk, let me do a couple of backflips.
Yeah.
So, yeah, yesterday I was shopping.
Emily and I were going shopping, looking at some clothes, looking at fall clothes, trying to figure out because I need some warmer clothes.
And there was a kid.
And we could just tell instantly as we were checking out that this was not going to end well.
Like the mom was just being mean to him.
At one time she got up in his face and said, don't yell!
Stop yelling! How old was the boy?
Three or four, maybe?
Oh, boy. Three. And it was just so sad.
And she also had a daughter with her.
And they were both, I mean, running around.
And they were just being kids.
And they were in a safe environment.
There was no real danger.
And it was just she was taking off some of her stress and deep-seated emotional issues on this kid.
And how old was the daughter? The daughter was older, maybe five.
And so Emily and I are obviously, as most of the listeners are, we were just instantly attuned to this and we stopped talking and we finished checking out and kept an eye on this mother and the boy because they were leaving the store as well.
And it was a shopping mall.
So we were in like the public area of the mall and the kid was still kind of running around and then she grabbed the boy, dragged him behind a plant, but it was still public and it was just like a plant that was next to an escalator.
And she just started beating him repeatedly.
Like, not like...
Oh my God, yes. I mean, it was the worst abuse I've seen in public.
Because most of the time when they do it in public, it's just like a hit and then it's done, you know?
It's like a hissy kind of thing, like you'll get years later kind of thing, right?
Right. Or I've seen a hit.
I mean, I live in Philadelphia and in the downtown area of Philadelphia, you do see like a hit, but it's like one hit on the arm.
She was hitting repeatedly.
Boom, boom, boom, boom.
Oh my God. It was horrible.
I mean, we were both furious.
We both ran to the mother, and both of us were talking.
It was just like, whoa, no, no, stop, stop, no, no.
Because she was hitting him as we were talking to her.
Wow. And I was like, no, you stop hitting your kid.
And then she said, what are you trying to say?
You can't tell me what to do with my kid.
My kiddie. And then Emily said, no, that is unacceptable.
You can't do that.
And then she said, I'm just hitting him on the butt.
I can do whatever I want with him.
He's being bad. And then she said, look at him.
Does he look hurt? And the kid is sobbing.
Now, sorry, I'm just curious.
It sounds like you're imitating a black woman, unless my cultural cues are way off.
Was that the case? Yes, yeah.
And that's where, frankly, in Philadelphia, most of the actual violence in public you see is because the corporal punishment is just Really high in the Black community.
Especially, just to give you some context, this is in the Gallery in Philadelphia, which is a mall in Center City, but it's in the northern boundary of Center City, and there are a lot of discount stores in this mall, and it's in North Philadelphia.
Deep North Philadelphia is one of the worst ghettos in America.
I've never been there.
You don't want to go there.
And so a lot of people from that area go to these discount stores in this mall.
At one point, Emily and I went to the food court and then we were like, yeah, let's get food and then go to the park.
We don't want to stay in this mall.
It's just crazy. And this was after the situation.
So anyway... I mean, the mother was still hitting the kid.
And then she said, get out of my face to me.
And this is the part I had a question on because I was furious at this point.
She was still grabbing the kid.
She was still jostling him around.
And I mean, I raised my voice at her for the first time that I've raised my voice in...
Fuck years. And I said, no, you get the fuck out of his face, you bitch.
And like, I was, I mean, I was acting pretty, um, kind of in the moment.
It was not, I don't know, because it was such, she was hurting him, continuing to hurt him.
And she, it was when she told me to get out of my face, get out of her face, when she's clearly getting up into his face.
And I don't know how much What you think about how I handled that last bit where I kind of swore at her and I was...
We left after that.
But, I mean, I don't know.
Wait, wait. First of all, what happened after this?
After this thing, I just...
We both just left.
We... Because she stopped hitting him at that point because she was pissed off at me for calling her a bitch.
So at least the violence stopped, and Emily was glad to see that.
But we both were so shaken up after that that we left.
Right, right.
And what was her reaction to this?
So she stopped hitting the kid.
She stopped hitting the kid, and then she started...
I don't know. She was like, can you believe he just called me that?
Can you believe he just...
And she was actually...
And now she's all outraged because somebody called her a name rather than hit her, right?
Right, right. And then, actually, it's interesting.
This is the gallery, is that a bunch of the whole...
A bunch of people saw this happening.
And everyone was just sort of like laughing at me.
And I heard even one girl say, oh, look, his legs are shaking.
Oh, he's so scared. And then they were like mocking the leg shaking.
Right. So it was just totally an unhealthy environment.
It was crazy.
It was the worst abuse I've ever seen in public.
in fact, maybe in scene with my own eyes.
Right, right.
Right.
So, I mean, but afterwards I did have some questions about whether I, I mean, I handled it appropriately with the raising my voice at her, if I should have not done that.
I mean, it's a really tricky situation.
And whether or not it's good or bad, I mean, it's very much a fight-or-flight situation.
So I don't think there's a strong judgment that could be on the way.
But for the future, I mean, because I've confronted abusers before, but never this badly, you know?
Never that strongly.
Never repeated hitting, right?
Right, right. And I think what happened for me was when I raised my voice, it was that clear un-UPB of get out of my face when she is so, I mean, so basically don't violate my boundaries when she's clearly more than violating this kid's boundaries.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
How did the boy react?
He... Well, he actually, Emily, I didn't see the boy because I was just kind of in the moment heated and angry.
Emily saw the boy and said that he stopped crying and was just looking at her.
Who? Oh, at the mom and then looking at both of Emily and me and just kind of like almost shocked.
Right. And the girl, the older sister too, was just kind of looking at both of us, just silently.
Right. Right.
Right. And what have your thoughts and feelings been about it since?
I don't know. I mean, I feel glad that we both...
First of all, I was incredibly glad that Emily was there, so that I wasn't...
I don't even think that I... No, you would have because it was involuntary.
Right, right, right. Like, I mean, you do it before you think, right?
Oh, yeah. I mean, it was both of us.
It's amazing. Our legs moved before we even kind of got it, you know?
It was just like, even when we saw her grab his arm and pull him, we both started walking quicker.
Yeah, because you could see it coming, right?
Yeah, and we even knew in the store.
We were like, fuck, this is going to happen, isn't it?
So, I don't know.
The only real thing I have questions about is whether it was a self-indulgence or an acting out on my part in raising my voice at her.
Well, look, I mean, I'll tell you my thoughts.
First of all, let's keep it in perspective, right?
Yes, you raised your voice.
Yes, you swore to her. But let's keep the morality of it clear, right?
That she was initiating aggression, violence against a helpless child.
Right, right, right. So let's, you know, when it comes to the moral judgment, I think let's remember to keep that aspect of things in significant perspective, right?
Right, and to be clear.
I think that's really important to remember.
So let's say maybe it could have been slightly better, I don't know, right?
But maybe it could have been slightly better handled on your side, but that's like trying to look around the sun to see the flickering of a star.
Like, I mean, I think that's really important, too.
Like, you did achieve your end of getting the woman to stop beating the kid.
Well, in the moment, yeah, yeah.
Oh, yeah, yeah. But, I mean, that's all you can do, right?
Right, yeah, yeah. And I don't know if, I mean, another side of that could be maybe my instincts and maybe some part of my unconscious was like, okay, I need to shock her so badly that she'll just stop hitting her kid for a minute, right?
Right, right. So, look, swearing at somebody is not, I mean, in isolation it's verbally abusive, but to me I view this as self-defense on the part of a third party.
Right, so obviously if you just walked up to somebody at the opera and said, fuck off you bitch or whatever, right?
That would be a shocking and verbally abusive thing to do.
Just the same as if you went up and shot someone in the knee and provoked, that would be an act of criminal assault, right?
But if somebody's beating a kid and the only way you can stop them is to, you know, slap them across the face, then that's not...
Abusive. This is the way that I would...
Whatever you need to do to stop the woman from beating the kid, I think is fine.
Right, right. I'm not going to sit here and analyze the ethics of what you did because you achieved the goal and the ethics of what you did are completely inconsequential relative to the ethics of what the woman was doing.
Right. And I think it does go in, though, to another part of my goal, which was not just to stop the kidding in the moment, but also to have some kind of an effect on the kid.
And I don't know if, sort of, and that's where, sort of, and to be clear, it's no moral argument, and it's no kind of like, I should have done this, and it's bad that I did this.
It's just more of a, I wonder if the swearing took away from the experience that the kid had.
I don't know. What do you mean, took away?
Well, sort of, if he gained some positive, sort of, memories of hope or knowledge that people care, from Emmalyn And me like sticking up for him, if then sort of me swearing at his mom, if that kind of, I don't know, scared him more, or I don't, it's a bunch of kind of...
Well, how do you know it wasn't him you were channeling?
Mmm... I mean, how do you know you weren't verbalizing?
Because I'm telling you, those aren't your words.
I don't believe. I mean, in my opinion, it's just an opinion I wasn't there.
And even if I was there, it would still be just an opinion.
But I think for sure you were expressing what he was feeling.
Right. And if he could talk, he would have said.
If he could talk and if he had the safety that you had.
I mean, so that would be my guess as to what was happening.
Right, right, right. Wow, I hadn't had that perspective.
Cool. I mean, it's an interesting question, right?
I mean, if you were sort of all kinds of, quote, reasonable, right?
Like, you know, it's important to understand that you're using aggression against him, which means that, you know, you don't really have the moral right to say that I should not be intruding upon you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah. My guess, I don't know.
I'm just trying to picture it from a three-year-old kid's perspective.
It would be something like this.
Man, good people are pussies.
Right, right. I'm guessing.
I don't know, right? I'm something like that.
Right, right. And it certainly has, you know, I think anger is very healthy.
I think that anger in the face of that kind of situation is entirely appropriate.
I think that this is what the son felt towards the violence and humiliation that he was experiencing.
And it probably, because the other people were mocking you, it probably extends to his whole community.
So, yeah, I think, I mean, I think you were speaking for him.
Right. Wow, that's a really fascinating perspective.
And I wonder...
Because it was very automatic, right?
Oh God, it was. In fact, the you bitch part was kind of like, it was hanging on the bit, because I said, no, you get the fuck out of his face, you bitch.
And it all kind of like, it was like, there was a part of me that was like, am I really going to say this?
I guess I am, right?
Right, right. So...
So when we use language that we very rarely would use, and I can't imagine this is a regular part of your parlance unless you've joined some truly low-rent ghetto rap band or something.
So when we use language that is very unusual or surprising to us, and when we're in an extremity and we are empathizing with another person, that is a clear channel by which the other person can communicate through us.
That would be my particular thought.
Mmm, right, right, right.
And I did, at one point, have eye contact with the little boy, and I wonder if, I mean, this is all speculation, but I wonder if I picked up on that rage from that little boy when I had eye contact with him, and if that could have been kind of a channel of communication.
Oh, yeah. I mean, look, the kid's going to have rage.
I mean, the kid's going to have rage.
Public beatings, where the community is cheering on the mom, so to speak, the kid's going to have some rage.
And when you're acting on behalf of the child, that is a gateway for the child's feelings to come in.
Right, right. Wow.
Cool. I mean, I feel much better about that.
That's cool. Yeah.
So, look, I don't have any problem with what you did.
I mean, I was surprised and a little shocked because, you know, I'm such a shrinking violet myself, right?
But, look, I don't, I mean, you got the mom to stop beating the kid.
And you gave the example of somebody intervening.
Do you know, do you ever see a movie called Kindergarten Cop?
I think I saw it when I was a little kid, but ever since then, no.
It's Arnold.
And in it, he plays a guy who goes undercover.
I'm not giving anything away. I think it's worth renting because, I mean, he beats the living shit out of a child abuser.
Like, beats him to a pulp.
Oh wow. And I don't ever remember anybody in the media saying that that was a problem.
Oh wow.
So there's a popular portrayal of a child abuser getting The living crap beaten out of him by a guy who's, you know, vastly his physical superior.
And I don't remember anyone ever saying, I mean, imagine, I mean, if there was a scene where a disobedient wife got the shit beaten out of her, people would be like, oh my god.
And it was obviously approved of in the movie.
People would be completely up in arms, right?
So, I mean, this is not a great example of an ethical argument, but it was interesting to me that in popular culture, Arnold Schwarzenegger can beat the living crap out of a child abuser.
And nobody would have any problem with that.
And if that's the general morals within society, I'm not going to disagree in particular.
So I have no problem at all with what you did.
I think that you did the right thing in the moment.
I think you trusted your instincts.
And I think in voicing the boy's anger, it probably gave him the best connection he's had with the outside world since he was born.
Wow. All right. Yeah.
And I tell you this, he ain't going to forget that.
Right, right.
There's another movie called Once Were Warriors.
It's about, I think, the New Zealand indigenous people.
I saw it at a film festival, I don't know, gosh, 10 or 12 years ago.
And in it, a man who sexually assaults a girl, the father finds out and beats him, I think, almost to death.
I mean, it was one of the most horrifically violent scenes I think I've ever seen.
And again, nobody ever said, well, there is this sense in the world that...
You know, child abusers are, quote, fair game.
In other words, the ethical rules don't apply in third-party interventions with child abusers.
Yeah, I'm not so much for beating people to a pulp, but I think that is...
I think that is an important...
I'd remain curious about my reaction, continue to probe it, continue to figure out what was yours.
And also, what was the woman's conscience?
Was the woman's conscience speaking through you as well?
I mean, this is all a very complicated, very unconsciously dense interaction that's worth really mulling over.
Can you explain that very last bit?
Well, people know when they're being hypocritical.
You know that because they get all brittle and defensive and aggressive, right?
Rage is the attempt to cover up hypocrisy almost always.
Anger is a just and healthy response, but rage is turning up the volume so that people are distracted from the immorality and the hypocrisy that is going on, right?
And so you may also have been channeling the woman's conscience, her own unconscious UPB, which is what the conscience is, right?
Right. In other words, this is what she is saying to herself.
Like, you don't have the right to do this, you bitch.
And then she yells it down with her own inner abusers.
Like, so, you were her as a child, and you were him as a child, and she was acting out her parents, but you were mouthing her as a child and him as a child.
Again, I'm saying it's a complicated and dense thing to think about, but certainly I would definitely...
Okay, so this is, I mean, the next thing that I'm going to talk about down the road is the WECO system, right?
The WECO system is not enough, right?
It's actually a WECO system, right?
Because it's your WECO system and everybody else's WECO system continually interacting.
So it's actually, the WECO system is not enough of a term because it singularizes it to our own inner personalities, but it's the WECO system.
We are in a multiplicity of everyone.
And there's constantly different angles that we're interacting with people, like are submissive to their dominant, are dominant to their submissive, and so on.
And so there's lots of complicated stuff going on.
on.
So in that kind of moment, right, when she was inhabited by the abuser, herself as the victim who provokes the inner abuser may also have been speaking through you to her mom.
I mean, again, I'm just saying it's dense and it's complicated and it's well worth unraveling, but I would certainly trust your instincts in the moment.
Right.
Cool. Yeah.
And the reason I say that is it's this thing called priming, right?
I don't know if you know about it, right?
But priming is this thing where people can direct your behavior unconsciously by exposing you to particular stimuli, and this occurs all the time in human interactions.
A lot of what we do is not chosen, it's primed, right?
So the example from Cordelia Fine's book, Delusions of Gender, was that You could control how well women did on a math test simply by including or not including a question that identified their gender.
So if you said to women, answer these math problems and don't leave your name and don't leave your gender, those questions weren't even there, they did about as well as men.
But when they self-identified with name and gender as women, they did significantly worse.
Because those are the cultural expectations, that girls are not as good at math, or being good at math is somehow less feminine.
So when you identify as a woman, your math skills go down.
That's because those are the expectations of the people around you.
Surmounting the expectations of people around you is called individuation, right?
And it's only necessary because the expectations of people around us are so irrational.
Cheer for this flag, cheer for this god, cheer for this team, cheer for this president, right?
They're so insane that surmounting people's expectations of us is very, very hard.
So... We are, in a sense, very much imprisoned by the expectations of others.
And overcoming those expectations is very, very hard.
And that's what I mean by the Weco system, right?
So how much are we allowed to express in the face of other people's skepticism?
I was reading about, in Hitch 22, Christopher Hitchens' memoir, which is...
quite shockingly boring, but there are bits of it that are interesting.
There was a protest against a speaker that took the form of a bunch of people taking the first couple of rows of this person's speech and conspicuously opening and reading newspapers the whole time he was giving his speech.
And so that's basically all he could see was people reading the newspaper while he was giving his speech.
And that was their protest towards him, and that had a huge impact on the quality of his speeches.
And I don't think he did very well as a speaker after a number of those, and probably not too many of those, right?
Because that's the permission of other people.
Other people are reading the paper, therefore I cannot be interesting.
I can't surmount that by continuing to be interesting.
If you've ever tried talking to someone in a bar while that person is looking around for somebody more interesting to them to talk to, you know how hard it is to feel important and special as opposed to somebody who's really focused on what it is that you're saying.
So the question has always been, to what...
How much am I allowed to be according to the expectations and prejudices of others?
That's why it's so important to have open-minded and curious people around you, because they can't be a you if they aren't around you.
There is no identity without the curiosity of others, because we're not allowed to be.
This is why dysfunctional families are so crippling to be around, because we're just not allowed to be anything, in a sense, when they're abusive or dysfunctional.
And so, this is one of the things that people find such an oasis about Free Domain Radio, right?
Which is that I and other people will actually listen, won't jump to conclusions, we'll talk about feelings, we'll be curious.
And that's very disorienting to people.
And some people respond to it like water rushing into a hole, like, oh my god, finally, right?
And other people get a glimpse of their own emptiness and erupt in rage, not towards the original abusers who controlled them, but towards the people who were exposing that huge crater by being willing to listen.
In other words, to ask for something from people that they do not have called an identity.
And that terror of absence drives people into great rage and hatred.
So, I mean, that's what I want to say.
In this particular interaction, it's very dense and it's very complex.
There's you with your history.
There's the boy with his history.
There's the mom with his history.
And there's also the ecosystem of the community around you.
Right, right. And that, I think, was very important because they were completely disgusting, yeah.
Right. So they need to control their own inner horror at child abuse by attacking and mocking and crushing.
It's nothing to do with you. Their own inner abuse history is rebelling against the mom and is rebelling against their own abusers.
And so they feel this rush of sympathy, and they feel this rush of rage, and they then empathize with the child that you're attempting to protect, and successfully protecting, at least in the moment.
So they feel this rush of sympathy for the child, which awakens their own inner abused child, which in turn awakens their own inner abusers, who then rush to the surface and are not talking to you, but are talking to the inner child, right? Right, right.
And so it is a very complex interaction that, except on your part, I believe, is almost entirely selfish on the part of everyone, and the boys, of course, the children, right?
But everybody is self-managing, and they are attempting to self-manage by projecting themselves onto you and then mocking and attacking their inner selves, their inner children, through attacking and mocking you.
And at a more fundamental level, it doesn't even have anything to do with inner children or inner parents or abusers.
Fundamentally, it has to do with virtue and evil.
It has to do with good and evil, as almost every emotionally charged topic in the human lexicon has to do with good and evil.
It has almost nothing to do with topics of psychology.
So fundamentally, what happens is they see a good man standing fiercely to protect a child.
They feel humiliated at all the times they have not done that, or all the times where they've been the abuser, perhaps.
And so what they have to do is they have to say, goodness is weak, and strength and power is good.
Right, right. So they have to say, well, this good man, his legs are shaking.
Goodness is weak. We own.
Evil owns the world.
Good shakes and trembles.
Good is weak. Good is pitiful.
good is Urkel!
So it's a very dense and complicated interaction that has a lot to do Remember, the unconscious processes things 7,000 times faster than the conscious mind.
So what you were acting out was an incredible moment of intense processing of your inner mycosystem, the boy's mycosystem, the mom's mycosystem, and the mycosystem of everyone around.
It was an incredibly complex interaction that was all being processed far faster than your conscious mind could follow.
Wow, right. And that's what is worth examining.
Yeah, instead of simplifying it into, should I have acted better?
Or, you know, that was a very simple form of a question.
Yeah, and I mean, frankly, I will also say this, it doesn't matter.
Right. It doesn't matter, not only does it not matter relative to what you were opposing, but it doesn't matter because the next time you're in that kind of situation, your conscious intentions will mean exactly what they meant in this situation, which is nothing, right?
Well, next time I'm going to say this, and I'm going to do that, but next time you'll do what you do.
Right, right. I mean, it's like the baseball player.
You practice and you practice and you practice, but you don't say, well, next time I'm going to hit a home run.
Well, that's assumed. Of course you're going to hit a home run, but you don't have any control.
All you can do is swing at the ball that comes.
I mean, the training is all before the moment.
I mean, you don't not train your whole life, then jump into the...
World Series and start hitting balls saying, no, I really, really, really want to hit a home run.
You don't have control over that.
You have control over the practice.
You don't have control over whether you hit a home run in the moment.
So when the ball's coming at you at 110 miles an hour or however fast the hell it goes, you just swing.
But you can't control that.
That's just your training takes over and you're either going to hit it or you're not.
Because everybody wants to be in the major leagues, and the difference between the major and the minor leagues is like 1% better hits.
So everybody wants to be, like everybody, every musician wants to write Yesterday and Bohemian Rhapsody and, I don't know, oops, I did it again, but they don't.
Right? They just keep working on their craft and they keep dealing with their inspiration and they keep working at it and maybe good songs come popping out or maybe they don't.
In the same way that the baseball guy keeps swinging and practicing and maybe he'll hit the home run and maybe he won't.
And certainly the practice will up the odds.
But saying in the moment...
Should I have hit a home run or not?
It's pointless. Right.
Does that make any sense? Oh, totally.
Yeah, don't plan for what you're going to do next time.
Just keep thinking over it, thinking over it, mulling over it, talk it over with your therapist, talk it over with your friends.
You could even do diagrams of what ecosystem thing you think was going on for everybody in the environment, both before and after.
And remember, you also have Emily's ecosystem to take into account.
Right, I was just considering that too, yeah.
So, diagrams, seriously, I did all of this, like, I actually did this when I was working on my novels.
I did my ecosystem diagrams through all of my characters, and all the lines in which they interacted positively and negatively.
And I've done that in complicated business situations, like, okay, so this is my ecosystem, and this is other persons here, the various aspects of it, and how do they interact, and what's going on.
But all it does is, it may clarify some things.
It's not going to have any willpower-based effect on how you act next time.
Right, it's just getting more of a conscious understanding.
I have one more kind of clarification, though, on the different, because I've worked with that in therapy and in my journaling, because actually, like, over a year ago, you had mentioned it in a call with me about sort of my brother's mycosystem and kind of having a town hall-type mycosystem meeting with different mycosystem voices that all kind of talk to each other.
And so definitely that has been a part, not with the diagramming, but with the journaling.
And I'm kind of curious.
I'm trying to figure out, so is it...
Maybe this is taking too kind of logically rigorous of a framework to it, but like with these different aspects, like even just a me to someone else aspect, is it kind of how am I taking on their Mika system?
Or like how would you in just a two-person interaction diagram that out?
What would that look like? Well, it depends on the interaction, right?
Obviously, if it's a non-problematic interaction, don't diagram it, right?
Right, no, no, but in a problematic way.
Yeah, if there's a problematic interaction, then you diagram it, right?
And you diagram it based upon the emotions that you were feeling in the moment, right?
So if you were feeling humiliated or you were feeling put down, then you look at the phrase that began it or the moment or the general time frame that began it, and then you recognize, well, I slipped from feeling confident To feeling not confident.
Oh, and I wonder what personality that is.
Which means that there's a new aspect of the ecosystem is taking the spotlight, right?
The less confident aspect of the ecosystem is taking the spotlight.
Right, and then seeing what part did that tap into for the other person.
Right, so what changed in this person that provoked this response in me?
And you know that when a humiliated part of you has taken over, that the first place to look, it may not be the only place, but the first place to look is, did a cynical and dominant part of the other person take over?
Right, right. And that's going to provoke, right?
So whenever somebody goes up to compensate, we generally tend to go down.
In the same way that when somebody goes down, in terms of self-esteem, our tendency, if you don't know yourself and don't have higher standards, our tendency is then to become more dominant.
So when those interactions are going, look at where you are and look at what the other person may have done to provoke that.
And then you keep going back until you figure out what you may have done to provoke the other person and so on, right?
Right, right. Cool.
I'm just trying to imagine these diagrams because I've never really diagrammed it.
And just on a totally practical level for you, was it like a circle with a person's name in it?
And then, I mean, obviously the details aren't that specific.
Yeah, I did too. I used colors, right?
So, for instance, when I was doing revolutions, right?
So, Nechaev's relationship to...
To Natalie was dominant to submissive and that shifted throughout the book until it became submissive to dominant and then it became when at the end equal to equal.
So one color represented one moment in time where there was a dominant-submissive thing, and then you'd switch to a different color for a different interaction, and then each interaction was a different color?
Right, and so Nehaev's relationship to his father was of submissive to dominant, right?
So when he was with Natalie, he was his father, and Natalie was himself as a child.
That's how it flipped for the two of them, right?
And you can see all of this stuff going.
You can see this, for instance, in Just Four, right?
So Lawrence, when he is with Mary, is his father to himself, or his mother actually to himself, right?
Dominant to submissive, just as he is with Kay.
When he's with Lydia, he is Kay to himself, right?
Which is kind of forlorn and lost and desperate, right?
Right. Wow, right.
So, I mean, this is the kind of complexity that goes on in human relationships, which is why, I mean, just to jump back to the polygamy thing, I mean, a relationship with any self-actualized individual is going to be so exciting, deep, rich, and challenging, and there's always going to be more to explore.
I mean, I just don't know why you'd want, you know, it's like, I have an 8-core, 16-gigabyte computer.
I need two. No, no, no, that's enough, right?
Well, for what it's worth, my mind is already spinning.
I think that's why I was maybe focusing on the details for a second there, because it's already such a crazy thing.
It's like, I just want some fundamental...
Where do I start? Because it's very trippy trying to imagine how...
It's almost like a four-dimensional thing, because you also have the element of time, you have just so many different situations that occur, or different variables in complex interactions, emotions, Over time, like with the Nachaev thing, if he becomes his father when he's with Natalie, then is he also becoming sort of a dominant figure when he's with his father?
It's all these crazy things that go.
In that novel, Harrison, who is a father figure, invites Nachaev into his life as a father-son relationship, but refuses to play out Nachaev's father's script.
Which frees Nechaev from his sociopathy, for want of a better word.
So Harrison comes in and will not play, and Nechaev keeps inviting him to play that role.
Be the dominant father.
Be the bullying father.
And he won't play that role.
And people will constantly invite you into their life to play a role.
And if you don't play that role...
They'll love you or they'll hate you.
They'll never be indifferent, right?
Right. Wow.
Well, that's really fascinating.
And I really, I can't wait to kind of do that.
I'll start on the diagram just with this situation because it's so fresh in my mind.
But I think that with difficult client interactions, with difficult interactions with friends, and I think it's just going to be a really fascinating, this diagramming and this ecosystem and just exploring all these complex back and forth Multiple variable exchanges with people.
It's going to be so fascinating to work with.
Yeah, and ask yourself, whose face are you pinning on me now?
This is an important question to ask with people, whether they're self-actualized or not, because it's always a continual process.
Whose face are you pinning on me now?
Am I your dad?
Am I your son?
Am I your ex-wife? Am I your sister?
Am I your childhood friend?
Am I your priest? Whose face are you pinning on me now?
And in response, could you also ask, and then in return, what face am I pinning on you if it's an unconscious interaction?
Right, right. How do you feel when you're around?
How did you feel over the last five minutes when you were around me?
And if somebody's really honest, you can figure out whose face you're putting on them.
I mean, this is how tough it is.
And it's not going to be the case in the future.
It's just because this is where we're all coming from, right?
But this is how hard it is to actually reach through and connect with somebody.
And be you...
With them. In the same moment, without projection, without unconscious manipulation, without role-playing, without...
We all want to, like...
There's a spring at the top of a mountain that's been running for a thousand years, and there are these channels that are carved down into the side of the mountain, and that's how the water gets down.
Well, we all have this, these carved channels of interactions, these carved channels of behavior around projection and manipulation and anxiety management and not breaking out of old habits, right?
And forgiving those who harmed us by reproducing their behavior, either in ourselves through submission or in other people through dominance.
But that's not freedom!
Freedom is jumping the tracks!
Freedom is jumping the carved channels.
It is taking the wheels off the train and giving it some goddamn legs so it doesn't have to roll down these stupid tracks until it dies.
Until we die. We don't have to have the same conversations.
We don't have to have the same interactions.
We don't have to have the same bullshit going on.
We can choose to get off the tracks, but it's really disorienting for us and it's really disorienting for others.
But it's only when we're off the tracks that we can actually connect with each other.
Actually be there with each other without saying, okay, well, here you have to be my seven-year-old self and I'm going to be my mom.
Oh wait, you want to be your mom?
Okay, I'll be your seven-year-old self and maybe a bit of my seven-year-old self.
Or whatever, right? We see this with bosses, with priests, with people stammering in front of celebrities, with politicians.
Right? I mean, Obama's, I don't know what, everybody's fantasy dad.
Right? The same way that George Bush was everybody's slightly scary uncle that you have to defer to.
I don't know, right? But it is only through combing over those kinds of interactions that we can stop acting in that automatic way, in that self-protective way of slipping into roles.
I mean, no human being wants to slip into a role.
We don't want to have these masks.
We don't want to have these goddamn straitjackets.
Of forced, unconscious, boring, repetitive, defensive interactions.
It's just where you have to go to survive as a kid.
You have to go into these roles.
Because if you try to break roles with your parents, they will tend to become quite aggressive.
They're those automatic responses that come from unthinking people.
And those are what gives determinism a reasonable Veneer.
Because a lot of people are like robots.
Because shifting into roles, shifting out of roles, shifting into putting other people down or being put down themselves, into making fun of themselves so other people don't make fun of them first, into pursuing people who will reject them to confirm an old pattern of rejection rather than jump the tracks and begin to walk themselves over the snowy ground towards actualization, intimacy, and truth. It's a damn hard thing to do.
But yeah, interactions are that complex.
It is a weak system that we're dealing with.
It is our internal tribe in constant communication with everybody's internal tribe.
And what's even more bizarre is that we can't be closer to other people than our inner parts are close to each other, right?
So if our own inner parts Are schismed.
Are dissociated.
Are separate. Are in these vertical tubes with no way of communicating to each other.
Then we can't be close to anybody else because we keep flipping in and out of different personalities.
And so nobody can ever get to know us.
Because there is no us.
There's only a series of atomized, separated, individual mini-identities.
Or manipulative little slates of hands and tricks that we've developed.
So the reason that the ecosystem is so essential to intimacy is that we have to get the parts of ourselves to know each other.
And that way, when they change hands, we can be aware of it and we can negotiate it and we can be more of who we are.
We can be somebody who other people can actually interact with in a real way.
Yeah, the roles are a fucking straitjacket.
The roles are a noose.
And the roles, the funny thing about the roles is, you know, the roles, they seem essential in the moment.
And this is the demonology of the false self, right?
Those roles, they seem so essential at the moment.
Like, we can't imagine not having those roles in the moment.
But afterwards, we look back at our life And we say, holy shit!
I was a fragment of bullshit fantasy.
Why did I not speak up?
Why was I constantly slipping into these roles?
They all seem so essential in the moment.
Because they come from childhood where it was essential in the moment.
But I don't want people who listen to this just as I don't want for myself to be 60 or 70 or 80 years old and look back at my life and say, fuck, I was never myself.
All I did was flip in and out of these little roles just to gain a peace of mind in the moment, to gain some peace in the moment, to gain some reduction of anxiety in the moment.
I played all these roles to a largely empty theater rather than be who I am.
And stand up and speak up for myself.
Because I guarantee you when you get old, and this is what people consistently say when they are old, I wish I'd cared less what other people thought.
I wish I'd spoken more up.
Because, you know, by the time you're old, it's still worth doing, but the major prizes have long slipped by, right, in terms of marriage and parenting and so on.
There's still prizes to be had, but these roles, they just seem essential in the moment.
But if you don't fall into them, You realize just how small, ridiculous, wretched, and unnecessary they really are, but it's not until you step outside them, right?
You think it's the world, you step outside of it, and it's a nutshell, as Hamlet says, right?
So I just wanted to sort of mention that in terms of this complexity, the weaker system thing, that it is really important to understand this stuff.
Cool. Well, that's, I mean, it's just fascinating stuff.
I really can't wait to work on that.
That's just thinking to keep exploding the self-knowledge even further, which is really great.
Oh, sorry, somebody emailed me this morning and asked how the toothbrushing with Izzy was going.
Sorry to jump tracks!
But is that enough?
I mean, I know it's not a way of perfectly examining, but it would take a long time to perfectly examine that moment.
But if I were you, I'd be proud of what I did and curious about what was going on.
Cool. Yeah, this was totally helpful.
So thank you so much for taking the call.
You're very welcome. Yeah, I mean, after that one time, Which was not even a conflict, but just, you know, she could get a better thing if she brushed her teeth.
Isabella has been perfectly, perfectly content to let me brush her teeth ever since without a single bit of conflict for the last couple of weeks.
So it's a manual brushing.
And we did try an electric toothbrush for her, but she didn't like it too much.
All right.
Do we have questiones from anybody else with the other people heads?
You can put them into the chat room if you like. - Okay.
We are also getting Kindle books due to a very kind and generous listener.
We are getting Kindle books, e-books of...
I guess we've got most of them done by now, which we will post on the board, and thank you so much.
Well, it could be as usual that nobody wants to follow The Great G Show, but...
I guess we'll stop a little early.
That's good, because I've got a couple of podcasts to clean up and post.
And so, no biggie.
Thank you everybody so much for coming by this week.
I'm glad that we were able to do it a little bit earlier.
It's, I think, certainly more convenient for me.
And I hope that people will continue to listen.
And thanks everybody so much who stepped up to donate.
I just came back from a camera store and a video store where I got a good quote for proper lighting.
for the show and a good quote for a green screen which I may experiment and play around with to give the show a bit more of a rich and I'm still trying to figure out whether I'm going to do it in the study or in the basement,
because the study still has a fair amount of light coming in, but hopefully we'll be able to sort that out one way or the other.
All right. Thanks, everybody, so much.
Yeah, you can do shows from the moon.
That's right. I can do shows while I'm mooning.
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