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Oct. 7, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:39
1763 Irritation

When justified anger festers...

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An excellent topic request.
I can't believe I've never really thought of doing it.
Probably quite telling as to why when I talk about it.
A topic request from a listener about irritation.
The nature and purpose of irritation.
Irritation is a funny state of mind.
I've had a lot of experience with irritation, particularly in my early to mid-teens.
It has a kind of claustrophobic battery taste to me, a very familiar taste.
The height of my own irritation, and I say this because I think it's important to at least understand where I'm coming from when I examine the topic.
The height of my irritation was in 1977, when I was 12, when I was 11.
Uh, no... November the 6th, 1977.
We landed in New York because it was cheaper than flying to Toronto.
We stayed in New York for a day.
My brother became very upset because we could not afford to go on helicopter ride of the city.
And we took a bus from New York to Toronto.
And then we stayed in Toronto.
Actually, we then went to Whitby.
Where I think a half-brother of my mother's lived where we stayed for six to eight months.
I don't think it was a full school year.
I was in grade eight in Whitby.
And then when I came to Toronto, I was put back two grades, which was pretty teeth-gnashingly bad.
But of course, my mom didn't do anything to intervene about that.
I just had to sort of fend for myself and try my best, but I wasn't able to succeed.
And... I remember in particular in Whitby, two things that I remember very strongly about living in Whitby.
The first was that they had this beautiful collie dog.
I've always had a great affinity for collie dogs.
I mean, they're just so bushy and beautiful.
And when I was 16, I spent the summer staying with a friend of my father who's a marine biologist who taught at a university.
I was in Newfoundland.
And They also had a collie that I would take jogging with me.
Just a beautiful animal.
So my uncle had this collie and I was so fundamentally stressed and dissociated and disoriented and empty and bewildered and angry, irritated and frustrated.
I was just about to say my life and part of me rebelled and said, well, no, you can't call it your life, Steph.
It wasn't my life. It wasn't my life.
It was what was being done to me.
It was all just what was being done to me.
I was not there. There was no point in having a will.
There was no point in having choice.
There was no point in having an identity or preferences.
They meant nothing. So I was very angry at...
What was happening to my existence or what was being done unto me?
Again, I can't say it. I can be happy or upset with my life now because these are things that I have chosen.
My wife, this crazy career of pure sanity, chosen to be a stay-at-home full-time parent.
I mean, these are all choices, so I can be happy or not happy with those choices, and I'm very happy with them.
But back then, I can't say that I was happy or not happy with my life because I had no life.
I mean, we just... We're yanked off to Canada with very little notice, for no reason, other than, I mean, my mom didn't have a big relationship here or a big job waiting for her here or anything like that.
I mean, in hindsight, I know that it was because my brother and I were getting old enough to talk about the abuse, so we had to be moved to fresh locales where we had no contacts with people, and...
So, it wasn't my life.
It was just what was being done unto me.
And I went through, with the dog, I remember very, very distinctly and repeatedly just daydreaming about being a dog.
Thinking, oh, you know, I was so fundamentally exhausted and stressed by what had been done unto me over my...
Young life that I just...
I used to look at this dog and...
Oh man, I just envied that dog.
Like, you wouldn't believe.
I just envied how the dog would just be taken care of.
I mean, I felt so fundamentally barely able to function in my own life.
To... To survive and flourish or even just get by on what was being done around me.
I just felt so helpless that I just...
I love the idea of just letting go in a sense of any higher consciousness and just living as a dog.
Just... I'd wake up...
I'd wake up. It's such irritation.
Such fundamental irritation.
I remember I was sleeping in the basement, and I come up, and I just, ugh, I gotta say hello to everyone, and I gotta put a smile on my face, because if I don't put a smile on my face, people are gonna sort of mock and attack me, and all that, and I was just like, ugh...
I don't want to do it, but there's no opportunity to not do it.
I mean, it was all just so debilitating and exhausting.
I come up the stairs, trudge up the stairs, and I look at the dog, this beautiful collie, who was just lying in a patch of sunlight, dozing on the carpet.
And I just look at that dog and say, oh, I would trade anything to trade places with you.
I would do anything to trade places with you, where you just fed, and you play, and you walk around, and you have a nap, and you explore, and you snuffle, and you fetch things, and that's your life.
No stress, no worries, no problems.
I remember talking about this with my therapist, and she said, I should re-watch the film My Life as a Dog, which I never get around to, but...
I remember that particular time being so incredibly...
I was so incredibly irritated all the time.
And the irritation had a lot to do with fear as well.
And I think what it mostly had to do with was, I mean, the fundamental living hell of not being allowed to exist.
Of being forced to breathe but not being allowed to exist.
In any meaningful way.
I mean, I think a lot of people who are really, really disturbed, and my entire family was really, really disturbed.
It's like they have kids because they want to continue to end the life that was ended in them.
It has to be a perpetual thing to end that life, to continue to throttle that life.
And people who don't have any existence themselves They can't just not be around people, but they have to be around people and not have those people exist.
That is a very, very important thing that I learned fairly early on, though it took me a while to really consciously get it.
And so, there was this incredible bone weariness, a predictable soul strangulation that was occurring in my household.
Not just in my household, but in the entire environment that I was in.
There was this problem that you had to be, you had to live, you had to exist, but you could not have any thoughts of your own.
You could not contradict anyone.
You could not have any preferences.
That weren't in any way, shape, or form against the preferences of those around you, of those in authority around you.
And so it just became this exhausting trudge across an endless desert of anti-existence.
Non-existence, I mean, that's just death, right?
Anti-existence is you must breathe, but you cannot speak.
Being chained in the endless dungeons of personal absence and self strangulation to avoid external strangulation.
I mean, that is where I lived for over a decade and a half, really.
I mean, there was this incredibly powerful and instinctive opposition to existence, to difference, to choice, to values, to standards, to ethics, to truth, to reasoning, to thinking, to evidence.
Whatever came to pass in your mind could not exist.
What could exist, and I mean, of course, this is a fundamental contradiction, what could, quote, exist was obedience.
But obedience is not existence.
Obedience is slavery.
Obedience is just hellish, boring, crushing, destroyed slavery.
Obedience to whims, obedience to people, not obedience to values.
Obedience to truth, to reason, reality, that's freedom.
Obedience to people is a hideous kind of slavery.
And what happened to me, at least, in that environment was my response to this kind of enslavement was chronic irritation.
You see, irritation is dead rage.
Irritation is dead rage.
It is murdered anger.
It is murdered indignation.
It is the corpse, right?
It is the erg zombie of a murdered fight-or-flight system.
You get crowded out as a kid when you're raised by really dysfunctional people.
Your identity gets crowded out.
You get pushed out of yourself.
And there are big terrible blows that you remember with great power.
I mean, until the end of my days, I will remember those deathly days and nights of extreme violence.
But what really crowds you out, that stuff is more survivable in my experience than the other side of things.
The other side of things is this continual and perpetual crowding out.
So, I mean, I'll give you sort of an example, right?
So, and I talked about this on the Sunday show, which is probably why this topic is really floating around in my head, but, you know, I would say to my mom, I don't like such and such a thing or such and such a person.
And that was just, well, that was not allowable.
That was just, that was not acceptable.
That was not possible. Couldn't be.
So if my mom had a particular babysitter who was available and I didn't like that babysitter, well, too bad.
That's not allowable. My brother did the same thing.
So I'd say, well, I don't like this thing that mom does.
It's like, well, you've got to understand this.
You've got to understand that. You've got to look at it from this perspective.
You've got to look at that in perspective. Don't just look at it from your own perspective.
Just this whole big torrent of don't exist.
I can see that in hindsight.
I sure as hell didn't see it at the time.
At least not very clearly at all.
I could see it in hindsight.
But it's a whole...
Like the big cannons, you can survive.
And they, you know, where they hit the leaf scars, it's these tiny, endless, bullet-like ping-pong balls of opposition to everything that you think and feel that is true and real.
That... What for me was the death blow to the self that was.
And the self that I have now is not the self that was.
The self that was is the natural self.
I mean, dead, gone, buried, decomposed, turned into ashes, rained upon the Himalayas five times, and now washed into the bottom of the sea.
The self that I have now, it's a good self in many ways.
It's a self that I'm happy with in many ways.
But it is a robot.
It is a robot of reconstruction.
It is not the natural self.
The natural self will never...
I will never experience that.
And I see that achingly clearly as a parent with Isabella's natural self.
I will never experience that natural self.
No possibility. You can't go back and undo all that damage.
So, I've pieced together.
Right? It just made sense to me why my YouTube account is called StephBot.
Because I am a robot of reconstruction.
Not a natural thing.
Not a natural thing.
But for me, the death...
I was shoved into a grave by tiny beings of endless opposition.
To everything that I thought and felt.
Any decision. I say, oh, I like Ayn Rand.
Well, Ayn Rand is X, Y, and Z. Oh, I like fantasy novels.
Oh, that's just sad escapism.
You should, you know, deal with real stuff, right?
Oh, I like Dostoevsky.
Well, that's kind of pretentious.
And, oh, he's just always so brainy.
And I like Shakespeare.
Ah, Shakespeare is so pretentious.
Whatever you like, people are not even ferociously opposed.
They're just eye-rollingly, boringly opposed.
Yawn. You know, been there, done that.
I get that. That's just not what life is about.
That's just not what things are about.
I get that you're into that, but that's not...
Whatever. Whatever.
Whatever. I was into.
People around me were, you know, bored and indulgent.
Or oppositional in a, okay, okay, if you're into it, you're into it.
I just, you know, like, I get these sorts of things from people, these emails or comments where they say, you know, I just...
I get your arguments.
I just don't buy them.
What an insulting fucking thing to say to somebody.
Of course it's meant to be that way, right?
It's hard to get mad because it's just so obvious.
But I just don't buy it.
Like I'm selling something.
Like I'm hawking something.
I just don't buy it.
Ugh. What a repulsive thing to say about the truth.
That it's something that you buy or don't buy like a goddamn slap-chop on late-night TV. It's just hideous.
It's not what the truth is for.
It's not what the truth is about.
It's not something you buy or reject.
You know, it doesn't quite fit.
You know, it's just, it's just, I'm not into that.
Hey, if it works for you, but hey, I'm just, you know, I guess I'm a little more skeptical.
You know, people would say all this kind of crap all the time.
And that left me in a state of chronic irritation.
And the reason that I know that the opposition that was occurring to me was so constant and small was that the irritation for me, which was the only sad piece of pseudo-resistance that I had left...
The irritation is the size of your enemies.
Your enemies are so small.
Those who are pulling you apart are pulling you apart, not limb by limb, but atom by atom.
It's like Gulliver Travels, where Gulliver is in the land of the Lilliputians.
And the Lilliputians are tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny people.
But they lash him down with a thousand threads.
And even he as a giant then can't move.
Can't move. But that's it, right?
So, irritation for me was just the endless opposition of tiny counter-moves to any single tiny thread or flicker of identity that may have popped up for me.
That was what irritation was for me.
It was not...
Rage is the fire and dust that's kicked up from a large impact, a deep impact, a crater.
But that's not what it was for me.
It was like a smooth, glassy surface of thousands and thousands of tiny impacts.
And that was irritation to me.
Just a smooth, glassy emptiness.
That was sort of scoured from the opposition of a thousand thousand tiny little reversals, tiny little eye-rollings, tiny little...
not a punch, but a shrug to any piece of identity that happens to form and bubble up.
So for me, at least, irritation was what occurred When everything, not that I was as an individual, but anything that is human as any kind of collective.
I mean, it wasn't my decisions in particular that were opposed.
It was any decisions.
It wasn't my preferences that were opposed and rejected and scorned and beaten and humiliated.
It was any preferences of any kind.
No matter what anybody was into...
It was mocked.
Unless what they were into was what I talk about in The God of Atheists, entertainment, right?
Unless it was, you know, cynical, plan nine from outer space, mockery in and of itself.
Then it could be accepted, because, I mean, that was a grave marker over the grave of identity and beauty and preference.
And so, in a sense, you know, the rejections were always framed as the personal, right?
Like, Steph, it's your preferences that were rejected and mocked.
But it wasn't. It was anybody's preferences.
And I am the only one that I know who made it out.
Or even came close to making it out of that kind of history.
Everybody else that I know who came from that kind of world is trapped in these hellacious pits of history.
No matter what kind of house they live in or what kind of job they have, it's all the same shit over and over again.
And for me, irritation was the recognition that any kind of action was completely impossible.
See, you can't oppose the thousand Lilliputian oppositions of any kind of identity.
The instinctive, deep-down, under-the-table, kick-in-the-nuts chess moves opposing any kind of identity.
You can't oppose those because all you get is this wide-eyed innocence of, well, what do you mean?
Hey, aren't we being defensive?
Well, I guess we're a little touchy about our preferences, aren't we?
So you just get this wide-eyed...
You take further scorn, right?
So you attempt to point out the scorn and undermining and humiliation of this kind of endless opposition...
And you just get this, like, it just becomes further scorn and humiliation.
Because, you know, this is what happens when you can't be physically overpowered anymore, right?
I mean, I started working out, and I got fairly big, and I've been working out sort of, I guess, geez, almost 30 years now.
But, not that I'm that big anymore, but...
But this is what happens, right?
This is, I guess, why I showed up in my teenage years, rather than before.
Because before, I could just be physically overpowered.
But, I mean, your abusers, whether they're siblings or parents or whoever, they have a tougher time when you get bigger, right?
They have to... I mean, they don't want your retaliations, of course, and they have to find some way to oppose your identity, your decisions, and your preferences, because they really need to continue to erase you, but they can't do it in a brutal, physical way, right? So they have to do it in this kind of way.
And so the fear and compliance and occasional rage of my childhood was replaced with this just weird, dead, alienated irritation.
A numbness. I mean, it was a significant dissociation.
Because the physical attacks, which provoked more of a fight-or-flight response, had been replaced by these endless little tiny winds of pure opposition to any kind of identity.
And that was just so wearying.
It was just a weird thing. You can think of, you know, I don't know if you've not experienced it, it's a hard thing to explain, but if you're a guy who's beginning to wake up to the, you know, let's just say something stupid, like the stupidity of sports, right?
And you just start to voice these thoughts, like, why are we painting ourselves blue and cheering for some team that is taking a gun to our heads and ripping us off for subsidies and stadiums and all this kind of shit, right?
Like, we're cheering for people who steal money for us.
Or even if they don't go that far, just like, why are we cheering for these people who are just random geographical accident, right?
And we were no different from the people on the other side of the...
Field cheering for the other team.
I mean, if you just come up with this kind of stuff.
I mean, people are just, ah, what's your problem?
What's your team spirit? Whatever, right?
That's sort of an example.
And if everything that you think and everything that you are is, you know, pointing out the absurdity of those around you, or the immorality of those around you, Or the cowardice of those around you.
Or the stupidity of those around you.
Or the blind-heard idiocy of those around you.
You understand that everything you do will then be opposed.
Everything you are will then be opposed.
Not because it's you, but because it's anything.
I mean, if you go in and cheer the team, they don't give a shit because it just means that you're a, you know, a dead geo-zombie, right?
Cheering for that which is proximately close.
Proximately close. But if you come in with any kind of identity, right?
If you show any fresh blood, Among the waving nose stalks of these mummified zombies, I mean mummified in many ways, well, then they're just going to have to continually oppose you.
But they can't do it, obviously, and openly, because that would be to make it conscious for themselves.
So that endless opposition, for me, was the genesis for just a significant multi-year...
It wasn't quite depression.
It was... I was almost too numb to be depression, but it was this chronic irritation, flashes of anger, but most of all, I remember just a strange kind of dusty weariness just floated in my head.
Like, my head had been shaken and banged so much, it turned into one of those snow globes, but inside the snow globe of my head was vacuum and dust, and the dust would never settle.
And instead of being opposed, I was now just being drummed on and rolled around.
Disoriented and opposed.
And then it just became a freefall.
And there was just that chronic irritation of being continually opposed.
Any scent or hint of identity was just attacked and undermined and ridiculed and laughed at and so on.
And there was no escape from that cage, that prison of the weaker system of others.
Ugh. It was just an endless falling shark cage down the Mariana Trench and beyond into interstellar space, falling forever, turning forever.
Oh, it was a nightmare. But a very petty nightmare, a very small, petty nightmare.
And that's what happens when any kind of truth or identity or depth comes into the world of these petty, soul-sucking vampires.
These, the dead, right?
We are the dead men, we are the hollow men, headpieces filled with straw, alas!
But that was irritation for me.
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