All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 7, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:38
1764 Fear
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Fear. It's a very interesting emotion.
And I'll tell you a little bit about my experience with fear, both past, present, and perhaps future.
Maybe it's similar to yours.
I think it will be. Fear is not a problem in the moment, right?
So you fight or flight, right?
So I remember when I was working up north, I was operating a machine that helped sift out The sand, so gold is always heavier, right, than the surrounding silt and mud and all that.
And even then, the stones, the gold is very heavy, so you would use this gold panning.
So we started off by doing this machine.
We get these big clods of 80-pound clods of earthen bags.
And we'd take it back, and we'd sift all of the big stuff out, and then we'd sift it down and sift it down, and finally we'd end up with little stuff we could go round and round in a pan to try and find, and that's how you sort of try and find these gold flecks, which indicate where gold may have been smeared along the Canadian shield by the last glacier patterns, and that's how you find a mine.
You sort of look for the deposit that's been smeared by the glacier, sort of travel it back up and try and find the source.
So I was operating this machine in the woods in the middle of nowhere, and something poked me in the back.
And I turned around, and there was this, I don't know, 60-year-old Native American or Indian dude, Native Canadian, I guess, First Nations fellow, who stank of alcohol and was poking a shotgun into my back.
And as I turned around, the shotgun was leveled against my chest.
My first impulse was, of course, to say, I did not steal your land.
I was not even on the continent.
Neither were my ancestors. But he was just a harmless, friendly, scary dude.
And he wanted some alcohol, which we didn't have.
And so we gave him some food, and he went on his way, and he did not come back.
He was just wandering through the woods, randomly poking people in the bag and chest with shotguns, I suppose.
But in that moment, there was some considerable fear.
Some considerable terror. Other times, up north, getting lost in the tundra.
That's a significant piece of unease, right?
Like, you get lost in a car.
Eh, it's kind of annoying, but, you know, you're on a road.
Long before cell phones and all that.
I was working with a friend of mine, and we got lost.
And it was minus 28.
Minus 25? It got up to minus 40 or minus 50 sometimes up there, even worse with the windchill when we were working in the winter, and we got lost.
I mean, you can't survive a night out there very easily, so we got lost.
It was evening, supper time, it was getting dark, and we were pushing ourselves because the plane was coming the next day and we still had a couple more samples to get, but fortunately our companions put lights, put a little...
Tungsten light on the window, and that was how we were able to navigate our way back.
But yeah, we just got lost.
I mean, there's no maps out there.
Nothing that helps you. There's no roads for hundreds of miles.
We came in and out through planes.
So those are sort of instances where fear was actually very helpful.
I mean, you wouldn't want to be striding confidently off into the minus 20 or minus 30 wilderness as night is falling.
That would not be very smart.
They would not find you until the next glacial thaw.
So, those instances where fear was entirely appropriate, a fight-or-flight mechanism, it really sharpens your senses, makes you alert, makes you figure out what's going on, and, you know, with the goal of not dying, I think, would be the key thing.
So, in those kinds of situations, fear is good.
Another time, the same friend of mine was riding a snowmobile, and I was sitting on the back with all of these big, heavy monster drill bits and poles and so on.
And he was going down a steep hill.
I saw him going down a steep hill, and I got really uneasy, and I said stop.
And I jumped off.
And then when he went down the hill, he got stuck at the bottom, and all of the poles ripped loose from their moorings and went spearing all over the place, which would not have been very good had I been still sitting on them.
So things like that, you know, this is good.
We want that. We want that level of fear and anxiety and caution.
And those things are stimulated, and then they go away.
And that's really what you want in this life, is to have that sense of caution.
Of course, I've revisited that, as I mentioned in a parenting podcast, revisited that as an adult.
I mean, you're constantly scanning for things which might puncture your child's eyeballs and so on, right?
And, I mean, just today, I was holding Isabella in my arms.
It was raining. She wanted to be outside.
I was holding Isabella in my arms.
She wanted to hold the umbrella, so I had my arm holding her and another arm holding the umbrella, and so I had to put her down to get some keys out, and she went totaling off, and I had to sort of...
And the parking lot was empty.
There's no one around, but just, you know, there's that paranoia.
There's that fear. When I had only one hand free, I needed to lift her up and the umbrella.
I had to really make sure that the edge of the umbrella wasn't going to poke her in the eye or something like that.
I mean, it's just that natural caution.
And I think that's good fear.
That's healthy fear. That's fear that you want to make friends with.
That's not fear that you want to alienate from yourself because it's a protective device.
But that's not the kind of fear that we have any problems with or concerns with.
Those situations are very rare.
I've had maybe 20 or 30 of them in my life where, you know, it's really important to be alert.
Otherwise, you could, you know, experience some significant damage or harm or whatever.
So, what kind of fear are we talking about?
Well, there's a kind of existential fear that I found to be much more powerful and much more permanent and much deeper.
Much more deep. More deeper fear.
And it goes a little something like this.
I live in hell.
Okay, I guess it's fairly short.
I live in hell. I am surrounded by moral monsters, by abusers and enablers and just about nobody else.
That I live in a world where morality is known and used for evil.
So, if morality is not known, then you can just explain to people, oh, you see, well, what you're doing is immoral, and they go, oh, well, I don't want to be immoral, so I won't do that, or I'll start doing this, which is moral.
But in a world where morality is known but used for evil, that is a world of existential dread, terror, and horror, that we live in a world of sociopaths, that we live in a world of monstrous and cowards.
Yet, monsters and cowards who praise themselves for their compassion and their virtue.
So, I'll give sort of an example that pops up from time to time.
So, people say to me, oh, you shouldn't be so hard on abusive parents because they themselves had bad childhood, so you should strive to understand them and you should give them sympathy and so on.
To which I reasonably reply, well, I had an abusive childhood, so why aren't you striving to give me sympathy and understanding, but rather just telling me that I'm wrong and telling me to do better?
Because isn't that exactly what I'm saying to the abusive parents?
That you're wrong and you need to do better?
And then people vanish.
Right? Not everyone, but just about, right?
So that's a kind of horror that you see in people.
It's a real kind of horror.
So I just run through that argument once more because it's really, really important.
People come to me and say, well, you shouldn't be so hard on abusive parents.
You should have sympathy because they had...
Abusive childhoods which they're acting out.
And therefore, you, Steph, should strive to understand and have sympathy for them rather than just correcting them or condemning them or telling them that they're wrong.
Which is a self-detonating statement, in a sense, because the principle there is whoever has had an abusive childhood needs understanding and sympathy, not judgment and correction.
But I had an abusive childhood, a significantly abusive childhood, which people are well aware of.
And that same principle would then apply to me.
It should apply to the person you're talking to, right?
Someone on the boards came and said, you know, Steph, you shouldn't judge others because there's no such thing as right and wrong.
To which I reply, if there's no such thing as right and wrong, why are you telling me not to judge others?
Right? Surely you're holding up a standard of right and wrong, saying that I'm failing to meet it, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
And then people don't go, oh my heavens, I hadn't even thought of that.
Oh my, I'm sorry, I was so unjust.
I told you to have sympathy for these victims of abuse who became abusers, and you, I do not have sympathy for.
I'm not striving to understand you and correct you in a gentle and positive and curious manner.
So, I'm so sorry.
Here I am coming to you, who did not become an abuser.
And holding you to a higher standard than those who have become abusers.
Gosh, I wonder why, blah, blah, blah, to which you then end up, well, whoever's most scary, you conform to and call it virtuous, right?
I mean, that's a sad truth of morality throughout history.
It's such a way of conforming to the most powerful, but telling yourself that you're doing good, or to the most scary, or to the most aggressive, or to the most abusive.
It's conforming to evil.
And calling it virtue.
That's pretty much what morality has been since it were first conceived of and put into those boa constrictor words which have choked the soul of humanity ever since.
So people don't say, gosh!
That's just terrible. I better figure this out, right?
They're like, oh shit, well that didn't work, so I'm just going to vanish.
I'm just going to vanish.
And that's slimy, nasty, ugly, bleh.
So to me, real terror is not a fear of acceptable and manageable dangers.
So, you know, if you...
If you don't go skydiving, then you don't have to be afraid of falling out of the sky while skydiving.
Those are sort of manageable fears.
But, I mean, we pretty much have to interact with society as a whole.
There's not much choice around that.
Even going to live in the woods, as I've talked about before, is a way of not engaging with society.
I take my balls and going home because there's a bully out doesn't mean you're not interacting with the bully.
You're just interacting with the bully by leaving.
So, to me, the real fear did not ever come from the manageable dangers in society.
The fear for me, the real existential fear, didn't come from, you know, to use a metaphor, it didn't come from going to the dentist and realizing that you have to have a root canal that's going to be painful, right?
That's not really the fear.
The fear is finding out that the root canal is unnecessary, and the dentist is just a sadist, right?
That to me was the real fear in the world.
That's what really got me.
Let's say you go to the dentist and he says, this won't hurt, right?
And he straps you down, and he starts drilling, and then it starts hurting.
And he pushes down even harder and says, oh, I know.
But then you're really in trouble, right?
I mean, if the dentist doesn't want to hurt you, and then he finds out that he's hurting you, then he'll stop and figure something else out.
And if he can't figure anything else out, at least he doesn't want to hurt you.
It's just kind of what has to happen in order to fix whatever tooth problem you have.
The real fear is not, I have to go and get a painful drilling in my tooth.
The real fear is, the dentist is going to tell me it's fine, and then he's going to lean into a nerve because he enjoys causing me pain.
But he's going to reassure me that I won't feel pain.
So he knows that I don't want to feel pain, but then when I'm in a vulnerable position, he inflicts pain.
Then you're screwed, right?
There's nothing you can do. You can't appeal to the dentist and say, I don't want to be hurt, I don't want to feel this pain, because he already knows that you don't want to feel this pain.
He already knows that, because he said, don't worry, this won't hurt, right?
So he already knows you don't want to feel pain.
So telling him you don't want to feel pain won't help if he's a sadist.
In fact, it'll only egg him on, and then you're in this contradictory position, right?
Where you don't want to feel pain, but you are in the grip of a sadist, and therefore you have to reverse everything, right?
You have to pretend what doesn't hurt, hurts, and what hurts doesn't hurt, to throw him off track.
And that's dissociation, right?
In many ways. So, what does this have to do with society?
Well, society always talks about virtue, but then the moment you actually ask society to be virtuous, they turn on you like a bunch of rapid jackals, because virtue is something which we use to gain power over the gullible, right?
Oh, here's somebody who wants to be good!
Excellent! Let's tell him that virtue is serving his country.
Oh, that's great!
Oh, here's somebody...
Who wants to be patriotic and good?
Well, let's tell them that patriotism and goodness is paying your taxes, supporting the war on drugs, and perhaps going to kill people overseas.
See, that's virtue. You define virtue, and virtue only has power because people really want to be good.
Most people really want to be good.
Virtue only has power because of that.
I mean, to use the counterfeit analogy, right?
If you're in a store and somebody gives you a counterfeit bill and you say, hey, this bill is counterfeit, what they should say is, oh my heavens, I'm so sorry.
Here, check this bill. Here's a real bill.
I'm so sorry. I'm going to go and find out where this came from.
I'm going to try and sort this out.
I'm going to report it to the police and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Right? That's somebody who unknowingly passed a counterfeit bill.
And, you know, it can happen.
We can all make bad arguments, we can all make mistakes, we can all be handed...
I mean, we don't all have counterfeit detection machines that we run every bill through, so we can unknowingly and unwittingly pass along a counterfeit bill.
But it's what happens when that's pointed out to us, right?
So when people come at me with these bullshit pseudo-moral arguments, and I point out the, let's just say errors, it's not hypocrisy yet, and I point out the errors in those arguments, and the person just vanishes, well, then it's like you say to somebody, hey, this is a counterfeit bill, and he's like, oh, I left my wallet in the car, let me go and get a new bill for you.
And he just doesn't come back.
Well, that's not an honorable man, right?
He's leaving you with a counterfeit bill.
Maybe he even took the goods, but he's not coming back.
So he knows. And he doesn't want to expose the criminal, because he's the criminal.
To knowingly pass a counterfeit bill is an entirely different moral category from unknowingly.
And the way that you find out whether somebody's knowingly or unknowingly passing a counterfeit bill is you point out to them that it's counterfeit.
And you see what they do. If they pay with good money, if they call the cops, if they tell you where they got it from, if they give you all the information they can to help track down the counterfeiter, then they're an honorable person who was duped.
And that's, I think, something hugely to be respected, right?
So if somebody comes at me with one of these bullshit moral arguments like sympathy for victims of abuse with no sympathy for me, well, I point it out.
And do they go, oh, gosh, that's a real flaw in my argument.
I'm so sorry. I mean, I didn't even think of that.
I wonder why. And that, of course, leads you on a whole lifelong journey in the realm of uncovering the lies that were told to you as a child, right?
But how many people do that?
One in a hundred, maybe?
Maybe one in a hundred. But not many at all.
most people will simply slither off.
In a thread recently, I think that was that, I can't remember the guy's name on YouTube, who recorded something critical of me, people were piling on, oh, yeah, he's got great points, blah, blah, blah.
And the moment I point out how silly and foolish his points were, people just vanished.
They didn't say, gosh, that was kind of obvious, I wonder I didn't see it, or I'm so sorry that I called you wrong when it was pretty easy.
To see that you weren't, or even if it wasn't easy.
I'm sorry that I jumped the ground and called you wrong when I clearly didn't think it through, or understand the issues, or when I was in the wrong.
However, that doesn't happen. It happens with a few people.
It happens with a few honorable and decent people, but most people, they're just using virtue like a club.
They're just using virtue like a way of thumping people.
Most people use virtue...
As a way of getting you to self-attack.
So most other people will come in and try and get you to self-attack using virtue.
Virtue is the most powerful way to get somebody to self-attack.
Because virtue is considered to be universal, a universal standard, and everybody wants to be good.
So if you feel that you're doing wrong, then you will self-attack.
A bad person. Well, sociopaths won't, but, you know, good people will.
And this is why good people are so weak, because they're so susceptible to arguments from morality.
Whereas bad people aren't susceptible to these arguments, because they don't want to be good.
They don't have any real sense of virtue.
They're too tortured for all of that.
So good people are very susceptible to arguments from morality.
And so good people will self-attack.
In general. But UPB blows that out of the water, right?
UPB rejects and resists the self-attack.
It resists the projection of immorality from the bad person to the good person by turning it back around onto the bad person.
Well, I shouldn't say onto the bad person.
Onto the person who is almost inevitably revealed as bad by how he reacts to the universalization of his attack weapon, right?
Somebody comes and says, we must have sympathy for those who are victims of abuse without showing any sympathy for me.
I don't self-attack then. Oh my god, I'm not showing sympathy for these poor parents who were abused as children who became abusers.
I have to reach out with sympathy, with understanding, and not judgment, and not call them wrong, and so on.
It's like, wait, wait a minute. You're not doing that to me, so this is not a universal principle.
And that's pretty inevitable.
So, a while back I had a convo with someone who was saying, well, there are sites that are critical of FDR, so there must be something in it, there must be something to it, where there's smoke, there's fire.
And I said, well, is that a universal principle to you?
And he's like, well, yeah. I said, good heavens.
Well, what reaction did the B'nai B'rith have when you said to them that there must be something to these anti-Semitic websites?
Or what reaction did the NAACP have when you called them up on a call show and said, well, there are lots of racist hate sites and therefore there must be something to racism and the blacks must be doing something to create this racism?
Of course, he wouldn't answer that because it's not a universal principle.
I mean, it's always claimed as a universal principle, but then when you say, is it a universal principle?
Yes. Well, here, you know, I must be pretty far down the list then of people you're concerned about being criticized on the web.
Lots of people being criticized on the web.
There must be something to the earth being flat, because there is a flat earth society, right?
There must be something to Deepak Chopra, because lots of sites critical of modern science.
So, I think you sort of understand that the fear is not of any specific danger.
The fear is living in hell.
The fear is living in a world where virtue is only used to attack the virtuous and to swell the power and egos and manipulations of the evil.
That's the reality of what we really fear.
And that's where fear has been at its greatest for me.
It's not that people are bad.
Obviously, there are people who are bad.
It's that the world is bad.
It's not that people aren't good.
I mean, lots of people aren't good.
But it's that they know what goodness is and reject it, right?
It's not that they say, oh, the dentist doesn't want to cause me pain.
So I say, ow, and the dentist stops.
But if the dentist says, I don't want to cause you pain, I'm not going to cause you pain, and then you say, ow, and he digs in deeper and starts laughing, then you're really screwed, right?
That's real terror. That's real terror.
That's where the greatest fear has come from for me.
That we live in a shit planet of manipulative assholes, fundamentally.
There are exceptions. There aren't enough exceptions yet for us to have a free society at all.
I mean, we are probably not within 100 years of having a free society because it will take a long time for people to lose their addiction to the evil manipulation of ethics for the goal of getting good people to self-attack.
They will have to let go of it.
It's the greatest reversal of ethics that the world has ever known.
It's not the discovery of ethics.
It's dropping the use of ethics as a tool for evil.
That is necessary.
Understand, that is a big deal.
It's not teaching people what the moon is.
It's getting rid of the priesthood of everyone who uses the existence of the moon to cow and control good people in some superstitious manner.
That's what we're facing. And this is why we're generations away from this.
We're generations away from this because people already know what ethics are.
They just use it to control good people and to hurt good people and to get good people to self-attack because good people are prone to self-attack, right?
Self-attack is a healthy thing.
We'll do another podcast on this, but self-attack is a very healthy thing because it's humility in its essence.
It's not the assumption of being right.
That's very important. And this, in my perspective, is why people are so fundamentally afraid of and opposed to and shit-scared of philosophy.
You see, as I've said, I haven't said it for a while, so this may almost count as a new thought.
But philosophy is 99% archaeology and 1% creation.
It's very little invention, and mostly it is excavation.
Philosophy is...
Accepting what we already know unconsciously.
That is the vast majority of the work in philosophy, is accepting what we already know unconsciously.
And so, in my very first book and very early in my podcast series, I said, well, take questions of virtue to your figures of authority.
They punished you and rewarded you based on their deep, deep knowledge of virtue, your priests, your parents, your teachers.
So they must have a very deep knowledge of that which is good, and they must have a great deal of experience in differentiating that which is good and evil.
They must have a fabulous theory, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, if I claim to be the best navigator on the seven seas in the 18th century, I can't very well be offended if somebody asks me what a sextant is.
If I claim to be a star pilot...
Then people can reasonably, if they have any questions about my competence, can reasonably ask me what an altimeter is.
So, if people are punishing and rewarding children for Moral standards for achievement or failure to achieve moral standards, well, they must have a very, very deep knowledge of ethics.
I mean, if you're willing to use force and confinement and timeouts and all these to punish children, to reward children, you must damn well have a very deep knowledge of what you're doing.
I expect that from my doctor, when she inoculates my child, that she has a pretty deep knowledge of what she's doing.
It isn't just grabbing some random stuff and throwing it into my kids' veins.
I expect that.
So if I ask my doctors a couple of questions about the safety and efficacy of inoculations, I expect that she's going to have some answers and not get all huffy and offended by the very fact that I'm asking some questions.
So, I said, right, go to those who punished and rewarded you as children and ask them about their knowledge of ethics, which must be very deep.
Now, of course, that's a bit of Socratic passive aggression, which I'm still mulling over the value of, but...
The reality is, of course, we all know that priests and parents and teachers and politicians know next to nothing about ethics.
And that is not the problem. The problem is not that they know nothing about ethics.
The problem is that they claim to know stuff about ethics.
That's the problem.
The problem is not you don't know where the universe came from.
The problem is when you claim to know where the universe came from and you found the entire edifice of your claim on the deep, still, muddy waters of the infinite river bullshit.
And since those very early podcasts and since my very first book, which came out quite some years ago now, the number of people who have actually questioned their elders on virtue, on their knowledge of virtue, has been tiny.
Again, I would guess about a percent.
Probably not even that.
200,000 and 250,000 listeners, that would be 2,000 to 2,500 people who've actually gone through and examined the ethics of their elders.
I think that's probably pretty high.
It's probably closer to half a percent.
Now, everybody wants to be good.
There are these people in authority who claim to have deep knowledge of goodness.
And so, why would people not go and get that information?
I mean, compare that to the goddamn dieting industry.
I mean, just compare. Moral philosophy, far more important than muffin tops and love handles.
Let's compare moral philosophy to dieting, right?
So, let's say there's people out there who claim to have this deep and powerful and fantastic knowledge of dieting, of how to diet, of what to do, of how to lose weight.
And the fact that they're overweight themselves, well, let's just pass that aside for a sec.
Let's pretend that we only know them through radio.
So there are people out there in the world who have a deep and powerful knowledge of how to diet.
To the point where they're willing to force children to eat certain foods and punish them for eating other foods.
That's how deep and certain their knowledge is.
Well, as these people write diet books, then you would expect people to go thundering out to get these diet books.
I mean, people still are on the Atkins diet, though the guy died of a sclerotic heart attack of some kind, I think.
And diet books are a multi, multi, multi hundred billion dollar a year industry.
So if people claim to have knowledge that other people say that they want, well, those people meet up in the marketplace.
So, if people have great knowledge of dieting, other people will buy their books by the millions.
So, people don't have any trouble going out to get information that is important to them, whether it's diet books or makeup tips or how to get your six-pack on or...
How to style your hair better or what clothes to wear or how to bag a man or, I guess, a woman.
So people go out and do these Four Dummies books and they go out and buy these diet books and style books and magazines and they're constantly perusing.
Somebody knows he wants a car, he's going to spend, if he's like me, days or weeks on the internet and test driving and so on, finding out.
So people want information that's important to them, they have no problem getting it.
So everybody wants to be good, and certainly people who listen to this show are interested in virtue and goodness.
So can you imagine people who listened exclusively to a show about dieting, who had people in their life who had a near-perfect knowledge of how to best diet, and steadfastly refusing to go to those people for this fantastic nutritional and exercise information about how to easily and best diet?
Imagine! You listen to a show about dieting, hours and hours a week, And your mom is a world-renowned dietitian.
And I say, hey, if you're interested in dieting, and your mom organized your meals when you were a kid, and you were healthy, and she's world-renowned, she knows everything there is to know, or at least a huge amount of what there is to know about dieting, so go ask your mom about dieting.
Wouldn't that be? I mean, you have an expert in the family, for Christ's sakes!
You have an expert on ethics in the family!
Right? I call parents because they punish and reward for virtue, not for power.
They never say for power, but for virtue.
So isn't it incomprehensible?
You have a world-renowned dietitian in your family.
You listen to a show about dieting and health.
Hundreds and hundreds of shows about dieting and health.
You have your mom, your dad are both experts in nutrition and exercise.
And I say, well, go ask your parents.
They're experts. And 99.9% of people would do almost anything rather than probe the expertise of their parents in the realm of nutrition and exercise.
All I want to do is lose weight.
I recognize that I have a diet and nutrition expert in the home, but you could not at gunpoint march me up to probe their expertise and get their knowledge.
Why? Well, the answer is completely obvious, of course.
The answer is that we all know that they don't have this knowledge.
We all know that they don't have this knowledge that they were using ethics to cloak the exercise of power and conformity and convenience for the most part.
That's the truth.
Nobody wants to use these counterfeit detection machines because they know there's nothing but counterfeit currency all around.
Right? Nobody wants this counterfeit detection machine because they find out that just about everybody's a counterfeit.
And then they have to live in the world of lies.
They have to live in the world of hell.
They have to live in the world of the manipulation of virtue for the sake of serving immorality.
They have to unclip their noses and drink deep the stench of shit planet.
I don't want to do it. But see, the thing is that avoiding doing it doesn't help.
I mean, that's what's so funny, right?
That's what I finally realized, right?
By avoiding probing the knowledge of virtue of those around me, I didn't avoid the knowledge, right?
I didn't. I simply confirmed the knowledge that they did not have this.
And that's a terrifying thing.
It's a terrifying thing to see.
And I think that's where the greatest fear was for me.
Once you're through it, it's not so bad at all.
But it is really scary to contemplate.
It is really scary to examine.
That's the greatest terror, in my view.
▲
Export Selection