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Nov. 14, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:34:43

1788 Freedomain Radio Sunday Show, 14 November 2010

The philosophy of the body, preaching reason to Christians, and how to stop self attacking at work.

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	Hello, my beautiful, beautiful, shiny, godlike brainstem friends.
	I hope you're doing magnificently.
	It is November the 14th, 2010, another day of deep joy just to be alive.
	So cute. A couple of days ago, it was really foggy in the neighborhood, and I took Isabella out because she had never seen fog, at least not while she was sort of conscious.
	And so I took her out, and I said, Isabella, Look, it's so...
	It's very foggy.
	And she said, Yes, Dada is very ribbit.
	Which I thought was very cute.
	Because, you know, froggy and foggy do sound a lot.
	And I thought that was just really, really funny.
	It is very ribbit. And you know, the funny thing is, though, is that kids can...
	It's like a combat of whose language is going to win over whose.
	So, of course, for the rest of the day, I was strongly, strongly tempted to...
	We refer to the weather as it's very ribbit outside.
	And it's really, really, really tempting.
	She has better words for things than I do, or that the English language does.
	And really, we should all just speak Isabella, right?
	So she says her own name is Abia, although she's getting better at that.
	And it's a much better name than Isabella.
	Grapes used to be Begei, but now they're grapes.
	Spiders are still Beedabo.
	And that, I think, is a great...
	Because it sounds a little bit like a spider would sound when walking across bubble wrap.
	And watermelon is menino, which is much, much better because it sounds like watermelon with a Spanish flair, which a really watermelon should have.
	And anyway, it sort of goes on and on.
	But it is just...
	Yeah, that's right.
	You know, they had... In Prohibition, they had speakeasies.
	And in this house, we have speakeasy, which is a much, much better language than English.
	Isberento? Anyway, something like that.
	So I hope you're doing most fantastically and beautifully.
	And thank you, everybody, for your wonderfully kind support, consideration, interest, criticisms, corrections, and all other sorts of beautiful things.
	UPP2, I hope, will be out within six to eight months, I think.
	I may just start the book, scrap it and start it from scratch, which I think would be an improvement.
	I still like the structure, and of course it's important not to get confused by the people who have problems, because you generally don't hear from the people who don't have problems.
	But there's ways that I would like to reorganize it to overcome some of the most common problems with theory, and that will come out.
	Against the Gods is finished!
	I'll actually post a link to the audiobook in the chat room in case anybody wants to have a wee preview.
	It is a fine, fine book.
	I'm very pleased with it. And I think that the section on why we have gods is some of the best thinking I think that I have ever done.
	And it could well be some of the best thinking I'm ever likely to do.
	Oh my god, I've peaked already.
	It's all downhill from here.
	So I hope that you do.
	Well, I hope that you will enjoy it.
	And please let me know if there's anything else that Very, very happy.
	Alright, I believe we have some callers, and I am ready to hear and throw a few potential nuggets of hopefully not fool's gold into the mix.
	So if you have a question, you can Skype, of course, just let James P. know.
	If you know have the Skype, which if you're listening to this on a computer, you should have.
	If you don't have the Skype, you can call...
	A number, and the number goes a little bit something like this.
	315-876-9705.
	Just let James P. know that you're calling, because we now have auto-answer in the server room.
	So, let's go with the show.
	I believe that the lady with the cold got in first.
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I'm a bit sniffly this morning.
	Hi. I wanted to actually just give a little update from a Sunday show conversation that I had with you almost two years ago.
	Oh, that one? Yeah.
	It's no big deal.
	I don't know if you remember, but I called in and I was asking if you had any ideas about phobias, and I mentioned that I had a phobia of...
	Like seeing people throwing up?
	Yeah, I remember that.
	Yeah, I remember that. That totally made me nauseous.
	Go on. I'm kidding.
	I'm kidding. I don't have that phobia.
	Right. Yeah.
	And I remember that when we were talking about it, it made sense to me.
	You had mentioned a metaphor of a lot of just the digestive system and vomiting having to do with anger.
	And I definitely experienced a lot of rage from my parents when When I was a kid, it made sense to me intellectually, but just Friday night, it all kind of came, I mean, you know, paired with work that I did with a therapist and work that I've been doing on my own and stuff, it all kind of came together for me.
	And yeah, I just kind of wanted to say that I think that you're exactly right on target.
	Well, I must say that I do like to really linger over the calls.
	Wherein I'm right.
	So please, take your time.
	And I'm going to get quite comfortable here, stretch out a little bit, rearrange the fig leaf, and I'm all ears.
	Tell me what happened.
	Yeah, so on Friday night I was watching TV with Kyle and there was a scene where...
	One of the characters was gagging a lot, and I had been kind of trying to slowly work through the phobia with exposure therapy, especially on TV, where I know that it's not really happening,
	and I can kind of just try to relax and reinforce the idea that nothing actually bad is going to happen to me when When I see people vomiting and so I was trying to do that and I just had a really severe reaction and I just like almost panic attack and so you know we paused it and I relaxed and and I was you know since it was so fresh I was trying to really explore what was what it was that I was so terrified of and as I was describing what it was Everything that I was describing about it,
	I wasn't describing somebody getting sick.
	I was describing rage, and I think specifically my dad's rage.
	It was just gagging.
	I didn't even see anybody actually getting sick on the TV show, and I had just this panic.
	I think it's because of that anticipation where...
	I know you have some experience with rage, so I'm sure you know what I'm talking about.
	The anticipation where you know that there is going to be an explosion, it's just kind of like you're waiting for it to happen.
	Oh yeah. And that's what was really getting me.
	And yeah, as I was working it out and stuff, I just kind of realized like, Throwing up is actually a really good thing, and it's just the contents of your stomach.
	There's nothing actually really bad or anything happening when somebody gets sick.
	It's actually a lot of times a really good thing that's happening.
	Yeah, I think that's right.
	What sort of comes to my mind is not to sort of poke your phobia, but I remember when I was working up north as a prospector and gold penner, A friend of mine and I, we drove into town because every couple of weeks you just get sick and tired of looking at the trees in the tent.
	We drove into town and we went to Allegiant and we ate some pierogies.
	And I guess these pierogies had sort of been scraped off the back of the fridge that had been thrown out three years ago and then boiled in fungus or something because I got very ill.
	And not like sick, sick.
	I was just throwing up a lot. But my friend didn't.
	And he ended up having to go to the hospital.
	And he said that I was lucky that I had a sensitive stomach because it meant that the moment my body detected foreign icky stuff that I would sort of throw up.
	So it's actually throwing up is a very good thing to do because it's something that keeps you healthy.
	It's the best way to get rid of some sort of bacteria or fungus or something which is bad for you that you've ingested.
	So it is a healthy thing.
	And so I sort of understand that.
	But on the other side, when you look metaphorically, if I remember what we talked about two years ago, if you look metaphorically at the act of emotional vomiting, right, then it's very different, right?
	Because physical vomiting is healthy and it's your body protecting itself and it is not at the expense of somebody else.
	Whereas somebody who is feeling humiliated and then wants to level up by humiliating his children say, that is a kind of vomiting.
	In other words, he's trying to expel a negative substance called humiliation by putting it into somebody else.
	So I feel humiliated.
	I'm going to go and bully somebody weaker than I am so that I can feel strong again.
	That is, in a sense, and not to use too gross a metaphor, that's different from throwing up.
	That's throwing up in somebody else's mouth.
	That's a very different situation.
	And, of course, that's abusive, whereas simply getting sick from exposure to some sort of bio-agent pierogi is not, if that makes any sense.
	So knowing that that imminent... I think that there is commonality in the unconscious where metaphors reign supreme.
	There is commonality between vomiting and leveling it up because it is an attempt for somebody to purge something unbearable within themselves.
	But of course, the difference is that they have to put it in somebody else, which is where the hideousness comes in.
	Yeah. Right, exactly.
	Yeah, and that's what I kind of realized that I was describing when I was describing exactly what I was afraid of happening.
	But yeah, I mean, nothing really bad happens when somebody gets, I mean, obviously, it's uncomfortable for the person who's getting sick.
	And it's, yeah, I mean, it's kind of uncomfortable for other people around too.
	But yeah, when it comes to, yeah, the emotional vomiting and And rage, it definitely, definitely hurts a lot.
	And I don't have any memories of a specific traumatic event where I was exposed to vomiting, but I know that my parents were both heavily into drugs and alcohol when I was really, really young, like pre-memory.
	And so it makes sense to me that there would be a lot of rage and a lot of vomiting, or at least some kind of vomiting.
	And so it kind of just made sense to me that that's probably where that came from, just like a really early transferring of like, I have to put this terror into something here where I feel like I can kind of control it,
	because it affects me all the time, where I'm always kind of looking out for people throwing up and Even, you know, in kind of irrational situations, but like if I hear somebody coughing, it'll automatically trigger this fear.
	Right, right, right.
	And there is, you know, let's make this the body fluids show, right?
	There is an involuntary aspect to body fluids in certain ways, right?
	So, you know... I remember getting fluoride treatment as a kid.
	I vividly remember this.
	One thing my mom was pretty good at was oral hygiene.
	So I got a fluoride treatment and they said, what flavor do you want?
	And I had this blueberry or candy or candy floss or something.
	You have this theory, this idea that it's going to taste like these things.
	And they put this awful goop in your mouth that drips into your throat from these sort of plastic casings for your teeth.
	And it just tastes like, I don't know, like, I don't know, elf sweat and Satan's armpit.
	It's just horrible. And whatever flavor they put on top of it seems to just make it worse.
	And after that, I couldn't get the taste out of my mouth.
	I remember walking along the street.
	I remember being shorter than garbage cans.
	So I was really young, maybe five or six.
	I was walking along the street and I was desperately trying to think of something like a Big Mac because I didn't want to throw up.
	I didn't want to throw up. I didn't want to throw up because I felt really embarrassed about throwing up.
	Anyway, I didn't make it.
	I also remember when I was much younger, I guess I was being toilet trained, so I must have been two or three years old.
	I remember having to basically take a crap, and I was running from my room to the bathroom, and I was thinking, if I can make it, I'm going to be a real giant.
	I'm going to be a real human.
	I'm going to be a hero. And I didn't make it.
	And there's a kind of involuntary aspect to that as well.
	I also remember in boarding school, having the nurse scrub my pants after I'd crapped them by staying out.
	On the soccer field for too long.
	And, you know, the sort of disgust on her face.
	And there's also a phase where farting and, you know, poo-poo and farting and all of that is very funny to children.
	And at the same time, very embarrassing.
	Because we have, you know, we have so much in our lives that is an out-of-body dream.
	You know, there's so much that we worship that is antibody, non-body.
	The body is...
	The body is physical.
	The body is real. The body is us.
	There is no soul. There is nothing ethereal to our consciousness.
	We are not drifting in and out of bodies in a sort of slow motion repetition of reincarnation.
	We are simply electricity lodged deeply and dreamily in meat.
	But we are not any kind of sky ghost dipping down into the physical like a bird reaching in to grab a salmon from a river.
	And so because we're so fundamentally physical, but we are so infected with these dreams of otherworldly abstractions, and I don't just mean religion, though, of course, that is there too, that the perfection is gods and angels and the Virgin Mary and Jesus, all of whom are immaterial and anti-physical.
	So there's a huge amount of falseness that's built up in our dreams of the immaterial and our veneration and worship of imaginary and anti-physical, anti-material, anti-meat entities.
	So much of our false self is bound up in that, in fact, created by that.
	But it's not just religion.
	I mean, worshipping a country.
	A country is exactly the same as a god.
	It's a completely immaterial entity.
	And because it has no existence, but we have to worship it, we only end up having to bow down to those who claim to represent it, whether it's politicians representing the country or priests representing God.
	It's like, I have this giant invisible friend that everybody must worship.
	But my giant invisible friend doesn't really talk except through me.
	So basically you just have to worship me.
	If somebody says, you have to worship me, if a guy comes up to you and says, you have to worship me as an immortal perfect immaterial entity, be like, dude, I can touch you.
	So that doesn't work. So you have to invent this immaterial giant infinite friend that you only claim to speak for.
	And that, of course, is how hierarchies and power work, whether it's class, which doesn't exist, or race, which doesn't really exist, or the nation, which doesn't exist, or culture, which doesn't exist, or gods, which don't exist. All of these immaterial, perfect entities are repudiated by one wet, involuntary fart.
	Right? Because we all know that that is kind of a humiliating thing, which is a ridiculous thing to think of, right?
	I mean, I think we've all been, you know, if you've been in a restaurant where you suddenly swallow something the wrong way and you have a bit of a coughing fit or whatever, somehow people feel that this is embarrassing or wrong or whatever.
	But it's your body saying, I really like to breathe because life is better than death.
	So it's actually helping out in that way.
	It's really trying to help you out.
	And so, this is a sort of long way, but hopefully a useful way of saying that there is all of this immateriality that infests and infects our minds.
	And what this exploitive, destructive, violent, and hierarchical immateriality, what it fears and hates is mere biology, mere blood, flesh, Vomit, shit, semen, like all of that sort of stuff.
	That's why God had to be created without ejaculation, right?
	Without penis and vagina and sperm and egg and all that kind of good stuff.
	And so I think that there is something that is horrifying to really exploitive and destructive people about the mere flesh, about flesh.
	The mere thing itself called being a human being, as Lear put it in King Lear, this bare forked animal, right?
	Just a body and two legs.
	And I know that temptation.
	I really do understand that temptation of the dream of immateriality as perfection.
	It is a desperate way to overcome not living in this life, right?
	So the more that you don't live...
	In a visceral, passionate, committed, emotional, connected, intimate, loving way.
	Strong, courageous, virtuous.
	The degree to which you don't do that is the degree to which you are both infected by immateriality and the degree to which you must continue to worship immateriality, hoping that after death will be your reward for not living in this life.
	It becomes a real addiction.
	So I think there's a lot of complicated mythology that's built up in the unconscious about The mere flesh that we actually are.
	And part of it comes from, I think, a general incomprehension about how, as I've sort of had this idea of writing a poem, basically, it's a one-line poem, sort of goes like this.
	A human being is a good machine for turning a pig into a poem.
	Because you can eat some bacon and then go write a poem.
	But there is something that is very strange about living inside this helmet of meat and chemicals and electricity called the skull and yet having the ability to see to the edges of the universe and backwards in time to its beginnings and see the evolution of life through merely material means.
	I mean there is something astounding about a couple of pounds of wet meat matter being able to do mathematics and write symphonies.
	I mean, it is an astonishing thing.
	And we do sometimes almost feel catapulted out of Of our own brains by the capacities within our own minds.
	But it is something to be resisted.
	We must continue to root ourselves in the material.
	That includes the amazing ability of the mind to do all of its wonderful things.
	But it also includes and is founded upon shit and vomit and semen and all of the other stuff that is material and which offends and is very offensive in a very fundamental way.
	It really offends people who are addicted to immateriality and abstractions.
	That this is – it feels, I guess, undignified.
	You know, if you're a sort of glowing princess of God, it feels undignified that you have menstruation every month.
	I don't know. I mean, that's why perhaps it's considered in the Judaic religion unclean, you know?
	Why are menstruating women not allowed into the temple?
	Because it is a reminder that all of this abstract, exploitive stuff is complete, total, ugly, vicious and evil bullshit.
	And that God doesn't make human beings.
	Menstruating women make human beings.
	And the menstruation is a reminder that it is the physical that we come from and the abstract we may remain addicted to.
	But it has no power other than to exploit us.
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	And I was just thinking that it's kind of similar, or it's really similar, the kind of almost like disdain that we have, or not you and I, but kind of in general society that we have about our physical bodies and also our emotions.
	There's a lot of humiliation around feeling sad or A lot of, you know, like, anger.
	Like, I'm sure if either of my parents had any kind of a healthy and realistic relationship to anger, it wouldn't have come out as this, like, horrible, you know, aggressive vomit.
	Sorry, say that last part again.
	I just want to make sure I understood it.
	Right. I just mean that, right, like, if my dad or my mom had Like a realistic and healthy and like in, you know, in the moment relationship to their anger instead of like making it all about this,
	you know, the anger is really bad and violent and then they might not have or they wouldn't have acted out the way that they did and probably had this effect where I distorted it.
	Where you distorted it?
	Sorry, yeah, into a phobia.
	Yeah, yeah. I wouldn't say you distorted it.
	I think it was a natural reaction to something that you could not experience or express in the moment, right?
	So if you have these aggressive and abusive parents, you can't say, you know, mom and dad, your anger and your drug use and your alcoholism or your drinking, as you mentioned, is terrifying and alarming and horrible to me and I really want this family to get fixed and so on.
	This is not possible.
	It was not possible.
	And so it gets driven down and Into the metaphorical dungeon of the unconscious, right?
	That which we cannot express does not vanish.
	That which we cannot say does not vanish.
	It simply goes underground and mutates.
	The truth never dies.
	It just changes shape.
	This is why we have so many creatures in mythology that change shape, right?
	Like werewolves and vampires and other sorts of creatures that are all shape changers.
	This is simply saying that you can...
	You can repress something, you can put it in a coffin, but it's going to only change shape.
	It will not die.
	And so I think it was a natural and inevitable reaction, not something that you did, but an inevitable reaction to something that was done unto you.
	And you're right, I think that the baser emotions, and you can look at things like Buddhism and so on to find confirmation of this.
	The baser emotions are considered immature, lower level, and sort of selfish.
	And those emotions which are downgraded at all times, which are cast out, which are expelled, the emotions which are expelled and marked down in the hierarchy of values, usually to the negative, have always one thing in common, always and forever one thing in common.
	The emotions that are scorned are always the emotions that are inconvenient to the exploiters and the abusers.
	Always. So, what emotion is revered?
	Forgiveness! Right?
	Forgiveness is revered because it is convenient for the abusers that we forgive them.
	Anger is downgraded because anger is inconvenient for the abusers who exploit us.
	Integrity to rational values is downgraded as Ideological rigidity, because it is inconvenient for people in power.
	Integrity to the whims of those in power, which is called obedience in the military or the police or patriotism in the general citizenry.
	Respect for the law.
	Well, the law is just a bunch of opinions with guns.
	Right? So, what other emotions are venerated?
	Well, a general calm, peace detachment from the things of this world.
	Well, why is that venerated?
	Because it reduces competition.
	For the people who want to grab, hold, rip, tear and consume the things of this world.
	So, and we can sort of go on and on, but there's a clear division.
	Those emotions which disrupt a violent hierarchy are scorned and rejected as immature, as short-sighted, as selfish, as primitive, as unworthy.
	Whereas those emotions, and it's really hard to call them emotions, it's more like the empty, gassy vacuum that lies in the hole of a vacated soul.
	But those emotions which click you nice, easily, imperfectly, and gently into the hierarchy of power so that you're a good, obedient, and willing slave, well, those are very much approved of.
	We can imagine that a farmer, if his cows were intelligent, would send them To Buddhist schools of detachment and forgiveness.
	That way, he could keep milking them and murdering them.
	Right. Right.
	Yeah. That's what...
	I mean, I do get...
	I'm sorry for rating my voice, but I do get angry...
	When I hear all of this praise of forgiveness, you have to forgive, you have to forget, you have to move on.
	I just think that is absolutely toxic.
	Absolutely toxic.
	Because it is always and forever only applied to the victims.
	Right. Not to the abusers.
	And any ethic which is applied only to the victims is scummy, parasitical verbal abuse and is responsible for such a savage amount of violence in this world that if you were to fill it with blood, it would eclipse the moon.
	I absolutely loathe universal ethics that only ever apply to the victims.
	It is just such a net used to control and weigh us down that I'm just...
	Yeah, anger is one of these things, right?
	See, if you get angry, then...
	I mean, part of the horror of anger is invented by the masters, right?
	So that the slaves don't get angry and say, you know, fuck you to the masters.
	I'm out of here. I'm out of this hierarchy.
	I mean, this pyramid doesn't work for me.
	So part of it is invented...
	By the masters. But a significant portion of it is invented by the slaves.
	Because anger gets slaves beaten.
	And slaves generally used to experience collective punishment, right?
	So if one slave ran away, they would all be beaten.
	And this is one of the reasons why there's such a horizontal clampdown on any move towards freedom and self-expression.
	Because Historically, slaves were punished collectively and therefore they had to police each other.
	That's why slaves were punished collectively.
	One, so that the person who ran away would then feel the guilt of the punishment raining down upon his friends and family.
	And the other is so because of the collective punishment, they would all enforce the edicts of the masters on each other.
	Collective punishment is just evil genius.
	And so when a slave would get angry because of collective punishment, other slaves would face extreme danger.
	And therefore, they would all clamp down on each other.
	Don't get angry. You must forgive.
	You must forget. You must turn the other cheek.
	Eye for an eye is for the masters, you see.
	Turn the other cheek is for the slaves.
	And so there was a general horror in the slave class of any assertive emotions which threatened the hierarchy because the moment you threatened the hierarchy, you rained down universal punishment on your fellow slaves.
	They all clamped down on each other.
	Now, it's really humiliating for people to say, well, we are slaves, and this is the bullshit we have to believe.
	This is the, you know, the crap sandwich we have to eat in order to survive.
	So they have to make a virtue out of it.
	And that's what, of course, Nietzsche talks about.
	That the Christian slave population made a virtue out of submission, made a virtue out of enslavement.
	And, I mean, they weren't the first and they weren't the last.
	We, of course, have it now that...
	You can see this everywhere.
	I was just watching the trillion-pound horror story of the British debt, this sort of documentary.
	I mean, it's the same thing.
	We should fix the government.
	We should move more like to Hong Kong, though Hong Kong, of course, has an enormous debt, and it's going to go exactly the same way as every other government.
	Ah, you hear the same story over and over.
	Oh, there's this new tiger of economic freedom that's coming along.
	It was Ireland.
	Like a decade, decade and a half ago, now Ireland is going hand in hand to the EU because they're out of money, because it's always the same goddamn cycle.
	So, yeah, I mean, it's very, very important to recognize that the value that is placed on emotions, certain emotions, you know, peace, obedience, turning the other cheek, forgiveness, gentleness, meekness, unless, unless you're ordered to go and kill some other slaves, in which case... Heroism and patriotism and service to your country and stabbing people who are wounded, or as they call it, double-clicking in the military, right?
	Shooting somebody who's wounded.
	That is a virtue because that's slave-on-slave violence, but you can't ever be aggressive towards your masters.
	You must have forgiveness and loyalty.
	And if you dislike any individual master, then you must have loyalty to the system as a whole.
	I don't like the war, but I support the troops.
	I don't like George Bush or Barack Obama, but I support democracy.
	Everything that we're taught about emotions, we are taught so that we will fit into the great chain of enslavement that runs from history and, unfortunately, into the future.
	But that's what we're taught about emotions.
	It has nothing to do with mental health.
	Yeah. Yeah, that definitely resonates with my experience.
	Do you ever remember getting angry at a teacher when you were a kid?
	Yeah, I remember one time getting angry at a teacher and then that teacher whispering in my ear that she's not my mom or something like that.
	She got really aggressive with me about that, or passive aggressive.
	Right. Yeah, it's absolutely not allowed.
	Oh yeah, no, it was unthinkable, right?
	So I mean, teachers could humiliate and scorn us, but if you drew one funny picture of a teacher, I mean, you were in detention for a week, right?
	It can't go both ways.
	Ethics are for suffocating the true selves of the slaves.
	They're only claimed to be universal, but the moment you act as if they are universal, well, you get royally fucked up, right?
	Right, right.
	I mean, it starts so early, this universal rule, these universal rules that always have exceptions, right?
	So whenever you disobey the rule, in the wrong context, it's a universal rule that you have to obey, right?
	So anger is bad unless we point you at some other innocent poor bastard across a trench, in which case blow the shit out of him and we'll give you a medal.
	Murder is bad, murder is good.
	Theft is bad for you among slave on slaves, theft is bad.
	But theft for masters to slay through taxation is virtuous, right?
	But it's so funny. I mean, we met up with some listeners up here who have two absolutely charming and delightful girls.
	And they're a very nice couple themselves.
	And we've been socializing a bit.
	And we went to a farm yesterday.
	And Christina and Izzy and I were walking through this.
	It's like a little maze, like a little path that was sort of enclosed.
	And there was an entrance and there was an exit.
	Now, Isabella went in through the entrance, and it was not too, too long, but she wasn't aware that there was an exit just around the corner, and she wanted to leave, so she didn't know to keep going on, but she knew the way back.
	She knew how far it was to go back.
	She didn't know how much further it was to go on.
	So I sort of tried to tell her that it was just around the corner, but she wanted to go back, and so fine, we went back.
	And a little boy was running from the exit to the entrance...
	And he turned to us as he was running.
	He turned to us and he said, you're only supposed to run the other way.
	You're only supposed to go the other way to us because we were going the wrong way.
	Now, remember, he was running past us in the wrong way.
	So he was telling us we were going the wrong way and that was bad and wrong while he himself was running.
	We were only walking. He was running the wrong way.
	So he was trying to inflict...
	A quote, punishing rule upon us that he himself was violating at the exact same moment that he was telling us it was wrong, with no consciousness of how insane that was.
	That kid was like five or six years old.
	It is such a fundamental thing that we live with.
	I don't know if it's human nature or learned.
	I assume it's learned, because I don't really have much belief in human nature other than adaptation.
	But we all get that if we can invent a rule that everyone has to follow except us, We gain extraordinary power.
	And so, of course, Christina set him straight about the UPB aspect of that, and we sort of moved on.
	But it's just astounding.
	This is a five-year-old kid who's running saying, you can't run this way, it's wrong.
	Amazing. Just amazing.
	Yeah. That's...
	I don't know what I was going to say after.
	Yeah, I'm sorry. I just thought it was sort of relevant.
	So listen, I completely understand that we have a complex and ambivalent relationship with things like anger because it is something that is so propagandized in our lives.
	Right. Yeah, absolutely.
	And I really appreciate the call.
	You're welcome. And I appreciate the follow-up.
	I think that's one of the longer follow-ups.
	But, you know, if success only takes two years, that is fine progress.
	Seriously, that is fine progress.
	And congratulations. Thank you very much.
	I appreciate it. All right.
	Thanks. I think we have another caller who may want to talk about armpit sweat, groin sweat, anal leakage, something like that.
	Because this is the Body Fluids show.
	So everybody get your jealous shots and let's go to town.
	Yeah, that was my second topic of choice.
	Okay, let's go with your first stand.
	Let's break the cycle.
	Okay. Hey, Steph, how are you doing?
	Good, how are you? Doing okay.
	Pretty nervous, though. So I was wondering if you could give me some insight on a personal problem I'm sort of involved with.
	All right. As I put it to James so far, I'm sort of in between a hard place and a bunch of crazy Christians.
	I sent you an email maybe about a month ago.
	I'm 18. I'm sorry, did you say it was pretty culty?
	Yeah, culty. Sure, go on.
	We don't have contact with anyone else outside of the retreat for three days.
	We don't have watches. We don't have phones.
	We don't have TVs, any of that sort of stuff.
	And the idea is that we are brought closer to God.
	And this is something I've really enjoyed, you know, for the past three years when I was a Christian.
	And about, I don't know, last spring, I was invited to become a retreat leader, which basically meant that I got to organize all this sort of stuff with 12 other people.
	And, you know, the school takes these retreats pretty seriously.
	Now, I accepted at that point being a Christian at the time.
	And I now have an obligation to do that sort of stuff.
	And then over the summer, I really started studying a lot of the work that you put out on atheism and stuff that men like Dawkins and Hitchens put out.
	And I've really had a change of mind on the subject.
	And now I'm caught in this situation where I have an obligation to run this retreat.
	Yet my ideas and my values are totally opposite to what these people are teaching.
	And I suppose my main question is how I can integrate my values that I now hold in my life and how to solve the sort of conflict between myself and the other people who I have to now deal with.
	Right, right. Help me understand how this obligation has concretized, if that makes sense.
	So I guess you volunteered or you were volunteered when you were more deep in this delusion, I suppose?
	Yes, sir. It was technically an offer.
	It's voluntary, but it's one of those things where you really shouldn't refuse doing it, or else it's sort of like social ostracism, and you don't get a lot of respect from the administration.
	There's another thing regarding my theology class, where now that I'm doing this, it's part of my grade.
	So if I drop out of doing this retreat, then I fail theology, which means I can't graduate.
	Right, right. Right.
	So they've kind of got you by the short and curly, so to speak, right?
	Yeah, unfortunately, that seems to be the case.
	Well, I'm very sorry for that.
	I'm very sorry for that.
	That is a very tough situation to be in.
	I really do sympathize.
	That is a very tough situation to be in.
	Now, just out of curiosity, where are you in the sort of journey process arc?
	Of rethinking your religious teachings.
	Teachings is the nicest word I can come up with, so feel free to substitute something less kind if you like.
	I think I'm at strong atheism.
	I suppose maybe about a year ago, Christian fundamentalism.
	Wow, okay. So, I've come quite away a short amount of time.
	Holy whiplash, Batman.
	That's impressive.
	Good.
	Got it.
	All right.
	Go on.
	So.
	Do you want me to describe more about what my transition has been or.
	I'm certainly happy to hear how your transition has been.
	I'm more curious, though.
	I'm happy to hear whatever you've got to say.
	I'm more curious about where you are now, but I'm really happy to hear about the transition because that always fascinates me as well.
	Okay. Well, it was basically, to keep it brief, it's a transition from really Roman Catholicism that I found problems with that whole doctrine, tried to move to Christian fundamentalism, then moved to maybe a little bit of agnosticism through your work.
	And I didn't stick with that for a while because I think your agnosticism arguments, or at least arguments against it, made a lot of sense.
	So I had to accept strong atheism.
	Now where I am now is that I pretty well accept that God doesn't exist.
	I shouldn't say pretty well, I do accept that God doesn't exist.
	Very much into learning about this sort of stuff and trying to understand the position even more so than I do now, if that makes sense.
	Sure, sure. Okay, okay.
	All right. Well, that's, I mean, that's really impressive.
	And, I mean, that's a lot to overturn.
	How's it been going in your personal relationships?
	In a word, terribly.
	Oh, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
	But go on. The relationships that I have with people, everyone that I know knew me as a Catholic or Christian fundamentalist.
	And, you know, going to a Catholic school, I was pretty well accepted, at least from the teachers in that regard.
	Um... I've studied Aquinas, Augustus, all that sort of stuff.
	Knew the theological arguments for the existence of God, all that sort of stuff.
	But now that I've tried to implement these new values into my relationships, if I want to be honest, I have to say, you know, I don't accept this stuff anymore.
	And that comes as a big shock to people, especially since they've known me in a certain context for three or three and a half years.
	And I guess it's confusing for people, and it's a huge shock.
	And it just seems to throw a lot of my relationship out of whack.
	Out of whack. Could you tell me a bit more about that?
	Sure. Like, my mom.
	She's a Roman Catholic.
	She was the one that raised me Roman Catholic in the first place.
	And I recently had a conversation with her in the most generalized way possible about some of the flaws within the Bible.
	Where somehow we brought up a lecture that was given at Mass from the bishop about some sort of early Christian people.
	And the guy had mentioned that they were one unified people.
	And I just sent some reading and I knew that that's not true.
	There were two divisions within Christianity, I think the Aryans and the Catholics.
	I started talking to her about this sort of stuff, and she sort of, I don't want to say started to reject the information, but she was very much taken back by it.
	I suppose maybe a stronger example would have this, like this type of thing, is like with politics, where it's known as very big neoconservative, but now that I'm an anarchist, I have the same type of parallel going on, where I'm bringing up anarchism with people in my relationship that I'm throwing down as crazy or delusional or, you know, idealistic...
	I don't know if I'm answering your question or if I'm going off.
	Do you know, listen, I mean, this is very important stuff for me, and again, I mean, congratulations on this sunburst of rationality, but I know that it comes...
	It's like if you don't brighten up, if you don't become light yourself, you don't see the shadows in the people around you.
	You light a fire and you can see all the shadows behind the trees.
	If you illuminate your mind, it throws a lot of shadows in the people around you and that is an uncomfortable experience.
	If you had to guess, do you think people would choose you over their illusions?
	I don't know if I could generalize it like that.
	If I did have to generalize it, I would say no.
	I think there are maybe a few people that I know who would choose me over the illusions, but I would say the majority would just choose the illusions.
	Right, and so choosing you, I guess, is a misnomer because it's not a personal thing, but choose reason over illusion, right, which in a sense is choosing you.
	So, yeah, and look, that's a chilling thing to see, and I just sort of wanted to pause and really acknowledge that.
	Before we go on to any thoughts I might have about this obligation you have, it is a really chilling thing to see in people's faces as they struggle with the choice whether they're going to continue in a delusory ideology, or religiosity is the same thing, whether they're going to continue in the matrix or they're going to step out of it.
	That is a chilling thing.
	It is My experience was that it was kind of a humiliating thing.
	You know, when I would go to friends and family and say, look, this is the truth as I've recognized it.
	Here are my arguments and here's the evidence.
	And I was always told, you know, arguments and evidence, right?
	I mean, we were always told that that was important.
	And I would bring this to people and I could see the struggle.
	I could see the struggle where they would recognize that there was great value in And validity in what I was saying.
	I didn't have to accept it all right away.
	It takes time and so on.
	But they got that I wasn't saying I'm being told what to do by a giant invisible spider sitting in the base of my spine, right?
	They knew it wasn't crazy.
	They knew that there was reason.
	They knew that there was evidence.
	And so they would try all of these ridiculous tricks because they wanted to find some way to throw me off the horse that I was riding, right?
	As I sort of reached down to haul them up.
	And so people would, like if I was into Ayn Rand, people would say, and I just had somebody email me about this, so they'd say, well, so there's nothing you don't agree, you don't disagree with anything about Ayn Rand, you just follow everything she says?
	Like, that's important.
	Like, what does that have to do with anything?
	I don't follow Ayn Rand at all.
	I follow reason and evidence. If she has better reason and evidence, I follow her.
	If Nietzsche has it, if Aristotle has it, if maybe I have my scraps here and there, then that's all that matters.
	It's not following a person.
	I mean, nobody says...
	I just believe everything that Darwin says.
	Now people say, well, Darwinian evolution is pretty incontrovertible as far as scientific theory goes.
	Nobody says, I'm a slave to Einstein, like I'm a slave to reason and evidence, so to speak.
	So when you are putting reason and evidence in front of people, it is deeply threatening.
	They don't see their own shadows if there's no light around them.
	This is why human beings sort of love to grope around in the darkness and hug their collective delusions, because without light...
	There are no choices without light.
	There are no shadows.
	And there is no sense of where you are.
	So I just wanted to just sort of pause and say that is a very tough situation to be in where people are choosing between illusion and a real person.
	I mean, that's a choice that makes no sense to me.
	You know, my friends and family, and it's a choice that made no sense to me.
	I did not have enough respect for the power of propaganda when I was younger.
	And when I say younger, I mean...
	A few years ago, I did not have enough respect for the power of propaganda because I never really imagined that people would choose ideology over a brother or a son or a lover or a friend of 20 years.
	I just could not imagine when I started using the against me argument and say, well, do you support the use of violence against me?
	I thought for sure that it was in a sense the crowbar of my relatedness And my history with people that would dislodge this boil of statism or lance this boil of statism, so to speak.
	I thought that once they got that they were advocating the use of violence against me, they would drop statism like they thought they were picking up a stick and it turned out to be a rattlesnake.
	Away with it, right?
	But that's not what happened.
	The bonds were so fragile, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, exactly.
	I mean, I agree with what you're saying.
	Taking these types of ideas to people who I'm close with is a humiliating thing.
	And at least when you talk about the choice between illusion and a real person, as someone who once believed in this delusion, I don't think that people see it that way.
	I think that they see it as a choice between two actual people, or in their mind, a god and an actual person.
	And you can't reject god in favor of some person.
	Well, I understand what you're saying, but there still is a perception in religious people that God is out there, that God does exist, and it's not just an internally generated fantasy.
	And of course, reason and evidence, you know, chip away at that all fairly quickly.
	I mean, they chip away at it like an asteroid lands on a sandcastle, right?
	And that, I think, is a great threat.
	I just, you know, my whole life I was told, for instance, I was told, family is everything.
	Family is everything.
	Friends are everything.
	It only matters, your relationships are what matters, not money, not career, not ideology, not, you know, your particular cultural biases, that you have to put your relationships above everything.
	You've heard that same thing too, right?
	I mean, it's not just me who heard all this nonsense, right?
	Oh yeah, I definitely heard it.
	Yeah, and I complain about other people believing stuff that they've been told.
	And actually, I do believe that that's true.
	I think that relationships are essential.
	And you can't be a happy person without loving, intimate, and virtuous relationships.
	You just can't. And so I believed all of that stuff like it was just true.
	Now, of course, the things that are really true don't need to be repeated, right?
	Yeah. I don't need to be, I don't need to write on my hand every day, shit falls down, right?
	Because I kind of remember that, because it's true that stuff falls down.
	So I don't try and put my iPod, you know, I don't try and leave it hanging in midair, like I'm on the space station.
	So stuff that is true, like I need to take my, I don't have to write down that I have to write on my car dashboard that I need keys to start my car.
	I just remember, I may forget them, but I don't forget that I need keys, right?
	So things that are true don't need to be repeated, right?
	I don't need to wear a t-shirt with the reverse letters called, I love my daughter, or I love my wife, so that I remind myself when I'm brushing my teeth, because those things are all true, so I don't need them repeated.
	But I'm incredibly suspicious of anything that is repeated all the time.
	To my mind, anything that's repeated all the time is just false by definition, because if it were true, it wouldn't need to be repeated.
	And so everybody said to me, oh, family is everything.
	Relationships are everything. So like a grinning, happy village idiot, I wandered into this arena saying, no, no, no.
	I have my relationships to lean on.
	I have my family and my friends of 20 years to lean on.
	And when I bring the reality of their beliefs to them, they will choose me.
	Their brother, their friend, their son, their uncle.
	They will choose me over these ideologies because everybody has always told me that relationships are everything.
	And it's just not true.
	It's just not true.
	Just about everyone I've heard from, not everyone, but just about everyone I've heard from, ideology, fantasy, delusion wins out over human flesh and blood people almost every time.
	It's chilling how spiderweb thin our relationships are, that disagreements about relationships The use of violence, disagreements about the indoctrination of children, about gods and ghosts and afterlives and people walking on water and wine turning into blood and bread into flesh.
	These delusions, which would be psychotic if held by an individual, become normal when held by a collective.
	These delusions seem to win out every single time and that's a chilling thing to experience.
	Yeah, it really is.
	It's terrifying.
	It is. It is.
	It is terrifying how powerful this stuff is.
	So I really wanted to just sort of pause and just acknowledge and mention that you're not alone in this.
	This is something that all people who find reason and evidence have to face, which is that in the choice of Between imaginary friends and real flesh and blood, people seem almost invariably to choose imaginary friends, whether that's the state or the god or whatever.
	They choose to live in fantasy rather than be with real people.
	That's a chilling thing, and this is one of the reasons why people stay in fantasy, because everybody knows that deep down.
	Everybody knows that deep down, and that's why they stay.
	So, enough of that.
	If that's alright with you, I really wanted to acknowledge that.
	Happy to talk about it more if it would be of use to you, but the more immediate concern that you had about this imminent experience of youth leadership, right?
	Yes. I think that's the more pressing thing at the moment, but thank you for that.
	I'll give you my brief thoughts on this.
	There's two ways to approach it.
	Please understand, I'm in no way telling you what to do.
	I'm some guy on the internet, right?
	I'm just telling you, this is the way that I would divide the choice up for myself.
	If I were going just as a victim, if I was just going as a tenant of this place, or I don't know what you'd call them.
	Retreatment. Yeah, but what do the people go?
	What are they called when they're there, right?
	Attendees? What's that?
	Attendees, or what do you call them?
	I'm sorry? Like the people who go on the retreat or retreat.
	Yeah, what do you call them? That's what we do call them.
	Oh, retreatees? Retreatents.
	Retreatents? Yes.
	Okay, retreatents. Good.
	That's my word of the day. So if I was just a retreatent, then I would say, okay, I'm just going to go and I'm going to emotionally experience what it's like with my new awareness.
	Okay. Because you can get a lot of closure in a situation simply by opening yourself up to it completely and saying, I know I don't believe this stuff, but I'm going to go and absorb what it's like to be in this environment.
	So an example of that would be...
	And you can do this as a leader to some degree as well.
	So we took my daughter to a little fair that was going on, and the mayor of Mississauga, this wizened old crone of 900 years old who I think would be Methuselah's grandmother, was giving a speech about this wizened old crone of 900 years old who I think would be Methuselah's grandmother, was giving a speech about it's the best place in the world to live, and we have the best health care, and we have the best resources, and we have the best workforce, And of course, it's all mad, right?
	But I can just be there and experience what it's like to be in an empty crowd.
	It's a chilling thing, right?
	It's like in the movies, you know, where you've got a guy dressed up as a zombie who's moving among the zombies, you know, and he's like, you know, I hope I don't sweat my makeup off and I hope people don't notice.
	Or like in Invasion of the Body Snatchers when you're trying to move among the alien replicants and you just kind of have to pretend you're one of them and you know you're not but you hope that nobody notices and so on.
	You can just have that experience and sort of remind yourself of what it's like to dissolve into the empty-headed collective Borg.
	It's a good reminder.
	Of what we're all about.
	So you can sort of go and experience it, you know, in a sense without judging it, but just go and experience it for what it is.
	I think that will give you a lot of closure to see it with the new eyes, so to speak, I think is a good idea.
	Now, that would be my first approach.
	The second approach, which I think is, if you know your theology, and it sounds like you do...
	There is a time-honored tradition in most theologies, but particularly in Christianity, of bringing atheist questions to the table and then appealing to faith.
	So there's lots and lots of writers who there's still debate in the academic community about whether they were atheists or not.
	And these writers would say, okay, so here's ten arguments against the existence of God.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
	And then they wouldn't answer those arguments.
	But what they do is they would say, and thus is the glory of God that it requires so much faith to continue to believe in him, and thus is our additional faith even more rewarded when we overcome these objections without having an answer for them, even within our own hearts and follow Jesus anyway.
	Does that sort of make any sense?
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, actually.
	Right, so you can bring the arguments that convince you.
	You can completely bring them to Christians and say, so here's an argument that you may come across from an atheist.
	Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Right?
	And just have that, you know, I'm playing devil's advocate.
	Blah, ha, ha, you know, horns and a tail of it, right?
	So play devil's advocate and then say, yeah, I mean, you know, I guess most people would say that it's a matter of faith to continue to believing, but there is no way to answer these objections rationally.
	That's planting a kind of seed, in a way, while still remaining entirely within the confines of theological discourse, and again, with a long and noble history of free thinking emerging in the Christian fog that way.
	Yeah, I know what you mean.
	I've done something similar when we have these retreat meetings.
	The leaders all get together, or some of the adults, and we have to plan stuff out.
	And they ask us some personal questions, and one of the questions was, You know, what's your relationship like with God?
	And I tried to be as honest as I could be without saying, hey, I'm an atheist, you know.
	And I basically said that, you know, over the summer my relationship with God had been degraded because I had questions and all this sort of stuff.
	And the adults seemed pretty curious about what those questions were.
	My experience of them.
	So, you know, in the most honest way, I could in the situation explain, well, you know, I have this question A, B, and C, and, you know, I can't seem to have any answers to them.
	And, you know, they didn't really have any answers either, but their whole idea was, you know, God will give you the answers.
	And it was like a big question.
	How do we know that God exists?
	Well, God will give you the answer to that.
	Right. Right.
	You can use those three magic words in Christianity.
	What's your relationship with God like?
	I'm... Being tested.
	And here's the testing that I'm undergoing, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	And so on, right? So, yeah, I'm still committed.
	Hey, look, I'm still committed to Jesus.
	I've been an atheist for 35 years.
	But if Jesus comes down tomorrow, I'm back.
	You know, I'm back.
	If he passes double-blind scientific testing and he can levitate pigs and walk on water and And perform miracles and bring people back from the dead, so on, right?
	I'm down. I'm there, right?
	So if God has a good answer for me, then, you know, I'm there.
	Because reason and evidence is my religion, so to speak.
	So it's not really a false thing to say.
	I mean, I'm still being tested as an ex-Christian.
	I'm just, you know, the test is very good.
	It's a very good test and actually a very enjoyable one.
	But, yeah, I mean, if God comes down tomorrow, I'm, you know, I'm all over.
	I'm like a cheap suit, like a fat kid on a smarty.
	I'm there. But, so in a sense, when you say, well, look, I'm being tested, and here's the thoughts that are going on through my head, it is a way of getting the word out without directly pushing people's defenses.
	Wow, that's really smart, yeah.
	I like that idea. Because I have to give a talk to a lot of these, actually all of the retreatants, about my relationship with God and on a specific topic.
	My topic is, what is love and how has love affected me, and where is the love of God in my life?
	That's something I was struggling with because it helps to be honest and be perfectly honest with what we say.
	And my whole struggle has been how do I write something like this and how do I give that sort of speech while still being honest and while living my values.
	And I think that phrase, I'm being tested, is going to let me sort of, not weasel out of it, but to find a little bit of a loophole.
	Right. And another approach that you can take, if you have a question about, I would assume, your relationship with God and what it's done in your life.
	Was there something about virtue in there?
	Is that right? Yeah.
	How do I give a speech, which I know is going to contain lies, if I'm trying to give them what they want, but still live with integrity?
	Right, right. Well, look, the reality is that Christians...
	Do not worship God because God is powerful.
	Because the worship of power is not moral, right?
	Right. So, you could say something like this.
	You could say something like, I am trying to differentiate my worship of God from my worship of virtue, of virtuous living.
	Because I don't want to worship God Just because God is a word, just because God is all-powerful, or even just because God is all-good, if I don't know, God is angry.
	God is vengeful. God tells the guy to kill his son.
	God blows up the world except for Noah, and then says, oops, sorry, here's a rainbow, because Lord knows a rainbow makes up for a genocide.
	So, I mean, you don't have to go quite that harsh, but we understand that the example of how God lives in the Bible It's not something that I can directly emulate because I'm not God.
	Even the example of Jesus, who was a God in human form, is not an example that I can directly emulate because I'm not Jesus.
	I can't perform miracles.
	I don't have that direct relationship.
	God doesn't speak like a voice in my head.
	So the challenge that I am trying to work out is to understand what virtue means outside of just saying I love Jesus.
	I believe in God.
	I am a Christian. I need to figure out what virtue means without just the template of a God that I can't follow, without just the template of Jesus who I can't follow directly because I'm not either of those beings.
	So I've really been trying to say my relationship at the moment is with virtue.
	My relationship is exploring what it means to be a good man, not just exploring my relationship with God, which is obviously an important part of my life and obviously it still is, right?
	And will be for some time because it's what you grew up with.
	But you could focus on your pursuit of virtue rather than your pursuit of worship because worship doesn't inform you necessarily how to make difficult moral choices in your life.
	Simply saying, I worship God, I have a strong relationship with God, I pray to God, doesn't give you a very strong understanding.
	In fact, I would think it gives you a very bad understanding of how to make difficult moral choices in your own life.
	So you can focus on your pursuit of virtue rather than just your veneration of God as something that you're pursuing.
	I think that has a lot of truth in it, and I think that's a valuable conversation.
	And it does differentiate obedience to incomprehensibility from...
	The pursuit of rational ethics, if that makes sense.
	That makes a lot of sense, yeah.
	And you know, the pursuit of virtue is interesting because I remember your RTR book.
	I believe it's, you know, love is an involuntary response to virtue.
	And since my talk is all about love and my relationship to it, virtue fits in very well with that.
	Yeah, and look, no Christian alive who's sane would say, we just have to do exactly what Jesus did, because that's so much open to interpretation, right?
	Are you like the dewy-eyed hippie Jesus, or are you the Jesus with a whip who's driving out the moneylenders from the temple?
	I mean, it's not a very consistent character to follow if you just want to sort of say, I'll do what Jesus did, because Jesus, of course, did a lot of things, at least in the myth, right?
	So, trying to find something more consistent.
	And of course, the angry people follow the angry Jesus and the vengeful Jesus and the vengeful God.
	Like the Old Testament people are the angry people and the New Testament people are the more pacifist people and so on.
	And so, you know, to avoid cherry picking is very important to try and find some consistency because cherry picking is really the...
	I mean, there's nothing to religion but cherry picking what appeals to you most personally.
	So, saying that you're trying to focus on sort of, you know, a consistent, a rational organization of your values...
	I think something that could be a very good conversation for people to have.
	And it does plant the seed that obedience to fictional characters which you can't possibly emulate.
	I might as well say I'm going to live my life like Superman.
	Well, I can't fly.
	I'm not faster than a speeding train.
	I'm not invulnerable to bullets.
	So I'm not going to do that.
	That's like saying I'm going to have a financial plan called Live Like Bill Gates.
	It doesn't really make any sense.
	So that could be an approach that you take that I think has a lot of honesty and resonance, will spread, I think, some interesting concepts and hopefully open up some curiosity, but isn't exactly waving a torch in Frankenstein's face, so to speak.
	Right, yeah. Makes a lot of sense.
	Is that enough to work with?
	Have there been some remote kind of use?
	I think you have been.
	Thank you. No, no.
	If there's something that I haven't, I'm happy to pursue it further.
	It's just a lot to take in and process.
	Right. Yeah, you might want to listen to it again.
	And look, if you listen to this again, if before you go, if you want to practice, if you want to role play, if you do any kind of that stuff, just give me a shout.
	I'd be happy to listen and maybe give some more tips because it's a very important thing that you're doing, in my opinion.
	Bringing a little bit of reason to a lot of young people is a very important thing to do.
	If there's anything else that I can do to help, please let me know.
	I'd be more than happy to. Maybe would it be possible for us to talk about the talk after I write it before I have to give it to people?
	Yeah, when are you giving it?
	About five weeks, maybe six?
	Yes, absolutely. Just remember, if you can write it over the next week, I'm going to be in...
	In Arizona for a conference.
	I'm speaking at a conference.
	So for, I think, from like the 2nd of December through for a week.
	So that'll be much less available then.
	But that's in two weeks, right?
	So if you could sort of give me a shout in a couple of days or a week, then we can do it then.
	I plan on writing the talk today, so that would be great.
	Oh, beautiful. Okay, fantastic.
	All right, that would be great. Okay, thank you very much, Jeff.
	You're very welcome, man. Best of luck and congratulations again.
	Yes, my wife and I have been considering being foster parents and ethically I have a bit of a problem with it because in most cases the children are forcefully removed from their homes.
	However, I do like the aspect of trying to help children and the agencies claimed a mission of reuniting the children with their families once that becomes possible.
	So I'm a bit split on whether or not I want to participate in that system, and I just was hoping to get your thoughts on that.
	Can you just give me a little bit more background about the decision and what's going on for you guys?
	Sure. Well, we have three children of our own, and for a while we've just been considering to foster other children.
	I'm not sure if you're familiar with the system in the U.S., but the Essentially what happens is if the state deems that a child's welfare is at risk, There are a number of interventions that take place, ultimately leading to the removal of the child from the home.
	The child is temporarily placed in a foster care situation while the parent perhaps goes through parenting classes or drug treatment, with the hope being that eventually the child is placed back in the home with the parents.
	We just...
	We like the idea of being able to help to provide a safe place for a child in a difficult situation like that, and also perhaps to work with the parents and try to help them on their journey back to becoming responsible parents, if that's even possible.
	But the part about it that bothers me is that it is the state coming in and making the decision.
	One judge makes the decision, okay, this child needs to be removed.
	I'm from their parents and placed into a foster home.
	But at the same time, if the child is really in danger, I can understand the need for that.
	So ethically, I'm not sure that I'm okay participating in a system like that.
	But at the same time, it sort of goes along with what you said.
	When people... When they say, well, if you have a free society, how would people be helped?
	Without forcing people to help with welfare and other systems, nobody would help anybody who is in need.
	And what I'd sort of be saying is, well, I am an anarchist.
	I do want a free society.
	I am an atheist.
	I'm not doing this to convert somebody who hasn't been raised as a Christian into a Christian or anything like that.
	I just... I just want to be an example of somebody who can help, and truly for the desire to help a less fortunate child.
	But that aspect of the harsh intervention of the state really bothers me, so I'm kind of torn on it.
	Right. No, it's a challenging question.
	What pops into my mind is that if you and I saw someone Getting mugged and we had, I don't know, some ninja martial skills that allowed us to intervene.
	In a state of society, I feel that I would intervene in that situation, regardless of the fact that it would probably be reported to the police and I would have to maybe go and testify in court and all of that kind of stuff.
	In other words, there is the moral action itself and then there's all of the crap that the state wraps around it, so to speak.
	And I don't think we want the state to eclipse the moral action itself, if that makes any sense, and say, well, I can't do this thing, which is a good thing to do, because there's a state apparatus around it, because then that's, in a sense, allowing the state to prevent you from doing something that's good, which is not really being free of the state, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	So, what I would suggest is talk to the foster home area and say, look, these are my concerns.
	You know, I have some reservations about the system as a whole, but I do want to help the kids.
	You know, what can we do?
	So they may say something like, look, we will sit down with you or we'll talk to you on the phone and we will go over the case details.
	You know, there's some woman who's strung out on drugs and she's been unable to care for her children or whatever.
	I think that we all would want to do something to help someone like that out, and I think it's a very good thing to do.
	And so you wouldn't not want to do it just because there's a government agency involved, because I think it would be a good thing to do in a free society, in a government society, in a slave society, whatever, right?
	Sure. But you also may have, you know, when you hear some other case, you may have suspicions or reservations about it, and so you may just want to apply your own Rational standards for intervention and just look at the details of each particular case and not worry so much.
	And look, I appreciate that you're bringing it up and I'm completely sensitive to your concerns, but not worry so much about the fact that the state is around, but rather think more about what's happened to the child and what you can do to help as an individual.
	The fact that the state is there is a hassle, but...
	We still drive on public roads despite the fact that they're run by the government because we have to get places.
	And if the place that you want to get is to helping children, which I can't tell you how much I admire, then I would judge that on a case-by-case basis and try and forget as much as possible about the statism that's wrapped around it.
	Excellent. Thank you very much, Steph.
	You're welcome. And please keep me posted.
	I would be fascinated to hear how it goes.
	I mean, I think that what you may need to prepare yourself for is that the government may return the child to an environment that you do not think is good.
	That's going to happen.
	I have no doubt of that.
	But at least the child, you know, just because the child is going to be hungry in the future doesn't mean that we shouldn't give him a meal now, so to speak.
	Indeed. We have been taking the classes.
	There's a program you have to take about maybe 18 hours of courses.
	We definitely understand that typically what happens is the child goes in and out of foster care three to four times over a period of about two years.
	Either it works out after that point or the parent's rights are terminated.
	I just hate the thought of it, but I also hate the thought of some poor child suffering through that.
	But anyway, if we can do our small part.
	Oh, listen, that is not a small part.
	That is not a small part at all.
	I think that what you're contemplating...
	It takes a huge heart.
	It takes a huge spirit.
	It takes a generous mind and a generous wallet because this is not cheap to do.
	And I just wanted to express huge admiration for what you're contemplating.
	I hope that you find a way to follow through on it because all children should be exposed to a household that is peaceful and reasonable and affectionate and all of those kinds of good things.
	Even if all you do is plant a seed, then it can have a huge effect.
	I mean, I had a friend when I was a kid.
	His household was...
	Ordered and fun and the parents were involved and that had a huge effect on me.
	Just to see something that is different, to see something that is potentially different or in actuality is different from what you've experienced.
	The one problem with these underworld families of abused children is that they tend to live on a completely different planet from everybody else.
	Certainly when I was a kid, all the families around were dysfunctional because we lived in a subsidized public housing in a pretty rough part of town.
	And all the families were dysfunctional.
	And yeah, you'd go to school and you'd maybe see other people come and pick up their kids and look relatively happy and all that.
	But that wasn't something that I lived much, certainly when I was younger.
	I just didn't live that.
	I didn't really see that. As something other than, you know, like a foreign film with no subtitles.
	It's like I see, but it doesn't really connect with me.
	I see it, but it doesn't have any resonance for me.
	Whereas being in a household of some greater order and some greater stability and some greater affection.
	Well, I shouldn't say. With some order of stability, it wasn't great.
	It was there at all. I kept that.
	I held that close to me.
	You know, like if you've ever seen Lord of the Rings, the elf queen gives Frodo that little light that in the time of darkness is going to burn, and it's in Vasilab, it burns, and that's kind of how it lights up and saves him.
	That's the kind of light that you can hold on to when you just step for a time into a peaceful and reasonable household.
	You can really hold on to that, and that can give you a possibility to move towards that otherwise you just may never experience.
	It's a foreign film, but exposure to it turns on the subtitles.
	You can read it, it has resonance for you, and you can begin even in a small way to move towards it as an adult.
	So I think that what you're doing is just fantastic.
	Thank you.
	That was a wonderful analogy too.
	I look forward to sharing this with my wife.
	I hope so. And if you get a chance, let me know how it goes.
	I certainly would be happy to hear.
	And again, congratulations on thinking about this stuff.
	Thanks. I will keep you updated.
	Thanks, Steph. All right. You're very welcome.
	Alright, friends, Romans countrymen, lend me your words.
	Yeah, lend me your hair.
	Oh my god, if any parents have any tips about how to get toddlers to have haircuts without screaming, that would be good.
	We had to take Izzy to, well we didn't have to, but it took Izzy to get her hair cut.
	We tried a couple of times and she didn't work.
	Eventually just, I mean, her hair was like hanging in her eyes.
	I mean, it was not good. And so she did eventually get a haircut, but it was not a pretty scene.
	So anybody has any tips or tricks?
	We were able to do the tooth brushing.
	The tooth brushing has continued now for months.
	After one intervention, the tooth brushing has continued.
	She's great with it. She has no problems with it.
	We've turned it into a fun game.
	We've never had any particular issues with it again.
	But yeah, the haircut thing is pretty rough.
	And I remember crying when I got my haircut as a kid.
	I guess... Do you just think it's going to hurt or something like that?
	Well, we actually had a lot of luck with that initially, as long as you don't mind a less than perfect result.
	Oh yeah, no, I actually thought of just cutting off her bangs while she was sleeping, because that was the only thing.
	I mean, I didn't like the hair, it looked pretty ratty, but it was just hanging in her eyes all the time, and she wouldn't wear a hair clip, so she was just constantly bothered by it, so we kind of had to do something.
	But yeah, I guess we could just go with a sort of monk look and not worry so much about it.
	Well, what it meant was that perhaps if you or your wife would take a shot at it, we found that part of the scare for our children was that it was a stranger holding the scissors and that when their mother held the scissors, it wasn't quite as scary.
	And over time, they began to trust the haircutting process and we were able to take them to a professional.
	Right. Okay. I appreciate that.
	We will definitely try that. I mean, it's been more than six months since the last haircut, so we will definitely try that next time.
	Thank you. That's a good idea. I completely hadn't thought about that, which is sort of retarded for me not to think about that.
	But yeah, you're quite right. That's a good idea.
	Oh yeah, no, I did watch someone else getting their haircut.
	Absolutely. I took her once or twice before we took her to the hairdressers and showed, look, this kid's having...
	We tried to engage the hairdresser, tried to give her toys, tried to offer her ice cream.
	I mean, it was... But yeah, she really, really didn't want to get her haircut.
	So we'll try. We'll try it at home.
	I tell you, she just looks a million times better, and she's much less bothered by her hair now, so I'm glad we did it, but I will definitely try that.
	We'll do it instead, because it just doesn't matter how it's styled.
	It only matters that it's shorter. Wash your head with an air instead of shampoo.
	Yeah, no, I tried that with myself.
	It didn't work so well. Somebody's asked...
	Galambos, who is, I believe, a pretty radical IP guy in the libertarian movement.
	I know very little about him other than probably pretty biased, and I assume fairly hysterical misinterpretations of his ideas, like you had to pay somebody a dime for using his name or whatever.
	So I have not had a chance to review him.
	It's not high on my list, so we'll see.
	If I'm ever really short on topics, which I certainly haven't been as yet, then I will...
	I will look it up, but it's not on my list just yet.
	I do believe we have time for one more caller.
	Hello Steph, can you hear me? I sure can.
	Oh hey, how are you? I'm good, how are you doing?
	Sorry, I had to cut this listener off.
	His audio was very bad. He was complaining about being heavily criticized at work for a genuine fault that he had made.
	So I'm responding to that, and I'm sorry for having cut the audio off.
	I'm sorry. I'm going to just have to cut you off because you're cutting out.
	Sorry to interrupt.
	I'm sorry. I think I've got some of that story, but unfortunately, you're cutting out quite a bit, and so I'm missing a fair amount of it.
	So let me just give you my thoughts on these kinds of work conflicts.
	So I'll give you an example of one that happened with me.
	When I was sort of very new to the entrepreneurial world, I was giving a presentation to a big company that did X. And I was giving it with a company that provided Service-Y. And we'd worked out a deal with another company that provided Service-Y that they would give a big volume discount if the big company used her software or whatever,
	right? And I mentioned, because I was so used to just giving this benefit in the presentation, that I told this company, we have a service provider that will give you a 50% discount if you use our software.
	While there was another service provider sitting in the room with me who'd gotten me into the meeting.
	Now, this was a pretty big faux pas, right?
	I mean, you should not advertise.
	Like, if somebody gets you into a meeting, you shouldn't advertise one of their competitor's lower rates at the same time.
	That was bad on my part.
	Now, this guy got really mad at me.
	And afterwards, he gave me real dressing down in the elevator on the way down.
	And I was humiliated, and I was angry, and I was upset.
	And I was like, oh, this guy totally overreacted.
	And I was upset with him.
	Now, the reality, though, was that he was right.
	He was right.
	Now, if you focus on the way that people express something, then you can lose out on a lot of valuable information.
	You can lose out on a lot of useful information.
	Because a lot of people aren't very good at communicating in a peaceful and positive and encouraging way.
	Of course not.
	I mean, they've been raised by priests and public school teachers, right?
	Of course they're not used to that.
	And so my concern is that if you focus on the way in which someone is communicating, rather than the content of what they're communicating, then in a sense you can't hear the music over the noise.
	And the music can be good.
	It can be helpful and useful.
	So I sort of had to sit there and think about it and say, okay, well, if I were in this person's position, I would feel really mad.
	Like if I brought someone into a meeting with a potential client, a big potential client, and they talked about my competitor's software as being cheaper and better, I'd be mad too.
	Now, I wouldn't. Express it in the way that this guy expressed it, and it wasn't good in the way that he expressed it, but I can understand why he was upset and why he was angry.
	And the important thing, though, for me was that I needed to, and it took a while for me to get this, it was important for me not to translate his attack on me as an attack upon myself.
	That's really important.
	You don't have direct control over how people communicate to you.
	I mean, you have some indirect control, right?
	So if you're more confident and you're more assertive, then bullies will steer clear of you, right?
	But you do have control over how you translate that to yourself, right?
	So what I said to myself afterwards, and this took a couple of days because I was young.
	I'm new to the business world.
	As I said to myself, yeah, I made a mistake.
	That doesn't mean I'm a bad businessman.
	That doesn't mean that I'm malicious or malevolent.
	I was just doing the presentation a little bit on autopilot and I just was not aware of and alive to the sensitivities within the meeting, people's needs and perspectives.
	So I'll just try to be more conscious of that.
	I made a mistake. It wasn't out of any malicious intent.
	The guy who got mad at me was kind of mean, pretty mean, and I think there was some malicious intent there.
	They came from a place of frustration and hurt.
	But I didn't want to translate that into...
	I didn't want to internalize his perspective so that it became my perspective.
	So, in a sense, you want to work...
	I would suggest it's important to work on self-attack rather than worry about what other people...
	Because nobody, nobody can make you attack yourself when you're an adult.
	When you're a kid, you have to adapt if you have abusers, blah, blah, blah.
	But when you're an adult, nobody can make you attack yourself.
	That is something you have to do.
	You know, the way that this sort of stuff works, and look, it's not easy.
	But the way that it works is it's sort of like you're boxing with someone, but all they can do is pretend to hit you.
	That's the reality of communication when we're adults.
	You're in the ring, and you're dancing back and forth, and you're sweating, and your abs are rippling.
	This is my fantasy. So you're in there, and all the guy can do is go and pretend to hit you.
	The fist has to stop six inches from your nose.
	In order for him to score a knockout, You have to punch yourself.
	Right? And that's what I really want to focus on as far as that goes.
	That you have to complete the punch yourself.
	So if somebody's pretending to hit you, which is all that this kind of verbal aggression really is, or even verbal abuse, you're the one who has to punch yourself in order for the blow to land.
	Nobody can give you a black eye when you're an adult.
	You can only punch yourself.
	And if you focus on other people, rather than focusing on how not to punch yourself, you will forever be at the mercy of, and you will forever have to try to control the actions of other people.
	Because if every time somebody pretends to punch you, you punch yourself, and you don't notice that last bit where you punch yourself, then you will really think that they're punching you, and then you will have to Control their behavior.
	You'll have to manage them. You'll have to focus on them.
	You'll have to deal with them.
	You'll have to calm them down.
	You'll have to appease them. You'll have to oppose them.
	You'll have to fight them. But the reality is that self-attack is punching yourself.
	And if you focus on that aspect of things, not only do you free yourself, but you can really free the other person as well.
	I, through this process, I ended up not being friends with the guy, but we did more business trips together and so on, and it was fine.
	He was an okay guy.
	You know, he moved on. He was Italian, so this kind of mood swing was perhaps cultural.
	Perhaps... He was going through menopause.
	I don't know. But it's not essential that you control the actions of other people.
	It really is essential, I would suggest, that you focus on controlling your own propensity or habit of self-attack, which came from your family in a way that I can completely understand.
	But that is my suggestion.
	Dan, sorry, and I can't even wait around for your response because your audio quality is so bad.
	Next time... We will try just using the telephone, which may work better.
	So I'm sorry, but have a listen to this.
	If there's anything else, just shoot me an email.
	All right, well, I think we will wrap it up.
	Izzy's up, so...
	And it's actually shockingly sunny.
	Just a reminder if...
	Oh, the effects are being raised by a single mother.
	The effects are being raised by a single mother.
	That is a great question. But of course...
	I am going to read to you.
	I'm going to read to you a story.
	Are you all sitting comfortably?
	Then we'll begin. I'm going to read to you from my novel.
	Because that is a...
	That is a good question.
	I wrote something about this in a novel, so just give me a sec.
	Let me pull it up. And I think it's pretty useful.
	Everybody get your milk and your blanket.
	We're going to have a story.
	So this is a character from my novel, The God of Atheists.
	His name is Gordon.
	He's a protagonist. This isn't giving anything away.
	It's pretty early in the novel.
	Gordon Marrow was not ugly, but he was very poorly groomed.
	It is a sad but true fact that boys brought up by single mothers are rarely dressed for sexual success.
	Perhaps their mothers feel that their own sexuality really messed up their lives and want to keep said temptation far from their sons.
	Or it may be a hatred of absent fathers avenged on the son's possibilities of attracting a mate.
	Either way, the profusion of bowl-cut hairdos, petroleum-based pants, thin t-shirts with little holes where the labels used to be, or dates on them more than six years old, jeans with no pockets on the asses, or God forbid stitched purple Saturns, does not bode well for the continuation of the bloodline.
	It's like a depressing descent.
	Two parents. One parent.
	No parent.
	Shorn of the tribal markers of success these boys often adopt a rather dispirited anti-materialism, scorning those who pay exorbitant prices for jeans or sneakers.
	The practical fact that goodwill castoffs keep the cold away is not lost in them.
	The fact that they also keep the girls away is.
	No matter how intelligent these boys are, the dual nature of clothing, warmth and adornment seems completely beyond their grasp.
	Clothes exist to keep us warm.
	All else is vanity, is the natural attitude of unloved souls, breaking free of conventional gravity and riding a helium updraft to the life of the mind.
	Their anti-biological approach sadly blinds them to the fact that they would not exist at all if their fathers had dressed the way they do.
	Gordon's future seemed completely preordained.
	No dating, vivid, random, too intense sexual attractions that frightened him more than motivated him, a slow strangling of sexual desire, reading comics and playing Warhammer-type board games well into his 30s, an inability to move away from his mother, an apartment filled with old newspapers, plastic chairs, hamburger helper, and dust bunnies.
	But it was not to be. Gordon broke away from this quiet tribe of natural bachelors and dry librarians in a way he did not expect at all.
	So that's just a little bit.
	I talk quite a bit about being a son of a single mom.
	Of course, that's my experience too, right?
	So I sort of wanted to mention that.
	Upgrade to gold. You get the audiobook and PDF for free.
	It's well worth it. I think it's a good...
	It's a good read.
	I think it's a great book.
	So I hope that you will enjoy it if you get it.
	Well, I do believe...
	Oh, yeah, yeah, right. So when the podcast awards go to the next stage of voting after open nominations on the 17th, I think listeners can vote every single day.
	You can vote every single day for Free Domain Radio.
	And we can finally take that Witch of Correctionism down, Grammar Girl, and put her on the level.
	Well, she's been on Oprah and I haven't.
	So I'm not holding my breath.
	But... It is a very good thing to vote.
	It's good to be on the list. All right.
	Well, thank you everybody so much for your continued support, your generosity.
	I hope that you enjoyed the audiobook I posted in the chat window.
	Please feel free to have a listen.
	Please feel free to let me know what you think.
	And have yourselves an absolutely delightful, charming, wonderful week.

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