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Nov. 21, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:36
1793 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call In Show 21 November 2010

Loving the moment, and no fears for the future!

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Alright, well, I'll push this out today.
It is the 21st of November, 2010, and I guess in just over a week, The Molyneux clan bots head down to Phoenix, Arizona for the 2010 Freedom Summit and I hope that you will be able to join us.
You can go to freedomsummit.com to check out more about that.
It should be a great... I hesitate to say show because that sounds a little disrespectful to the philosophy and philosophers involved but it should be a great show nonetheless and I hope that you'll be able to make it down.
And I will be speaking for, oh, finally, I have an hour and a half.
Oh, my heavens, I finally have enough time to be able to do the kind of speech that I want to do, and I've been working on, I think, a really good one.
So I hope that you'll be able to come down.
If not, I hope that you will enjoy it on YouTube and donate to cover all of the wild and exciting costs that come with this kind of media scrutiny and attention.
Nothing particular to report.
This week I did push out Against the Gods, which you can find linked on the homepage at freedomainradio.com, a fabulous tool for helping you learn philosophical English.
I found some ways to get the captions generated for a video, so it's also available on YouTube.
The full book is available on YouTube, and I hope that you will check it out and share it around.
I'm very, very pleased with it.
I certainly think that the explanation of why the belief in God is so prevalent among mankind is some of the best stuff that I've ever written and certainly some of the deepest stuff I've ever thought.
So I hope that you will check it out.
It's buried in the book, like the jelly center of a donut.
And other than that, I think let's head straight to the listeners.
This is supposed to be your show. So I think we have somebody who wishes to have a chat.
I am all ears if you would like to speak up.
Hey, Steph. Hello.
How's it going? It is going just great for me, thank you.
How about you? It's all right.
I'm a little bit nervous, but not as much as the first time I talked to you.
So I should ramp it up a little, like whatever I did before, just to equalize it out?
Well, so as you probably know, Thanksgiving is coming, and My parents are coming to visit me and I think my unconscious is kind of trying to scream at me.
Last night, for example, by the evening I was just in a lot of pain.
I had been doing some journaling during the day and I just ended up With this massive headache and all this tension and feeling really sad and I've been spending lots of time listening to the relationship podcasts and on the boards lately and I have this conflict between a desire to take my values seriously and to be myself in front of people who claim to love me and And the fear to do so and the fear of kind of the crossroads kind of situation happening.
Right, go on. So I kind of, I moved across the country without a job with a friend of mine, kind of to get some space from my folks.
And so that's been kind of a good thing and a bad thing.
Overall, I'm more relaxed.
As a result but you know now they're coming and I'm having this ramp up of emotions and I'm not sure what question to ask but maybe if you had some questions I could try to answer them.
Questions about what? I just want to make sure I'm as useful as possible.
Well okay I guess I could talk about my situation a little bit more.
I have every intention of going to therapy and doing some intense therapy, but since I'm unemployed still, I can't afford it.
So I've got this voice in my head that's like, you know, push, push, be yourself in front of these people, try to live your values, and then the voice that's like, This is really scary.
You can't afford therapy.
Just wait. Just hold out until you get that job.
And then there's the voice that says, like, when are you going to get this job?
Are you just putting this stuff off?
When are you going to be yourself?
When are you going to stop hiding from your parents?
Et cetera. Those kind of thoughts.
Right, right. So, do you want me to ask questions?
Do you want to talk more? What do you think would be most helpful?
I think that's a pretty good summary of what I've been thinking about.
So, if you have questions to ask.
Well, I think to keep relationships alive, and this is not particular to parental relationships, I think to keep relationships alive, Something fundamental needs to occur, and it needs to be an ongoing process.
And I think this may be of use to you.
It may be valuable to you. It certainly was valuable to me in all of my relationships to try and make sure that we don't end up with inertia and habit decaying our relationship, right?
So for instance in my marriage I will regularly ask myself, why is Christina here?
Why is my wife here and not off doing whatever else she could be doing?
I also ask myself, why am I here?
And that is to make sure that you don't just sort of fall into a groove of just being in a relationship and you just kind of get that habit and you know maybe that makes you feel a little bit lazy or you take things for granted but I think it's really important to refresh every relationship I think requires a daily it doesn't have to be a sort of an automatic have to but a sort of daily recommitment or evaluation of it otherwise you know people get married for like 20 or 30 years and then they break up And that to me is very sad.
I mean, breakups always are very sad, whether it's a parent-child or a husband-wife or whatever, even friend-friend.
It's very sad when you have a lot, quote, invested in a relationship.
And I've always been sort of puzzled about why that would happen, like after 30 years or 20 years, that people don't want to be with each other.
And I think it has a lot to do with no longer being alive to the causality of the relationship, which is a really long-winded way of just saying not recommitting to the relationship, not evaluating why you're there.
Because if you never sort of... If I never would have said to myself, well, why is my wife here?
Then I'm just taking her for granted that she's here.
You know, like the floors in my house, I take for granted that they're not going to fall apart when I take another step.
And I don't really think about them.
If you take your car for granted and don't sort of say, well, what do I need to make my car happy and change the oil and get it serviced or whatever, then it will give out on you.
And the reason I'm talking about all of this is because it's also something that's very important To ask yourself, not just about your presence in a relationship, whatever relationship that is.
The relationship that you have with Free Domain Radio is an important thing.
Why am I still listening? What am I trying to get out of it?
What am I trying to pursue?
Am I just consuming without a purpose?
I think it's really important to take that approach.
But it's really important to ask in your own mind, what does this other person get?
Out of his or her relationship with me.
With me. That is a way of staying alive to the value of what it is that you're doing.
This is true in business as well.
If you have some, you know, in software, you sell software, but then the real coin often is in the support contracts.
So why are they still paying the support contract?
We used to ask, I used to sort of bring this up in board meetings, you know, we're making X amount of dollars from all these support contracts.
Why would a client renew, right?
So you're in the client seat. Why would you want to continue renewing?
Or is there another way that we could make the relationship more valuable so that we could up the price?
Whatever, right? So, the reason I'm sort of pointing this out is I think rather than focusing just on your side of the relationship with your parents or anyone, let me ask you this.
Why do you think your parents are coming to visit you?
Um... Well, I guess they're in the relationship because they want to avoid the knowledge that we don't have a good relationship and that they made seriously bad choices.
Well, A, I'm very sorry to hear about that, but I think it's worth talking about that a little bit more.
Because I think it's really important to put yourself in other people's shoes, even if those shoes are kind of uncomfortable.
I think it's really important to put yourself in other people's shoes when it comes to relationships.
So that you don't just think about your side of things, but think about the other person's side of things.
I mean, I went through this review with all my relationships about 10 years ago.
I said, okay, well, why is this person in this relationship with me?
What benefit do they get from their relationship with me?
I sort of found that there were some relationships that were along the lines of what you're talking about, which is it had a kind of habit and there was a kind of sanction.
In other words, if I continued to have a relationship with these people, it was like the bad things didn't happen, so I could really see what the benefit would be for those people to have the relationship with me, but it became harder for me to figure out Why I had a relationship with these people, if that makes any sense. Yeah.
So tell me a little bit more about why your parents are coming.
I don't know. Family, you know, holiday, obligation, love, whatever.
I don't know.
Well, look, if it was love, then I don't think that you would be sweating and terrified about speaking honestly about your thoughts and feelings.
Yeah. You know, love, terror, and honesty do not go in the same bag together.
They really don't. You know, love, terror, and honesty do not go in the same bag together.
And I think that's an important approach to take.
I mean, with all your relationships.
What is in it for the other person?
Now, if what is in it for the other person is not you being honest, then it's really important to examine what their motive is, because it's not you then, right?
Like, I've had a number of ex-girlfriends in my life who most of them wanted to stay friends, and I had significant complaints about their behavior, and I'm sure they had complaints about mine, but I didn't particularly want to stay friends.
But I kind of had this thing in my head, you know, like it's mature to stay friends, you know, some sort of Seinfeld-Elaine nonsense, right?
It's mature to stay friends with your ex-girlfriends, you know, you shouldn't become enemies, there was a lot that bound you together and it didn't work out, but it was more just like a difference of opinion rather than good and bad behavior and blah blah blah.
But I never particularly wanted to stay friends with my exes, but they very often wanted to stay friends with me, and I began to realize after a while that It was on the condition that I not talk about our relationship, and I give my honest view about our relationship, if that topic came up, as it often did.
And so I got that they wanted to be friends with me, not because they wanted to hear what I was thinking and feeling in the moment.
And so it became for some other reason.
And the other reason, I think, was sort of twofold.
One was that they didn't want to admit the bad things that they'd done in the relationship, and so they felt that if we stayed friends, they didn't do anything wrong.
And the second was, I think, some of them harbored a desire to get back together, you know, like that I would sort of realize that there was this sort of difference of opinion or that I was going to grow up or whatever, right?
And then we would be back together and everything would be happy as soon as I had worked out whatever I needed to work out to become a better boyfriend or, you know, fiancé or I guess eventually husband or whatever.
And trying to figure out what was in it for them, I think, was really, really important.
And then saying, well, look, I'm just not going to be in a relationship where I can't be honest.
Because it's not a relationship then.
I mean, if I can't be honest, if I can't...
And that doesn't mean, you know, raging and screaming at people, not that I'm saying you would, but if I can't be honest about my thoughts and feelings, I'm not going to pretend to have a relationship.
You know, any more than I'm going to say, hey honey, I'm going to drive down to the mall to pick us up some stuff and I'm going to go sit in a cardboard box with wheels drawn in felt crayon on the outside and pretend I'm driving a car.
I mean, that would be a crazy thing to do.
It's even more crazy to be in a relationship where you can't be honest.
I think it's really important, if it's not you, in other words, the true and honest and expressed you that they're coming to see, why are they coming?
It seems to me quite likely that you're on the right track in terms of, well, if we just pretend like nothing bad happened, then nothing bad happened, and that's easier.
It's a lot easier than actually dealing with what happened.
Does that sort of make any sense? Yeah.
I think that might be what I'm afraid of, It's kind of the certainty that that's what the case is and that I can't be myself in the relationship and that they would reject that.
Right, right. And that is a terrifying hypothesis because it's so easily testable, right?
Like there are some hypotheses that are very tough to test, right?
So when Darwin came up with the theory of evolution, it was a tough It was a tough theory to test.
If you have some belief about where the universe came from, you need, I don't know, some hadron collider, some time machine, some fantastic telescope to stare deep into the depths of space to the origins of the light that's racing away from us and all that sort of nonsense.
But that's a really tough hypothesis to test.
Even the theory of relativity was fairly tough to test.
I guess they had an eclipse, they could see the light bending around the moon, the starlight.
There are some hypotheses that are very tough to test, but there are other hypotheses that are terrifyingly easy to test.
The hypothesis of, I can't be myself in this relationship, as you know, as you feel, as your emotional experience is telling you, is a terrible, terrible thing to see because it is so, so testable.
It just takes a phone call and ten minutes or five minutes or even one minute.
And it's that imminence of testability that is so terrifying to people and what keeps them so silent and so dissociated in these kinds of non-relationships because it's so testable.
So I really, really sympathize with what you're talking about here.
I guess the question then becomes...
I mean, there are three basic options in my mind, and I can't recommend any course of action to you.
I mean, this comes down to your history, and I don't have expertise in your history or anything like that.
But just to sort of clarify, there are three options.
You can tell them not to come.
You can accept them coming and not Talk about what you're really thinking and feeling about, but just, you know, pull out the family habit and go along with the flow.
That's the second.
The third thing that you can do is to accept them coming to your house and then to speak your mind, right?
Yeah.
I guess one thing I've been thinking about is how to make progress.
I don't know.
I'll just say it.
How to make progress without necessarily bringing everything to a head.
No, you can do that.
Look, you can do that.
There's nothing wrong. See, there are lots of times when I don't bring my values into a conversation.
You know, if some dental hygienist is cleaning my teeth and rattling on about X, Y, and Z that I don't agree with, it's like, I'm just here to get my teeth cleaned, you know?
There are times that I don't talk about this stuff, right?
My neighbor, Isabella, went into their house at Halloween.
They have nice kids and they seem like pretty nice people, but they got religious stuff all over the walls, right?
My daughter likes to play their piano, which she's done precisely once, but she still likes it, she still talks about it now.
But I'm not going to sit there and say this is all primitive superstitious nonsense.
So, the truth is not a sword to be drawn at all costs.
You should not feel compelled to always speak the truth in every situation, no matter what.
That is not being free.
Does that sort of make any sense?
Yeah. You can be free to talk about your beliefs.
You can also be free to not talk about your beliefs in any situation.
The absolute danger of philosophy is to turn it into a set of rules that orders you around.
That is a terrible, terrible enslavement, and it is the great danger.
If philosophy turns into a series of rules that order you around, it is indistinguishable from religion.
Because then you just become a machine that philosophy has programmed and that you then just have to do X. And you lose the subtleness and quickness and perceptibility and ambiguity and ambivalence of your true self.
And you just become, you know, like a dog that philosophy whistles and you run.
And if you don't, you attack yourself for it.
Philosophy is there to strengthen and support your true identity.
It is not there to turn you into an abject citizen of a state of mind.
You have the choice in any situation to speak your values or to not speak your values.
I don't follow Ayn Rand in this, you know, the correct thing to do is, you know, X. I don't believe that because I don't believe that there is virtue in following orders, even if those orders are correct.
That's why I don't tell people what to do.
Oh, there are times that I really, really, really want to tell people what to do.
But I don't tell them what to do, because that is not to help anybody.
I can make an argument, I can put some perspective in place, I can make a case, but to tell people what to do, to tell myself what to do, is a very bad idea.
That is not freedom. Does that sort of make any sense?
You can have your family over and you can keep your mouth closed about what you're really thinking and feeling about.
You can still get a great deal of truth about the situation with your family even if you don't open your mouth and say an honest word the whole time that they're there.
And what I mean by that is that you can experience what it's like to be with your family.
Like, experience. Sit in the moment.
Sit in the interaction. See what you think.
See what you feel. See what thoughts flow through your mind.
See what kind of dreams you have at night.
See how you feel when they knock on the door.
See how you feel when they give you a hug.
You can stay connected with yourself and still not say a single true, honest and authentic word to the people around you, but simply note your experience of spending time with your family. but simply note your experience of spending time with your I think that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, don't feel like you've got to X, Y, and Z. You know, that is...
Don't turn philosophy into a bully.
Don't turn philosophy into a have-to.
The virtue comes from a very deep understanding and a desire.
When I was thinking about leaving my career to do this one-way crazy street of ranting for spare change, I absolutely had to say to myself, look, I'm not going to do this because there's a have-to involved.
I'm going to do this if there is a genuine desire and pleasure and excitement involved, but not because there's a have-to involved, because that would not be free.
Just kind of go more with what I'm feeling in the moment, not plan it out and not have goals that I have to achieve, and I can gather evidence, and not plan it out and not have goals that I have to achieve, and I can gather evidence, and I don't No, no, no.
Listen, the truth about relationships is experienced in the moment.
It is not experienced in the planning.
It is not even experienced through appeal to abstract values.
Like honesty or integrity or courage or virtue or any of those sorts of things.
The truth about relationships is found in the experience of those relationships.
And I'll give you a sort of cheesy metaphor and you see if it makes any sense, right?
The truth about how hot it is is not found from looking at the thermometer.
Because you may be going out in a jacket, so you won't feel cold.
You may be somebody who's perpetually cold, in which case hot weather feels normal, whereas to somebody else that hot weather may feel hot.
You may have a fever, in which case your temperature is going to feel different.
You may have just come from someplace that's really cold.
Like I remember when I worked in a restaurant, we'd go in the freezer sometimes, and occasionally you have to spend some time in the freezer, you'd come out of the freezer, and it would feel really warm outside.
And then, you know, ten minutes later it would feel fine.
So values like truth and honesty and integrity, they're real and they're objective and they have truth in them.
But they're like the thermometer.
It just gives you a rough idea.
It doesn't give you your actual experience of warmth and cold.
And there were times when I was a prospector up north and there were times like minus 40 or like minus 60 with the windchill and you'd go out of the tent and you'd be like, oh my god, I can't do it.
It's so fucking cold out here.
I can't do it. And then you're stomping along and you're doing your work and, you know, within 15 minutes, sometimes you're sweating because you're in this like 90-pound jacket with these mittens the size of sleeping bags and all that kind of stuff, right?
So, the experience of temperature is what temperature actually means.
It's the human experience of temperature.
Looking at the thermometer, which is sort of like referring to philosophical values, has value and it has truth and it does give you an objective sense of what the temperature is.
But relationships are not looking at the thermometer.
They're shivering or sweating or feeling comfortable.
It is the subjective experience and it changes over time.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, I think so.
You think so? What doesn't make sense?
All the bad metaphors?
I really do. It's about the experience of happiness or not, and things like truth and honesty and those things are kind of the thermometers to help you to achieve those states.
Differentiate. Okay, I'm getting mixed up.
Well, let me put it to you another way, right?
So let's say it's a bad relationship.
You have a bad relationship with someone.
That bad relationship, to me, is always going to have negative effects in the long run.
However, there are benefits in the short run around not confronting that bad relationship.
To give you an example, every now and then we get what is commonly called a troll on the free-domain radio forums.
Somebody who's difficult, who raises issues and then evades any kind of definition, who constantly pokes holes in things but won't respond to any objective requests for conversation or anything like that.
They're just out there storming and causing problems and not helping or aiding the conversation in any way.
Now, as the admin, there's always this choice, right?
You say, okay, well, maybe the person will just wander off, you know, or maybe other listeners will stop engaging with him or her or whatever, right?
Because if you sort of confront that person, then there can be escalation, there can be problems, it can be time consuming, it can be sort of, you know, it's not big stress, but it's a little bit of stress or whatever.
Yet, if that person stays and continues, then it has negative consequences on many levels to the community as a whole.
People enjoy it less. Since anarchism is about a self-regulating community, they wonder why nothing's happening to deal with it or to solve the problem or whatever.
And so, in that kind of situation, it is a gut-level instinct That is very important.
I don't know of any abstract values that will say, at 11 p.m.
tomorrow, you do X, right?
Now, it's true that there are abstract values that say, don't strangle a homeless guy or a non-homeless guy.
You know, don't stab a cat in the groin or whatever, right?
Those are abstract. But those aren't the moral decisions that we really need to make in our life, right?
The moral decisions that we need to make in our life are much more complex, much more ambivalent, and do not respond to the mere external principle thing.
I mean, even if we say honesty is essential in relationships, well, honesty about what?
I mean, there's about a billion things we can be honest about Hey, I'm wearing socks.
That's an honest statement. Does it really advance our conversation?
Not very much. Even if we say honesty is a value, honesty about what?
Honesty in what sequence?
Do I talk about this first and this first and this first?
Honesty in what context?
Am I honest simply about my own experience, or do I help the other person prepare for my oncoming honesty?
It's not dishonest if I don't, but they're much more likely to hear in a positive way if I do.
Do I go slowly? Do I go fast?
Do I bring up the hardest stuff?
Do I bring up the easiest stuff and build?
So even if we say, yeah, honesty is the ultimate value in a relationship, that doesn't give us much...
It doesn't really give us any specifics about what to be honest about, when to be honest, how to be honest, under what circumstances, under what conditions, to who.
An extended family gathering, just one person, right?
So, the abstract philosophical values, which I think are very important for society as a whole, right?
UPB is essential for society as a whole.
But UPB has almost nothing to do with how you and I are going to make decisions with reference to any kind of values in our life.
Because I'm not about to rob a bank.
I'm not about to stab a homeless guy.
I'm not about to go beat someone up for looking at me funny.
I don't have to deal with self-defense, right?
Nobody's running at me with a chainsaw.
Those aren't the decisions that I need to make in my life around ethics.
Almost everything we deal with at a personal level is what I call aesthetically preferable actions, APA. At a social level, we've got to stop the sociopaths with UPB, mow down their armies and all that kind of stuff.
But at a personal level, it's all aesthetically preferable actions.
And honesty and courage and integrity, these are not UPB. These are all aesthetically preferable.
You can't shoot someone for being dishonest.
You can't shoot someone for lacking integrity.
So that's why you can't reference philosophical values to guide you in your relationships other than in general.
You know, truth is better than falsehood.
Absolutely. No question.
No question about that.
But so what? I mean, all that does is put you on one side of a fence that goes on about 12 light years in either direction.
Doesn't tell you where to go or how to get there or just says be honest.
So I would really focus on if you have ambivalence or ambiguity about a relationship, spend time with that person.
I would say the really important thing, or spend time with those people, spend time with your family.
Not with an agenda.
Relationships are not about agendas.
Relationships are about the experience in the moment.
Relationships are about the experience in the moment.
To have an agenda with other people is to use them like things.
Like I have an agenda for my car.
It should get me to the mall and back.
I don't have a relationship with my car, right?
I'm not Roger Taylor.
So I think it's really, really important.
Stay with your experience, your emotional experience.
Be in the relationship.
Be in the room with those people.
See how you're feeling. See how you're experiencing.
But don't go in there with a have-to.
And I say this from some experience.
My conversations...
about core values in my relationships occurred, with very few exceptions, almost all spontaneously.
My decision to ask Christina to marry me did not occur because I was totting up pluses and minuses on a column on a sheet of paper with a line down the middle.
It happened entirely spontaneously when we were climbing a hill out hiking.
I was just looking up at her, climbing the hill, and I thought, I want this woman for the rest of my life.
It was not even a thought, it was a feeling.
It emerged fully and completely.
I couldn't have plotted and planned that.
The one time that I did plan to ask a woman to marry me, went out and bought a ring and asked her to marry me, it was a complete disaster.
It's because I experienced the relationship with Christina, the immense desire to spend the rest of my life with her occurred spontaneously and has never ever wavered since.
That is the true self-attachment.
So if you're in a relationship with someone, be in that relationship.
Not in order to.
Not because of.
Not to get X but stay with your experience of that person and if you have an impulse to be honest you can follow that impulse or you cannot follow that impulse.
I think at some point the impulse simply becomes overwhelming and you find yourself being honest almost in a sense.
You catch up with yourself but I don't think that relationships respond very well to conscious controlled plans.
So basically just Go with my gut.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's, again, easier said than done.
It's like saying just win the gold, right?
Well, sure, go with your gut.
But the important thing, the great challenge is if you have a relationship where honesty has not been possible in the past, what happens in that relationship is self-erasure.
It's dissociation. You fall into automatic habits and you lose touch with yourself.
The challenge is to stay in contact with your own emotional experiences while you're in a relationship where you can't be honest.
That's a real challenge. You kind of have to remind yourself to do that and you kind of almost have to write it on the back of your hand or pinch yourself from time to time just to stay present to your own experience because dissociation or the evacuation of the true self and the replacement of the true self with empty conformity and all of the Dull rails of history that our choo-choo trains go down so often.
To abandon that habit and to stay in touch with yourself while you're in a relationship with someone where you can't be very honest is a great challenge.
So, yeah, but yeah, go with your God for sure.
But for heaven's sakes, don't follow rules.
I feel so much more relaxed about this now.
Well, good. Is there anything else that you wanted to talk about?
No, I'm basically going to do just what you said.
I'm not going to plan it out.
I'm not going to make rules.
I'm going to try to pay attention to how I'm feeling and thoughts that I'm having and stuff, but as far as what I do, I'm just going to try to go with the flow and see what I'm feeling like in the moment.
I've been doing work on myself, so it'll be easier than in the past to To at least be aware of myself more, and so I think it'll be productive regardless of what I end up doing.
I hope so, and if you do get a chance, either post on the boards or just drop me a line, let me know how it goes.
But I think that's the best approach, and I've sort of refined this over the years, but that's, I think, what works best, and I think what stays in real conformity to the values that we have around self-knowledge, which I think is really important.
Thanks very much. It's a great, great question.
And I wish you the very best with this situation.
I hope there's a breakthrough.
I hope you connect. I hope that you can turn this thing around.
And so that is my greatest hope for everyone.
But you'll do the right thing if you stay in touch with yourself and you trust yourself.
It's going to happen. Thanks a lot.
I feel so much better. Thank you very much.
You're very welcome. Best of luck to you.
All right. I'm just scrolling up to see if we have any other questions.
Do we have any other comments just now?
Not the moment. Excuse me, not the moment.
I'm just asking if anyone wants to be added or any questions, but not yet.
Somebody's asked, how can we expect people to see the truth and expand truth without pointing it out?
Well, by demonstrating it, right?
Almost all human communication is non-language, is non-verbal.
The way that we spread truth is to live truth.
I have a question. What does it mean when people say that truth is just an opinion?
It is so annoying, and that it is annoying.
And I completely agree with you that it is very annoying.
I had a conversation about this with a fellow a week or two ago who was a skeptic.
If anybody remembers who can pop up the show number, that would be great.
What they're saying, in my opinion, is they're saying this.
I had a parent who was irrational and absolute, and I was not allowed to contradict that parent's irrational absolutism, whether it was religiosity or nationalism or statism or whatever.
And so the only way that I could find any mental space for myself was to downgrade everybody's perspective to an opinion.
I could not oppose irrationality with rational certainty with philosophy.
I could not oppose superstition with reason.
Because I was a child and I was powerless and blah blah blah, and so I've had to relativize everything in order to find any kind of room for myself.
Because it's so obviously irrational.
This is a great challenge of philosophy, is that these things are so obviously irrational that it doesn't take but a moment's thought to realize just how irrational they are.
To say all truths are opinion is to state a truth that is not an opinion.
I mean, it doesn't even take a moment's thought to realize just how nutty that is.
And so the only way that such an irrational Argument can be maintained in the brain is if the brain is already damaged so that this bent spoon fits in a bent drawer, so to speak, right? So irrational arguments like you take a spoon, you bend it all the way back.
You can't use the damn thing.
You just spill everything on yourself.
Irrational arguments are just bent spoons.
And the only way they fit into people's heads is if their drawer is bent as well.
Hey, this fits really well.
This fits perfectly. So an irrational argument has to fit in someone's head somewhere in order for them to continue to accept it, in order for it to make sense to them, which means that they have to have been bent and twisted in order for a bent and twisted argument to fit so perfectly.
And that's why it seems reasonable, and that's why it seems rational to them.
1782, November 7th, Sunday show, FDR 1782.
Good Lord, we're rounding into the 18th century, 19th century.
And you understand that ideology and twisted logic, they're ex post facto justifications for the experience of abuse and constriction as children.
Yes, it's a single drum.
I'm going to keep banging it because it is the one that empirically, scientifically, philosophically is the answer.
So when you get into an argument with someone Who is making a completely irrational statement.
Look, there are some arguments that are really tough and complicated.
UPB is a really tough and complicated argument, which you'd kind of hope, because if it was easy, it would be ridiculous that we hadn't figured it out before.
But there are some arguments like, everything is an opinion, is just an obviously ridiculous argument.
But when you point out the ridiculousness of it, what you're doing is you're exposing The abuse that occurred, that has bent the drawer, that allows the bent spoon to fit.
And the whole point of ideology is to pretend that no abuse occurred.
The whole point of ideology is to pretend that no abuse occurred.
And so, when you break the reason, you expose the wound.
Sorry, when you break the irrationality, you expose the wound, and people don't want to see the wound.
They don't want to see the wound. I use this metaphor in a podcast I've just released.
I'll just mention it here. People have lost their thumbs, right?
Through religion, through statist education or miseducation, through family irrationalities, they've lost their thumbs.
And losing your thumbs is not the end of the world.
You can get prosthetics, you can get a toe stuck on your hand or some damn thing, or at least you can just use two hands to pick things up.
But everyone thinks they have a thumb.
They think they have two thumbs. So what they do is they reach for a coffee cup called rationality.
They try to pick it up. It just falls over.
It just falls down.
And they don't know. It's like, what the hell?
Because they think they have a thumb when they don't.
They think they can think, but they can't.
So they're like somebody wandering around, trying to pick things up, trying to throw balls, trying to masturbate when he doesn't have a thumb.
I guess you could do that.
Wait, let me check. And so, when you point out that people don't have thumbs, then you're reminding them that they have been wounded and mutilated by their culture, by the irrationalities of everyone around them.
And that is very painful and frightening to people, and so they'll just continue clinging to this crazy thumbless argument.
They'll even play thumb wars with you and pretend that they know what they're doing or can do something.
So, I just think it's important to understand that, to avoid your frustration.
Because if you think that you're simply dealing with rational arguments when you're in fact dealing with the ex post facto justification to avoid childhood abuse that has great terror, anxiety, rage and pain to the entire personality, if you don't see the iceberg that's under the tip of the iceberg and you try and push it around like an ice cube, you're going to get all kinds of frustrated and also going to think that you're weak.
Philosophy looks incredibly weak if it doesn't take into account child abuse because it tries to move the immovable.
Right? It's like the old joke that people use.
You get a...
I don't know. This won't make much sense to the American audience because the biggest coin they have, I think, is a quarter.
But you get like a toonie.
It's a $2 coin here.
And you glue it to the sidewalk, right?
And the people bend and they try and pick it up.
And they scrabble and they scrabble and you super glue it so you can't come up, right?
Well, philosophy, if you're trying to reason with people and you don't understand the bomb in the brain stuff...
Then you're like, oh, so somebody said an irrational thing.
All I have to do is point it out to them, and they'll go, oh, right.
Right. Of course, I can't say that everything is opinion because I've just made a non-opinion statement.
I can't say nothing is true.
I've just made it true. Oh, right.
Gosh, heavens, right? You're just picking up that coin.
But what happens is you go down and try and pick up that coin, and it's welded to the sidewalk.
And the glue is child abuse.
So you sit there, scrabble, and it's like, oh, my God, I can't even lift up a coin.
How weak am I? So I think it's really important to recognize that so that you don't waste time on that kind of stuff.
You cannot get a straight spoon into a bent drawer.
And it takes years and years to straighten out that bent drawer.
Years and years and years.
It is neuroplasticity reprogramming at about the deepest level to change your core beliefs, To come to reason takes years.
It won't take years in the future.
Children are raised rationally and peacefully.
It won't take years in the future. But it takes years and years.
So, trying to do it in an online forum, trying to do it in a little chat, trying to do it here, there, there...
Won't.
Won't happen. Yeah, I've just finished reading Chapter 10 of Lloyd DeMoss' The Origins of War and Child Abuse, which is about patriarchy.
Very powerful stuff, well worth reading.
I think he's a little bit optimistic about Barack Obama's juicy soul of infinite goodness, but nonetheless, it's a very good read, very well researched.
It takes a long time to come up with these chapters because it's a lot of research.
Well footnoted, but well worth having a look at.
I'm going to put it in the feed at freedomainradio.com.
forward slash psychohistory.aspx.
You can also get to it from the free books down to psychohistory at the bottom, but I'm also going to throw it into the FDR feed 1790, I think it is.
Somebody's asked, do I think there is a sexual motivation behind spanking a child in many or most cases?
I mean, I'm sure there is in some.
I don't know that it is...
I don't think the sexual motivation is primary in most instances.
I was caned on the rear.
I mean, it was creepy and freaky, but I did not get a sense that it was sexually motivated.
I think that it is a hidden place of the body to hit.
The bum is a place with no bones, so you can't break a bone, or at least it's very hard to break a bone when you hit.
It's a place that is very sensitive.
Try spanking the elbow, it's not going to hurt very much.
It's very sensitive, so it's going to hurt a lot.
So it's just a place to inflict pain which can't be seen once the clothes are back on, which is painful, which is relatively hard to damage in any permanent or semi-permanent way.
So I think there's just a kind of, you know, cowardly kind of attack that occurs there.
It also is a pain that continues because it's hard to sit down afterwards.
I certainly remember that it was.
I was red. Red welts on my ass.
So it's hard to sit down afterwards, so it's harder for the child to sort of resume normal activities to sit down and read a book or something like that.
I don't think it's specifically sexual.
I'm sure that component is there.
But I don't think it's primary in most circumstances.
I mean, it's just in my opinion.
I don't have any facts to back that up.
Yeah, if an adult spanks another child, the sexual component would come up immediately. if an adult spanks another child, the sexual component would
Yeah, I think that's true. We can get to a state, the society... Well, I don't know, without a horrible collapse.
I mean, there's going to be a collapse of the system.
I mean, mathematically, that's just...
You know, the U.S. in particular is entering banana republic phase with printing of the money.
That's just what tinpot dictators do in banana republics when they run out of people to steal from.
They just start printing money, and that's what the U.S. is happening.
China has stopped... Buying US foreign debt, which is one of the reasons why the US is printing so much money.
Ireland is teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and the European Economic Union is lining up to pump money into...
Ireland, which is completely mad, of course, because Ireland...
Well, they have no money, right?
So it's like you've got a whole bunch of people losing blood from gaping wounds in an ER, and you're transfusing blood from one of them to the other.
Well, they're all losing blood, just at different rates, so it's not like anyone's going to get any better.
You're just making everybody get sick all at once.
But, I mean, the politicians are...
In a sense, as captured in this system as everybody else.
A political solution can't occur even if the very best motivated people got into power.
The system is grinding its way.
Violence creates a dependency class.
Violence fosters life choices that people can't recover from.
Like having too many kids, like neglecting training or emotional intelligence or advancement or challenge by being in public sector unions and so on.
It creates life choices that cannot be reversed.
Institutional and organized violence creates a one-way trip down a rocket-propelled roller coaster with no end and a bottomless pit at the end.
With no way back up and a bottomless pit at the end.
There is no reversal to these kinds of situations, which is exactly why they have to be avoided.
If statism could ever be saved, it would be like there was a magic cure for smoking.
Well, if there was a magic cure for smoking, then people would just keep smoking.
The fact is that once you get lung cancer, particularly beyond a particular stage, your chances of survival are practically nil.
The system is in its death throes.
It can't possibly be saved or reversed.
Because if it could, then we wouldn't really have to worry about statism.
It is an irreversible decline.
The logic of the system is going to play itself out.
Because people have become too damaged by their addictions to violence in one form or another to be able to change.
You know, we've heard from a number of people in this show who've tried confronting abusive parents with extremely destructive results on the part of the parents.
I have a huge, huge admiration for the people who've done this.
That's not even institutional violence.
That's just abuse, I suggest.
That is abuse within a family situation.
And that is with children.
Who have had a long relationship with parents and whose parents have a very strong incentive to patch things up with their kids, even if you just look at companionship in old age and resources and all that kind of stuff.
So confronting violence, even within the bond of the family, is very rarely successful.
I can't think of an instance, though I'm sure there are.
But it's very rare. And if there's been significant abuse, it seems almost impossible.
Again, that's just to my memory sort of thinking back.
And so confronting abuse within the family, with the authority of the family, with all of the history and bonds and future dependencies of the family, is so rarely successful.
So what on earth would make people think that confronting abstract, institutionalized violence is going to turn it around?
around.
It doesn't even turn things around within the family.
And the great thing, the best way to free yourself from politics is simply to confront someone who's abusive in your own life and ask them to change.
And if they won't change, even if they're close to you, and even if they've got a lot invested, and you have a lot of invested, then you get that asking politicians to do better, and asking abstracts, public sector workers to give up some of their unjustly gained pensions and benefits and healthcare, it's never going to happen.
happen.
If the people closest to you can't reform their malevolent ways, asking the government to do it is just completely ridiculous.
I don't believe that there is going to be a breakdown of the US that involves cannibalism and, you know, eating your pets and I don't think any of that's going to occur.
The world is too well connected.
The world is too advanced, philosophically.
It has advanced over the past couple of thousand years.
It's not going to go that way.
The ruling class, they know that if they impose a dictatorship, they starve with everybody else.
The ruling classes have gotten used to a standard of living that comes from the vestiges of capitalism.
They know that if they get rid of that, then they're toast.
The farming method called totalitarianism has been abandoned by the ruling classes.
I mean, they only pursued totalitarianism because they thought it was going to produce a better human crop, a more productive human crop, than freedom.
Remember, Marxism promised greater wealth than capitalism.
Fascism promised greater wealth and cohesiveness than freedom.
But that's all been disproven by evidence, if not theory.
Certainly the theory disproves it, but the evidence has accumulated.
So there's no way that totalitarianism is going to replace the vestiges of freedom, because it's been thoroughly discredited as a farming method.
Any more than farmers are going to give up their combine harvesters and go back to rain dances and slaves.
It's just not going to happen because it's so inefficient.
Everybody knows that. So, yeah, when push comes to shove, the ruling classes will support their most productive cows and they will screw their most dependent cows.
So the old and the weak and the dependent who aren't productive will simply get screwed by the state.
And that's the price of depending on the state.
They will get screwed by the state, and certain freedoms will be restored to the productive classes in order to maintain the ruling classes.
So no, I don't think it's going to go that way.
It went that way in Africa sometimes, and in Russia, but these were all incredibly primitive societies philosophically.
I think that we still need to work very hard to make sure that the values are out there, because everything we can do will help.
But no, it's not going to go to medievalism for sure.
Oh, sorry, if they're addicted to power, how could they increase their productivity?
Well, the ruling class cannot increase productivity.
All it can do is exploit the productive.
But, I mean, they know which side of the bread is buttered for them.
They know that the productive classes are the ones that produce the wealth that give them their power.
No question of that.
I mean, just look at the example of Russia, or even China.
I mean, China has a smaller per capita share control of the economy than England does, for Christ's sake.
And England was the inventor of the free market as we know it.
So China just liberalized.
Because they know.
They know what's going to... They're not stupid.
The ruling classes are fucking brilliant.
They know what they're doing.
So in Russia, right, you went from the Tsarist regime, and this very often happens.
It's the anxiety, growth, panic that DeMoss talks about.
In Russia, you went from the Tsarist regime to a prototypical democratic regime, but that did not match...
The split and traumatized personalities of the Russians, and so they had to veer off to a more extreme path, going away from the Mancheviks and towards the Bolsheviks, or away from the anarchists to some degree as well.
Now, that didn't happen with the fall of Soviet Russia, right?
The fall of Soviet Russia was replaced with more freedoms.
Not freedoms, of course, but more freedoms.
There are almost no gulags left.
And same thing with China. China slaughtered tens of millions of its citizens, but that was because they were expecting to get more productivity by just changing things.
Remember, communism was not supposed to starve people.
Communism was supposed to feed the world.
So they just thought, hey, communism is a much better farming method than capitalism, so let's implement that.
And then all the livestock, well, half the livestock died.
And they're like, shit, let's go back to the other one, because that worked way better.
This one doesn't work at all. And now, yeah, of course, I mean, they're running out of productive people and so on, but all they're going to do is they're just going to betray their dependent classes.
They're just going to stop paying pensions.
They're just going to stop paying Social Security.
They're just going to screw the weakest and the most vulnerable and the most dependent, not all of whom are morally guilty, but a lot of whom are.
And those people are going to be screwed, and the shackles are going to be taken off the productive so they can start producing again.
For the ruling classes.
Somebody says, how can you screw someone who doesn't deserve anything in the first place, who hasn't earned his or her keep?
Well, I mean, that's why I didn't say morally betray.
You know, people have made huge decisions in their lives based upon the continuance of the warfare welfare state, right?
So, if you look, I mean, the government's going to need to cut money.
Are they going to cut money from the soldiers?
Well, not hugely likely, because then they're going to get lots of rampaging soldiers all over the place.
They're going to find the weakest and most vulnerable people, and they are going to screw those.
I mean, they've already screwed the very weakest and most vulnerable people, which is the unborn, right?
So they're just going to find the weakest and most vulnerable people and screw those people over.
Now, those people have made decisions based upon...
The existence of the welfare state, and they're going to expect that welfare state to continue, and they're going to get royally hosed because of that.
And yeah, it's a shame.
It's a shame that they've been raised this way.
They've been so heavily propagandized in many ways that it's really hard to condemn them morally.
I mean, they've been raised without a single shred of moral understanding or clarity.
They've been lied to by their entire culture.
They've been told that they deserve stuff by every special interest group infesting the festering wound of Society is statism.
So it's sort of hard to get really angry at those dependent people, the welfare people, the old age pensioners and so on, because, you know, hey, I paid into the system, hey, this is the way the system is, they've made all these, they've had six kids, they've whatever, haven't saved for their retirement outside the state system, and they have been stolen from.
The money's all been blown, of course.
So it's really hard, I think, to just put a real clear line down the middle of society and say, on this side there are virtuous people, on this side there are non-virtuous people.
A lot of even the productive classes are productive in selling to government or quasi-government institutions.
But what is, of course, what is true is that you will hear a deafening silence from everybody who claims to care about the underprivileged when the underprivileged truly gets screwed in the death throes of the existing system.
Yeah, somebody says you're born in the ghetto and you're kind of fucked.
Well, you know, in a way, that's pretty true.
In a way, that's pretty true, right?
You've got the government-controlled and sponsored drug war raging all around you.
You've got completely shitty schools.
You've got a system that fosters one-parent families, usually moms who are...
Depressed and angry because of a lack of life purpose and lack of individual success.
And it's a complete mess.
It is a complete mess. And when these people do really start to get...
You don't hear a lot of people who claim to care about the poor talking about how the government has messed things up for the unemployed at the moment, right?
Because nobody except the anarchists really care about the poor.
Nobody except the anarchists really care about the poor because we want society to take its boot off their neck.
Nobody except the voluntarists really care about the poor because we're fighting for a system where the poor would actually have the freedom to become wealthy if they chose and with good historical evidence of exactly why and how that came about and how it can be reproduced.
Somebody has asked, is the ramping up of invasive TSA procedures just another power grab?
I had a thought that the intent was to reduce internal movement.
Well, I think it's important to remember or to understand what power people are really after.
What power are people really after?
It's not money. It's not money.
I mean, beyond a certain amount.
It's not money. Politicians aren't after money.
Because, I mean, there are politicians who are 70 or even older who still run for re-election, even though they have more money than they can conceivably spend an entire lifetime.
They still want something other than money.
It is a very, very different thing that people are after.
It's not money. It's not directly forcing people to do stuff.
Politicians don't do that, right?
They have their lackeys do it for them.
So the TSA procedures is not to do with money.
People enjoy that for a very different reason.
Power, control, humiliation.
Having power over somebody else, squeezing their soul until the white ichor of fear runs between your fingers, gives you a sense of control over your own history, of your own childhood abuse.
You know, John McCain was so stubborn that he would be beaten until he passed out.
Then when he passed out, His parents would fill the tub with cold water, throw ice in, and dump his unconscious body as a child into that ice water.
He's never dealt with any of this stuff.
This is one of the reasons why he stayed as a torture victim in North Korea.
Because that's what it was all about.
That was his Simon the Boxer, controlling the effects of torture.
When you've gone through that as a child, and you haven't dealt with it, you're going to want to reproduce that on others, right?
The true purpose of power is to have huge vats of the population that you can vomit your own poison into rather than deal with it yourself.
North Vietnam, sorry. Somebody said, I'm in UK on an old age pension.
Do you think it will also be finishing?
Well, I don't know. I mean, that's a very technical question.
The problem that politicians face of course is that old people vote significantly more than the unborn.
And so politicians who touch old age pensions are going to face a tough time.
For re-election. So I think it is going to be tough.
They're going to want to keep paying off the old people as much as humanly possible.
But in a choice between the old cows who don't have any milk left but rather are consuming resources and the young cows producing lots of milk, I'm afraid to tell you that you don't need to be told this is simply a reality, that they're not going to choose the old cows.
Yeah, somebody said maybe they'll let the libertarian politicians do it.
Yeah, it could be. I mean, maybe libertarians will get in there, take the bullet, and then get out from there.
I mean, I don't know. It's really impossible to predict.
But when you look at a class's self-interest, it's impossible to predict the details or the timing, but it's completely easy to predict what's going to happen.
Another thing that's going to happen, of course, as they try to get more and more revenue is they're going to continue to outsource things that were formerly paid for through tax revenues.
They're going to outsource those to private companies.
And charge people for those things, right?
So parks and fire engines and so on.
They're just not privatizing those and charging people.
And then, of course, everyone's going to get mad at the private companies rather than the government.
The government's going to keep taking all the level of taxes that used to pay for public service.
It's going to privatize a whole bunch of stuff.
But that's actually really good in a way because at least it's starting to move some control into the private sector, which will create some greater efficiencies and stave off things a little bit longer.
But... No, it's going to be brutal on the people who don't have a lot of power in society, who are dependent upon the state.
They are going to have to make some significant changes in their lifestyle.
Yeah, you're going to see old people who are going to have to all start living in the same place and really conserving their money.
They're going to grab people's gold.
They're going to do a lot of stuff. So I think it's… I just think it's important to recognize that that change is going to occur, but I don't believe it's going to be a bottomless abyss.
I think that it's going to be a necessary and painful readjustment that will be better.
Yeah, the privatized stuff will likely be the monopolies.
That's very true. Yeah, I think that's right.
Once the power has been delegated to the government, there will not be a large public outcry if the government does decide to exercise control over that service in the future.
I'm sorry, I don't quite follow that.
Oh, the previously privatized service.
Yeah, I mean, look, when you privatize a service, even if you create a monopoly, you're creating an entity outside the state that has a vested interest in that, never being nationalized again.
And so that will be very helpful.
And look, let's not forget too that...
You have – the mainstream media is a pretty pitiful thing now compared to where it was in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s.
I mean you have the internet. You have – I mean good lord, I can't imagine – I can't even remember the last time I went to the mainstream media for any kind of news.
I mean it was – all I do is go there for outrage fodder for true news.
That's all I do. I don't go there to get a single scrap of truth.
Going to the mainstream media for truth is like going to the Bible for medical advice.
I mean it's just ridiculous.
So the information that's available to people is so much more fragmented and that fragmentation creates schisms within society just as Christendom broke into Catholicism and Protestantism and Zwinglianism and Calvinism and Lutheranism and all that kind of stuff and that creates conflict for sure but it also creates possibilities for the multiplicity that undermines and destroys centralized authority so I think that can be very helpful.
Look, and again, this is the Damas chapter, right?
That wars occur during times of growth panic, not during times of depression, right?
Wars occur when a society is growing, is gaining more freedoms.
And my approach to this is generally that what happens is...
The young take freedoms that the elders would never have been allowed, that would have resulted in psychological murder for the elders, right?
And so it creates enormous panic and rage within the elders when the young take new freedoms.
And the way that they retaliate is to start wars to kill off the young.
I mean, this is what happens at a very primitive level in society, which is why societies never start wars, democracies in particular, never start wars during a depression.
They only start it when there's a great growth in freedom, when there's a great growth in economic wealth.
And so, yeah, taking more freedoms than your parents is a very, very dangerous thing to do in society.
It gets a lot of people killed, according to these statistics and the research.
This is why it's either going to be peaceful and philosophical and therapy-assisted or it's going to be a war.
And we really don't want that.
Yeah, well, Jon Stewart, I wouldn't go too far with Jon Stewart.
You know, his rally to restore sanity, he had this speech, you know, like, can't we all just take turns, you know, like a zipper?
Like, one car goes into a lane, and then another car goes into a lane, and then another car, you know, we all just work together and join together, and it's like, dude, Jesus Christ, do you not get that this is a government that tortures and kills millions of people, that throws two million people in jail, that tortures people in jail, that beats people in jail?
We're not talking about a fucking zipper or a merge lane, we're talking about a murderous institution.
Soaked in the blood of history.
Anyway, because he's in the privileged classes, he doesn't experience that.
If he were to be arrested for drug possession, thrown in jail for a year, he might come out with a slightly different metaphor than the zipper, or it might include a zipper, but would be followed by something a lot less pleasant.
I would like to do more talks on US colleges.
Travel is a real challenge.
I mean, travel for me is okay, but I don't want to be away from Isabella.
But challenge is a real challenge with the family.
You know, I did this podcast on environmentalism and taxicabs, and I got delooshed with emails.
People saying to me, well, Steph, you should have just taken the bus.
And it's like, the bus?
really, I can only assume that these aren't people who've traveled with a 22-month-old baby for about seven or eight hours and with 900 pounds of luggage because you have to track pack for having a baby, who then think that it would be great to take that baby and all that luggage on four who then think that it would be great to take that baby and all that luggage on four different buses to I just think that is just funny.
But of course, when you're young, you don't think of experiencing these things.
People should, I guess, think a little bit more about it perhaps.
But they often don't.
All right. Well, I think we've maybe done the questions.
HKW, if you wanted to give me a ping, maybe we can have a private confo about that other thing.
I think it was a good question, but it might take us past the show itself.
And yeah, don't forget if you want to – I just sent out a bunch of subscriber podcasts with MicoSystems stuff and other sort of advanced stuff.
If you would like to send in a subscription or sign up for 10 or 20 or more a month, I would really appreciate that and really does help keep the old finances stable and predictable as opposed to the wild oscillations of random donations.
So if you'd like to go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate.
For that, I would really, really appreciate that and have yourselves an absolutely wonderful week.
I really do appreciate everybody's support.
I did take a day or two off after finishing the book because it was quite a lot of work to get all that done.
There will be a hardcover copy of that.
Coming out. I just have to send it to myself, make sure it doesn't look too bad before releasing it.
And thanks everybody so much for all of your continued support.
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