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April 26, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:27
2129 How To Keep Your True Self

Stefan Molyneux discusses how to save your own soul. .

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So the question has been asked, and it's a great question, which is how do I keep the flame of my true self alive in this world?
Great and important question.
Now, I don't know.
Fundamentally, I've got some thoughts and ideas about how I managed to achieve it, but this can be different for everyone, of course, but I'll show you my thoughts.
Well, after 30 years of talking philosophy with people in literally every walk of life that can be imagined...
I talk philosophy with complete roughnecks that I was working in the bush with when I was a goldpanner and prospector, all the way up to postgraduate people in university and professors and so on.
From politicians to store clerks to, I've even had philosophical conversations with waiters, and I really am a slut for the muse.
A Socratic slut.
These are the ways that I've sort of understood the idea or the question of the true self versus the false self.
Of course, the question is what is meant by the true self.
The true self is the part of us that relates to reason and reality and objectivity and philosophy and UPB and all of the things that We're born designed to understand.
But there's two worlds that we have to adapt to, and there's a great deal of tension in the modern world between these two worlds.
The first is the world of reality, and the second is the world of culture.
And in a healthy society, in the society of the future, these two worlds will be the same.
And that's going to be very costly for a lot of people currently making their profits off falsehoods.
But in the future, there will be no adaptation to the world of culture.
There will be an adaptation to the world of reality, of reason, of evidence, of truth, of UPB. And there will be no need to hide all of these things for the sake of conformity to a culture which attacks you if you don't conform.
Ah, culture. The first syllable is the key.
So, in the future, there will be no such thing, really, as a false self.
I mean, there'll be like, you know, you won't act the same way with your brother as you do in a job interview, but these will be, you know...
Adaptations in the same way you use a different style of language and presentation when you're giving a speech to a hundred people or a thousand people than you do when you're chatting with your wife in bed.
But one of them is not true and one of them is not false.
So there'll be adaptations and appropriate methods of communication, but this will not be what we call the true and the false self now.
If you dress differently to go to the beach than you do to go to a wedding, That doesn't mean that the beach is false and the wedding is true.
These are just different adaptations to, you know, reasonable circumstances.
So the true self is that which is able to be honest.
And the false self is that which develops when honesty is savagely attacked.
And it substitutes the hostility of others for the authenticity of the true experience of the self.
It is the internalization of threats and violence and ostracism and abandonment.
It's the internalization of those and the conformity with those that is the false self.
It is a self that has to conform, that is forced, literally forced, to conform with falsehood.
It's really important to understand.
When children are presented with a violent or aggressive culture, which all children in the world pretty much...
Oh, I'm looking over my shoulder.
Almost all children in the world.
Isabel is having a little nanny.
They're all presented with this violent culture.
Children do not try to figure out how far the parents or the authority figures are willing to go in the maintenance of this culture, because child sacrifice and infanticide were so common throughout history.
That the adaptation is to conform to the prejudices of the tribe, because the alternative so often is to be killed.
And by the time you've figured out that you're going to be killed, it's too late.
Like by the time that the Selim religious elders have determined, so to speak, that you're a witch, it's kind of too late to back out of the situation.
And when you're being marched up to the dais to have your head cut off, Or your throat's slit in some primitive ceremony because you disobeyed one of the weird edicts of the tribe.
It's too late to back out.
And so we don't, you know, you don't jump in the well to find out how deep it is.
And, or if you do, you don't last very long.
And you also do not push back against the aggressions of the tribal falsehoods because inconvenient children were killed and abandoned with extraordinary regularity.
Hundreds of millions, if not more, throughout history were simply killed because they were not convenient to the powers that be, to the elders of the tribe, to the prejudices of their parents or their witch doctors or their warlords or whatever.
So, we're not designed to push back against the irrationalities of the tribe.
And it is only because of, to some degree, economic independence or the potential for it that has arisen over the last century or two that it's even remotely possible to push back against the prejudices of the tribe.
And so, our purpose as biological creatures is to survive and to reproduce.
You push back against the prejudices of the tribe, you generally would get killed or ostracized, abandoned, rejected, cast out.
And even if you weren't, you'd be relegated to very low-cast status and would be very unlikely to breed, right?
The Socratic gene is definitely recessive.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
And Socrates was unusual in that he lived to breed and lived to be in his 70s and had children.
And that was quite different from what would be the case in the past.
Because cultural attacks upon the young occur very early in the children's lives before sexual maturity.
And before any possibility of economic independence.
And so, right, you get that we are bred, or we only have survived to continue to breed because we bow down to the tribe.
A clue to this is, when you think of Ayn Rand's novels, the heroes have no families.
I mean, they just have no families.
Their families are like shadowy, distant people in the past who've had no effect on them, but they've been on their own since they were able to wriggle out of their diapers and all that.
Because if they had had In the book, then they would have been closer to Peter Keating or to Hank Reardon rather than to John Galt, Howard Rourke, and so on.
And so that which cannot be survived or threatens the organism before sexual maturity gets weeded out very quickly.
The gene's just right.
So our natural reaction is to be terrified of the cultural attacks of the tribe, the physical attacks based upon skepticism about the cultural norms of the tribe.
We're designed to be terrified of that.
And this is why progress is so hard.
And this is why the lone voice of reason is a kind of myth, I think.
We need some sort of community because we need some sort of tribal approval in order to have strength behind what we do.
So, the true self versus the false self.
Well, the true self is that which is able to be honest about genuine experiences and honest about the skepticism of the unseen, of the impossible, of the invisible, of the merely threatened entities like state, church, God, whatever. The true self is based on the truth.
The truth is that if you give a child a box with no present in it and then tell them that it's a God present, they will not believe that there's a present, a gift.
And so, how do you preserve that Well, through cunning, right?
Through a Nietzschean form of cunning, which is, I know the truth, but I will nod and smile.
And unfortunately, this gives rise to the great danger of the true self, which is contempt for your fellow human beings.
And, I dare say, a richly deserved and well-earned contempt.
Because the true self is attacked by a culture or a system of thought That holds truth and honesty as its highest virtue.
Right? I mean, all religions say to the young, tell the truth.
But then when they tell the truth about their skepticism and scorn of the invisible, the unseen, and the merely threatened, the fairy tale characters come to god-awful life.
They're then attacked. Tell the truth, but don't tell the truth about your skepticism.
And, of course, the truth is something that is...
Designed by those in power.
So when someone in power wants to know something about something you've done or something you know, when they want you to reveal your thoughts to them, then truth becomes a virtue.
When the thoughts that you reveal are inconvenient to those in power, then they're called blasphemy or rudeness or whatever, you understand?
When it's convenient to those in power that you tell the truth, truth becomes a virtue.
When it's inconvenient for those in power that you tell the truth, the truth is called heretical.
It's called Being a traitor, you know, all these kinds of nonsense, right?
I mean, this is the standard UPB inversion, right?
It's absolute to serve those in power, the moral, and then when it doesn't serve those in power, the opposite is moral, and these two things are never, they never come into contact.
It's a double thing, right? And so most people, the true self in most people has vaporized, and the only thing that's left Of the true self is the crater.
It's exactly like a giant asteroid that plowed into the moon a billion or two years ago.
There's no sign of the asteroid left.
The only reason you know it was ever there is the crater.
And this is true for people as a whole.
The vast majority of people.
And if you don't believe me, eh, test it.
This has been my experience.
I got tons of evidence, but certainly not conclusive.
Never substitute my judgment for yours, of course.
That would be non-philosophical, actually anti-philosophical.
There is no human authority.
Authority is reason and evidence.
But what is left when the capacity for honesty and authentic expression of experience is arrived at?
When you say, why do we care that it's our team that wins and not the other person's team?
Why do we care whether it's our soldiers or their soldiers who die?
Why do we care which flag flies over us?
Why do we care about the approval of this wizened old guy in a funny hat?
Why do I have to believe that which can't be proven?
Why am I not allowed to have imaginary friends but you are?
Why are my imaginary friends imaginary, but yours are more real than we are?
All of these things that go through the minds of children.
Of course they do. Well, integrity is called evil.
Integrity and honor are defined as service to the rulers.
A soldier has honor when he obeys the rulers.
That's called integrity. That's called virtue.
The apocryphal story of George Washington and the cherry tree.
The father wants to know who cut down the cherry tree.
And George Washington said, I mean, of course he didn't, but he's supposed to have said, I cannot tell a lie.
It was I. Because that's called integrity.
However, integrity to the proposition that all men are created equal apparently also includes riding down at the head of an army to go and slaughter a bunch of farmers in Pennsylvania who don't want to pay their whiskey tax.
You understand? It's called virtue.
Well, it's called virtue because his father wanted to know who cut down the cherry tree, and therefore honesty and integrity, truth to evidence, was a virtue.
When... And it was more convenient for him to go and mow down the farmers resisting his power than he did that.
And that's called safety to the republic or integrity or virtue or courage or whatever it is, right?
Whatever serves the interest of those in power is called the good.
Whatever opposes it is called the evil.
And so, for most people, their capacity to Process reality has been smashed and has been replaced by fear of attack.
Now, fear of attack is not enough for power to flourish in this world, right?
You must love Big Brother. It is not enough to be afraid of Big Brother.
You must love Big Brother. And so all of the lies that are told in the world by those in power to those helpless and dependent upon them as children are called virtuous.
And so the crater of what is smashed is overshadowed, in a sense, by an imaginary hill of virtue.
And that makes people very dangerous.
Because their sovereign judgment, their independent judgment, has been replaced, first by fear, By incomprehension, by anger, by scorn, by contempt.
And then the reaction formation occurs and it becomes love.
A passion for, a loyalty to, a love of the threatener, the attacker.
The reproductive brain stamp of culture.
That is inflicted by the parents and in turn on the children and the children and so on.
That which is false must now be accepted as true.
Attacks must be worshipped as love.
Threats must be replaced with love.
They spanked me because they loved me.
They threatened me with hell because they wanted to save my soul.
They suggested I go into the army because they wanted to make a man out of me.
As the saying goes, good iron does not get turned into nails.
Good men do not join the army.
And this is a very important consideration when dealing with people, because what's happened is they have founded their identity on a recoiling of the truth, and they have turned violence into virtue.
And they no longer can see violence as anything other than virtue.
This is so important when you think about your conversations you have with people about taxation.
Why can they not see the violence of taxation?
Why do they need to justify it?
Why do they need to praise it as moral?
Why do they need to look to the alternative to violence as far worse?
Why can't they even see that it is violence?
Why did they invent the social contract?
You understand? This has nothing to do with taxation.
Nothing to do with the state.
Nothing to do with the world as a whole.
This only and forever has to do with their early childhood experiences.
That aggression must be recast as virtue and the aggression forgotten.
Of course, nothing is ever really forgotten.
The aggression must be recast as virtue.
And then when you say to people, taxation is force, you're dealing with such an old and primitive defense that nobody's even remotely talking about taxation as it is.
They're talking about their early childhood experiences, and if you want to know the degree of trauma that children are experiencing, look at the number of people who can rationally process taxation as force.
Everyone who can't process it has been enormously traumatized and terrorized by culture to the point where they have Stockholm Syndrome fallen in love with their abuser.
And this is why I say the state is in effect to the family.
And so people are extremely, most people are extremely broken and quite dangerous.
Machines Of justifications for immorality, for lies, for violence, for aggression, for threats.
And this is why libertarianism doesn't work.
Because libertarianism is attempting to engage people at a political level when people's political beliefs are mere reaction formations to early childhood traumas.
And this is why there's not much point talking about Anything until you've established the early childhood, because otherwise you're just fencing with defenses whose manifestation has nothing to do with the cause of the problem.
If unconscious experiences of aggression that have to be recast as allegiance to the parents, if that is the root, Why people cannot understand that taxation is force and then piling more arguments and more arguments that taxation is force is not going to solve the problem.
Because the problem is not that people don't understand that taxation is force.
The problem is that there's an incredibly deep, powerful, all-pervasive defense mechanism that has actually become the personality Which is based upon the recasting of force as virtue.
First of all, you reject that it's force, and you call it virtue.
And second of all, even if you accept that it's force, you call it virtue in that it is an avoidance of a far worse fate.
So when people say, we need a small government because the alternative is even worse, they're saying, okay, it is force, but the alternative to force is even worse, which is exactly the same as saying, yes, spanking is violence, but if I hadn't been spanked, I would have turned out far worse.
You understand? This is the basic reality of how people operate.
And this is why talking about human freedom at the political level is only useful insofar as it stimulates interest in self-knowledge.
I mean, I talk about politics.
I did True News for a long time.
I talk about politics.
But I really only do that to stimulate people's interest in self-knowledge.
This is what hung over the Lyceum in the ancient world, the university.
Know thyself. So, how do you maintain the true self in the face of all of this?
Well, Unfortunately, you have to end up damning the world.
Or you have to recognize that the world damns itself through its actions.
It's them or you. When it comes down to the true self, it's them or you.
And most people are so broken, and this is why I say it's got to be multi-generational, is most people are so broken that when you bring the truth to them, since their personality is almost now entirely founded upon lies, when you bring the truth to them, It's like they've built this house and you're there dialing up the gravity.
And the house is going to...
You're attacking their house.
You're attacking the structure of their home.
And if you keep dialing up the gravity, the house is just going to collapse once it's at Jupiter level or something.
So they're just going to hurl you back from that and call you a bad person for doing what you're doing.
Right? They genuinely, or as genuinely as is possible...
They perceive philosophy as the injection of an illness, a fatal illness, a disfiguring illness, a leprosy.
I mean, the whole purpose of culture is to get you to found your ethics on lies.
Ethics is the essence of the personality.
Ethics is the essence of everything because the most powerful aspect of our mind is its capacity to universalize, right?
To extract principles and to universalize and to predict.
That is the essence of what it is to be a human being as opposed to any other species.
It's not language. It's Language is just a reflection of our capacity to conceptualize, to extract principles from experience.
A monkey can catch a banana, a monkey cannot do physics, cannot do math.
And that is our single most powerful characteristic, is the universalization that we have.
The essence of humanity is universalization.
That's why the essence of humanity is ethics.
Because ethics is the most powerful universalization that we have.
Because it is either through that that we are freed or enslaved.
If we believe false ethics, then we are enslaved.
If we believe true ethics, then we are truly, truly free.
And so the essence of our personality is ethics.
And if we build our ethics on lies and fears and justifications for violence, what happens?
Well, the truth becomes holy water to the Antichrist.
Garlic to the vampire.
We become creatures of the deepest night who fear destruction from the merest ghosts of the rays of the sun.
Peeking over the horizon or breaking through a cloud.
We become inconsequential albinos speared and scalded and sunburned by the merest ghosts of starlights.
And that makes us dangerous.
And so what people who are broken will almost always try to do when confronted with their brokenness, which is what happens when you bring UPP to people, what they will try to do is they will strive as hard as they possibly can to have you feel broken.
Because that's how culture is transmitted, right?
Culture is transmitted because broken people smash up other people so that they don't feel broken anymore.
And so you have to limit deep contact with people who are irredeemably broken, who are committed to broken, who are founded upon brokenhood, whose personhood is brokenhood.
And that is a...
I mean, it's a contamination.
It's a contamination. You can interact with other people.
The way I sort of view it is you can interact with people, but...
I mean, with the unenlightened.
You can interact with them, but it's kind of like pearl diving.
You can go down, your eyes bulging and your cheeks bulging and bubbles trailing out from your nose...
But you've got to get back to the surface, right?
You can dive into these depths, you can dive into these crypts, but you've got to get back to the air pretty quickly.
I mean, you are a mammal and you can't breathe underwater, and if you're virtuous, you can't breathe among fundamental ethical error.
You just can't. And so you can go down, sure, you know, if my dentist wants to chat politics, yeah, okay, we'll chat a little bit of politics, but keep it really at the surface and don't show your hand.
The minority survived through camouflage.
And when you find people who are open to the truth, grapple them close and treasure them.
But when people are a long way from the truth, when people are fundamentally opposed to the truth, you have to limit contact.
If you want to maintain your sanity, and it does come down to something that fundamentally important, Because we all carry the craters of culture.
We all carry the army of the undead that can be brought to life by a powerful enough rhetorician.
Our souls are layered over with the potential animation of limbs that can come to life when summoned by a powerful enough call from culture.
And the magic words, the spells that are cast to reanimate the dead in our hearts are very dangerous to us.
We will always be susceptible to that.
Because we can never be the moon that was never hit by a crater.
We can fill them in and so on, but the reality is that we are inhabited with the biting ghosts of culture that can be summoned back to life to attack us.
And we cannot ever undo that.
We can raise children without that, but those of us who are raised with it, it cannot be undone.
And people will forever be whispering the words into your ears designed to reanimate the zombies, to reanimate the dead to attack us.
The resurrection spells are constantly being cast into the shaking tombstones of our hearts.
Everybody is always trying to get us to turn against ourselves using culture as the key that opens those locks to the crypts of our former deaths.
We are always constantly bringing ourselves back to life.
This is why undead movies are so common and so popular.
Anyway, my daughter is chatting again in the back, so I'll stop doing this.
She's woken up. We'll chat more.
Thank you so much for listening, as always, my friends.
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