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April 26, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:34
2130 How To Have Hope
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Mullen from Freedom Aid Radio.
How do we keep ourselves optimistic, positive, hopeful, and helpful?
Well, we can't. There we go.
End of podcast. We can't.
We can't do it. People have asked me, I'm surrounded, you know, I say, oh my god, I'm surrounded by people who hate reason, who hate truth, who hate freedom, who, you know, just rail against everything and use the most transparently ridiculous emotional tactics to pretend that they're winning arguments and All this awful stuff and I'm full of despair and sick of the attacks and sick of people I'm trying to help lashing out at me and sick of the blindness and sick of the hypocrisy and so on.
And I get it.
I really, really get it.
We are mammals at the feet of some pretty dangerous dinosaurs.
I understand.
And some of my optimism is in spite of the evidence.
Because I think that to surrender to the evidence is to create a self-fulfilling prophecy in many ways.
There's no doubt, I think, that it is love that will sustain and keep us on the right path and will win in the long run.
But love of what? That's a challenge, right?
I mean, you look at your average fellow citizen...
And what is your experience?
They're generally avoidant and defensive and manipulative and evasive and, I mean, we have some seriously broken up specimens around us.
Can't love that. Can't love it.
Can't. You can love something that is broken that is struggling to heal, as we are all broken, I think, and struggling to heal.
We can love that. We can love the struggle, the strife.
But we cannot love the avoiders of truth and defenders of evil.
I mean, just can't.
So, it is not those in the present that can generate a wellspring of love from us.
Those who are struggling, as I struggle and as we all struggle, I mean, I think generate significant and deep and abiding admiration.
But very few people do struggle.
Very few people do ask questions.
Very few people are willing to listen to reason.
But simply rant and rave and dissociate and attack and critique and evade and lie.
And it's funny, you know, personhood is sort of an interesting thing.
I mean... When I was 19, I think I was working as a gold panner, and we'd be in town for some time to sort of process the stuff, the samples we picked up in the bush.
And I remember one, I was living with a female geologist in a little apartment in Thunder Bay, and we were coming back from doing some groceries.
And there was a woman who kind of grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into her house.
And no, this is not the beginning of a penthouse story, but rather something quite different.
And she was an elderly woman who was drunk and she was obviously desperately lonely and wanted to have me listen to her husband's favorite records who had been dead for many years and kept me there talking about, you know, in a slurred, rambling, incoherent way.
Talking about her life from her husband, their children who didn't speak to her anymore, you know, for reasons that weren't that hard to figure out.
And what's interesting, I mean, my heart, you know, went out to this woman in many ways, although I can imagine it's easier to have sympathy for people if they've never had power over you.
I mean, imagine how she'd been as a parent if she was this drunk in her 70s or 60s.
You know, I was so young that I didn't differentiate between those ages.
I'm a little bit more discriminatory now as I get closer.
But it's easy to be sympathetic for people who've not hurt you.
It's easy to be sympathetic for people who've not abused their power over you.
So I did feel some sympathy for this woman, though I did even at the time feel that this was some pretty horrendous stuff that must have gone on in the family.
And I remember thinking that this woman had her own story.
Her husband had her own particular name.
He had his particular records.
She lived in her own particular place.
She had particular pictures on the wall.
Her kid's hair were parted on this side, not that side.
Each little piece of brick or brick was particular to her.
The arrangement of everything on the shelves, the eiderdowns, the little tea cozies, the Dusty, claustrophobic Victorian furniture.
Each little stain on the wall, the slight peel of the floral wallpaper hanging down from a little corner of the ceiling.
All of that was particular to her.
And yet, there was a grinding sameness to the dysfunction as a whole.
I feel that way with the majority of people.
That each person has...
His own individual story and individual details which are different.
And most people call these individual details their personality, their identity, their history, who they are.
I have this many numbers of hair on my head.
I'm the only person with this number of hairs on my head.
And that is my identity.
And people do that a lot.
They take... Accidental or even chosen details and make that into a personality.
And I don't think that is a personality.
I think a personality is individuation.
It is when you have discovered your values, not invented, but discovered your values and lived by them.
That is the furnace, the heat and the resistance in which is forged the sword called the self.
And most people...
Are the same. And I've mentioned this before, but this goes back to something I read many years ago in a book, I think it was called Modern Times, or Intellectuals, by Paul Johnson, a historian.
There's an old saying from Tolstoy.
He said, all happy families are alike, but all unhappy families are unhappy in their own particular way.
And he said that this doesn't seem to be true at all, in that All happy families seem to have a wealth of individuality and potential and possibility and difference because health can accommodate differences, whereas dysfunction requires conformity.
Whereas unhappy families have the same grim cycles of addiction and abuse and avoidance and manipulation and demands and petulance.
And there is a grim sameness to defensiveness.
I mean, you get over your own defensiveness when you just get bored of being defensive, when you realize just how grindingly repetitive being defensive is.
You know, hanging on to and justifying your positions and resisting criticism and resisting opposite information and all this, that and the other.
Once you understand how boring, arid, claustrophobic, and horrible defensiveness is, you give it up.
It's only when we know the cost of things that we give them up.
The cost of cigarettes we give up smoking.
And once we give up defensiveness in ourselves, then we can see and avoid defensiveness in others.
Because there's no identity in defensiveness.
There's no personhood in defensiveness.
Because defensiveness is having a conclusion that is a cover for trauma and attacking anybody who threatens the conclusion or who undermines the conclusion.
In other words, any facts and evidence.
And so when people are defensive, and you understand that statism and religiosity is just defensiveness.
Nobody rationally comes to the idea of a state.
The state is what we have. The state is what educated us.
We bonded with it. And so we defend it.
But this is defensiveness.
This is not an argument.
I had a Jehovah's Witness the other day on the Sunday show.
And he had these incredibly high standards of...
Proof, requirements for evolution.
And yet, when I pointed out some of the inconsistencies in religion, he just bypassed those completely.
I mean, this is defensiveness.
This is not rationality.
Obviously not, right? I mean, this is, I need to believe, I want to believe, and so I'm going to have these incredibly, impossibly high standards of proof for evolution, and if it falls short or even comes close to falling short, and even one of these requirements, evolution is false, it must be discarded...
Whereas, as I pointed out in the Bible, there's nothing written down there that wasn't generally available to people at the time.
Well, he had an explanation for that, right?
I mean, so you've got impossibly high standards of proof for one situation and ridiculously low or non-standards of proof for another.
That's just defensiveness. And it's really boring.
It's so obvious, of course.
And it's really boring. And so you can't love defensiveness because defensiveness is the opposite of virtue.
Defensiveness does not allow for the existence, the psychological reality or existence of another person.
And therefore it is selfish, it is solipsistic, it is narcissistic.
Defensiveness is hanging on to a conclusion that serves to cover up Emotional scar tissue.
And the reason that people, of course, hang onto it so grimly is because if the conclusion is dislodged, the scar tissue is re-experienced.
And this is why people attack those who oppose irrational conclusions because they experience the questioner as the abuser who inflicted the original scar tissue.
And so they react in aggressive or manipulative ways because it cuts close to the bone.
It touches or it threatens to uncover the original abuse.
And so we cannot love defensiveness, because defensiveness views difference, and all human beings are different, and all human beings have different perspectives and opinions.
I mean, there are some things we can agree on.
Gravity affects us and so on, but there's a lot that is very different.
And love is an acceptance and curiosity about those differences, and it comes from a humility.
About those differences. I refuse to teach my daughter conclusions because I am not even close to vain enough to imagine that my conclusions are all correct.
And I will not teach her conclusions.
I will teach her how to think, and if we arrive at the same conclusions, that's, you know, plus one for those conclusions, but...
Defensiveness is to hang on to those conclusions and to hang on to conclusions in the face of somebody else who has not developed the same defense mechanisms for the same traumas.
You have to erase the other in order to hang on to your defensiveness because all differences of opinion from the other threaten the defense mechanisms and that is why there is something so fundamentally narcissistic about people who are defensive.
The statist has to dehumanize the anarchist.
The Christian has to dehumanize the atheist.
Now, you could of course argue that the anarchist has to dehumanize the statist and so on, but that's a slightly different position.
Actually, it's a significantly different position.
If somebody is dehumanized and you call them dehumanized, that is true.
If somebody has a difference of opinion and you attack them and pretend that they're dehumanized, then that's not true.
So if we say...
That the statist doesn't really care about the poor when the evidence is that statism is making life worse and worse for the poor, but they cling to that belief anyway, then we can say, with reason and evidence, that the statist does not fundamentally care about the poor.
Otherwise, they'd be open to superior arguments on how to help the poor, and they'd look at the historical data of what did help the poor, and so on.
That's one perspective. The other perspective is if, of course, a statist says that the libertarian or the anarchist does not care about the poor, that it's just an ad hominem.
So, I mean, there is a little difference in the ascription of the word dehumanized.
So, the clinging to ideology to cover up scar tissue at the Eternal expense of the individuated other.
Boy, there's a tasty sentence for you.
You can't love it.
You can't respect it. You can't even like it.
I think you can sympathize with it.
I think, you know, because once you see the scar tissue, you can sympathize with it, but it is such an immature and destructive way to deal with abuse, and it is such a catalyst and trigger for new abuse.
Right, so you think of the statist whose child is questioning the state, or the religious person whose child is questioning religion.
How comfortable can they be?
How encouraging can they be of that difference, of that curiosity, of that reason?
Well, not very, for the most part.
And so they have to repress, they have to attack, they have to undermine, they have to avoid, they have to withhold information, they have to lie by omission, they have to not teach about other religions or atheism or whatever.
So, yeah, so you can't love that.
I mean, people are just so scarred and defensive and conclusion addicted and, as a result, so prone to irrational ad hominems in someone that, you know, it's almost like, why would you want to save these people?
Well, I mean, this is the great humility of reason, is that reason can be rejected and there's nothing you can do about it.
Statism can be rejected and there's something you can do about it, which is to throw someone in jail, right?
Taxation can be rejected and you can arrest people.
So statism has the, oh, you reject me, I force you.
It's the rapist philosophy.
But philosophy doesn't have that.
Religion can be, you reject me, I kill you.
You commit apostasy, the sentence is death.
You deviate from my teachings, you burn in hell.
So, ideologies have punishments, whether supernatural or corporeal.
Corporeal? Corporeal.
Corporeal or corporeal, yeah, both work.
Army, physical, and physical.
So ideologies and mysticism, they have the, oh, you don't agree with me?
Well, I damn you to hell out of prison.
But philosophy doesn't have that, you see?
We don't have that.
We don't have a whip.
If people reject reason, the rational course of action, Is to disengage.
In the same way that if somebody doesn't speak the language you're speaking, there's not much point yelling louder.
They simply will not speak it.
And defensiveness is the opposite of reason, because it is the assumption of an irrational answer where there is none, and therefore, no more searching!
I'm looking for my keys.
I hold my keys in my hand.
What do I do? I stop looking for my keys.
I'm looking for an answer. I have a pretend answer in my hand.
What do I do? I stop looking for an answer.
So, we can't love the world that is, right?
The world is full of defensive anti-rationality.
And therefore, we can't love it.
How could we? But we can have hope for the future.
We can love the world that is to be.
We can love the world that we can midwife into groaning, sputtering life.
And we can love the potential.
We can look for the infinite...
the tiny little gradations of change that can produce light.
We can love the friction of the stick that produces the fire.
And we can encourage...
That in people. I mean, we do have, you know, it's not really a threat, but we do have the weapon of ostracism.
I mean, I sort of hesitate to use it as a threat thing, because if I go on a date with a woman and she doesn't want to come on a second date with me, is she punishing me?
Is she attacking me? No, she's just exercising voluntarism.
If I ask a woman on a date and she says no because she doesn't like the way I look, doesn't like the cut of my jib, well, is she punishing me?
Is she hurting me? Is she attacking me?
Well, I may be hurt, but, you know, what are the alternatives, right?
Force? No. We do have that.
We do have ostracism, which is so powerful that even very few libertarians want to exercise it.
Very few anarchists want to exercise it.
So, I don't have any way to tell you how to love the world that is, because I think it would be an irrational thing to do.
I mean, you can't fundamentally want to change the world and love it for what it is.
I mean, that's just not rational.
If you want to change something, it's because there's a dissatisfaction.
You can't say, I love being fat, but I want to be thin.
You may accept being fat, you may, you know, but wanting to change something is evidence of a dissatisfaction of the way it is.
And the degree to which you want to change the world is the degree to which you do not love the way it is.
I mean, that's just axiom. I mean, you can't deal.
That's the way it is. The more you want to change something, the less happy you are.
If you're going north, and then you immediately say, oh my god, I've got to go south, then you are as dissatisfied with going north as you can be, because north is taking the opposite direction.
And those of us who are You know, first principles kind of people, secularists, atheists, rationalists, anarchists, whatever.
Well, we want to change the world about as much as it can be changed, and that means that we do not love the world.
In fact, there are many, many, many aspects of the world that we hate and fear, because the rationality is dangerous in a way that reason is never dangerous.
So I think accepting that, you know, it sounds like giving to the hate, but the hate is a natural part of wanting to change things, or at least certainly a lack of love.
And we can love potential, I think, when potential is manifested.
But if potential is attacked, resisted, and opposed, well, there is a line in the world, and we have our friends, and we have our enemies, and we have our frenemies.
And that's the way it is.
It's not what we choose, but that is what we empirically observe.
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