What is the philosophical definition of a healthy ego? What are the ethics of addiction? How can I save my nieces from their drunken father? Why do I not love my virtuous girlfriend?
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| All right. It is the 29th of April 2012, and I wanted to thank everyone for their help on the documentary. | |
| Again, if you'd like to donate to that, freedomainradio.com forward slash donate. | |
| Would really, really appreciate that. | |
| It's coming along quite nicely. | |
| And I guess we'll just get going straight with the listeners. | |
| I think we have somebody on the line who wishes to have a chittle-chattle. | |
| Well, somebody had a question in the chat room about the – we had almost 330 gigabytes of podcast downloads in one day. | |
| I think that was right after the Peter Schiff show that I did. | |
| So, obviously, that reached out with some smoky tendrils of infinite thought. | |
| To some new listeners, and yeah, the bandwidth, I mean, my cost is about 20 bucks for 500 gigs, so that was almost 20 bucks worth of bandwidth in a day. | |
| And I mean, that was higher than normal for sure, but it's encouraging and frightening at the same time. | |
| So that's good. | |
| Anyway. Hi, Steph. | |
| Hey, how's it going? Good, thanks. | |
| I just had a couple of questions about ego. | |
| And I want to get your take on a couple of conflicting approaches that I found. | |
| And so I've written just a short summary here. | |
| If I could read a little bit out to you. | |
| So the three approaches I'm looking at are, I don't know if you've heard of Eckhart Tolle. | |
| Oh, yeah. He had a book called The Power of Now. | |
| And then there's Landmark. | |
| And then there's Ayn Rand's approach. | |
| I've accepted various parts of all of them, and now I'm just confused. | |
| With the Eckhart Tolle approach, his basic idea is that your conscious mind is a tool like a computer. | |
| You can use it as needed, but don't be a computer. | |
| You just want to... Don't actually experience your whole life from that point of view of yourself. | |
| And that there are other aspects of your mind that you can experience reality from that are much more pleasant and so on. | |
| And from that ego, it only knows admiration, pride, shame, victory, power, pleasure, interest in simulation, judgment and so on. | |
| Sorry, I'm just getting some paper noise or something. | |
| Is that coming from you? Is that better? | |
| Yeah, let's keep going. | |
| Alright, sorry about that. Sorry, can you just give me the emotion? | |
| This is Eckhart Tolle, right? | |
| What was the emotional states that he was saying the ego is set to dread? | |
| Sure, so admiration, pride, shame, victory, loss, achievement, pleasure, power, judgment, kind of like, yeah, things of that nature. | |
| I'm sorry, so those are the feelings that he associates with the conscious mind? | |
| Yeah, the conscious thinking mind, the part that's actively the mind chatter. | |
| Yeah, yeah, but I'm sorry, I'm no expert on the guy, but how does he know? | |
| I mean, how does he know that admiration and pleasure and pride and shame and whatever, how does he know that these are states of the conscious mind? | |
| I mean, what differentiator is there? | |
| So what he's doing is he's lumping all these states together in a construct that he makes clear that he's defining his terms when he's writing about them. | |
| He's not relating to existing terms so much. | |
| So it was the idea that all of these things are useful survival mechanisms, but they don't actually give you the same enjoyment that you can have if you just put them aside Sorry, but didn't he include the word pleasure? | |
| He meant sensory pleasure, drinking, sex, food, all these kinds of things that are nice, but that are typically used by many people to escape from the lack of real connectedness and love that they feel when they inhabit their ego too much, as he defines it. And then, yeah, does that make sense? | |
| I'm not sure. I mean, if he's associating ego with addiction, then that's not valid, right? | |
| Because we already have the word addiction, and the word addiction is not the same as the word ego. | |
| Sure, okay. I mean, so if he's saying that there are, you know, these shallow transient pleasures that make things worse in the long run that we pursue and so on, then he would be talking about addiction. | |
| And addiction is, you know, very, very different from ego. | |
| I mean, ego is just sort of the conscious analyzing, you know, the sort of standard sense or the conscious analyzing part of our mind that we have direct access to, whereas, you know, the unconscious is something that we don't have direct access to, but we get the effects of its analysis through emotions and through inspiration and all these other kinds of things. | |
| But the addictive mind – sorry, the addictive aspect of the mind is – and I'm just going straight off Gabor Maté's work here in the realm of Hungry Ghosts and the realm of Hungry Ghosts, which is his work as an addiction counseling doctor for many years in British Columbia. | |
| The addictive side of the mind is specifically bred through trauma, right? | |
| So very briefly, there have been tons of experiments that have done in this and it's almost unanimous that addiction is sort of a brain ailment that arises from trauma and then combined with exposure to particular substances. | |
| So particular substances don't cause like heroin or whatever. | |
| They don't They don't cause addiction in and of themselves because the majority of people can try these things and not become addicted. | |
| And people who have a healthy upbringing and good relationships, they can be on painkilling drugs for a long time and not become at all addictive. | |
| And the most addictive substance is tobacco, which is I think a 34% addiction rate from people who try it for the first time. | |
| But of course that's still two-thirds of people who don't. | |
| I think heroin is in the low 30s. | |
| Cocaine is only about 10%. | |
| The majority of people, even crystal meth, I think 5% of Canadians have tried it and only less than 1% have actually become addicted. | |
| And of course, if the substance was the addiction, those two numbers would be about the same. | |
| And they've done this experiment. | |
| You can make just about any lab animal into a drug addict, but only if you put it in a small cage and don't give it a fulfilling natural environment. | |
| They've done experiments where they created this rat plant. | |
| It was a cage or rat environment, but it was huge. | |
| There was tons of stuff to play with. | |
| It had natural light, light and dark. | |
| There were 30 or 40 rats in there, and they put sugar plus morphine, like the two things that rats love, sugar and morphine together, and they just didn't care. | |
| They would try it, and they would just wander off. | |
| And they wouldn't bother. | |
| But if you jam a bunch of rats into a smaller cage and don't give them stuff to play with and so on, they'll become addicted very quickly. | |
| So it is a traumatic environment, plus trying these drugs for some people results in addiction. | |
| So if he's talking about the addictive mind... | |
| Then, you know, he's talking about a broken arm, so to speak. | |
| But that's, you know, if you take the word broken out and just say arm, I think that's an unfair extrapolation of the term. | |
| So if he means the addicted or addictive mind, that's different from the ego. | |
| If I could, I probably did a bit of a disservice in my explanation there. | |
| What I meant was more like... | |
| So people are addicted to... | |
| His stance is people are addicted to thinking rather than living. | |
| And they live in this world of thoughts that are cut off from a lot of their true emotions so that everything is filtered and distorted. | |
| And it's kind of like a prison within their mind. | |
| In order to escape that prison, they then resort to things that could be great pleasures, but they use them as escape. | |
| Right. So rather than lovemaking, they have sort of empty casual sex, that kind of stuff, right? | |
| Yeah, exactly. Rather than good food, they have junk food or that kind of stuff, right? | |
| Okay. So rather – even on another level, rather than enjoying their work and getting expression out of it, they're striving in their work in this very tense proving something kind of way rather than just being free and enjoying it. | |
| Yeah. Why does he think, sorry, just out of curiosity, what does he think the cause of this is? | |
| Basically, our exposure to our environment growing up and our minds are like survival machines looking for, like we're designed to survive whatever our environment is, but the side effect of that survival machine is that it works, but it's not going to make you happy. | |
| It's just going to So the idea is you want to recognize that that's what it's designed for, but just don't switch on the machine unless you have to try and experience reality from outside of that machine, if that makes sense. | |
| Okay, so does he feel that it's his argument that is it child abuse that causes this sort of mental dissociation and intellectualism? | |
| He wasn't clear on that in his book, but what he tended to focus on was it was more the thinking habits that come from people's experiences growing up. | |
| So, for example, it's not so much the degree of trauma in what he was saying as the degree of what you make it mean. | |
| That's where the… Oh, and that's an overlap with Landmark, right? | |
| Yeah, exactly. Okay. | |
| And I guess that covers the landmark approach as well. | |
| They also say, so you're designed to survive this world, but the key is, sure, you can be always looking at what's true, what's false, judging, comparing, evaluating. | |
| And while you're doing that, you might get some useful information. | |
| But while you're doing that, you're also cut off from A lot of the experience of life that would involve actually living on a more complete level, feeling connected with people and so on. | |
| And their approach is that you have this Most of the time, most people are either resentful, sorry, building up resentments that they use as excuses to get out of responsibility or like they'll pick someone to get irritated at just so they can get away with something themselves. | |
| Or they'll spend the rest of their time striving in some other way to prove something, to prove that they're independent or to prove that they're A lovable or something like that. | |
| And all these kinds of things are substitutes that are just part of that survival machine in their framework as well. | |
| So that's their approach. | |
| And then you have the Randian, Nathaniel Brandon type approach where they say people who try to transcend their ego haven't developed a healthy one and are trying to escape reality. | |
| And I kind of got the... | |
| I kind of get confused by all of this at a certain point. | |
| What is a healthy ego? | |
| How is it useful? | |
| How would you compare it to this experience that sometimes you have when you're not thinking about anything, you're just really in love with the moment that you're experiencing? | |
| Really in love with the moment that you're experiencing, right? | |
| That's a strange way of putting it, but... | |
| No, no, I mean, I think I understand it. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I think we've all had those moments where it's just like, wow, everything's perfect, and I don't want anything else in the moment. | |
| And there's a lot of life, of course, that is challenging, striving, and all that kind of stuff, so... | |
| Like that feeling where you don't need... | |
| Where you don't need anything? | |
| Right. And so, are you asking me what I think a healthy ego is? | |
| Well, I'm asking, so what do you define as a healthy conception of an ego compared to an unhealthy one, and how do you say that the strengths or limitations of these various approaches fits with that, or do you have your own? Well, I mean, I don't want to – this is a big question. | |
| Maybe I'll do a show on it devoted and I appreciate you bringing it up. | |
| But I don't think you can have a healthy ego at the moment. | |
| I don't think it's functionally possible because society is so messed up. | |
| Right? I mean, it's – society is so messed up that – I mean, to have a healthy ego is to have a strong and confident relationship with reality. | |
| To be empirical, to be rational, to be honest, to be honest with people around you. | |
| To be accurate, to be truthful, all of these good things. | |
| To have a healthy relationship with reality. | |
| Unfortunately, the majority of our reality is other people who themselves have a very sick relationship to reality and a very hostile relationship to truth and reason and evidence. | |
| So I don't believe that it is possible To have a healthy ego at the moment. | |
| I think that we can work to build a world in which a healthy ego is not only possible, but the norm and praised and good. | |
| But most people's relationship with reality is really messed up and is quite the opposite of what it should be. | |
| And of course, most people are traumatized and don't know it. | |
| And most people are not only uneducated, but propagandized and don't know it. | |
| And most people see the barest whiff of truth coming their way and play whack-a-mole with whoever happens to put their bald head up through the matrix and point it out, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Look, this is something that I – because I have seen a different – every time I see someone say on Facebook or whatever post how all the problems in the world could disappear if people just set aside their egos and things like that, I just want to get in there and go – No, no, no. | |
| All the people who don't talk about child abuse just have no credibility. | |
| I mean not just with me. | |
| I mean with the science. | |
| Right, so if... | |
| And to me, this is a big thing that objectivism missed out on, which was parenting. | |
| Objectivism should have just... | |
| I mean, Atlas Shrugged should have been Atlas at the daycare. | |
| It should have been... | |
| And she does touch on it very briefly in Galt's Gulch, but there's, I mean, no manual on parenting. | |
| I mean, so people who... | |
| It's superstition and mysticism to try to describe human beings without reference to their origins. | |
| It's not knowing the difference between ten rats in a tiny cage and a rat in its natural environment. | |
| You know, we're almost all of us, ten rats in a tiny cage. | |
| It's like going to a zoo and thinking that you're a biologist studying animals in their natural habitat. | |
| And not even a good zoo, like some horrible Russian traveling circus where they beat the bears. | |
| Do you know what I mean? | |
| And then you're studying these bears that are scabrous and beaten and terrified and fed badly and, you know, fat. | |
| I wonder why. | |
| And then you're saying, well, you know, bears don't seem to have a very good relationship to their environment. | |
| Let's lecture the bears, right? | |
| Let's lecture the bears about their deficiencies, about how they're not living in the moment, man. | |
| you Thank you. | |
| Right? Well, I don't think there's so much lecturing them as saying, just look, they're saying, look, yeah, this stuff happened, but... | |
| Without a time travel machine, all you've really got is what you can do now about it. | |
| Right. But what I want to know is – sorry to interrupt – but what I always want to know is why don't they talk about voluntarism? | |
| Why don't they talk about ostracism? | |
| Why don't they talk about not having abusive people in your life? | |
| Why is it always that we have to look inwards and adjust ourselves to the crazy world and try and find some way to live as if the world wasn't crazy? | |
| Right. It's sort of like, I don't know, like 100 years ago or maybe even 50 years ago or whatever when it was sort of inconceivable for women to leave abusive husbands. | |
| To lecture them about how they just don't seem to be living in the moment. | |
| You know, they really need to look inward and they really need to figure out a way to live in the moment and to be relaxed and happy. | |
| Not overthink things too much. | |
| Not to be stressed out. Don't worry about things. | |
| Just enjoy the sun and the breeze and don't do anything weird and all that. | |
| And it's like, why are you lecturing the women? | |
| I can see that. | |
| Definitely, I can see that. | |
| I guess... | |
| It's just another way of getting the slaves to attack themselves. | |
| Something's wrong with me. I need to find some way to be free and happy. | |
| It's just something else that's wrong with me, according to these people. | |
| But without talking about the course and my... | |
| The cure to evil is to not be around evil. | |
| I mean, that's the only thing that you can't cure evil, right? | |
| See, it's kind of like that thing where... | |
| So, for instance, when I went to therapy, I had this issue where the more I got into things, just the worse I felt, the sadder I felt, the more helpless I felt when I went into the past. | |
| And I didn't really see a way through that was going to be... | |
| Way out of the other side. | |
| It was only the ideas of responsibility and so on that gave me some kind of sense of, alright, I've got to stop running this stuff over and over my head again and just actually look at what's in front of me right here and now. | |
| To some degree, I don't know if that's right. | |
| Feelings are actions. | |
| Feelings are for action. | |
| And so anyone who doesn't counsel action but who talks about feelings is blaming the victim, in my opinion. | |
| Sure. Right. | |
| You, oh victim, need to adjust your feelings. | |
| Not your environment, right? | |
| Right. Slaves shouldn't be freed. | |
| I'm going to go and lecture the slaves about how to be happier with slavery and to not even call it slavery but just say that they seem to be oddly unmotivated and they seem to be oddly uninterested in improving their lot and they seem to be oddly depressed and they seem to be oddly living in their heads and they have this irrational fear of whips and let's talk with them about that. | |
| Right? Whereas there are other people who are running the Underground Railroad and actually getting these slaves to freedom. | |
| Who's serving the slave master? | |
| The former. Yeah. | |
| They're enabling the system. | |
| Of course they are. Okay. | |
| Okay. Now, sorry, to give Ayn Rand credit, right, I mean, she consistently talked about separating from abusers, right? | |
| Or exploiters. I mean, that was the whole story of Hank Reardon, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. But he's your brother! | |
| But she's your mother! | |
| Right? Yeah, I thought that was great. | |
| These people weren't explicitly abusive. | |
| They were just kind of mean and selfish and exploitive. | |
| They wanted him for his money and so on, right? | |
| But the whole point of that was to... | |
| Right? He attempted to reform the relationships and... | |
| When he couldn't, he got out. | |
| Yeah. People think I've invented this stuff. | |
| It's funny. Well, see, I actually... | |
| Sorry, I won't take too much longer, but there's one thing that I just remembered noticing. | |
| When I was in Landmark, I noticed that pretty much everyone actually had a... | |
| It wasn't that they were all in denial about their families. | |
| They were really pissed off about their parents and so on. | |
| They really had a lot to say about them. | |
| They knew exactly a lot of the things that were really... | |
| The grudges and so on they had. | |
| And not just grudges, but just legitimate grievances that they had with their families. | |
| And it strikes me that that really goes against what I've encountered for most people... | |
| Normally. What does Landmark suggest that they do? | |
| Landmark suggests that they forgive and they go and forgive. | |
| I love them. Exactly. | |
| There's a couple of times when I've seen that, I'm just like, that's not going to work. | |
| It's going to work for the parents, right? | |
| It's going to work for the parents. | |
| It's interesting. It goes to show you the divergent values or perspectives within society. | |
| So, the significant majority of divorces are initiated by women, right? | |
| Do you know what the number one reason for divorce is? | |
| No. Is it abuse? | |
| Are they being abused? No. | |
| Is it an affair? | |
| No. Is it irreconcilable differences? | |
| No. Do you know what the number one reason is? | |
| What? Dissatisfaction. | |
| Okay, okay, I see that. | |
| Dissatisfaction. And society praises this. | |
| Right? At least certainly they don't condemn it. | |
| Even when there are kids involved. | |
| I mean, go to the Huffington Post if you've got the application. | |
| Read a couple of stories about in the divorce section. | |
| It's all about propping up people's bad decisions. | |
| You go, girl. You go, sister. | |
| You've done the right thing. It's going to be hard, but you'll be better off for it. | |
| It's all about authenticity. | |
| It's all about self-expression. | |
| It's all about freedom. It's all about what works for you. | |
| Sometimes things just don't work out, and it's good for you to recognize that and make the right decision for you, right? | |
| And so I've never – I mean, certainly the people I've said, hey, you don't have to spend time with your family if you don't want to. | |
| I mean, that's just a fact, right? They're not just saying I'm vaguely dissatisfied, but even if they were, I mean, society incredibly supports women, and I mean some men too, right, but the majority are women, who just, they're just dissatisfied, so they're going to break up a family. | |
| Right? But you hear the way that some people have been treated by their parents, and you say, hey, go to therapy, but you know, it's voluntary, all adult relationships are voluntary. | |
| Suddenly that's really bad, right? | |
| And that's what I'm concerned about with people in these professions who are – oh, no, I shouldn't say the professions. | |
| The people who talk about this kind of stuff. | |
| What can – what actions do the emotions produce? | |
| What actions can the emotions produce? | |
| Because if you're going to focus on your feelings without having the capacity of altering your actions, your feelings are going to get really pissed off. | |
| Right. Do you know what I mean? | |
| Yes, I do. You pick up, you know, your dermatologist and your dermatologist says, you know, well maybe you should wriggle around a bit or maybe, you know, just blow on it a little bit to cool it and so on. | |
| But, you know, you've got to learn to love this. | |
| This would be criminal. | |
| I mean, first thing you've got to do is get out of the sun. | |
| Right? You've got to move. | |
| You've got to do something to get out of the environment that is causing you harm. | |
| Man, I have the biggest smile on my face right now. | |
| Thank you for saying that thing that you just said about feelings. | |
| That was gold. Alright. | |
| Because that basically is, I feel like I've been going around in my head with feelings and not taking, not using them to do anything. | |
| They just get more intense. | |
| How happy is your skin going to be if you just sit there and lecture your skin while staying in the harsh sunlight? | |
| It's going to be really rebellious. | |
| It's going to fuck you up, right? You fuck me up, I fuck you up right back, right? | |
| Okay. And so your feelings... | |
| So when I read these books, and I've read a lot of them, I've not read much Tali, but I've read... | |
| I mean, I've had exposure to Landmark. | |
| And so my sort of feeling, my perspective is, so I'm just supposed to sort of fucking sit here and navel-gaze and push around my inner little feelings and rearrange my little chessboard of my heart and all that. | |
| Like, when the fuck do I actually do something with this stuff? | |
| And I, you know, what is the... | |
| Now, for other people in society... | |
| This is very clear, right? | |
| What does everyone tell victims of spousal abuse to do? | |
| Just leave. Yeah, just leave. | |
| Yeah, just get out. Get out. | |
| Like, now. Do not pass go. | |
| Do not collect $200. Pack your bag and go. | |
| Right? And there are movies. | |
| There are shows. I mean, this is just accepted. | |
| Because they're supposed to act on their feelings, right? | |
| You understand? See, after they leave... | |
| After they've used the feeling to basically get out of the relationship, I think maybe the issue is when people go and they still ruminate on it and they still go over it again and again in their heads and use that as an excuse after the fact to not do something important in their lives. | |
| That's really abstract. It sounds like it's in a really personal place, but it's a really abstract way of describing it. | |
| So perhaps you can be a little bit more meaty in your description. | |
| It can still be theoretical, but just give me something a bit more concrete. | |
| Okay, so I had a falling out with some friends a few years ago. | |
| It was mostly my issue, but there were a couple of things with them that I was really pissed off about. | |
| I stopped seeing them. | |
| Basically, after a year and a half of that, I was still holding on to resentment about it and spending active thinking time about it when I could actually be doing something else with my time. | |
| I couldn't let it go. | |
| I didn't know how to let it go. | |
| I'd never learned that skill of letting go of a grudge. | |
| I just... | |
| I think that was probably the main reason why I was looking for something, just anything that was going to be different to the standard approach of just judging people severely and just living at that. | |
| Because I didn't know what comes next. | |
| I didn't know how to let that stuff go. | |
| And as a result, I noticed myself using it as an excuse. | |
| Sorry, using what as an excuse for what? | |
| Sorry, using this resentment as an excuse. | |
| For example, I'm sorry. | |
| Don't worry about it. | |
| I think I've got enough. So let me give you a quick two-bit amateur analysis and you can tell me if it makes any sense. | |
| Okay, so you had a falling out with your friends and you dwelled on it, right? | |
| It happens. It happens to all of us. | |
| Nothing wrong with it. I think there are two reasons that people dwell on stuff. | |
| The first reason is because they haven't learned the lessons that are needed to prevent things, right? | |
| Yes. They have not learned the lessons that they need to prevent a recurrence. | |
| And so they keep going back over and over. | |
| They can't let it go because they haven't learned their lesson yet. | |
| Okay. And this is why people are drawn back to these kinds of thinking. | |
| And if they haven't got that correlation yet, right? | |
| You know, if I got a really bad sunburn but I haven't associated it with being out in the sun without sunscreen, then I haven't learned the lesson to prevent. | |
| Which means I'm still going to worry about my sunburn because I haven't figured out how to prevent it, right? | |
| Does that make sense? Yeah. | |
| And so you keep thinking about stuff until you get the root of it and then you learn how to prevent it, right? | |
| Yeah, exactly. That's one aspect of it. | |
| It's when... | |
| Sorry, keep going? | |
| No, no, you were going to say? | |
| When I think of the times, especially with stuff to do with high school and bullies and stuff, I mean, it's so long ago. | |
| It's stuff that I don't really need to be going over, and yet I still have a feeling of, like, rarely now, but still, sometimes I'll feel like, if I was in that situation again... | |
| Right, so what that means is that you're not sure how to not be in that situation again. | |
| Does that make sense? Like, if I get mauled by a lion and I move to Nunavut, Northern Canada, I'm pretty much not going to worry about being mauled by a lion again, right? | |
| But if I'm still out wandering, marinated with gazelle legs strapped to my back in the middle of the African bush, then I'm still going to be worried about being mauled by a lion. | |
| I'm going to go over and over it because I'm still in a situation of risk, right? | |
| So if we haven't figured out how to prevent recurrence of problems, then we are going to worry about those problems, right? | |
| I think that's most of it in my case, yeah. | |
| Thank you for that. Well, there could be another one, which is the second reason that people dwell is they're waiting for the call. | |
| They're waiting for the call. | |
| They're waiting for the other person to wake up one morning and say, Oh my goodness gracious, Zeus on a high stick of dynamite, I did my friend wrong. | |
| I've thought about it. | |
| Gosh, it's all just burst upon me like a... | |
| Like sunfire on the surface of the sun. | |
| A solar flare of awakening has erupted from my very chest itself and burned my corneas with the unalterable x-ray beams of truth. | |
| And, oh my goodness, I'm going to call this guy up and say, I get it. | |
| I'm so sorry. You're right. | |
| I did this and this and this wrong. | |
| Thank you for calling me on it. | |
| Let's have brunch. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| That actually, I ended up doing that. | |
| That felt great to do that. | |
| Oh, you did that to someone else? | |
| Yeah, but I've never experienced that from anyone. | |
| Yeah, you know, there's this, you know, I've said this before, you know, these scenes, you always see these in movies and sitcoms, you know, the girl is leaving to go to Paris for the job of her dreams, and the guy just wakes up one day and goes, oh my god, I love her so much, and he runs to the airport and he tackles this way. | |
| You don't see this so much since the TSA came in, but tackles this way past security, begs and buys a ticket with his own cash, gives a pint of blood to top off the taxes, and goes through and talks to the woman, begs and pleads, and they're together, right? | |
| That somebody's willing to work that hard to To save or maintain a relationship. | |
| Yeah, or you can just do what's correct. | |
| Yeah, fix things somehow. | |
| Well, no, but I mean, even that is incredibly rare. | |
| I mean, I think that's just a wish fulfillment fantasy that people have that someone care enough about them to do all of that. | |
| And it not be desperate, codependent need, right? | |
| But of course, if you're healthy enough, You know, if you're healthy enough, like, my wife would do that for me, and I would do that for her, but because we love each other so much, that's never going to happen, right? | |
| It's this idea that we can be as dysfunctional as we want, and then a spasm of insight can somehow make us better and make us whole, and that's just not true. | |
| You smoke for 40 years, if you suddenly wake up one day and realize that smoking is bad for you, you don't get a fresh set of lungs, right? | |
| I mean, you're still all scarred and burnt up on the inside, right? | |
| And if you are dysfunctional and nasty and selfish and petty and vindictive for year after year after year, well that scars and burdens up your insides. | |
| It turns your heart into a marshmallow that's just been left in the fire on a stick. | |
| There's nothing left but a little dinosaur husk of carbon. | |
| And if you wake up one day and realize that you've been not a great person, in fact a nasty person to many people for most of your life, you don't just get – the angels do not deliver you a fresh heart. | |
| That's just a myth. That's a fantasy. | |
| That's a way for people to postpone Being better people to the point where they never end up doing it. | |
| This fantasy of salvation, right? | |
| So if I imagine that if I just wake up one day and completely understand how bad smoking is for me, I get a fresh new set of lungs and it will be as if I'd never smoked. | |
| What's that my excuse for? | |
| You'll never quit. Yeah, you'll keep doing it. | |
| Yeah, the fantasy of salvation is – people only quit because the damage that smoking does is, at least in the short term, irreversible. | |
| In the long run, 15 years or whatever, your risk factors go down for a lot of stuff or whatever. | |
| But this fantasy of salvation is, at least in my understanding, the brain does not magically heal itself. | |
| Right? The brain doesn't sort of just wake up reconfigured to reason and kindness and empathy. | |
| Virtue is a habit that we have to inculcate in ourselves and we have to maintain. | |
| You don't just, you know, 300 pounds, you know, chain smoke, you don't just wake up one day strapped to that, you know, strapped into a lean Bruce Jenner style body and able to sprint your way faster than the flash combined with Yosemite Sam on cocaine. | |
| What happens is if you are a 300 pound chain smoker, It's possible, I guess, one day that you might be able to run successfully a marathon. | |
| But that's probably going to be at least 10 years of pretty damn hard slog. | |
| And it has to start now. | |
| But this fantasy that we're just going to wake up healed one day or wake up better one day is, to my understanding, not only philosophically ridiculous, but scientifically ridiculous as well. | |
| That the brain can change itself, but it takes an enormous amount of effort. | |
| It takes an enormous amount of effort. | |
| To do that. More people successfully lose weight than successfully improve their personalities, I believe. | |
| And losing weight and keeping it off is the minority. | |
| I think it's less than 10% of people actually who really want to lose weight. | |
| Less than 10% of them actually lose it and keep it off. | |
| Most people lose it and gain more back. | |
| It's like all your bad habits are standing against you. | |
| They're the natural tendency. | |
| Well, they're not standing against you. | |
| They are you. | |
| Right? | |
| A habit is you. | |
| They start as cobwebs, they end as chains, as the Spanish proverb goes. | |
| What we do is our personality. | |
| There's no magic. | |
| It's the idea of a soul, right? | |
| That there's some part that is apart from us that remains pure, that God has created and that no man can corrupt. | |
| Right? | |
| This idea that there's a part of our being that is separate from who we are and what we do that remains pure. | |
| It's just a hangover from the god binge of the past, say, 20,000 years. | |
| It's this idea that there's a great or perfect or wonderful part of us that remains independent of whatever we do. | |
| Like we have these magic fantasy perfect lungs that are immune to the effects of smoking. | |
| It's not true. We don't have any backup lungs. | |
| There's no part of us inside that says, in case of stage 4 lung cancer, break glass and take out these pink fresh new lungs and put them in. | |
| Right? What we do to our body is, through our habits, is who we are. | |
| And the brain is just a part of our body. | |
| If we drink alcohol like crazy, then our liver gets diseased. | |
| And there's no healthy, God-given, Jesus freshly spanked liver that we can replace it with. | |
| That is our liver. And I guess you can replace the liver with someone else's, but you can't do that with the brain. | |
| No. Right? | |
| So there is no such thing as of us and our habits. | |
| We are our habits. Our habits are us. | |
| And every step you take in the wrong direction is two steps uphill that you have to take in the right direction. | |
| Everything that is based upon the momentum of history is a soft downhill glide of relative comfort. | |
| And going uphill is spiky and difficult and all the other dysfunctional people who've been riding with you downhill will turn around the moment you turn around and try and rope and grapple you back down into the squalid pit of Hades with them. | |
| There is a kind of clearly defined part of the mind that can, like, take over and say, all right, all this stuff, it's just going to change. | |
| Some of these habits, like, we're going to start working on this. | |
| And whoever that is inside you is not the habit. | |
| It's some other part of you that's taking control over how the structure of what you're going to be doing is, to some degree. | |
| Well, but see the other thing, too. | |
| But no, we judge that relative to its success. | |
| Yeah, okay. Right, because that which we attempt and fail at is more a confirmation of bad habits than of good habits. | |
| I mean, somebody who tries to quit smoking but then ends up quitting smoking has only strength in smoking. | |
| Because now they have a failure, right? | |
| Remember, failure can promote more failure, right? | |
| And so somebody who tries to do something better and quits is a little more likely to give up hope. | |
| And also, people who try to change without looking at the root causes of their dysfunction, I believe, are much less likely to succeed. | |
| Okay, cool. I can see that. | |
| Right, which is sort of what we talked about. | |
| Stuff comes from the childhood and so on. | |
| And so, we sort of talked about why people dwell upon prior wrongs and past wrongs. | |
| Yeah, so first, they haven't figured out what they did before. | |
| to cause this and how they ended up in the bad situation so they have danger of recurrence and the second thing is that they're waiting for repentance from the other person and repentance is never worth waiting for it's never worth waiting for and I don't mean that repentance never comes but repentance comes in 24 or 48 hours if repentance hasn't come that quickly Then what's happened almost certainly is the person has created an ex post facto justification in which they're right and you're wrong, | |
| and therefore repentance becomes practically impossible. | |
| I mean, you can wait for it, sure, and I guess you can also not get a job and you can wait for a winning lottery ticket to blow up your ass, but neither of those seem to be a big good happen, I suppose, but it's not worth waiting for. | |
| I think that what you just described are those ex post facto justifications. | |
| I think that's actually what I think I meant by the kind of resentments that are sort of lumped in with an excuse. | |
| It's like the excuse happens first and then we come up with a story. | |
| Yeah, if we've done something that's wrong, then we're in a state of discomfort. | |
| We're in a state of anxiety. And there's two ways that we change that, right? | |
| We either then do the right thing, or we make up a fiction in which we did the right thing, and the other person did the wrong thing, and click! | |
| Everything goes back into dysfunctional pattern, right? | |
| So no, I don't wait. | |
| I'm happy to accept apologies. | |
| And sometimes I did a podcast a while ago with a guy who trolled FDR pretty heavily and he apologized and so on. | |
| And I thought that was nice and this was sometime afterwards. | |
| And I do get letters of apology for people who've been dysfunctional towards me. | |
| I get letters of apology, you know, occasionally, a couple of years maybe. | |
| But I mean, it's nothing I sit around and wait for. | |
| And even if you get that letter of apology, it still doesn't mean you're going to be friends. | |
| No, no, no. Right. | |
| So, yeah, if you've had a falling out with people, you know, obviously before I do anything in relationships, I really, you know, talk it over and work it out and try and talk it out with the other person and so on. | |
| And then when I'm comfortable that I've done everything that I can to solve problems in the relationship, what I do is I simply refuse. | |
| I refuse. I do not give myself the slutty luxury of Of doing all the work. | |
| I sit back, and I wait and see what the other person does, and then I wait and see how I feel about that. | |
| Thanks, Steph. It's okay for you to be wooed. | |
| It's okay for you to lie back and let other people solve your problems once in a while. | |
| In fact, about half the time. | |
| Anyway, listen, I've got to move on to some other callers, but great, great set of questions. | |
| I hope that was helpful. Thanks. | |
| That was really helpful. Thank you, Steph. | |
| You're very welcome. All right, well, we have four more people, so let's see if we can get them all in. | |
| Okay, go ahead. So first up, we have Bernard or Bernhard. | |
| I'm sorry if I said that wrong. | |
| All right. Okay, can you hear me? | |
| Yeah, a little muddy, but not too bad. | |
| What's up? Well, I'm calling from our hotel room in Ecuador, so maybe it's not the best of the connection. | |
| Maybe we can turn off the... | |
| The video, so it improves the video. | |
| It's not being watched. Yeah. | |
| Is it okay now? | |
| Yeah, go ahead. Okay. | |
| Well, it's nice for having me. | |
| I listen quite a while to some of your shows, especially on YouTube. | |
| And I wanted just to address with you the issue about when you talk I'm basically on your side, but... | |
| Sorry, I missed the topic. | |
| What was it? You know, I would like to talk about you, that you talk about the bad government and forcing them on us and that one should be free and all you're bringing up in your... | |
| Especially I see what you bring on YouTube. | |
| I'm with you in the most of your argument, but on the other side, I know as well that there are many people, they're just not prepared for it, and they certainly need still guidance, you know. You have often heard that a lot of people, you know, they think they need a government. | |
| Right. So, then I was thinking, you know, this is just a thought. | |
| This is one of those thoughts you wake up in the morning and you just have him in your head, you know. | |
| So, why don't... | |
| One tries an approach, you know, to really do something, I call it, we the people 2.0. | |
| Having a thought of rules, not enforced by some government, but instead by some You know, computer program, you know. | |
| So certain decisions, you know, it's like on the traffic, on the intersection, there is a light, here is yellow, green, and red, and you can go when you have green, and you go when you have red, you know. | |
| So this may come for a lot of people to say, okay, I have still something like rules, but they're not enforced by politicians, not enforced by a government. | |
| This is just a thought. | |
| I throw you in and I like what you think about it. | |
| Sure. I mean, I'm fine. | |
| You know, as long as violence – I mean, violence is the only thing that I'm really concerned about. | |
| Everything else is just an after effect. | |
| And so, yeah, what society looks like in the absence of institutional violence, it's interesting. | |
| It will be interesting to see. But I don't really care. | |
| What society looks like after we end slavery and give equal rights to women. | |
| Who cares? What matters is we do the right thing. | |
| Some people may want to submit themselves to a computer program. | |
| I've been a computer programmer for about 20 years, so I'm not sure I'd want to because computer programs are neither impartial nor bug-free. | |
| But yeah, if you want to try that, I think that would be great. | |
| I think there will be a lot of wonderful ideas that will come out and... | |
| I think it's going to be fascinating to watch. | |
| You know, you can try yours, I can try mine. | |
| Lots of people will be offering the best solutions and I think it would be interesting to see. | |
| But it doesn't fundamentally matter what happens after we're free. | |
| Well, I would think, you know, because what I see, you know, or what I'm seeing during my life, you know, it's that, that the Let's just say that the American Constitution, | |
| that was in the beginning something very simple, and then men, you know, the politicians with their interests and everything, you know, they start to bend around things, you know, and now we are where we are at this moment, you know. | |
| And this is, I would say, the interesting point as well, to have a computer program, you know, so it's not manipulated basically by politicians, you know, who do just things to get re-elected or stuff like that, | |
| you know, because, well, no, you have just the basic set of rules, and if it's not good to build a dam in this part of a rainforest because you're messing up the nature, Well, then it's not to be done, and not because some politician wants to make some extra bucks out of it in the long run. | |
| Well, look, your audio is pretty bad, so I'll have to move on to the next caller, but I would caution you against thinking that computers are somehow impartial or that computers can somehow be objective. | |
| Computers don't have value judgments. | |
| Of course, computers simply do what you tell them to. | |
| And there's lots of ways to put glitches and bugs into the programs, lots of ways to introduce viruses to things, lots of ways to alter garbage in, garbage out, lots of ways to mess things up. | |
| I don't think that a computer would be a whole lot better than democracy, no matter how well it was originally programmed. | |
| And, of course, computers lack... | |
| I mean, this is the argument, of course, to do with some of the Venus Project, right? | |
| Which is that computers lack the price mechanism. | |
| And without the price mechanism, you simply cannot allocate resources in any intelligent way. | |
| So, interesting idea. | |
| Certainly, if you ever come up with an algorithm, I would love to have a look at it. | |
| But I'm afraid we're going to move on to the next caller now. | |
| Oh, good. Thank you. | |
| Thank you. You have a nice Sunday. | |
| Bye-bye. You too. So far, so good. | |
| Right. Next up, we have Brandon... | |
| Or do we? Do we? | |
| Or do we? Or do we? | |
| Sorry, let me see. Make sure you're still on the line. | |
| Yes, I do see that. Like these people have never, ever studied the philosopher Jay Cameron and his version of Skynet. | |
| Anyway, so next we have... | |
| All right, well, next on the line we have Corbin. | |
| Hello. Hello. | |
| Hello. Stefan, I have a great admiration for your work, and I think your philosophy has radically changed my life, so I just wanted to thank you for that up front. | |
| Oh, my pleasure. Glad to hear that. | |
| I'm basically going to ask for advice, and it is regarding my younger brother. | |
| I am 35 years old, and he's about two years younger than me. | |
| Sorry, how many years? He's roughly a year and a half younger than me. | |
| We had a pretty suboptimal growing up. | |
| There was plenty of violence in our family. | |
| My parents, they were bad parents. | |
| I came out of it okay. | |
| I think that I'm damaged, but I'm... | |
| Fixing myself. I've seen what needs to be done, so I don't feel like I'm just locked into it the way a lot of people get. | |
| That type of thing. | |
| But my younger brother, who has two children, my concern is, after reading Real Time Relationships and trying to apply that to my life, that's been really great. | |
| With him, He's a very angry sort of drug-addled... | |
| He's an anger addict. | |
| I mean, he's very... He's emotionally violent. | |
| I basically can't talk to him, and so I don't. | |
| I guess what I'm asking is, you know, he's got these two wonderful children, and they're becoming mentally damaged by the day, by the minute. | |
| And the last thing I heard about was basically him... | |
| It was a child abandonment threat towards his daughter because they had a little argument about, you know, supplies in the house. | |
| And she said, well, I'm going to go down to the store to get something. | |
| And I think she's years old. | |
| And he said... Sorry, she's how old? | |
| She's 11 years old. | |
| Uh-huh. And as she was leaving, he said, don't fucking come back. | |
| And to me, I mean, that ripped my heart out. | |
| I wasn't there. My father was and he relayed this... | |
| And my heart sank. | |
| That's horrible. Yeah. | |
| That's horrible. I mean, basically, that's, you know, go live under a bridge, enter into a life of prostitution and drug abuse and dependence on brutal men and die an early death, right? | |
| Because that's what happens to runaways. | |
| And not always, but often. To me, yeah, to me, he was basically saying, die. | |
| Just go die. And... | |
| I don't know what happened to him. | |
| I know there was some trauma, but I don't know what it was. | |
| And I guess that's not really my charge. | |
| What do you mean you don't know what it was? | |
| Well, I know trauma. | |
| I mean, you were there. You know some of it, right? | |
| I know trauma happened to him, but something changed maybe eight or ten years ago where he became dependent on alcohol and drugs. | |
| And I have another brother, and he and I, we have problems. | |
| I mean, we're affected by the trauma, but it's like that middle brother, something else, it's like something else happened to him. | |
| Like he got secretly tortured or something. | |
| I mean, I guess for the sake of this conversation, that's not the most relevant part, but my question is, Can I help these children? | |
| I mean, I don't know what to do, really. | |
| How long was he... | |
| Now, first of all, I can... God, I'm sorry. | |
| I mean, the aggression and violence in your household, it's... | |
| There's no fucking way to grow up. | |
| And I'm just, I'm so sorry. | |
| I mean, that should never have been the case. | |
| And it's unconscionable. I'm really, really, I just want to express. | |
| I can't do anything about it, obviously, but other than say that I'm really sorry that it happened. | |
| But what, how long was he doing the drinking and drugs for? | |
| Is he still doing either? He is, yeah. | |
| I think that he uses opiates every day, like prescription opiates, but definitely drinks every day. | |
| And generally, I mean, he'll start the drinking just after he wakes up. | |
| In the morning? | |
| Wow. Yeah, well, if he woke up in the morning, but no. | |
| Oh, okay. So he wakes up sort of, what does he do? | |
| I mean, I was curious how people sustain themselves. | |
| Alcohol is expensive. I was curious about that. | |
| I mean, how does he, I mean, what does he live on? | |
| I know that he's still married and him and his wife, she's more responsible and I know they both work and she makes a lot of money at a restaurant and so I think that she might be subsidizing his ways. | |
| Yeah, I mean I'll drink a beer every couple of days. | |
| And I have a weakness for carbonated drinks. | |
| I don't want aspartame or sugar or caffeine. | |
| And so a beer is actually a pretty good way to hit that spot. | |
| And now I go to buy a beer and it's like, holy crap, this stuff is expensive. | |
| How do people drink a lot? | |
| I mean, so much money. | |
| Anyway, look... | |
| And, you know, again, I don't mean to one-note sing, but Gabor Mate's book, In the Realm of the Hungry Ghost, is well worth reading. | |
| People who become addicted, particularly, and alcohol is rough on the brain. | |
| There seems to be, again, you should look into experts for this, of which, of course, I'm not one, but emotional learning, emotional development tends to stop in addiction. | |
| And so when your brother started drinking, you said it was about 10 years, so it's his early to mid-20s? | |
| Yeah, yes. | |
| Or younger. I know that he experimented with various drugs and some softer drugs and then drinking ramped up in his early 20s. | |
| Right. And so his brain is different now. | |
| His brain is different than if he hadn't drunk. | |
| You know, the connections between his neurons are weaker. | |
| His capacity for learning and retaining any kind of new information, particularly emotional growth, is stunted, if not non-existent, if not even negative, and it might have gone backwards. | |
| And so it's a very different thing. | |
| His brain is sinking in a vat of poison. | |
| I mean, alcohol, extensive alcohol use is poisonous to the brain. | |
| Not even metaphorically, like, it just, it is physically, it damages the capacity of the brain. | |
| And so, it's just, he's a different, I mean, I almost want to say he's a different species, but he definitely is not who he would be if he hadn't been drinking, right? | |
| Yeah. Plus the fact— I mean, I'm sure this is not news to you, but I mean, that's the reality when you're dealing with people who are substance abusers. | |
| They're just different. And he's going to be—this is my understanding. | |
| Again, do the research, obviously, yourself if you haven't already, but when people are in addiction— They are kind of unreachable. | |
| Because to reach someone means that you provoke discomfort in them, right? | |
| So when someone says to you, you're doing something really wrong, it's pretty uncomfortable, right? | |
| Right. Particularly if it's true. | |
| But people who are in the throes of addiction, how do they deal with discomfort? | |
| They run from it at full speed. | |
| Yeah. They nuke it with whatever their substance of choice is. | |
| Work, sex, drugs, drinking, whatever, right? | |
| Right. And the longer they've been addicted, the more bad stuff they've done has accumulated, right? | |
| And so the more discomfort that they already experience internally at some level, I think you can't drink away a conscience, But the worst their behavior has been for the longer period of time and the longer period of time they've been addicted, they actually have less brain capacity to deal with ambivalence and discomfort and much more ambivalence and discomfort to deal with. | |
| with does that make any sense like they're getting weaker and the weights are getting heavier that they have to lift yes yeah and to me that's I imagine that's why his his addiction and usage of multiple types of substances Instead, it's not just a plateau. | |
| It's like he's having to use more stuff because his brain is getting more addled and his problems are getting worse. | |
| Is there any possibility that, I mean, do you believe that the children are being, are there any physical danger? | |
| Are they at risk of attack or assault? | |
| I wouldn't doubt, I've never witnessed anything physical, but I know that he's willing to, he's probably, you know, he probably gets a little physical, like grabby and like he'll corner people. | |
| So, yeah, they are at risk for assault. | |
| I think the majority of their abuse will be emotional. | |
| But yeah, I mean, I know I wouldn't be surprised if he was if he would occasionally lay hands to them, you know, and that disturbs me greatly as well. | |
| And how old are his kids? Daughter's 11 and his son's about seven. | |
| And then they're both in public school. | |
| And what really set this off for me was when I noticed that his daughter started to talk a lot about Jesus lately. | |
| And so I knew... | |
| Well, she's going to find some older guy who loves her, right? | |
| I mean, that's not too surprising. | |
| She needs a hero. | |
| And look, the thermonuclear bomb of puberty is going to land on this family, right? | |
| Yes. He can threaten her with abandonment and death, so to speak, by saying don't come back now because she's 11. | |
| When she's 14 or 15 or 16, she's going to be much bigger. | |
| She's going to be much smarter. He's going to be weaker. | |
| He's going to be more befuddled and more unstable. | |
| So she's getting stronger and he's getting weaker. | |
| And there's no one more dangerous than somebody whose power has been abused and is diminishing, right? | |
| Right. And so that's, you know... | |
| Puberty is a challenging enough time for all families, but in abusive families, it's thermonuclear, right? | |
| Because the kids now have a comparison. | |
| And the kids can look way outside the family at other role models... | |
| I mean, she's going to look at Jesus and she's going to look at her dad. | |
| And I can't see how her veins are not going to be filled, but the iciest kind of contempt. | |
| That's so true. And I know that's what's happening. | |
| She resents him. | |
| They resent each other. I mean, I don't know... | |
| What makes him think that... | |
| Well, he doesn't get to resent her. | |
| The parents don't get to resent their children, right? | |
| I mean, he may, but she can justly resent him. | |
| He can't justly resent her. | |
| I totally agree. He was the dad, right? | |
| I mean, I can build a statue, and then I can say that statue is shit. | |
| And I can hate the statue, but that's, you know, kind of... | |
| I made the statue, right? | |
| It's ridiculous, yeah. | |
| It's like the Pope carving a, I don't know, a big giant penis coming out of the forehead of the Virgin Mary and then, you know, accusing himself of blasphemy. | |
| I mean, that would be the actions of somebody who would be too crazy even to be a Pope, right? | |
| Right. Yeah. | |
| And that's, to me... | |
| That's the crux of this whole thing, is where does he get off treating her like she's some burden when he made her, and it was a willing decision. | |
| Yeah, of course, of course. | |
| But, you know, people have kids for a lot of bad reasons, right? | |
| Because of pressure, because they think, and they think the kids are going to come along and love them. | |
| Boy, you have that expectation. | |
| You're using your kids to fill some hole in your own soul. | |
| That is, I mean, that's really, that's a recipe for disaster right there. | |
| Because then, you know, the kids owe you a legitimate debt called love and they refuse to pay it, and so you've got to bang them on the head until they cough up their money. | |
| You become a loan shark of emotional neediness, feeling that you are justly owed back something that is yours. | |
| And that's, you know, the desire for children to love you, I think, is a huge recipe. | |
| I mean, I think my daughter does love me in many ways. | |
| I mean, she doesn't have much choice. | |
| You've got to put up with the daddy she's got. | |
| But, I mean, she tells me many times a day and I believe her, but that's not because I needed her to. | |
| Right. Now, as far as how you can help, that's hard, man. | |
| I've had this question a bunch of times. | |
| I'm just gonna give you, I'm afraid I don't have anything better than a canned answer. | |
| If you genuinely help the children, Will it not be at the expense of the parents' comfort, at least in the short run? | |
| Yes. And you've known this guy for over three decades. | |
| How does he handle confrontation or discomfort or being told that he's wrong about something? | |
| Oh, just as horribly as I've seen. | |
| Yeah, it's explosive, right? | |
| Yeah. So, if you help the children, you will be provoking a confrontation with the parents. | |
| This is the terrible trap, right? | |
| I mean, I'm sure you're not calling in because this is 2 and 2 make 4. | |
| You're calling in because this is a horrible problem, right? | |
| Yes. And what are you going to say if the daughter comes and says, I don't know, I really don't like my dad or whatever, right? | |
| What are you going to say? That's the mystery. | |
| Can you be honest? | |
| I can. I'm willing to. | |
| And, you know, she talked to me about Jesus. | |
| Then she's going to go back, and the next time she has a fight, she's going to say, Uncle so-and-so said that you were Hamina Hamina, right? | |
| Yeah. Then what? | |
| Nuclear explosion. | |
| Mm-hmm. I mean, this is the hell. | |
| This is the living hell. | |
| Yeah, he will... | |
| I mean, unless you're willing to pull Child Protective Services guns or whatever, right? | |
| Which, if the children are in danger, it's all we got, right? | |
| There's no DROs for this stuff. | |
| Right, I wish there were. So, the only thing that I can suggest, and it's a piss-poor option, but this is the only thing that I can suggest. | |
| If you provoke a confrontation with the parents, it seems to me likely, and, you know, don't take some stranger's Opinions over the internet is worth anything more than a pop-up ad telling you that you've won a million dollars because you're the millionth visitor to the site. | |
| But if you provoke a confrontation with the parents, then you will lose. | |
| Right? Because they're not rational. | |
| Right. And I feel like she'll lose as well because they'll attack her. | |
| Right. Yeah. And then you'll be banned, right? | |
| Yeah. So if you provoke a confrontation with the parents, most likely, my guess is that you will be out of the picture. | |
| When you provoke a guilty person's conscience, if that guilty person is not able to handle that, all they do is attack, right? | |
| Right. It's so primitive that a guilty person whose conscience you provoke, the guilty person is so primitive they actually think that you're causing them discomfort. | |
| Yeah, and that's his modus operandi for sure. | |
| Yeah, so it becomes self-defense to cast out the person who's causing me guilt. | |
| I mean, that's how primitive it is. | |
| It's like a chimp's brain on steroids sometimes. | |
| It seems that way. | |
| And not a lot of steroids either. | |
| Anyway, so, but if you're there and are compliant, then they don't get any counter-examples and they will also lose respect for you as well, right? | |
| Right. So, the only thing that I can suggest is to be there as an example of different behavior. | |
| In other words, to talk with her and to listen with her and to deal with her as a rational and reasonable human being. | |
| And obviously that's not going to undo her history or anything like that, but it is going to give her a different way of experiencing herself and her relationships. | |
| To live as free a life as you can yourself and to not lecture her but to show her what that looks like. | |
| If you're there and you're happy and her worm-tongued dad is seething and brooding and lashing out and all that, she's going to note your happiness at some level and she's going to note her dad's not happiness at some level. | |
| And you don't have to say anything. | |
| You just have to be a different way. | |
| Does that make any sense? Totally. | |
| Yes. So my end is... | |
| It's like you don't have to lecture the fat dad to lose weight, which might make him really angry. | |
| You just have to be there, able to climb stairs and play and not be fat. | |
| And that will be noted as a difference. | |
| Of course. Yeah. | |
| So to be in it, just be a good example. | |
| To live a principled life and just to show her that this is what it's like. | |
| Right. I guess this whole conversation could have been a lot shorter if I just said that. | |
| Well, the options, if that makes sense. | |
| Never say one word when 12,000 can do. | |
| I love it. Well, you know, I thought that's about all I could do anyway because I could see that my options were limited. | |
| But I'm willing to do that because I really love these kids and they're very bright kids. | |
| I just know they're damaged. | |
| I know that they're being damaged every day, that they're around him. | |
| And it just breaks my heart. | |
| Yeah, I mean, and they are incredibly lucky to have you in their lives at all. | |
| And I really wanted to. | |
| To express my gratitude, if that makes any sense, on their behalf. | |
| You know, I sure wish that someone like you had been around when I was growing up. | |
| And they're just very, very lucky to have somebody who cares so much and is such a good person around it all. | |
| There's precious few children who have that. | |
| And I really wanted to express my admiration and respect for what it is that you're contemplating and what it is that you're doing. | |
| I want to just point out that a lot of it is because of the work you're doing. | |
| When I said a radical transformation, I've tried very hard in my life to Bullshit. | |
| But I was so mired in just wrong thinking that I was just confused and damaged guy. | |
| But as soon as I came across your philosophy, it was like it sharpened my thinking to a laser. | |
| And I couldn't lie to myself anymore. | |
| So jolly good work, man. | |
| Oh, thank you. I appreciate that. | |
| And if you get a chance at some point, just feel free to drop me a line and let me know how it's going. | |
| I will do that. | |
| All right. Thanks, man. And thanks again at every level for what you're doing for the future of this world. | |
| To you as well. Thank you, Stefan. | |
| You're welcome. All right. | |
| Who we got coming down the pipe? | |
| We have Stephen. | |
| Hey, Stephen. Hi. | |
| Are you on? Are you live? | |
| Are you speaking? Looks like... | |
| Sorry, it's a mind-free zone. Looks like it might have had some issues with him connecting. | |
| He's got a very low call counter right now. | |
| Looks like it just popped back on. | |
| Can you hear us at all, Steven? Oh, I have somebody else. | |
| A phone caller. Actually, two people might want to call on the phone. | |
| A phone? Oh, how cute. | |
| How archaic. How primitive. | |
| Not bourgeois. That would be a cell phone. | |
| How 20th century. | |
| Go ahead. All right. | |
| I'm going to add him on. Do this. | |
| The person you are trying to reach is not accepting calls at this time. | |
| Please try your call again later. | |
| I must say, I do admire callers who have the gumption to play hard to get. | |
| I think that's very playful. | |
| I want to call, but I want to make you work for it. | |
| I'm going to add this other individual who gave me their phone number. | |
| By the way, thanks again, James, for your work every Sunday. | |
| Let's hear it for the James. | |
| Let's give the boy a hand. | |
| Sorry. I may have missed that first note. | |
| Last note was perfect, though. | |
| Yeah, the special... That's right. | |
| If I were on an iron lung and opening for Iron Maiden, that's what I would sound like. | |
| Somebody has in the chat room, what's a phone? | |
| Look at the really, really old Dick Tracy things. | |
| It's the thing on their wrist. Hello. | |
| Hello. Hi. Hi, how are you? | |
| Good. Is this a phone or a cell phone? | |
| It's a cell phone. Okay. | |
| Um... So I have a question. | |
| I know I've listened to your podcast on relationships, and I think you were quoting Ayn Rand when you said that love is the feeling where it's an involuntary response to virtue. | |
| And my question is... | |
| Actually, sorry, that... | |
| I don't think that's Rand. But, I mean, it might be. | |
| I've never read that specific way of hers. | |
| And I'm not saying that to claim my own idea, but just in case people mistake Rand think that it's a bad idea, it's not hers. | |
| If it's a good idea, it's mine. | |
| If it's a bad idea, it's still mine. | |
| But anyway, go ahead. All right. | |
| So I wanted to call. My question was, what should you do if you've found a virtuous woman, you're with a virtuous woman, and you're not feeling this involuntary response situation? | |
| Well, keep reading real-time relationships, staring at a picture for it until you get a boner. | |
| And call me back if that doesn't work. | |
| And if it doesn't work, just keep calling me back. | |
| You can also put some Vaseline on the inside of real-time relationships. | |
| Fold it over itself. Anyway, just kidding. | |
| Although you probably could. But paper cuts, my god! | |
| That'd be good. Okay, so can you give me a bit more details? | |
| Sure. I mean, I think it's kind of like how you explained it when you met your wife initially, where you met her and initially there wasn't kind of an immediate physical attraction, but after getting to know her, you became more attracted to her. | |
| But when I listened to kind of the way The way you talk about how you feel about her and how I've heard other people talk about the way that they feel about the person that they love. | |
| It doesn't feel like what I'm feeling is up to that level. | |
| It's like I don't feel the way... | |
| No, sorry. It wasn't a clear question. | |
| I understood what you meant when you said you don't feel love. | |
| What I mean is... | |
| What are the virtues that you see her as holding that should provoke love within you? | |
| I think she's a good person. | |
| She's honest. She's kind. | |
| When we have discussions, we've never been in a fight. | |
| I've heard other people on here and they talk about Someone they're with and they're mean and horrible and bitter and she's none of those things. | |
| You know, when we talk, we discuss things. | |
| I trust her. I can confide in her. | |
| Just a lot of good things. | |
| It's like I can't really find... | |
| Sorry, but what you're describing is an absence of bad things. | |
| We don't fight, you know? | |
| So what are the positive virtues? | |
| Um, well, like I said, she has, uh, when you consider honesty to be a virtue, she's honest, um, kind, um, she, um, and I'm sorry, I'm nervous. Um, yeah, she's honest, she's kind, um, you know, it's like I really know that she loves and cares about me, you know, she vocalizes that. | |
| Um, she, um, um, I mean, all those things, um, I know I'm trying to think of other virtues, | |
| um, but I would say all of those things, um, and, um, Yeah. | |
| Okay, and I mean, I think those things are very good. | |
| Those are nice things to have. | |
| But what I'm looking for, which, you know, I mean, this is just what I'm looking for, and the fact that it's not there hopefully is some consolation to the theory, if not necessarily to you. | |
| Okay. You know, there are... | |
| I mean, this is not literal, but there are slave virtues called being nice and being kind and being pleasant and all of that. | |
| And I think those are good. | |
| Those are good things to have. Those are nice things to have. | |
| And I think that they can evoke warm and fuzzies, and they're pleasant and they're nice. | |
| But I think that the real love comes from admiration. | |
| And for admiration, I think that you need more positive virtues. | |
| The positive virtues are things like courage, steadfastness, resolution, taking on big challenges, making the world a better place, being out there in the public sphere doing good, taking on bad guys and all that kind of stuff. | |
| Right. Being nice to your cat – I don't mean to diminish it too much. | |
| Being nice to your cat is not going to evoke love. | |
| In people. Because love has to have something to do with admiration. | |
| And admiration has to have something to do with something like courage. | |
| Yeah, okay. No, I see what you're saying. | |
| I see what you're saying. I mean, so in other words, and the way that you know courage is... | |
| Unfortunately, this is going to go back to where we were starting from, but courage is... | |
| How does she exercise virtue when it's difficult, when it's tough, right? | |
| And it is tough to exercise virtue in the world, right? | |
| Right, right. So how does she do that? | |
| How does that show up? I don't know. | |
| I mean, I think, you know, I've been listening to your podcast for a while, and I know, like, an example of that would be something like if somebody's spanking their child, you... | |
| You know, you speak out and maybe talk to them or something like that. | |
| But I don't... Well, no, because that's kind of passive in a way. | |
| Then you have to wait until you see someone be expanked or whatever, right? | |
| Right. So, for instance, does she accept that the initiation of force is wrong? | |
| Yeah. Yeah, I've talked to her about, you know, libertarianism and kind of the ideas of anarchy and, you know, this was all... | |
| When I started dating her, this was all kind of new stuff to her, but she's accepted the arguments. | |
| I wouldn't say she's a full-scale anarchist, but when I say things like that, she'd never... | |
| Like me, when I got into libertarianism, no one had ever said that to her before. | |
| Sure, sure. What is she doing with that knowledge? | |
| Well, I think she... | |
| I mean, I can give you an example. | |
| She was going to go into when we first started going out, she really wanted to go into become a librarian. | |
| And I think, you know, as I was telling her some of these ideas, she now kind of really doesn't want to work for Yeah, you know, that's... | |
| I mean, look, I appreciate that, and I hope that it hasn't killed her dream. | |
| I certainly don't think that there's anything directly immoral about being a librarian. | |
| I mean... But if I'm going to go with the stereotypes of the librarian correctly, other than being stunningly sexy when she takes off her glasses and the slow-motion hair cascade down that always seems to happen in movies when the librarian takes off her glasses, how is she acting on the – yeah, and there are private libraries and so on. | |
| I met a woman in my yoga class once who was a curator and librarian at a private collection and so on. | |
| But – What is she doing with the knowledge that taxation is force in her life? | |
| And see, I'm not trying to say she should or she must or whatever. | |
| I'm just asking the neutral question, right? | |
| And you don't have to answer it because I already know the answer, which is that she's keeping it to herself, right? | |
| Yeah, well, I do think she might have brought it up one time when she was amongst some of her librarian friends who are very, you know, very sort of... | |
| Yeah, very stated, yeah. | |
| So I think she did bring it up once, but I think as far with that knowledge, I think, publicly, I think that's probably all she's done. | |
| Okay, so she's not talking about it with her family or her friends or anything like that, right? | |
| Uh, no. No. | |
| Right. So what does that tell you? | |
| Um... Is that moral courage? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I... I hear you. | |
| I hear you. I know what you're saying. | |
| And please understand, I'm not trying to criticize her or condemn her or anything like that. | |
| I'm really not. I mean, nobody has to do that at all. | |
| But you asked me why she don't love her. | |
| Right. And I'm telling you why I think. | |
| Love is the highest feeling of reverence that we have for someone. | |
| And so it must be the highest degree of moral courage that we can see. | |
| That would provoke the love, right? | |
| Right. Right. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I know what you're saying. | |
| Because she's not telling the truth. | |
| Because you said she tells the truth. | |
| And if she's keeping the truth from her family about the true nature of the society that they live in, and the degree to which they're probably unconsciously supporting violence in the world, I don't think she's telling the truth. | |
| She's not being honest. | |
| Right. Because she sits down, she talks with her family about, I'm sure, all kinds of things, right? | |
| The weather, the cats, the neighbors, the dogs, the lawn, whatever, right? | |
| Right. Maybe the sports team, maybe the movies, maybe a little bit of politics, right? | |
| Right. All of that's pretty frickin' inconsequential relative to the use of violence in society and the disasters that result from there, right? | |
| Agreed, yeah. And so she's avoiding the important honesty. | |
| She's minimizing or avoiding the truth that is really important. | |
| And that's to avoid the discomfort of speaking the truth about virtue, right? | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I don't know... | |
| I don't know how... | |
| I mean, I understand what you're saying, and I know I get that. | |
| I get what you're saying, but at the same time, too, I don't think it's... | |
| I don't know. | |
| I mean, and I know it takes a lot of... | |
| I think it takes time before you're ready to go out. | |
| No, see, but you're mistaking what I'm saying. | |
| You're defending her, and I'm not attacking her. | |
| I'm not attacking her. I mean, you're saying she's a virtuous person, but I don't love her. | |
| I'm defending my theory. | |
| And maybe it's fair, maybe it's not. | |
| You can certainly let me know. But I think that you can respect the fact that she's interested in philosophy. | |
| I think you can respect the fact that she's... | |
| Honest about things that are not really uncomfortable. | |
| I think that you can respect the fact that maybe it will take her time. | |
| Nobody has to do this ever. | |
| Nobody certainly does this overnight. | |
| But she's kind of hiding out with friends and family if she's got these values, but she's not talking about them. | |
| Then she's hiding out and she is implicitly disrespecting the people around her. | |
| And she's clearly communicating to you that she doesn't respect them enough to think that they can handle the truth, right? | |
| Hiding out in a relationship is so profoundly disrespectful to the other person that it's going to destroy your relationship much worse than philosophy ever could. | |
| Because you're saying, here are things I'm passionate about. | |
| Here are things I care about. | |
| Here are things I love. Here are things that I treasure. | |
| Here are things that are incredibly important, not just to me but to the world. | |
| Here's the cure for evil. Here's the end of war. | |
| Here's the end of debt. Here's the end of enslavement. | |
| Here's the end of taxation. Here's the end of imprisonment. | |
| This is the great golden glorious globe of light that will illuminate the future in radiant waves of perfect peace. | |
| But I'm not going to tell you about it. | |
| I'm not even going to bring it in the house. | |
| I'm not even going to take it out from the trunk of the car that I keep hidden in an abandoned garage deep in the Amazonian jungle. | |
| Because I fear how you are going to react to that which is both glorious and true. | |
| What does that say about the people around you? | |
| If you have a cure for the cancer of the modern world, the cancer of violence, and you don't share it with anyone, what are you saying about them? | |
| I mean, if this woman's father was dying of cancer and she had a cure and instead talked about the lawn and the weather and the Knicks and the TV shows, what would you think of her? | |
| Yeah, yeah, I mean, I get your point. | |
| Why are you talking about all that kind of useful stuff when there's something infinitely more important? | |
| Yeah, you know, there's this old thing about, you know, what do you do when you're walking by and a little boy is drowning in the lake? | |
| And, you know, this is an old question. | |
| It's a moral question, right? | |
| Right. Well... This isn't even a perspective. | |
| This is a fact. The children of the world are drowning in violence. | |
| In the violence of families, all too many of them. | |
| In the violence of the state that is selling them off. | |
| In debt to bribe people in the here and now. | |
| In the emotional abuse of fundamentalist religiosity. | |
| in wars that we are walking past a giant lake where literally billions of children are drowning through no fault of their own in a world that they did not ask for in a world that they in their hearts violently resist and here we are standing by the lake And how many of us are shooting up flares and shouting, save the children, save the children, they're drowning! | |
| And how many of us are chatting about the weather and the lawns and the cats and the dogs and the TV shows? | |
| And the Knicks. It's not a metaphor. | |
| This is very real. If you close your eyes and you imagine how many children are being beaten right now, it has been millions of children over the course of this show have been beaten. | |
| Millions of children have been raped. | |
| Thousands of them have been murdered or starved to death as a result of the societies that they live in or died of disease that is preventable. | |
| Of course we have to live. | |
| Of course we have to see movies and enjoy the sunlight and the feeling of grass between our toes. | |
| Because we don't want to jump into the lake and drown as well. | |
| But this is a topic that at the very least should be discussed, let's say, just once a week. | |
| An hour a week in families, among friends. | |
| An hour a week for the millions of children The billions of children drowning in a sea of violence, lies, economic exploitation, predation, debt, shitty schools, bad families, bad churches. | |
| An hour a week. | |
| Is that too much? | |
| And if people don't talk about it at all... | |
| That is such an unbelievable condemnation to the people around them. | |
| I think that's so unbelievably cruel to the people around you to not talk about that which you treasure, about that which you love, about that which you worship, about that which is true and good and noble and will save the world. | |
| Because I don't think that anyone should be convicted in the absence of a trial. | |
| I don't believe that anyone should be damned without the chance to plead their case. | |
| This is why I always say to people, if you have people in your life who've harmed you, talk with them, reason with them, speak with them, open your heart to them, be vulnerable. | |
| Because that gives them the conscious and clear opportunity to respond. | |
| But if you don't talk to people about what you treasure, about what you love, about the virtue and goodness that is possible in the world, about how they can be happy, By doing that which is good and right and true, which they don't know about in all likelihood, then you're like a researcher who's the first guy to figure out that smoking causes cancer and everyone around you is smoking and you don't say anything. | |
| There's a kind of murderousness in that. | |
| There's a kind of unbelievably vindictive slave vengeance in withholding the truth from the people that you say you love. | |
| In withholding the greatest and most glorious aspects of your own beautiful soul from the people around you. | |
| And yet continuing to be around them. | |
| No. No, we don't hide. | |
| We don't hide. | |
| And we don't condemn people without giving them a chance to respond to our virtues, to the arguments, to the truth, to philosophy. | |
| To honesty. The honesty that society says it praises so much. | |
| To the violence that society says it abhors so much. | |
| To the uncovering of all that is true about all that is evil in the world. | |
| We speak with people because we will not condemn them in the absence of evidence. | |
| And the evidence is the conversation. | |
| If you refuse to speak the truth to someone you say that you love, you're casting them into an oblivious pit of eternally itchy and absent fire with no chance for them to rescue themselves, with no chance for them to redeem themselves. | |
| It is damnation without Jesus, and I think it is incredibly unjust and cruel. | |
| And I agree. | |
| Thank you. | |
| And people who do that, I think, have the kind of moral courage that truly evokes love. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, no, I hadn't looked at it that way. | |
| I hadn't looked at it that way. | |
| And she doesn't have to do it, and you don't have to do it, and nobody has to do it, but I don't think that we can get genuine and long-lasting love without it. | |
| Because isn't that such an incredibly admirable thing to do? | |
| Yeah. I don't do it as much as I would like to, but I certainly feel better when I do. | |
| Yeah. And of course, if you want her to see... | |
| That virtue, then you need to show it, right? | |
| Because if you haven't looked at it in that way for her, then obviously you haven't looked at it in that way for you, right? | |
| And so really, the person whose moral courage you most need to admire is not hers, but yours, right? | |
| Right. You know, everyone talks about self-love. | |
| And... Self-love, you know. | |
| When I talk about love being our involuntary response to virtue, I'm not talking about other people fundamentally. | |
| I'm talking about ourselves. | |
| Right. If you want to have that kind of love and respect for yourself... | |
| Then the greatest moral courage is required because the world is, as I've said, not a friendly place to truth-tellers. | |
| But I still think we have to give everybody as much opportunity to respond as positively to the truth as we can. | |
| But to not speak it is to condemn them in perpetuity. | |
| Anyway, listen, I think we may have one more caller, which I wanted to jump to before the end of the show. | |
| I really appreciate you calling. It's a great topic. | |
| And again, I'm not saying go do anything, but just mull over this. | |
| If there's something missing, I think that would be the first place to look. | |
| Maybe right, maybe wrong, but that would be my argument. | |
| All right, thanks. Thanks for taking my call. | |
| Thanks, man. James, do we have anyone else? | |
| Somebody who's been this patient should get at least a minute or two of the BCF. Yes, he's online. | |
| Thank you. Hello, hello. | |
| Are you there? Yes. | |
| Oh, good. Hi. Sorry, I don't know what happened before, but I'm on the line now. | |
| I just want to let you know this is my first time calling and I'm a very big fan. | |
| You've helped me a lot in a lot of ways. | |
| But my question had to do with a friend who just called me recently. | |
| She's a close friend. I guess you could say we're dating, but it's sort of, anyway, one of those things. | |
| You're in your 20s, right? Right, yeah. | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess you could say we're just hooking up on a regular basis. | |
| We don't like to be boyfriend and girlfriend. | |
| That's the 90s. It's not... | |
| It's not all that frequent because we live in different cities. | |
| So this is also why I don't really know how to help her. | |
| Anyway, she just called me the other day and told me that she was sexually assaulted by somebody. | |
| Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah. | |
| So, you know... | |
| When was it, you said? | |
| Yeah. Just about four days ago, I think. | |
| Maybe four or five days ago. Wow. | |
| And she was with... | |
| A bunch of friends at a bar, a bunch of people she works with, and I guess it was a guy that she works with, and I don't know him. | |
| I don't really know any of her friends. | |
| She hasn't been living in this different city for all that long, but it's several hours away, so I just haven't had much of a chance to visit her yet. | |
| So I don't really know her friends, but anyway, they were there at this bar or restaurant kind of place, and she went to the bathroom, and I guess this guy followed her in, and Yeah, he assaulted her. | |
| I don't think he raped her. | |
| Like, you know, actually raped her. | |
| But I think she described it as everything but. | |
| Everything but. So, and I have no experience with this kind of thing. | |
| You know, I don't know how to help her. | |
| I don't know what to say to her. | |
| But, you know, I don't know. | |
| I thought maybe I'd bounce some ideas off you or hear what you had to say. | |
| Do you have ideas you want to bounce first? | |
| Well, the first thing I said, so she called me after it happened, but it was late at night and I was asleep, so I didn't hear the message until the morning. | |
| And she was, I mean, that was the most heartbreaking voice message I've ever gotten before. | |
| She was just like bitterly crying. | |
| I mean, as you could understand it. | |
| And so when I called her back, she was like, wait, what did I say? | |
| And I kind of described the message to her and she was trying to minimize it at first. | |
| I was like, no, you know, don't minimize it. | |
| Terrible thing that happened to you. | |
| And she was like, and I said, are you going to tell your boss, you know, since they both work for the same lady? | |
| She was like, I don't think so. It has nothing to do with work. | |
| And I was like, are you kidding me? Of course it has everything to do with work. | |
| You work for this lady and your emotional health, first of all, you know, she wants to have... | |
| People who can come into wealthy, right? | |
| So that's one thing. | |
| And then secondly, obviously, the perpetrator, the attacker, works for her as well. | |
| Oh, this was a co-worker? | |
| It was a co-worker. And they were at a going-away party for one of the other co-workers. | |
| So this is a guy that she knows. | |
| She knows his name. So what happened, without getting into too many of the gory details, she went to the bathroom and And she apparently said that she was in the stall and when she came out he was standing there and it was just them two in the bathroom and he came up and he like pushed her up against the wall or something and he was like she has bruises on her wrist and I think between her legs and apparently she said that some lady walked into the bathroom And saw what was going on, | |
| but thought that it was just like two people hooking up in the bathroom. | |
| So she turned around and walked away. | |
| But then when that happened, the guy got scared and he ran out of the bar without even paying his tab. | |
| So it's like there are all these witnesses to what happened. | |
| And I was trying to tell her, like, you got to tell people. | |
| So she eventually did tell her boss. | |
| And I think she was appropriately upset. | |
| I don't know if she's going to fire the guy or what. | |
| I'm confused why people aren't pressing charges right now. | |
| And so that was the other thing I said. | |
| I said, why don't you go to the police? | |
| You have all this evidence, all these witnesses, you have bruises, you have scratches. | |
| Why don't you do that? | |
| And she said she didn't want to. | |
| She didn't want to deal with it. So I don't know what more I can do. | |
| And so is this guy still around? | |
| Your girlfriend? Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Well, so she just quit her job. | |
| She put in her two weeks notice, but I think her boss has been gracious enough not to schedule them together at all. | |
| But yeah, he's around. He works there. | |
| Jesus. Yeah, yeah. | |
| I mean, so, I mean, I want to kill him. | |
| I mean, non-aggression principle. | |
| I'm sorry, but, you know. No, here we are. | |
| No, listen, I got you. | |
| I got you. Yeah. But isn't it – I feel a sense of like eerie unreality around this. | |
| Yeah. It's really – yes. | |
| Yes, it's true. I mean – Like the woman sees and she walks out. | |
| He runs away without paying his bar tab. | |
| Your girlfriend comes out. | |
| Does she smile at people? Does she not tell them right away? | |
| Even when she does tell people there's this, well, okay, maybe I won't schedule this together. | |
| Like nobody wants to – Yeah, yeah. | |
| Fucking deal with this like it's a real crime, because it is. | |
| Bizarre, yeah. She said that she told all her friends, and they were all upset, like one of her friend's boyfriend was like, who is this guy? | |
| But he didn't do anything. | |
| And she was like, I mean, it was nice that they were willing to say that, but nobody's going to do anything. | |
| I was like, well, you can do something. | |
| Go to the police right now. | |
| And she's like, wait, but don't you hate the police? | |
| I thought you were against the government. | |
| I'm like... That's all we got, right? | |
| Right. No, absolutely. And it's just, yeah, I don't know. | |
| She seems to just want it to go away, which, I mean, I guess I can understand that. | |
| I mean, I don't have the greatest faith in the criminal justice system, so I don't know what would come of it, but at least for her own emotional, psychological health. | |
| Well, and for the other women, right? | |
| I mean, he's done this before. | |
| He'll do it again. I mean, what about all the other women? | |
| I mean, the next woman may not be so fucking lucky, right? | |
| She might be raped. She might get pregnant. | |
| God help her. Right? | |
| Right. Yes. | |
| I see that. And... | |
| So, I think it's one of those things, you know, I've told her about six times, if not more, I mean, on separate cases. | |
| I don't want to, like, beat it to death, but are you going to go to the police? | |
| Like, I don't know enough about the law. | |
| Can I go to the police and, you know, file a report? | |
| Oh, I have no idea, honestly. | |
| I have no idea. I mean, you can call the cops and ask them. | |
| I don't know. I have no idea. | |
| It depends. Right, right. | |
| Anyway, but, you know, I don't want to overstep her balance. | |
| Like, if she wants this to be private, I don't want to drag her into something that she didn't want to do, you know? | |
| Well, I mean... | |
| I'm so sorry. God, what a messed up situation. | |
| Yeah, it's really bad. | |
| I know. Thank you. | |
| Yeah. I'm so sorry. | |
| Listen, I mean, I can tell you some of my thoughts. | |
| And I mean, obviously, no one can tell you what to do. | |
| No one can tell her what to do. And obviously, look, it's not a lot of fun for women in the criminal justice system. | |
| And so there is this issue of re-victimization. | |
| There is this issue of it's drawn out. | |
| It's lengthy. It can be abusive. | |
| I mean it's an ugly process to put yourself in I would imagine. | |
| But it is probably the only way to stop the guy. | |
| Yeah, one little somewhat relevant piece of information. | |
| He's graduating from college right now, and his major is, he wants to teach like middle school children. | |
| Oh yeah, no doubt this guy is like scumbag incarnate. | |
| I mean, and if she doesn't do anything, if she doesn't do anything, and by that it means report the guy, then it's kind of on her. | |
| What happens in the future? | |
| If that makes any sense? | |
| No, it does. I had the same thought. | |
| I didn't say that to her. | |
| I'm trying to be gentle. No, that's a fact. | |
| I mean, it's a fact. She's going to have to live with that. | |
| Now, maybe she can live with it. Maybe she can live with it. | |
| I couldn't. Maybe she could. | |
| But that's an important consideration. | |
| Not just about her. I mean, it's about... | |
| There's a predator, right? I mean, if there was a rabid dog in a children's playground, she'd call the cops, right? | |
| Chasing all the kids around, foaming at the mouth and all that, right? | |
| And if this guy's going to, you know, get involved, if he's this kind of predator, then he gets involved with kids, I mean, God help him, right? | |
| God help the kids, I mean. | |
| So that would sort of be an issue. | |
| Now, without even remotely putting my toe in the blame the victim camp, he had to be pretty damn sure that she wasn't going to go to the cops before he did this. | |
| Yeah, I agree. How did he know that she wasn't going to go to the cops? | |
| That she wasn't going to just mace his fucking face, step on his neck, call the cops and hold him there until they got there. | |
| Mm-hmm. Yeah. | |
| That, yes. | |
| That's a challenge, right? | |
| I mean, because my guess is that this may not be the first time. | |
| That's actually true. | |
| That's actually true. | |
| She told me before I knew her that Well, it wasn't similar. | |
| I think this is a lot more vivid and a lot more violent. | |
| It was in a public place. The other one was more like a, you know, so-called date rape scenario. | |
| But, you know, I don't think you should, you know, separate. | |
| I think they're both in the same category, you know. | |
| Right. And that tells you something, I think, about what's her relationship like with her dad. | |
| Yeah. Not good, right? | |
| Well, actually, I don't know. | |
| I've met her family and her parents are together and they're nice. | |
| I've talked to her, you know, I guess kudos to you for even kind of giving me the... | |
| I don't know, the questions to ask. | |
| But I've asked her in the past, somewhat recently, before this happened, if she's been spanked growing up and what that was like. | |
| And she said, yeah, pretty frequently. | |
| But it was actually her mother more than her dad. | |
| Like her dad maybe did it, but it was always this light little... | |
| Like he didn't want to do it. | |
| Yeah, but her dad let it happen. | |
| Yeah, that's true. | |
| Well, let me ask you this. | |
| If she's close to her family... | |
| Has she told her family? | |
| No. And I say she's close to her family, but it's more in proximity. | |
| I was like, why aren't you going to tell your mom? | |
| And she said, because I don't want her... | |
| She's off to school for the first time. | |
| She's been living at home before, and so she doesn't want her mom to, I guess, pull her away or whatever. | |
| I don't know what her reasonings are. | |
| Well, I tell you, if my daughter was being regularly attacked, I would damn well want to know about it. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| I'd be beside myself if she didn't tell me. | |
| Yeah. Because we would need to go to the root of the issue about how these guys know that she's not going to go to the cops because they know these predators are very, very careful. | |
| You know, they say the average child molester, hundreds of victims before they're apprehended. | |
| Hundreds of victims. | |
| How do they know? Yeah. | |
| How do they know? Because they know the people who won't tell their families. | |
| They know the people who don't have those kinds of close support networks. | |
| And I bet you, I bet you that they know the people to whom this may have happened as children. | |
| These are not new defenses. | |
| Yeah. I guess. | |
| I don't know. What do I know? | |
| But I'm, you know, hundreds is not an accident. | |
| Yeah, right. So, what would you think? | |
| Would you think it'd be wise... | |
| Just assuming that she won't tell her mom. | |
| She was like, maybe I'll tell her in a few years. | |
| I was like, you know, that is not... | |
| I almost used her name. But anyway, that is such a bad idea. | |
| Do not wait. You have to tell people. | |
| So if she's not going to, do you think I go over her head and tell, call her mom up? | |
| Um, not to put you on the spot. | |
| No, no, listen, that's a tough question. | |
| How close are you to this woman? | |
| Not close. She's met me a number of times. | |
| She knows me. No, sorry. | |
| I mean the girlfriend. | |
| Oh, I see. | |
| We're close. We've known each other. | |
| We actually worked. That's how I met her. | |
| I met her through work. But anyway, we've known each other for a long time. | |
| And we are close. We've talked about some... | |
| You know, I'm pretty serious things. | |
| I think she knows me well and I know her well. | |
| I mean, there's still a big distance. | |
| That's why even at the beginning I said, I don't know. | |
| I mean, we're kind of dating. | |
| It's sort of one of those in-between things because, you know, anyway, not to get into it. | |
| Okay, look, I mean, this is most likely going to end your relationship if you go to the mom. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. | |
| Because it's going to start a shitstorm in the whole family. | |
| Right. Because there's a significant dysfunction if this woman has been targeted at least twice. | |
| That doesn't come out of nowhere. | |
| Yeah. My opinion, right? | |
| It's just all my bullshit opinion. | |
| But this doesn't come out of nowhere. | |
| Yeah. I mean, it's some guy in an alley, maybe. | |
| But if this guy has known her for quite some time and has studied her, he knows, right? | |
| These people have, right? Mm-hmm. | |
| Mm-hmm. So if you go to the mom... | |
| My guess is she's not telling the parents because the parents don't want to be told. | |
| Yeah, I would agree. | |
| Right? Because if the parents are told, then the parents, I mean, would have to, if they were sensible, they would have to look at whatever that parenting may have done that contributed to this. | |
| Again, this is not to blame the victim. | |
| It's just if you want to look for root causes. | |
| Sure, sure. The wallet on the park bench, right? | |
| Yeah. Well, and, you know, I've never been in a fistfight my whole life. | |
| Yeah. There are guys who get into fistfights every week. | |
| Mm-hmm. Yeah. | |
| And so, this knowledge, these facts about these evil attacks, is going to be a challenge on the entire family structure? | |
| Yeah. And what do you think is going to happen? | |
| I mean that neutrally. | |
| You know the family. I don't. I don't mean like what you think is going to happen if the parents have the knowledge not only of this attack but of the previous attack of what they weren't told about. | |
| If they have that distance from their daughter that she won't even come to them when she's really in trouble. | |
| In fact, she will hide and suppress and laugh and pretend that nothing happened. | |
| That's a chilling thing to introduce into a quote relationship. | |
| Right. What do I think will happen? | |
| I honestly don't know, but I can sort of surmise that I could see them, you know, giving her an ultimatum because they're supporting her being off at school saying, you know, either come back or we're going to... | |
| I don't know. I don't know if they would say this, but maybe, you know, we'll continue paying for school if it's here. | |
| And so they would blame the problem on her being far away from home? | |
| They might, even though the original or the other one that I know about was, it was still when she was back at home, so obviously that's not the root cause either. | |
| But, you know, I don't think these are two, they don't seem to be very philosophically minded people, like the family. | |
| You know, like they would do that, dig all that digging, or do all that digging. | |
| Like maybe that's to do with how we, you know, abuse her by spanking her as a child and so forth. | |
| I don't know. I don't know. | |
| Yeah, I mean, yeah, spanking certainly does seem to be correlated with problematic sexual behavior, to say the least. | |
| But I personally wouldn't, in my amateur way, ascribe that victimization to spanking alone. | |
| But anyway, who knows? Okay, so if she doesn't... | |
| Tell her family, and you tell her family, then you are definitely introducing a curveball into the family structure, to say the least. | |
| And it will never be the same. Yeah. | |
| Yeah. And I, you know, honestly, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. I would have to sit on that decision for quite some time. | |
| Yeah. But here's what, you know, this is what I would suggest. | |
| There are anonymous hotlines for victims of attack, of sexual attacks, right? | |
| Yes, I would assume there are. | |
| I mean, she can't conceive of herself as safe if it's happened twice and it happened with somebody who's known her for a long time. | |
| And so there's something that she's elementally not doing in terms of self-protection. | |
| Do you know what I mean? And I don't mean to trivialize it, but it's like an affair. | |
| You know, affairs don't just happen. | |
| Sure. You know, no woman has shown the slightest interest in me ever since I met Christina. | |
| Yeah, right, right. | |
| Right? It doesn't, whereas before, you know, I flirted with, I'd flirt, I mean, signals are down, there's no, sorry, we're closed. | |
| Yeah, right, right. And that's... | |
| And that's important. I mean, even if I don't, like I take my ring off to work out and sometimes I forget to put it back on. | |
| So even if I'm out with no ring and nobody, nobody, women don't flirt with me anymore. | |
| It's been like 10 years. | |
| Yeah. There's definitely a signal that you can give off. | |
| Right. So, and again, this has nothing to do with blaming the victim, but the reality is it's happened two times that you know of. | |
| It may have happened more. | |
| Mm-hmm. So she is not in a situation of protection. | |
| She's also, of course, by having this knowledge and not acting on it, she's directly endangering other women who may not be as lucky as she was. | |
| And I use the word lucky here very advisedly. | |
| No, you're right. So I would at the very least get her to call a support line. | |
| I would at the very least get her to talk to a therapist. | |
| The issue of dealing with this is such a big issue. | |
| I mean, it's family. | |
| It's community. It's, you know, none of her friends are thinking of going to her family. | |
| And I assume her friends know her family a hell of a lot better than you do. | |
| Right? This is a big, big, big monster issue. | |
| Yeah. And I don't know that it's going to be solved by you lobbing a truth bomb over the fence. | |
| No, I was thinking the same thing. It's going to be a big issue to deal with. | |
| Now, of course, so my strong suggestion would be that she's got to talk to a counselor, a therapist, even a hotline, something. | |
| Because starting to unravel all of this is a big issue. | |
| And she's either going to listen to reason and look, there's evidence that she's not in a protected state. | |
| What is this doing to her view of the world, to her view of men, to her view of security? | |
| What is this doing to her post-traumatic stress levels? | |
| What is this doing to her life sense? | |
| What is this going to do to when she has a daughter and the daughter grows up? | |
| If she doesn't process this stuff, how is she going to be as a human being in the world? | |
| Right. | |
| She told me – Yeah, go ahead. | |
| Well, she told me right after it – or like the day after it happened, one of her female friends came up and hugged her, and she was so jumpy when it happened. | |
| The slightest contact from a female that she knows very well, it made her jump back. | |
| And why is she inflicting this? | |
| Sorry to interrupt, and I understand that. | |
| I mean this is not going to diminish over time if she doesn't deal with it in my opinion. | |
| But why is she telling everyone this and not acting on anything? | |
| I don't know. I mean in a sense she's re-traumatizing everyone else with no possibility of beneficial action. | |
| That's not very good or healthy, right? | |
| So, I would strongly urge her and say, look, this has happened twice. | |
| How many times does this have to happen before you will get some help? | |
| Who knows? | |
| Be very tentative. Be very gentle. | |
| You don't want to, of course, say, you brought it on yourself. | |
| Of course not, right? I mean, nobody's responsible for being the victim, but there are ways that she can be. | |
| Why didn't she know that this guy... | |
| Was dangerous. Right? | |
| There's some radar that she doesn't have. | |
| Some level of awareness that she doesn't have. | |
| I agree. When you've got good self-knowledge, you can spot creepy people from halfway across the galaxy, right? | |
| Yeah. Yes. | |
| She told me that after it happened, he texted her. | |
| And she responded to his text. | |
| He said something like, hey, sorry about last night. | |
| Are we still friends? Yeah. | |
| I said, first of all, why are you even responding to this guy? | |
| And if you're going to say anything, why don't... | |
| I mean, I would be just like... | |
| It would be such vitriol in my text to say, like, you better help that I don't decide to go to the cops right now. | |
| You better watch your... Like, whatever. | |
| But why are you just going to be like... | |
| No, but why didn't she do that, right? | |
| I don't know. I don't know why she... | |
| I really have no idea. | |
| Because she's afraid of another attack. | |
| Yeah, yeah. Because if you say to this guy, I might go to the cops, what's he going to do? | |
| Yeah, that's true. You've got to look through the eyes of women. | |
| I mean, imagine everyone was twice your size and twice as strong. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Seriously. And some percentage of them were dangerous. | |
| That would be scary, right? | |
| Yeah, that's true. So, you know, I would strongly urge, look, I mean, because you care about her, because you want her to be safe, she's not safe in her current mindset. | |
| Mm-hmm. And she needs to talk to someone about this. | |
| If she can't talk to her family, that's important. | |
| But she needs to talk to someone. | |
| Even if it's just a little bit to start with through a hotline or something, she needs to talk to someone about this. | |
| She needs to start taking better care of herself. | |
| She needs to start making sure she doesn't get into these situations again. | |
| Yeah. Twice is significant if it's only twice. | |
| And maybe more. | |
| And maybe more. Now... | |
| I would also see if there's any place that you can talk to or a lawyer or anyone who does pro bono or anything like that. | |
| Yeah. Who you can say, look, I know this has happened. | |
| Is there any way that I can report this as a crime anonymously or anything like that, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. Now, I would also urge her, strongly urge her to take photographs of her bruises. | |
| Yeah. That's a good idea. | |
| So that if she changes her mind later, they haven't healed. | |
| Yeah. Yeah. Or get a doctor to take photographs, even better. | |
| But, you know, if she's not willing to do any of those things, if she's not willing to talk to her family, if she's not willing to take photos, if she's not willing to get any kind of help, then, I mean, I don't know. | |
| I don't know. I certainly would not view that as a relationship that had much potential. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| No, that's why I sort of, even before you said that, I was thinking, you know, that would be really, really bad. | |
| She would probably feel betrayed or something by me if I went to her mom. | |
| And it might damage the relationship, but what's more important? | |
| You know, I mean, her own safety. | |
| But I don't know. See, your responsibility is as much to the future victims of this predator as it is, because you now, it's on you if you don't do anything too now, because she's told you. | |
| So your responsibility is to the future victims of this predator as well. | |
| And so if you go to her mom, so what? | |
| Maybe they don't do anything. This guy's still out there doing his thing, right? | |
| Sure, sure. Whereas if she won't take any action, then I think that you have to contact the police. | |
| I was thinking the same thing. | |
| He's going to be around kids, man. | |
| Yep. Yes. And when, when she, well, she didn't even tell me that. | |
| I looked him up because I had never heard his name. | |
| You know, I don't, like I said, I don't know the people she works with, but she, she mentioned the guy's name. | |
| I did a Google search of like, I know what school he goes to. | |
| And it turns out he's an athlete for that school. | |
| And so he's got this whole page and it says what he's planning to do after he graduates and it says he wants to teach elementary and secondary, I guess, whatever you call it, middle school. | |
| Yeah, so he'll be a teacher and he'll probably be a coach too, right? | |
| Probably a coach and I remember creepy coaches from when I was, you know, 10, 11 years old. | |
| I remember them, you know, so I guess they gotta come from somewhere and maybe this is where they come from. | |
| Yeah. And if you're talking to the girl in person, I mean, obviously this is worth a trip to the city she's at. | |
| You know, take a camera. Take photos of the bruises. | |
| You know, you need that stuff. | |
| You know, it's a horrible situation to be in. | |
| And I mean, I hugely empathize with you. | |
| I hugely empathize with her. | |
| Yeah. But, I mean, you know, this guy is not going to stop. | |
| - Yeah. - Yep. - Wow. - Well, I guess that's pretty clear. | |
| I mean, I think you and I agree, but thank you for sort of crystallizing it for me. | |
| Yeah, and I'm so sorry, man. | |
| I don't envy this situation at all. | |
| Yeah, it's really bad. | |
| And then, when the smoke is all clear, I think you've got to look in the mirror and figure out how you ended up in this situation. | |
| That's for later. Deal with the triage first. | |
| I guess that's another phone call. | |
| We can talk about that. If you want to talk about that down the road. | |
| I'm sorry that you're in this situation. | |
| I'm glad that there's someone around who is even... | |
| Remotely contemplating doing the right thing. | |
| And I'm sorry it has to be you, but this is the kind of courage we were talking about over here. | |
| Well, thank you so much. | |
| You're very welcome. And I hope it works out. | |
| And of course, please feel free to call back anytime. | |
| Will do. Thank you. Well, thanks, everybody. | |
| That's it. We went a little over today, but I'm glad we got that last call in. | |
| It's a very, very important topic. | |
| And... Have yourself a great, great week. | |
| I will be seeing some of you. | |
| I've just put up something on the website. | |
| You can go to fdrurl.com forward slash 2012 to see a very artfully produced video of my speaking tour this summer. | |
| I'm going to be speaking at a whole mess of places and I hope that you will come. | |
| I've really been working hard on public speaking and I think I've I think I'm doing well. | |
| And I think that you owe yourself the live SBM experience at least once in your life. | |
| I think it would be worthwhile. | |
| And of course, I don't just speak. | |
| I don't just sort of helicopter in and speak. | |
| I'm there for the duration. | |
| I'm around. | |
| I'm available. And I hope that you will come and check me out and check out the The other speakers and, you know, stay to have a conversation. | |
| You know, this philosophical thing that we're doing. | |
| What a great marketer I am. | |
| This thing, this philosophical thing that I'm doing is very important. | |
| And you're part of the conversation. | |
| You're part of the solution. | |
| You're part of what I think is going to heal the world in the long run. | |
| And so just to Very briefly go over this. | |
| You can check me out at the Libertarian Party of Texas, June 9th, 2012, Dallas, Texas. | |
| You can go to lptexas.com. | |
| I am at a Libertarian conference called Moving Ideas. | |
| That's going to be June 11th, 2012, in Sao Paulo, Brazil. | |
| Of course, I will be Headlining at the Porcupine Freedom Festival, porkfest.com, P-O-R-C, fest.com, June 21st to 24th, 2012. | |
| I will be at Freedom Fest, July 11th to the 14th in Las Vegas. | |
| You can go to freedomfest.com. | |
| I'm going to be doing a monster presentation on UPB. With audience participation on July 28th. | |
| Capitalism and Morality 2012. | |
| That's going to be in Vancouver, British Columbia, July 28th. | |
| And again, FDRURL.com forward slash 2012 to get more of these. | |
| I'm going to be opening, closing, and emceeing Libertopia October 11th to 14th at San Diego, California. | |
| Libertopia.org. And if you check it out now, you can get some early bird specials that are well worth checking out. | |
| Second annual Liberty Cruise, FDRURL.com forward slash cruise 2012, October 15th to 19th, San Diego. | |
| And last but not least, the Toronto Liberty Festival, Toronto, Ontario, November 3rd. | |
| Probably be down for the whole weekend if people want to hang out and chat. | |
| That's the list so far. | |
| I'm sure that more will come in. And of course, I feel deeply honored to be able to do these speaking engagements. | |
| I feel deeply grateful, grateful, grateful to everyone here. | |
| Thank you, everybody, so much. |