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Aug. 6, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:51
2186 Is the World Insane?

Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, puts the planet on the couch. Freedomain Radio is the largest and most popular philosophy show on the Internet - http://www.freedomainradio.com

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Hello everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
An interesting question, been floating around in my mind, oh, for quite some time.
Is the world insane?
Is the world mad?
Is the world mental?
Kind of an important question.
Because if the world...
Is not crazy, then I'm crazy.
But if the world is crazy, then I at least have the chance to not be crazy.
I think a fairly good shot.
But it's important to identify this.
To me, crazy, craziness, insanity, corruption, dare I say evil in some circumstances, it's kind of like a hot potato in society.
It's often struck me that Craziness is something that everybody has to find a big bag to put into.
Lots of people do it different ways.
But you've got to find a big bag to put your crazy into.
If everyone is crazy, I'll give you some scenarios and let me know what you think.
I remember many years ago, I shared a room where the guy, he was working for the government.
I shared a room with a guy downtown.
I was producing a play and I was also working as a waiter.
Director slash waiter, not uncommon in the arts world.
And there was a guy who lived in the building, a pretty good-looking guy, and kind of muscular, and he was running a painting business.
I think it was Student Pro Painters or something like that.
And he had a real air of authority to him, a real air of leadership, a sort of calm, in-control kind of leadership to him.
I actually used some aspects of his character for a novel that I was working with.
I wrote a little while later.
I don't even know his name.
I just remember watching him with some sort of fascinated intent.
And he would often walk around without a shirt on, and he had this big eagle-winged tattoo on his chest.
And even at the time, I thought in a kind of weird way, he could be sane because his tattoo was crazy.
I mean, that's a lot of pain and a very permanent thing to put on you.
And he had not quite a shaved head, but a real punkish buzz cut.
And so, And through this no-shirt tattoo thing, he could make everyone who interacted with him feel a little crazier.
Like, whoa, that's a huge tattoo.
What a strange and bizarre and painful thing to do to yourself.
But because people would be discomforted by his big chest tattoo, he could feel some relief because he would feel less crazy than the people who were disturbed by his tattoo.
Do you see what I mean?
So he'd go meet someone, that person, he'd have no shirt on, right?
If he really wanted a high tattoo, just throw a shirt on, t-shirt on.
But he would go meet someone, he'd have no shirt on, they'd look at this big tattoo, they'd be kind of discomforted by it or whatever, like, whoa.
And so he would get to feel saner because other people felt a bit more disturbed.
And to me, the peculiar and intrusive adornment habits of people like goths and punks and so on Is that it makes other people feel kind of crazy, kind of disturbed, kind of off-put, and therefore they feel like they get some relief from their own craziness because they're putting it onto others.
To me, a lot of adornment is to do with putting your craziness onto others.
Now, this is in sort of the mohawk, spiky hair kind of thing, tattoos and so on.
That's just sort of one particular aspect of it.
I don't want to sound like I'm picking on our alternative brothers and sisters, but...
This can also occur in the yuppie world, right?
So, if you're really insecure and you don't want to handle your insecurity, if you want to project your insecurity onto the world, then you seek status.
You show up with the Christian Bales in American Psycho hairdo and you have, you know, everything is perfectly groomed and you have the great car and you must immediately or very quickly tell people how well you're doing and how much money you're making and all this kind of stuff.
Like the old Frasier Crane thing, right?
He could never go more than three minutes before mentioning that he went to Harvard.
And in this way, other people may become insecure and deferential, and therefore your own insecurity and deference goes into other people.
It jumps.
So, it's like these old stories of the demons.
If you have a demon in you, you can only gain relief from the demon by casting it into someone else.
And to me, a lot of craziness, a lot of society is hot potato crazy.
You carry it.
Oh, I don't want to carry it.
You carry it.
Ow, it's hot.
It burns.
And this is a very elemental aspect of this.
A woman who, say, went through premature sexual experiences, was molested, raped as a child, she has a disturbed view of sexuality and, I mean, through no fault of her own as a victim, but it is distortionary, I would imagine.
Well, she may become hypersexual and thus her own distorted sexuality, her own Odd relationship or damaged relationship.
Again, assuming she hasn't gone through the process of healing and self-knowledge and so on, her own damaged relationship with sexuality goes on to other people.
She had premature sexual experiences and therefore she's going to escalate sexual experiences in others by dressing in a highly provocative manner or may go the other realm and dress, you know, like a pear-shaped lesbian and have a managed haircut and be overweight and all of that to keep all of that stuff at bay.
To me, being obese is in a similar kind of realm.
I worked once with a guy who was easily 500 pounds.
And it's pretty intrusive.
Because you kind of want to mention it.
You kind of want to, hey, kind of notice that.
But, you know, decorum or civility or professionalism says that you can't, and so you don't, but it's kind of there.
So, in a sense, you're falsifying your experience when you encounter someone who's got an overtly extreme form of physicality, whether it's lots of tattoos or green hair or, you know, the Savile Rose suits...
Or obesity or provocative sexuality.
When you come across someone who has a more extreme kind of appearance or physicality, you feel...
Like, you can't say, hey, that's from really green hair.
What's up with that?
Or, whoa, that's a big tattoo.
That must have been incredibly painful.
What are you trying to manage when you go through this kind of painful experience and when you broadcast your painful experience to other people by taking your shirt off?
What are you trying to manage?
I mean, that's sort of the obvious question.
But you kind of can't, right?
Because then what happens is the other person will manage their crazy, they provoke the crazy in you, and the moment you identify it as being crazy, they will say that they have no idea what you're talking about, and then they will call you intolerant, narrow-minded, bourgeois, middle class, like you can't take a little bit of difference.
So I got a little green hair, get over it.
Right, so now you're even more crazy.
So, to me, when you get this metric, or this hot potato planet in society, it's very obvious.
And you see it everywhere, all the time.
Who's crazy is the basic...
Win-lose of society.
Now, anybody who engages in the who's crazy seesaw is, of course, crazy because you can't gain sanity by making other people feel disturbed.
You can only gain, you know, it's like, you know, I'm losing weight by hanging out with more fat people.
Well, it doesn't work.
I don't gain hair by hanging out with other baldies.
But this crazy hot potato thing is really, really important to understand.
So, I've talked about how as people become less religious, they tend to become more statist.
One of the things that came out of the collapse in traditionally religious Judaism in the 19th century was communism, which was, in its foundation, a largely Jewish phenomenon.
And even in its execution, literally, in Russia, it was a largely Jewish phenomenon.
And so, as Jews became more secular, well, what do you do with that big bag of crazy?
Well, you gotta create communism.
And that is something that you'll see, even in history, you'll see quite a bit.
And in the sort of left-right political spectrum, as the lefties tend to become more secular, they tend to become more state-worshipping, because they have to put their crazy in the state.
They have to put their big bag of crazy in statist fantasies.
Whereas if you minimize the state in the traditional Philish Lafley, Ann Coulter, right-wing kind of thing, If you diminish the size and power of the state, then you have to take your big bag of crazy and put it in a deity.
I mean, to actually process your crazy is really hard.
It's really hard.
Because when you process your crazy, it escalates anxiety in other people.
Because if you're no longer a willing bag Of I'll hold your crazy if you hold mine kind of thing, which is actually the basis for a lot of romantic relationships, if not friendships.
But if you have processed your own crazy, if you've processed the trauma that the craziness needs to be projected to hide from you, well then, you are no longer in the hot potato game.
And it just bounces right back.
Somebody throws you their hot potato, it bounces right back.
And to people, to most people, this feels like an attack.
Right?
So if you're not willing to hold somebody else's nuttiness, then what happens is they actually feel the potato.
You've got to keep the potato moving if you don't want it to burn you.
But if you say, no, no, here's your potato right back.
And then they try and throw it to you.
No, no, no, here's your potato right back.
And you hold it.
I don't want this potato.
I don't want this crazy potato.
This mad spud.
Well, it burns them.
And then they feel like, oh my god, I'm being attacked.
You're burning me.
You are attacking me.
You are...
Making me feel the crazy that I'm hiding from myself.
I imagine this is, I mean, in the avoidance of countertransference and so on, sorry, the avoidance of transference, this is to do with good therapy as well.
And there was an exercise I did a long time ago.
Where you would take your most passionately held conviction of being wronged, you know, of people in general do me wrong, or this group of people do me wrong, and so on, and you repeat it to someone and that someone simply does not react, and you keep repeating it until it loses its emotional power.
Because people who are crazy, they split other people, but they provoke crazy in other people.
They whisper down fiercely to them, and they create blogs and websites, and they provoke each other into staying crazy.
Whereas if you don't react to someone's craziness, it's disorienting.
It's scalding to them.
I mean, obviously the Republicans think that Obama is crazy and the Democrats think that Romney is crazy and Ron Paul is crazy and so on.
And you'll see this thrown around a lot.
What will often happen as well is you will be portrayed by crazy people as having an irrational fetish, right?
Right?
So, like, I did an interview recently where a guy asked me about my views on religion.
And then later, I haven't read anything, but somebody had mentioned that he'd said...
And then, you know, Steph went on a bizarre rant about religion.
Like, it's bizarre, like, I just, out of nowhere, I just, you know, I sort of go on this thing about religion as if it's some complete non-sequitur.
When, of course, the truth is that I was...
And I was asked, since I was being interviewed, I was responding to the question in the interview.
You know, somebody says to you, what's your favorite flavor of ice cream?
And you say, I don't know, chocolate chip cookie dough or something.
And then, out of nowhere, he just started talking about ice cream.
And it's a way of portraying other people as crazy.
And you'll see this as well.
When someone is reporting an interaction that went crazy, they will always portray the other person as having an irrational fetish or focus or emotional intensity about something.
So somebody will sort of portray an interaction and say, oh, you know, my roommate came in and just said...
You've got to stop leaving your shoes on the washing machine, man!
I'm like, okay.
Have you heard that before?
That, okay.
Okay.
I guess I will.
I guess I left it there twice.
I'm sorry.
And this is this, okay.
This is a way of portraying that the other person has a peculiar intensity and is crazy about this and the provocation is almost non-existent, right?
You see this, of course, in the message board world.
Obviously, I've seen it off and on over the years as well.
Where someone says, you know, I was banned for nothing, or I was banned just for a simple questioning of the dominant philosophy of the message board, or I didn't do anything, and then I got censored and banned, and this is a way of saying, maybe it's true, I don't know, but this is a way of saying the other people are crazy.
I was doing nothing, I was merely asking questions, I had a little criticism, I asked for some facts, I asked for some references, and they banned me!
Blocked my IP! Now, that, of course, doesn't really answer that many questions, right?
So, if you have this roommate who comes in and you're relaying the story, and you did nothing, and they're just completely angry over the shoes on the washing machine or whatever, okay, I guess I'll move them.
I guess I'll move them.
I'm sorry, this is so upsetting to you.
Well...
You get, of course, the immediate relief of portraying the other person as insane and you as calm and zen and sane in reaction, just trying to minimize whatever they be tripping on.
So, you get to portray yourself as sane.
It doesn't really help you that much, though, right?
Because you're still the guy who has someone crazy as a roommate.
So this, okay, I guess it doesn't really solve the problem because then anybody with any self-knowledge or curiosity or any desire to genuinely help you will say, well, why is this guy your roommate if he's this crazy?
Then, of course, people have to make up all these stories, right?
And again, you can gauge how crazy the world is by just seeing how often this happens.
And the story is, he was perfectly sane.
He had no problems at all.
We got along great.
And then, out of nowhere, wouldn't you know it, he just became nuts.
Well, that, of course, is to say that, you know, perfect schizophrenia, like the complete switching of personalities with no disturbance to either personality is possible.
And that, of course, is a way of retaining your sanity.
Because if you're blind to crazy people, that probably is because you came from a crazy history, like crazy people around you in your childhood.
And rather than deal with that, you will say, well, there was no way to predict that this guy was crazy.
He went from completely sane to completely crazy.
There was no way to predict it.
And this is just not credible.
Let's say that the personality can communicate nothing about its truth.
That people can hide so perfectly that even the act of hiding disappears.
In other words, I could become completely insane tomorrow.
And there would be, there was no, assuming no syphilis, brain tumor, there would be no way of knowing this ahead of time, and this is simply not credible.
The blink phenomenon, of course, is like the guy, James Holmes, the shooter in Colorado movie theater, guy from a gun show, oh sorry, guy from who ran a gun range at a gun club, I called him back after he sent a message through their website, listened to a few seconds of his answering machine message and told everyone, keep this guy away from guns.
He's really crazy.
Like, don't let him anywhere near the place.
And of course, as it turns out, according to media reports, James Holmes was seeing a psychiatrist at the university.
The psychiatrist even warned I guess broke doctor-patient confidentiality and warned the university that James Holmes was a danger.
But then I guess James Holmes dropped out and therefore, I mean, who knows, right?
I think there's a duty to report if he makes threats against people.
And so if you report to the university but not to the police, that's kind of a problem because when he leaves university, as he did after he reportedly failed his oral exam, then he's a loose danger and nobody knows anything or has any word about anything.
And, since he was seeing a psychiatrist, bet you dollars to donuts that he was on these meds, which can cause dissociation, rage, homicidal impulses, and so on, but we won't hear about any of this.
So, that's strange, too.
He mailed his plans, apparently, to his psychiatrist.
Anyway, we can get back to that perhaps another time.
I find that stuff very, very interesting.
So...
The question of sanity is very interesting.
When you start to see this game of hot potato, you will see this, you know, I've heard stories from people, oh, I was dating this guy and he was perfectly normal and then, bam, out of nowhere, I missed one date and he went crazy and so on.
Well, that, actually, it's a very dangerous thing to do, right?
This is one thing that bothers me about these kinds of stories, is it's a very dangerous thing to do.
Because if you put out, and you need to be responsible with this kind of stuff, everything that you add to the Borg brain, to the social matrix, is really, really important.
Everything you add is really important.
Are you peeing in the swimming pool or are you scooping out some bugs, right?
So, if you put forward the story, I was dating Bob or Jane and they were completely sane and we had a great time and then out of nowhere, bam, right?
Couldn't have been predicted and so on.
I mean, you're not just justifying your own actions and not having any curiosity or looking for the early warning signs, but you are also telling other people there are no warning signs, which is really dangerous.
Because other people will stop looking for the warning signs.
There's a psychiatrist who, when he asks his patients, was there any way, if I had met your boyfriend prior to him becoming abusive to you, was there any way I could have guessed that he was going to become abusive to you?
And yes, it's always tattoos, shaved head, no job, you know, substance abuse problems.
I mean, all the signs are there.
All the signs are there.
But if you say, in order to save yourself in the moment, there are no signs.
I was completely blindsided.
There was no way to know ahead of time.
You're not just excusing yourself, but when you socialize this story, when you tell other people, you are lowering other people's defenses.
And that's really dangerous.
I mean, that can get other people really hurt.
Whereas if you say, you know what, in hindsight, I look back and I saw this problem and this problem and this problem and so on, then other people can say, oh, wow, that's really helpful to know.
I will look for these problems and then not get into one of these kinds of situations.
You are lowering people's defenses.
You are taking away their scaly armor.
You are taking away the nimbleness of the antelope's legs as they flee from the seemingly endless lions around the world.
But when you excuse yourself...
And say that there were no signs.
You are not sharing the information that other people need to avoid the situation that you found yourself in.
And that's really important.
The signs of crazy are always there.
Always there.
You just have to be really honest to yourself and you have to grit your teeth.
And you have to spiral backward through time to the place where your crazy radar, your cradar, was smashed.
I mean, I think my daughter's got great radar that way.
People who I think are great, she finds great.
People who I have my guard up around.
And I don't think it comes from me, because this happens even before I see them.
But she's got really good radar that way.
So, when we ask, is the world crazy?
Well, the first question to ask, I say this, of course, 20 odd minutes into the show, but the first question to ask is, if the world is not crazy, but there are crazy people in the world, then everybody should be really good at spotting crazy people, right?
Sane people have to be good at spotting crazy people.
That's one of the most defining characteristics of sanity.
Is to be able to spot crazy people.
Like, if you're a nutritionist, you should be able to spot bad food.
Food that is bad for people.
Deep-fried chocolate pig's ears or something.
And so, if you say that you're a nutritionist, but you have no idea what foods are bad for people, then you're not a nutritionist.
I mean, you're not even a bad nutritionist.
You're just a liar.
You're not a nutritionist.
If you claim to be an Olympic-level coach and you have no idea what habits would be bad for an athlete, Yeah, smoke.
Eat Doritos.
Sit on the couch.
That's what I call training.
Then you're just a liar.
So, if you claim to be an expert in something, and sadly, because of culture, the way we're raised, you kind of have to have an expertise in something called sanity to be sane.
It's kind of trained out of us for the most part.
Religion and some bad parenting and lots of bad schools.
And so, you have to have expertise in sanity to be sane.
I think we're born with it, but I think it's taken from us.
You have to have expertise in sanity to be sane.
I should stop saying insanity because it's kind of confusing.
I mean, in space, sanity.
But if you have expertise in sanity, then you should be able to see insanity.
Clearly.
And how good is society at spotting insanity?
This is a fundamental test of the sanity of the world.
If the world is sane, then insanity should be dead obvious to everyone.
And if insanity is not obvious to everyone, then society cannot be considered very sane.
That's one aspect of sanity.
Now, another aspect of sanity is, and not just sanity, but in fact morality, another aspect of sanity and morality is what is the relationship between people's actions and their ideals?
What is the relationship between people's actions and their ideals?
The further the gap between actions and ideals, between stated goals and actual goals, the further the gap, the greater the insanity.
And if the gap is not even acknowledged, that's completely insane.
So, if somebody says, I am completely and totally 150% dedicated to losing weight and controlling my diabetes, And then they order a big giant chocolate cake and start eating it with a ladle.
And you say, wait, you said you wanted to lose weight and control your diabetes.
You're like, this is not good.
And then they get violently angry at you And don't even acknowledge their prior position and don't even acknowledge that what they're doing is bad, but instead insist that it is good for their diabetes and weight control, even though formerly they said that it wasn't, then they're completely insane.
I mean, this is about as crazy as you can get.
If somebody...
He insists that he desperately wants to go north, and then starts heading south, and you point this out to him with a compass.
He seizes the compass, throws it into the bush, gets incredibly angry at you, and said that he always intended to go south, and how dare you question his integrity?
Well, that's about as crazy as you can get, right?
Because he's not just doing the opposite of his stated goals, but he's refusing to acknowledge that there's a gap and getting enraged at anyone who points out the difference.
That is about as crazy as you can get, in my opinion.
I mean, outside of actually having bats in your head, that's about as crazy as you can get.
And by that standard, society is completely mad.
So, society has nonviolence as its value.
Things should be achieved in a non-violent fashion because violence is criminal, is punished, is unacceptable.
Zero tolerance in schools for kids punching out other kids or threatening or whatever.
Bullying is absolutely unacceptable in society.
Absolutely unacceptable in society.
And then when you point out that laws are violence, taxation is coercion, regulation is the initiation of force, debt is theft, national debts and so on, deficits and so on is theft, people get enraged.
But this is how insane Society is.
Violence is really bad.
Taxation is violence.
It is insane to equate the two.
Our goal is a peaceful, prosperous, non-violent society.
Statism is the initiation of force.
You get massive amounts of Hostility and rage and you get attacked and all this kind of stuff, right?
But that's insane.
I mean, I hope that's clear.
I mean, that's completely mental.
It's beyond mental.
I mean, it's absolutely, completely and totally insane.
We have an ideal called nonviolence.
When we point out, when any reasonable person points out that society is run on the exact opposite principle, the initiation of force and bullying, threats, right?
Letters from the government, threats of escalating penalties for non-payment of taxes and so on.
Well, then you are insane for pointing it out.
But that's sort of one example.
Another example, of course, is we are all about the children, according to society as a whole.
A family is everything.
I put my children first.
All I think about are my kids.
My kids are everything to me and so on, right?
Best thing that ever happened to me and so on.
And yet we will let them be educated in these absolutely wretched government, union feather bedding, crops of children, brain-stultifying recent extraction points called public schools.
That we will turn our precious children over to the state so that the state gets to spend four or five more time with the children than the parents do.
Parents get their kids in an unchaotic way, in a not getting ready for school, doing homework, getting back from school and feeding them maybe for half an hour to an hour a day.
But the state gets them for six to seven hours a day, at least, you know, in the environment and counting homework.
So 5, 10, 15, however you want to count it.
It's a lot more, right?
And everybody knows that government education is crap.
Everybody knows that there's a terrible dropout, right?
And everybody knows that it's the minorities and the poor who get hurt the most from these situations, in these situations.
And yet nobody will even countenance standing up to these unions, to these thugs.
Nobody will even discuss...
Nobody will even discuss returning the power to the parents to be in control of their children's education.
But no.
The children must be turned over to these...
Forced state monopolists who have no incentive whatsoever to provide any kind of quality in fact have disincentives to bring quality to the situation and in fact are specifically in many ways disallowed from bringing quality to the situation.
And these are just a few of the situations that occur in the world that just show you how crazy the world is.
Another example is women, in particular, should leave merely unsatisfying relationships, right?
So, 60% of divorces are initiated by women, and the number one cause of divorce is dissatisfaction, not abuse, not poverty, not whatever, right?
Homelessness, it is, I'm dissatisfied.
And this is considered to be empowering.
But if adult children who never chose their parents decide in conjunction with the...
and the requirement for a woman to go through therapy knows or not.
But if an adult child, an adult offspring...
Who decides to stop seeing parents because of a history of abuse and no reasonable possibility of turning around the relationship?
Well, this is just appalling.
So, involuntary relationships is a value.
Voluntarism in involuntary relationships, such as the parent-child relationship, when the child becomes an adult, well, this is unholy.
Violence for children is wrong, but spanking is necessary.
I mean, you sort of could go, we care about our children, but rather than confront the government and its growing web of power, we will simply sell our children off to buy peace among strangers.
Why?
That's why we will sell off our own flesh and blood, the fruit of our loins, we will sell those off to foreign creditors just to buy an ounce of peace among thugs we have no relationship with whatsoever, right?
So rather than have any confrontation with public sector unions, we will sell off our I mean, this is crazy.
This is madness.
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