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Oct. 28, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:27:59

2240 Freedomain Radio Sunday Call-In Show, 28th October 2012

Stefan Molyneux, host Freedomain Radio, discusses the power of evil in the world, the root causes of emotional dysfunction, and how to be free of the past.

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	Hi, everybody.
	It's Steph.
	Just a note, please.
	The first caller talks about some disturbing childhood sexual stuff, so if you have any history with that or if that troubles you, this might not be the show for you.
	I just wanted to mention that up front.
	Thank you so much for listening, as always.
	Well, good morning, everybody.
	It's depending on you.
	My goodness gracious me, it's almost the end of the month.
	Which means it's time for me to assume the position, knees down, pad open.
	Please to send donations to freedomainradio.com.
	You can even go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate if your clicky finger is getting tired.
	And it's really appreciated.
	It is absolutely necessary.
	And I genuinely believe it is going to an enormously good cause, which is philosophy, And a little bit of me.
	So I hope you will do that.
	And thank you so much to everyone who has supported the show and who continues to support the show.
	Ah, Rolling Stone, the magazine.
	When I was younger, I guess I thought it was kind of edgy.
	And just looking at the November 8th, 2012, time shift cover.
	A day in the life of Tom Hanks and then a big smiling picture of Obama and the road ahead.
	There are a number of things, I guess, which...
	Perhaps we're once considered edgy, but they're really not edgy.
	And, I mean, tattoos are not edgy.
	A mohawk is not edgy.
	Facial piercings are not edgy.
	I mean, they've just become, to me at least, just kind of a cliche.
	I think voluntarism is edgy.
	I think not spanking.
	These are all cliches and so on.
	And Bashing Ayn Rand without providing any arguments is also not edgy.
	Come on, people.
	It's been going on for 60-odd years.
	Anything that's been going on for 60-odd years, I mean, it's like calling plus fours edgy and contemporary.
	A Sinatra hat at a cocky angle is edgy and contemporary.
	This is old hat.
	This is old school.
	So, I mean, there is, of course, this constant misinformation campaign about Ayn Rand.
	And it's interesting.
	So, I mean, there's things that I didn't know much about her.
	I've read a couple of biographies of her, but apparently she was, I shouldn't say enamored, but there was some murderer who she felt had a kind of sacrifice the world to yourself at all costs, which she found interesting.
	And what's interesting to me, of course, is that people who criticize Ayn Rand for having a an interest a significant interest in a murderer themselves are very keen on politics and big fans of Obama or Romney or all other people who are key in getting people killed and flying drones in and starting wars and so on so Ayn Rand in her extreme youth writing a couple
	of things that were about her fascination with murders and I mean I think we it's actually It's quite healthy to be interested in murderers because if you live in the Serengeti, it's quite good for you to be interested in lions because they can eat you.
	So, I mean, to have a fascination with evil and to even find some aspects of evil stimulating, I mean, to me it's not, I mean, they are so different.
	I mean, the people who do evil, they're so different from a healthy human being.
	And if we want to end evil, then we need to understand it.
	And that can be a thin line between It's not the greatest thing that she ever did, not the greatest thing she ever wrote.
	But again, those people who think that it's really terrible for Ayn Rand to be interested in a murderer then put a big smiling picture of Barack Obama on the cover.
	And so not edgy.
	Anyway, so in an interview in the current issue of Rolling Stone, Obama told historian Douglas Brinkley that author Ayn Rand, whom GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan, Once credited as inspiring him to get involved in public service, and actually, interestingly, Paul Ryan also credited Count Chocula for his hairline, is for teens who are feeling misunderstood.
	So Rowling says, have you ever read Ayn Rand, President Obama?
	Sure.
	Rowling Stone, what do you think Ryan's obsession with her work would mean if he were vice president?
	I mean, my God, talk about a softball question, right?
	So I would say, have you ever read Ayn Rand, President Obama?
	Sure.
	Can you detail me specifically...
	Where she made logical errors.
	Because, I mean, that's the question that would be asked by anybody who was interested in getting to the truth.
	I mean, what a softball question.
	Ryan's obsession with her work, blah, blah, blah.
	So, Ayn Rand, Obama says, Ayn Rand is one of those things.
	And that's an interesting phrase at the beginning.
	Ayn Rand is one of those things.
	She's not a thing.
	She was a person.
	He is a human being.
	She was a human being.
	But he says Ayn Rand is one of those things.
	So immediately, semantically, you are alienated from the subject.
	So Ayn Rand is one of those things that a lot of us, when we were 17 or 18, and feeling misunderstood, we'd pick up.
	Right?
	No analysis of the content, no analysis of the arguments, nothing like that.
	He says, then, as we get older, we realize that a world in which we're only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else, in which we're considering the entire project of developing ourselves as more important than our relationships to other people, and making sure that everybody else has an opportunity, that that's a pretty narrow vision.
	I mean, he hasn't read.
	He hasn't read Rand.
	I mean, the very few people, I mean, certainly very few people have ever read it carefully.
	Most people have just read secondhand reports of Ayn Rand, which of course is exactly what she would predict.
	Only thinking about ourselves.
	Only thinking about ourselves.
	So let's just take Hank Reardon.
	Hank Reardon runs a factory that employs hundreds, if not thousands of people, I can't remember, 500 people or whatever.
	And he spends most of the book thinking about other people.
	And, you know, trying to make sure his customers are happy, trying to make sure that his employees are happy, trying to make sure he gets the right materials and produces a quality product and so on.
	And none of that would change right after the book concludes and things start over.
	Only thinking about ourselves and not thinking about anybody else.
	Now, of course, if Ayn Rand only thought about herself and not about anybody else, she wouldn't have been married.
	She certainly wouldn't have written books because books are there to be consumed by other people.
	And I would certainly argue that Ayn Rand was thinking a lot more about the poor than the people who want to use the club of the state to shovel money from one group to another through force.
	Ayn Rand predicted 60 years ago that Europe was going to descend into a socialist cauldron of inegalitarianism, inequality, debt, and ever-increasing Coercive regulations and that their economy was going to die and that their sole remedy was going to be Bailouts and Printing money and more debt and hysterical manipulations of the basic stuff of life
	You know when people screw with the economy they're screwing with life itself and When people say, well, we want to control the economy.
	Well, no.
	The economy doesn't exist.
	The economy doesn't exist.
	There's no such thing.
	It's like, well, I want to control the community, but I don't want to control any of the people in it.
	Well, then you don't understand what a community is.
	So when people say, well, we need someone to control the economy, we're saying, well, we need someone to control people.
	And if you screw around with the economy, people are all concerned about Human beings impact on the climate.
	You know, global warming, global cooling, new ice ages, old ice ages, climate change, which is redundant.
	Climate means change.
	They're so concerned that a hundred years from now, if we don't take specific action now, the planet might be a degree or two warmer.
	They're that concerned because, you see, the climate is so important.
	But they're not concerned about something like a carbon tax, which is where you really screw with people's lives and you screw with where food is grown, how food is grown, where food is transported, how much it costs to transport it, and you pluck bread from the mouths of starving children.
	If we're so concerned about man's impact on the weather, why aren't we more concerned about something much, much more important, which is man's impact on On the economy, the control of people.
	So he says that Ayn Rand is only interested in self-development and not in relationships with other people.
	But to me, one of the main points of Ayn Rand's work is to try to figure out what is your relationship with other people?
	This is an essential question to ask.
	What is your relationship What is your relationship with your family?
	What is your relationship with your lover?
	What is your relationship with your friends?
	Is it based on peace and virtue and encouragement and positivity?
	Or is it based upon manipulation, grease, control, insecurity, the reinforcement of bad habits, the hysterical clinging together like people in shark-infested waters upon One sinking life raft of everyone who is trying not to grow.
	I mean, to me, that's, Ayn Rand is only tangentially about the economy.
	It's not less tangentially about philosophy, but most essentially, it's all about relationships and getting to the truth of those relationships, which I am obviously very interested in as well.
	What is the truth of our relationships?
	Are we loved for who we are or are we loved for how we conform to error?
	Are we respected for that which is greatest and most striving within us or is that a threat to other people and will they malign?
	If people have a problem with this, will they come to us directly and publicly or will they sneak around planting the cowardly little seeds of calumny in those around us?
	What is our relationship?
	to other people.
	So I think that Ayn Rand is entirely about relationships.
	So he says the entire project of developing ourselves is more important than our relationship to other people and making sure that everybody else has opportunity.
	That's a pretty narrow vision.
	That's a fantastic, a pretty narrow vision.
	That is a wonderful In the same way that when you say, well, you know, when you're a misunderstood teenager, you pick it up and maybe it has interest to you.
	But of course, when you get to be 25 or 30, I mean, good heavens, that's like sleeping in Star Wars pajamas when you're 50.
	It indicates a massive failure of progress as a human being.
	So saying that it's, well, it's just for alienated youth is a way of Manipulating people into, well, if you defend her, then you must still be an alienated teenager, no matter how old you are, which characterizes you as immature and failure to thrive and all that kind of nonsense.
	Again, it's not an argument.
	We'll say, that's a pretty narrow vision.
	A vision is, in one of these words, like opinion.
	The moderator of the debate I had with Sam Seder recently was all about, you know, well, what's your opinion of this?
	It's like, no.
	If you classify everything as opinions, then you never have to actually resolve a dispute.
	And in calling Ayn Rand, well, she has a vision.
	You know, not that she sort of rigorously and ferociously worked out something or a whole series of things from first principles, marshalling, evidence, and all of that.
	But she has a vision.
	Like, she just...
	Fortunately, she was wearing a hard hat when the brick of philosophy landed on her head.
	And when she woke up, there were little Tweety birds flying around her cranium, whispering, Epistemological sweet nothings into her ears, which she then chased away with another billow of Russian-born smoke.
	But it's just a vision, you see.
	It's a vision.
	And you share that vision or you don't share that vision.
	I have a vision.
	I believe!
	I have a dream!
	This is all delusion.
	Somebody talks about vision, dream, opinion in the realm of facts, truth.
	They're basically saying that I don't have the capacity, I don't have the ability, I don't have the knowledge, I don't have the experience to make a truth statement.
	And so he says that's a pretty narrow vision.
	Bombing civilians with drones, supporting the indefinite detention of America.
	You see, that's a wider vision.
	Go to your doctor.
	He says, I could cure your cancer, but I feel that's a pretty narrow vision.
	I have a wider vision wherein we're going to feed your cancer and make it grow.
	Because it's just a narrow vision to want to be cured.
	I'm going to widen.
	I'm going to expand.
	I'm going to broaden your perspective.
	Mugger in an alley says, what, you don't want to give me your money?
	Well, that's a pretty narrow vision.
	Let's expand your vision to where you give me your goddamn money.
	You get to say vision...
	I don't have to say anything about truth.
	He says, unfortunately, it does seem as if someone, that vision, sorry, it does seem as if sometimes that vision of a you're on your own society has consumed a big chunk of the Republican Party.
	Ah, yes, because the government is such a community.
	Government is a community.
	If you're interested in not being coerced against, then you're an isolationist.
	You're an atomic individualist.
	You want to tear society to shreds.
	You want everyone to stand on their own two feet or fall by their own failures.
	And you want to lift a hand to help the Good Samaritan bleeding to death and blah, blah, blah, blah.
	But this is to define human society as coercion.
	This is to define human society as the state.
	And if you're anti-state, you're anti-society.
	That's...
	I mean, it's inevitable, but of course it's completely mad.
	I mean, that's like calling slaves free workers.
	It is calling rape love.
	And if you're against rape, well, clearly you don't want people to love each other.
	You don't want people to be happy together.
	You are an atomic individualistic lovemaker who despises the continued reproduction and satisfaction and happiness of the human race.
	But of course the state has largely become what we used to think of as society.
	Society and parents and the community used to educate children.
	Now the state does it.
	Societies used to get together to pool their requirements and dilute their risks in friendly societies, these groups of people that used to get together to minimize the risk of a fatal or a very expensive illness taking down a whole family.
	But now government largely does that.
	People used to negotiate on their own behalf or they would voluntarily together get people to negotiate on their behalf.
	Now the government rules it all and arbitrates it all.
	And forces people into unions and forces them to submit to union dues and so on.
	So the government now negotiates for people.
	The government raises, largely raises the children.
	The government helps, quote, the poor, the sick, the old.
	The government tells you everything that you can do, everything that you cannot do.
	Consumers, the community, the voluntary community, used to punish businesses who did wrong.
	And now the government does all of that.
	So the power of the consumer, power of the parents, power of all who are voluntary in society has diminished, has collapsed, has faded away.
	Fathers used to provide for their young.
	And now, in increasingly desperate and depressing numbers, the government does that.
	So this horde of vampires has taken over the town And anyone who pulls out a metaphorical steak and garlic is accused of wanting to raise the town to the ground.
	No.
	Love the town.
	The town is wonderful.
	It's the vampires I have a problem with.
	The vampires are not the town.
	The vampires are the opposite of the town.
	The government is not society.
	The government is the opposite of society.
	Society is voluntary.
	If the government, say, in an un-theoretical example, would round up a bunch of people and throw them in concentration camps, would we look at that and say, what a thriving society!
	No, we'd say, what a terrible thing to happen and what a, unfortunately, penned-in prisoners.
	People in concentration camps are not a society.
	They are caged.
	Animals and zoos are not in their natural habitat.
	They are enclosed.
	They are penned in.
	They are alive, but they are not free, and it's certainly not natural.
	Rape is not lovemaking.
	Theft is not charity.
	Violence is not order.
	As a state, it's the opposite of society.
	And so, I mean, it's natural he would say this, of course.
	The state has to portray itself as a friendly father figure, as society.
	But it's not.
	War is the opposite of trade.
	You say, well, I'm anti-war.
	Well, war is how goods and resources get transferred now, so you must be against free trade.
	You understand it, right?
	It's not that anybody who opposes the violence of the state wants everyone to stand on their own and not have a community.
	I mean, boy, boy, if you fall for that, I don't even know what to say to you.
	Anyway, let's move on with the show.
	Thank you for your patience.
	I hope that was helpful.
	This is something that somebody had asked me to take a look at, so I hope it was useful.
	If we have a caller, I am on deck.
	We do have a caller.
	Loki is up today.
	Hey, you're back.
	Yes, I'm back.
	I'm back.
	A couple of things, just a couple of small things that I wanted to bring to your attention before going into an actual conversation on something.
	First, just listen to your reposting of a debate that you had with the statist.
	And one of the things that he claimed was, well, the internet was created by the government and so therefore blah blah blah.
	And the internet was not created by the government.
	It was created by Xerox.
	And I am going to send you a link to an article that goes over that on the chat room right there.
	So you can check that out and it'll go over exactly how that happened.
	I appreciate that.
	Now, of course, when people say the government has created some technological marvel, I'm always just stunned.
	I mean, the government doesn't create anything.
	I mean, is there a government set of smartphones competing with the free market?
	Of course not.
	All the government does is restrict and control everything.
	But even if the government did originally create it, and I know that it was spread out as a way of avoiding communication problems in the case of nuclear attack, It was only brought to any commercial utility or any productive utility by the free market.
	But I appreciate that.
	I did a little bit of looking up on this Cuyahoga River that he had mentioned, just since we're on the topic.
	I did look up a few more things.
	And the Cuyahoga River is...
	The tort system of suing people for damaging their property was prevented from operating by the local government, which gave waivers from being sued to a variety of companies, no doubt, in return For donations or campaign contributions or some sort of political favor.
	And so the state, the governments, the local governments actively opposed, resisted and undercut the capacity of the legal system to deal with this remedy.
	So it was a state-created problem.
	I couldn't find out whether it was privately or publicly owned.
	They did mention a few landowners in a couple of articles, but I assumed that the waterway as a whole was publicly owned and therefore nobody was charged with protecting it.
	But those few people who would have had a legal remedy Of course, went to their lawyers and said, well, I've got to sue these guys.
	And they found that the lawyers said, I'm sorry, these guys have waivers from being sued for any property damage they create, so you can't do anything.
	And then we say, aha, you see the free market has failed to blah, blah, blah.
	Well, if you get out of jail free cards, it's not hard to understand why.
	And then people say, well, it's hard to figure out where the pollution comes from.
	That's actually really easy.
	I mean, you just put You just put particular tracers in the effluent coming out and then you find out where it is downstream, where those tracers are.
	That's pretty easy to do.
	So I just sort of wanted to mention that and of course the idea that Social Security was set up so that people would tax the younger generation to pay for the elder generation is not true.
	Social Security was set up That you were supposed to have, the government was supposed to hang on to your money and return it to you.
	It was never supposed to be, you know, government will spend all the money in tax the next generation.
	It's not how it was sold.
	It's not how it operated for many years.
	And then, of course, the inevitable corrosion of government took it over.
	Anyway, go ahead.
	Yeah, and on the same point, it was the nuisance suits that were being oppressed or denied by government intervention to try to create a more competitive industrial complex.
	You know, that women who were doing their laundry out on the clothesline could not actually sue the manufacturer who was pumping stuff into the air that caused their laundry to get all dirty.
	We suddenly could not sue for damages because we wanted to make sure that our industry was competing with England at the time.
	I think it's along that line.
	On a previous call I had tried to explain something that was a difference between aesthetic versus Immoral.
	And I guess the easiest way I found to explain it when I was talking with people in the chatroom is that ownership and the determination of when someone has abandoned their ownership rights, that is an aesthetic.
	In my mind, and I guess you could very easily just say in a logical, I don't know, result-oriented viewpoint, the only logical way to view it is that perpetual ownership the only logical way to view it is that perpetual ownership or permanent ownership of one's productivity is the only logical
	But then you might have people from the Zeitgeist Movement who would say, well, as soon as you set it down, you've abandoned it, and it's not yours.
	And if you pick it back up, then it's yours.
	But obviously, if you've gone through the process of, I don't know, sculpting something from clay or from a block of wood that was in nature, and it's now been converted into a new sculpture that's yours, it's and it's now been converted into a new sculpture that's yours, the numbers.
	You know, if you do set it down, theoretically, in my mind, it makes sense that you have ownership of it even if you set it down in your bedroom or whatever.
	And pick it up later on or whatever, but that is kind of an aesthetic preference as to how you deal with the abandonment issue.
	Yeah, I mean, you wouldn't, you drop a kid off at daycare and then they say, oh, we sold your child.
	Yes.
	Obviously.
	But this is a very, it's a very tiny issue.
	I think the important thing to understand, of course, first is that the question of when property becomes abandoned is a very tiny issue.
	Oh, yeah.
	Somebody pointed out that Obama set up this thing where if you have a pre-existing condition, you can get healthcare insurance and so on.
	And they're spending, what, $10 billion.
	It turns out that 81,000 people out of a population of hundreds of millions signed up for this.
	And for those 81,000 people, it's a big deal, I understand.
	I sympathize.
	It's a challenging situation.
	But this is a lot of, a huge amount of spending when the money doesn't exist.
	For the sake of dealing with a tiny problem.
	I mean, so, you know, where a friend of mine has a house and in the back of his house deep in the woods is a car that has been abandoned, right?
	And the reason nobody cares about it because it's just sitting there in the woods, you know, it gets rusting away, birds nesting, whatever.
	It has no value.
	In fact, it has negative economic value because you would have to pay quite a bit to have people track in and take it out.
	So it's probably going to sit there until, um, The sun explodes or whatever.
	No, our sun doesn't explode until whatever happens, happens.
	And so the issue of abandoned property is very rare.
	I do think that where property has value, then people will try to find ways of creating a will or legally disposing of it in some manner.
	Should something happen to them, they become demented, they lose themselves in the woods or whatever, never come back, can't be found.
	Then, you know, there's a waiting period or whatever, and then it goes to some place.
	Now, I mean, occasionally, right, you get crazy rich old mice or guys who die with, I think there was one just recently, die with like $2 million worth of gold under their bed.
	And, I mean, I don't know.
	I don't know what happens with that, but that's so freakily rare that I don't think that it really has to be sort of figured out in advance.
	I mean, you know, to me it would be maybe whoever finds it.
	I don't know, right?
	I mean...
	Who knows, right?
	If there's no heir, and there's no will, and some crazy guy dies with a million dollars of gold in his pants, then we would certainly admire his quads, but we would also say that this kind of property would be released, I guess, into a state of nature, since there's nobody who would have clear title.
	I guess it would be like mining, finders, keepers.
	So a new thought process of how to assign property as ownership is the licking process.
	You just lick it and from then on it's yours.
	As long as you didn't lick it, then you're not really claiming it.
	But if you lick it, then it's yours forever.
	Anyway, I guess to get into the...
	The serious subject, not the side tangential material.
	In a very, very, very long time ago period in my life, I did something that was, in my opinion, extremely horrible.
	I was 14 at the time.
	And I had been at school and had mistreatment from bullies and I was back at home that evening and my parents had a party to go to down the street and I was left to babysit my niece.
	And I started about the process of attempting to do things that...
	I don't know.
	To coerce her into sexual encounter.
	And how old is she?
	I don't know.
	But...
	Six, something like that.
	And how old were you?
	Fourteen.
	And why did you do that?
	I was very frustrated with my lack of power, with being put upon and abused and angry and just wanting to lash out.
	And had you experienced any sexual abuse yourself?
	No, not that I can remember.
	Maybe there was something, I don't know.
	As far as I understand it, according to several sources, my brother had sexually abused my sister.
	So anyway, I got to the point where I was, quote, closing in on the deal and closing in on the deal and couldn't freaked out and said, what the fuck am I doing?
	And, like, ran away from the situation.
	And, I don't know, I've been thinking about it a lot.
	I just, I feel, like, incredibly...
	Horrified at my own existence because of this tendency.
	Previously, when, I don't know, I think I was maybe 10, I was at camp somewhere and there was a girl who was being really obnoxiously mean And...
	I got a group of guys to hold her down and I gave her a hickey just to teach her a lesson, so to speak.
	So...
	Anyway...
	You know, I look back at these activities and...
	I just...
	I feel...
	Disgust.
	And so I'm...
	I'm just...
	I don't know.
	Negative about myself because of that.
	And I don't know exactly how to...
	Put it past me.
	Are you there?
	Thank you.
	Sorry about that.
	I imagine it was pretty terrifying for the girl, right?
	Yeah, I suppose so.
	What do you mean you suppose so?
	I would assume so.
	I mean, to me, I thought that I was terrifying her.
	But I can't, you know, say what was going on in her mind.
	What do you mean you can't say what was going on in her mind?
	Well, I'm not able to provide you her direct response to the situation as to what she said.
	Well, of course you're not.
	I understand that.
	I didn't say, were you in her mind?
	Well, no, no.
	I said she would be terrified by this.
	I mean, you were threatening her.
	And that's why I said I assume so.
	I mean, I can't...
	I don't want to, like...
	Jumped to conclusions.
	Maybe she was perfectly fine.
	I don't know.
	I don't really know.
	But as far as I understand it...
	But you were there, right?
	Yeah.
	As far as I understood it, she was terrified.
	Right.
	Right.
	And...
	So she was terrified, of course.
	And this may well have been a life-changing event for her, right?
	From what I understand, there was no memory of the event.
	And how would you know that?
	Later conversations and concepts and...
	I don't know.
	Nothing of that event has been ever brought to my attention from any outside source.
	Yes.
	I mean, it's distressingly common that people who suffer these kinds of attacks or near attacks don't.
	Consciously recall, but of course, it has an effect, right?
	Lack of conscious recall can actually be a sign that it was worse.
	Yeah, sure.
	I'm not sure about the age.
	I know that she was capable of walking.
	I'm really bad with ages.
	Yeah, so she was a year, but a year to six years is a big gap.
	Look, obviously I'm glad you didn't go through with it.
	I mean, that's getting a tiny silver lining out of a big dark cloud.
	And so obviously I'm very glad that you did go through with it.
	And do you still have these tendencies?
	No, not at all.
	And what do you think it has cost you?
	What does it cost you to have made this attempt?
	I don't know.
	I really suppressed it for a very, very long time.
	I never really thought about it for a very long time.
	Just recently, I've been thinking about it more.
	I've been doing a lot of self-evaluation as to what's happened in my life and a variety of things.
	If you recall from a previous conversation, we talked about my rape and that situation and so on.
	I don't know.
	I've had all sorts of weird crap happen in my life.
	I'm sure everybody has.
	What did this particular event cause me?
	I think weirder for you than for most.
	I just want to be clear on that.
	For which I'm obviously very sorry for everything that happened to you.
	So, I mean, to give you my opinions, and these are only opinions, I really want to foreshadow that.
	This is not any kind of philosophical absolute.
	But the way that we assuage guilt, if it's legitimate guilt, right?
	I mean, if it's not guilt that's been pushed on us by others and for things...
	Over which we had no control and, you know, whatever.
	Things that we blame ourselves for unjustly.
	But where we have done significant harm or wrong to others, I think the only way to assuage the guilt is through restitution.
	Then the question comes up is, if she's, like, not...
	Even aware of it, then am I introducing a negative into her life as it is now by bringing up the concept or the subject?
	Well, but this is the trouble, right?
	Because you said you know she was able to walk.
	Most kids learn how to walk at about a year old, and then you also said she was about six, so it's a pretty wide...
	I really am bad with ages.
	I mean, I suppose I could look into it and find out what the age was, but...
	You know, let's see...
	Basically, I find out how old she is, and I look at how old I was, and I know what year I was in school, and so then I can look it up.
	So let's just assume, alright, let's say that she was three or two, and then the reaction or the response or the action that would be appropriate would be one thing, and then if she was six, it would be a different thing.
	So what are the two scenarios?
	What about talking to her parents?
	My sister.
	Well, considering she was raped by my brother, I don't necessarily know that that would be a good thing for her.
	Right.
	Right.
	Is there anything that you could think of that may be restitution?
	If the individuals, and I have no way of judging this, and I certainly don't have the expertise to make any kind of call about that, But if you feel that it would be more traumatic for the people involved, that's still not the end of potential restitution, even if it doesn't involve the people at all, right?
	Yeah, I suppose.
	Right, so you could, say, for instance, find a charity that was devoted to street-proofing kids, or I don't know, I mean, who were, you know, devoted to exposing the evils of childhood sexual abuse or whatever, and you could...
	Donate to that charity if you felt it was doing good work and looked into it and I think it's important to do your checks and balances with charities, but you could do something like that.
	Set up some sort of regular donation so that it would maybe prevent this from happening to other people.
	Yeah.
	I don't know.
	I mean, considering that Few people who have been the aggressor in this type of situation are willing to talk about it openly and honestly.
	I'm just...
	I'm tempted to think about, alright, well let's see if I could go and talk to people who have had this type of thing and like, you know, explain Wrongness and whatever.
	I don't know.
	Being some sort of advocate on the, you know, like, I was a sinner and now I'm a reformed convert kind of thing, you know, except that there's no God involved.
	But then that exposes the questioning of, well, what, you know, somebody will figure out where things came from and blah, blah, blah.
	So...
	Yeah, I mean, if you go public, then you may end up having what you want to avoid, which is additional trauma in your sister and her daughter, right?
	Yeah.
	So...
	Sorry, go ahead.
	So obviously, I mean, number one, as far as I can understand it, it was basically me lashing out because of lack of power and frustration and anger.
	So, I don't really, you know, I'm confident that I'm not, like, you know, a pedophile in wanting to do that in any way, shape, or form.
	It was, you know, especially since I turned back at the time with horror.
	But...
	I... I look at my own...
	I don't know, selfish past and now where I'm at with my life and so on.
	I just don't...
	I don't know.
	I've attempted suicide before.
	And now I'm just thinking that maybe that might be better for everybody concerned anyway.
	So...
	Then I'm like, well, no.
	I mean, that's kind of like a selfish decision, blah, blah, blah.
	So, when is it not a selfish decision?
	I mean, let's say if you're a freaking sociopath, you murder, I don't know, serial killer or something like that, and you figure out, well, you know what, being a serial killer is really a bad thing for society, so I'm probably better off, you know, society's probably better off if I just go ahead and off myself.
	So, you know, at some point, I'm thinking about this and I'm like, well...
	Before, when I attempted suicide, that was a selfish thing because I was trying to tell my dad to shut the fuck up.
	But now I'm just...
	I don't know.
	I'm agitating people.
	I'm...
	I'm mean a lot.
	I don't know.
	It's...
	I just think that...
	And the thing that's really frustrating is that I don't really have any, like...
	I had a job where I had medical coverage and all that kind of stuff, and they paid for me to go and talk to therapists and shit like that.
	But I can't afford that shit now because I'm not employed anymore, so...
	Um, I don't know.
	I'm just looking at it and saying, well, empirically, you know, I'm a detriment to society, so why the fuck am I here?
	But...
	I don't know.
	It's a...
	I've got some great ideas, and I've got some...
	Nice thoughts and everything, but when it comes to the action, I'm a hyper-reactive douche.
	What do you mean?
	Can you say that you're mean?
	What do you mean?
	I don't know.
	I'll lash out at people in conversations.
	My current source of income is playing poker, so all I do is just take people's money.
	And smoke.
	And smoke, obviously, yeah.
	Sorry about that.
	That's fine.
	But, I mean, I don't know.
	I'm just not seeing that I've done much of anything for anybody.
	I mean, I suppose I... I contemplate, all right, well, I can do this and that, and it would really, really help people, and it could be really beneficial, but then I'm like, but then if I do that, then I'm not either A, working, which means I'm not making enough money to pay my rent, because, you know, playing poker is fine and dandy, but it's hard to make a living at it.
	It really is.
	Unless, I guess, you go...
	In the scale of money, but you have to have saved up enough money to have the bankroll to do that.
	But, I mean, bottom line is that the guilt and the anxiety of the crap that's gone on in my life is just like, you know, I can try to convert people to anarchism.
	Yay!
	That's about it.
	Right, so you're looking for a way to make a positive contribution to society.
	Right, and you feel that if I understand you correctly, correct me where I'm wrong, you feel that if you can find a way to make a positive contribution for society, then you will Find meaning and value.
	Right.
	I'm just not finding...
	Well, look, I mean, so clearly, I mean, if you feel suicidal, you need to call a hotline or go to a merge or whatever it is, right?
	So I just put that out front because it's not something a philosophy you can deal with.
	But I will say this, that...
	There's a part of you that has prevented you from going down as destructive a road as the ones you were surrounded by when you were a kid, right?
	Yeah.
	Right?
	There was a part of you that recoiled from assaulting the child.
	Yeah.
	And in my view, you have to find and feed that spark.
	And every time you are mean to people, you lash out at them, right?
	You're pissing on that spark.
	You're putting it out.
	Yeah.
	You are inhabited by the blood-soaked ghosts of the nursery, right?
	And I would suspect that...
	It's going to be very hard to imagine a future if you keep producing a negative effect on society.
	I'm not going to speak about the gambling.
	I mean, that's all voluntary for people, right?
	So that's not the same thing.
	But to the degree with which you're causing or creating suffering or anxiety in others, right, there are some people who can do that, right?
	I mean, the truly disturbed can do that, and they don't appear or seem to have a whole lot of negative effects.
	Emotional repercussions.
	So you're not one of those people, which is good, right?
	It means you have a conscience, right?
	And so you have a conscience, but you also have, I would assume, alter egos who are extraordinarily destructive that were inflicted or imprinted upon you when you were a child, who were also fighting for the wheel, fighting for the rudder, fighting for the joystick of where you're going to go, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And I do sense an enormous amount of passivity in what is literally the fight of your life.
	A despair, a resignation, a hopelessness, a sit back and let transpire what transpires, right?
	Um...
	Yeah, I suppose.
	Yeah.
	If you didn't suppose, it wouldn't be there.
	And so...
	I'm going to urge you to stop fucking around and fight for your future.
	To stop being passive.
	To stop waiting to see what happens.
	And to stop indulging in harming others.
	Because you have a conscience which is good.
	But that conscience may take you out if you don't stop fighting for a better future for yourself.
	Dead men are at the wheel.
	Dead women are at the wheel.
	They're driving you off a lunar cliff to a sea of zombies.
	And you're in the back seat playing online poker on your iPod, right?
	And they're driving.
	And you better get the fuck up to the front seat, my friend, and get that wheel back.
	Where would you ideally want to go?
	And where would you ideally want to be?
	No history, no problems, in five years.
	In five years?
	I don't know, I'd kind of like to do what Adam Kokesh did.
	Okay, so be an activist.
	And, you know, go into talk radio and then into whatever.
	Okay.
	Okay.
	So, do the zombies at the wheel want that for you?
	I'm sorry you broke up there.
	Could you repeat that?
	Do the zombies at the wheel want that for you as well?
	They want me to succeed in some sort of activist...
	I don't understand how the zombies would want me to do that.
	I said, do they?
	Oh, do they?
	Well...
	I don't know, they're...
	As far as the analogy goes, I guess that they're hands grasping at me, trying to drag me into a grave.
	Right.
	Right.
	What Freud called the Deathwish or Thanatos.
	And I would strongly argue that without strenuous activity on your part, your life is going to Not go well, to say the least.
	But you need to start acting.
	You need to start having goals.
	You need to start fighting.
	There's two approaches to the devils within, to the dark side.
	There's a sort of Jungian approach, which is you have to make friends with your shadow side.
	You have to, you know, make buddies.
	And this goes all the way through to The Sixth Sense.
	I don't know if you've ever seen that movie with Joel Haley Osment and Bruce Willis.
	But there's this kid who can see ghosts and make friends with the ghosts.
	And they're all, the ghosts are friendly to you.
	They just want to hum and hum and right.
	And I sympathize with that.
	I've explored that.
	I think that's worth looking at.
	There's another, for the life of me, I can't remember the title of it right now, but there was a very long movie.
	My therapist actually suggested that I watch it when I was in therapy, and I did.
	It's like five or six hours.
	And in it, there's a man who is in hospital with terrible skin rashes and shingles and all this.
	As my therapist stated, his unconscious is in full revolt.
	And he has a therapist and so on.
	And he has a weak, dependent, clinging, vicious aspect to himself.
	And at the end of the movie, he shoots it.
	And so, I don't believe that a true evil can be reformed.
	People, I'm not putting you in this category.
	I just want you to be clear.
	I don't know, but I don't think so.
	But true evil can't be reformed because we become evil by sacrificing long-term happiness for short-term satisfaction of selfish needs and by refusing to empathize with herself and with others.
	And the problem is when you go down that path, what happens is you end up with a very strong musculature and a very strong adaptation towards Anti-empathy and the postponement of gratification.
	And what do we most need to improve ourselves?
	What do we most need to become virtuous?
	Empathy and the deferring of gratification.
	And so the problem with evil is...
	It's like saying, in order to be virtuous...
	I need to use my broken fingers to knit a sweater.
	Well, you can't, because your fingers are broken.
	So the very aspects of the brain that are most needed to set you up on the path of virtue are the ones that are most broken by evil.
	And this is why true evil, to me, is not reformable.
	And statistics seem to bear this out, the recidivism writers.
	Huge.
	And the Willie Horton case, I don't know if you remember this from way back, but this guy was let out of prison on a furlough and immediately went and raped and kept a couple prisoner for hours and hours.
	This is not reformable.
	Please understand, I'm not putting you in this category.
	Yeah, I understand.
	Be clear on that, right?
	But what I mean by that is that every time you are Difficult, you know, negative, mean, vicious, unpleasant, causing strife and stress and trouble for others, and not in the pursuit of virtue and truth and justice and goodness and so on, right?
	I mean, the criminal suffers when he is apprehended, right?
	But that does not mean that he should not be apprehended.
	So when you cause suffering to good people, then you are strengthening the devil's hold on your heart.
	You are making him stronger.
	You are feeding the beast and starving the child, right?
	You're shooting testosterone and steroids up the ass of the lion, and you're tying the lamb's legs together, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	And I think that in your mind's eye and in your heart, I think that the old devils, the historical demons, tower so far above you that it sounds like you've half given up.
	Thank you.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I... I would say that makes sense.
	All right, so who in you wanted to talk to me today?
	I assume it wasn't the devils, unless it was to triumph...
	over their conquest who in you wanted to call me today Obviously it wasn't the position that says I'm evil.
	Right.
	So, who was it?
	Some other part of me that I haven't really identified yet.
	I hope that it was the part of you that pulled you back from harming the child irrevocably.
	Well, I would assume so.
	Yeah, the part of you that has hope, the part of you that believes that a better future is possible, the part of you that wants to stop killing time, the part of you that wants to act to change.
	But I would imagine that historically you've not seen a whole lot of triumph of good over evil, right?
	No.
	And so, what is, in your mind's eye, what is the proportion of good people to bad people in the world?
	I don't know.
	It seems to me that a lot of people are trying to do what they think is good.
	Okay, sorry.
	Let me refine that.
	Let me refine that.
	What is the degree of success that good people have in the fight against evil?
	The degree of success that people...
	Because, like, in movies, we always see this, against immeasurable odds, right?
	They're surrounded by the hordes of Sauron, the brave few fight their way in triumph and all that, right?
	I mean, we see this all the time.
	The lone cop takes out the entire criminal...
	Ring, you know, the hobbit wins, right?
	We see this all the time, against insurmountable odds.
	Virtue triumphs, and order is restored, and so on, right?
	Yeah.
	So we get that story all the time, but what do you see in your life?
	Do you see good people confronting bad people?
	And emerging with some sort of victory.
	And the victory is remaining in, you know, remaining in integrity to virtue.
	Doesn't mean changing the bad person's mind.
	That's surrendering to the desire to control evil, which is itself a kind of evil.
	So, do you see harm in the world and good people standing up to that harm?
	Not really.
	I see a lot of people...
	Just going with the flow.
	Yeah.
	Evil runs rampant and good people hide under rocks, right?
	Hoping to shelter the little flames of their mildly successful lives from the great storms of everyone around them, right?
	Yeah.
	I don't mean to tell you your experience, but I can certainly sympathize with this viewpoint, right?
	Yeah.
	Who do you think runs the world?
	Good people or bad people?
	Considering that we've got a monopoly, it's obvious that collusion and cheating and sociopathy will be the reigning pattern to follow in this world.
	Yeah, the politicians are propaganda, the people with guns are the enforcers, and the media is the enthusiastic lapdog.
	Who enables the entire behavior and acts as the verbal abuser against those who deviate from nodding their heads at the vast statues of evil that we've inherited, right?
	Yeah.
	And in your personal world, when you were growing up as a child, who ran your world?
	Good people or bad people?
	Uh, well...
	Pretty much everything was run by an abusive father.
	And...
	Nobody stood up to the abusive father, right?
	I did, and I got my head bashed in, basically.
	And for that, I'm incredibly sorry.
	But what I mean is, the society that you lived in, right?
	Your father didn't live in the woods, right?
	He moved through society like a shark through fish, right?
	He moved through society.
	He was embedded in the world, right?
	Well, nobody ever called him on a shit, so that's basically where we stand, is that we got to get away with murder, so to speak.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so people ask, well, why, you know, they say to me, why would you stand up to see someone harming a child?
	Well, because it gives the child some example that is different from the almost universal example that society provides children.
	Which is that you can all be fucked over and we will look away.
	And we don't understand, I mean I think if we did we'd change our behavior, but we don't understand the degree to which that transmits this signal to children.
	That evil is omnipotent and virtue is hopeless and helpless in hiding.
	If we don't stand for the children against their abusers, the children will grow up with contempt for virtue.
	I think that's one option.
	I guess the other option is that instead of being a contempt for virtue, they will have a love of oppression.
	Yeah, they'll join the powers that be.
	Yeah, they'll become, can't beat them, join them.
	Of course, yeah.
	And if they never see any kind of virtue standing up to any kind of vice, if they only see competing illusions of evil vying to place their hands on the throat of society, they'll say, okay, well, if I want anything in this world, being virtuous must be suicidal, because otherwise people would do it.
	Being virtuous must be being afraid, otherwise people would have stood up.
	Being virtuous must be putting lasers on your head to be crushed.
	It must be like a caterpillar calling the attention of birds to itself.
	It must be suicidal to be good, because that's the only way to explain why nobody stood up.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	And this is the This is the message that we roll like a severed head down the stairs into the crib.
	When we refuse to stand up against abusers, when we refuse to stand up against teachers' unions, when we refuse to stand up against those who are selling off the unborn through debts, when we refuse to confront those who are harming children, when we refuse to stand up to them, we transmit very clearly to the society Virtue is suicidal and ethics is abuse.
	Because by God, don't we lecture the children all the time?
	Oh, we lecture the children about virtue and goodness and have sensitivity and respect property and be good and be nice and what you did was rude and bad and...
	Right?
	We retch up virtue, cough it over children like a cat jacking up furballs.
	But then when it comes for us as adults to live by even one tenth of one percent of that which we inflict on children, we vaporize, we're beamed up, we're nowhere to be seen.
	We hide.
	Right?
	Yep.
	So why did you call me?
	Um...
	Angst.
	Yeah, too general.
	Um...
	Because I feel like I'm drowning and I'm trying to not drown.
	And you're looking for an example of where virtue can win, right?
	Yeah.
	You're looking for a counter example.
	One little tiny spear to point, dig into the ground and point at the thundering and approaching Cossacks of the inevitability of evil, right?
	Yeah.
	There's, uh...
	There's no future in it.
	There's no future.
	Right.
	Join me.
	We're thundering off a cliff at any moment.
	Right.
	I don't know how...
	Virtue.
	It's a losing proposition, but you'll feel terrible doing it.
	You know what?
	Actually, I really feel like...
	I feel like...
	I feel like, uh...
	I feel like I've joined the Legion of the Damned, and I'm looking at this hopeless venture that...
	I mean, I've got people that I know who, in my mind, are intelligent people.
	They're logical people.
	They are moral people who at least understand...
	Right from wrong, and all that stuff.
	And I push, and I push, and they just don't get it.
	And they refuse to change.
	I mean, I know that it's such a paradigm shift for them, and their engrams are so fixated on how things work, because that's how they grew up.
	A parent who was an authority figure who they could not question.
	And it wasn't an advisor, it was an authority.
	And then they went to a school that had a teacher who was an authority, not an advisor.
	And all of their lives are built about this construct that says, I need an authority to tell me how things should be and how we need to run things.
	And without that authority, I'm confused and lost, and so all these people are just, like, moths just sticking to this flash, you know, this light that's going to burn them.
	And I see it.
	I see it now, and I'm just like, I can't save you.
	And I feel like my efforts are futile.
	And so I'm...
	I'm...
	Feeling that powerlessness again.
	And so...
	I know that I can't act upon my powerlessness by going out and shooting the Supreme Court or something.
	So...
	I'm...
	impotent.
	And...
	raging.
	And...
	How do you resolve that without your mind exploding with anger and frustration?
	The explosion of knowledge that you get when you come to the realization of A, there's no God, and B, there is no state, is transformative in such a way that it really can destroy I mean, yeah, I lived in the house of cards, but at least it kept the rain out.
	So, I mean, dude, you did this to me, so what the...
	Yeah, tell me, tell me, tell me all about it.
	Don't stop now, keep going.
	So, what the fuck were you doing, like, exposing me to this reality?
	I didn't want to know this shit.
	Asshole!
	I mean, jeez!
	Come on, let me have it.
	You've got to feel stronger than that.
	Go on.
	More!
	You've ruined my frickin' life, you cocksucker!
	Jesus!
	Damn it!
	What the hell?
	I'm so...
	I'm impotent, and I'm angry, and I'm at a loss for how anything I can do will make a difference at all.
	It's worthless.
	I mean, you did this to me, and thank God you did, but fuck, it sucks.
	Yeah.
	You know, that almost perfectly describes my morning mantra to philosophy as a whole.
	If that helps, I'm with you, brother.
	I'm with you.
	No, it sucks.
	It does.
	Because we all grew up seeing the impotency of virtue and the omnipotence of evil.
	And then we handled...
	Yeah, go on.
	It's not just that, though.
	I mean, you made me frickin' like, analyze my own shit, and...
	I didn't...
	I didn't need to do that.
	I didn't need to frickin' like, look back at my heinousness and say, fuck, I was...
	That's...
	I'm retching over this crap.
	I mean...
	I was a seriously fucked up douche and I mean I'm still kind of a jerk but I mean certainly not gonna be initiating violence against people but geez I didn't need to like rationally understand that and then realize the wrongness of it.
	I could have just gone along just fine and Worked my job and been a happy little worker in the cog in the wheel, you know, in the machine.
	But no, you had to go fuck that up.
	So, I mean, dude.
	So, yeah, that's what I'm calling to do is I'm calling to vent about you pissing away my freaking mindset of delusion.
	Right.
	I should have taken the blue pill.
	Yeah, I hear you.
	I hear you, man.
	I really do.
	But go on.
	Well, I don't know what else to say.
	Can I help you out a bit if you're short on words?
	You go for it.
	Yeah, listen, I mean, I've had this conversation a number of times with myself.
	You're fucked because you're called to virtue.
	Yeah.
	You're called to virtue, right?
	I mean, nobody made you listen to podcasts.
	Nobody made, right?
	You're called to virtue.
	You yearn for this.
	You're called to virtue.
	And it's like, I don't want to.
	I don't want to.
	Quiet life, easy life, simple life, life of delusion, life in the matrix, whatever you want to call it.
	I am called to virtue and I don't want to go.
	Like, who the fuck conscripted me?
	Right?
	I didn't sign up for this.
	Yeah.
	I mean, how is it possible that everyone else can hear the same thing and just blithely and blindly ignore it with no problems whatsoever, but I hear this shit and I'm like, oh, fuck.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	Why can't I have missing what they're missing so I can hear this stuff and shrug it off, right?
	I'd like some of that ignorance.
	It would be nice.
	I would love some of that ignorance, right?
	Whatever extra wall they've got, build me one.
	Whatever got scooped out of their brain, scoop it out of my brain, right?
	You know, I'm at the point where, you know, I'd just love to just go ahead and stand in line at a frickin' Hitler rally and, well, it all makes sense now.
	I have a purpose and it all works.
	I'm doing good work.
	And it's one thing to join a battle with good companions, right?
	Bilbo had his 12 dwarves.
	There was the Fellowship of the Ring, right?
	There were lots of other people in the army in the past, right?
	Yeah.
	But it's the solitary nature of this that is so challenging as well, right?
	You think?
	I've got one solid friend and...
	He still thinks that I'm crazy for thinking that IP law is bad.
	Yeah, and that's just the tip of the iceberg, right?
	Oh, you think it's about IP law?
	How cute.
	Well, no, he buys into all the rest of this.
	Oh, I guess the rest, but IP is the problem, right?
	Well, Oh, in the military.
	No, no, no.
	But here's the thing.
	Does he buy the rest?
	In other words, does he buy that if he sees a kid being harmed, he should say something?
	Does he buy that he has to reject violence and aggression in his own, he yells, in his own personal relationships, right?
	That he has to encourage it in others.
	Does he get strive for and support good and shun irredeemable evil?
	Does he get that?
	Or is it all just a bunch of verbiage for him?
	Well, for him, it's basically that the most freedom for the most people.
	You know, if people are free, the more freedom that you have, the better things will be.
	And I guess he doesn't really get the non-aggression principle as a concept in a way.
	I don't care if he gets it as a concept.
	Does he get it in his life?
	Well, yeah.
	He never is an initiator of violence.
	Well, I don't know.
	He went to vote.
	So, obviously...
	Okay, so...
	I mean, that's not the make-or-breaker for me, right?
	But does he have a troubled childhood himself?
	Oh, I'm not sure.
	But, you know, we don't need to go on into that.
	And I think...
	Look, I know you've got other callers, and this has been wonderful in so many ways, and...
	And I know that we could maybe have a further discussion of this nature, if need be, and whatever, but I don't want to take too much of your time.
	I know that...
	All right, so it's interesting to me when you wanted to pull the ripcord or push the eject button on the convo.
	So I'll go for just a few more minutes, if that's all right with you, and then I'm happy to stop if that's okay.
	Yeah, I did remember what another one of the little points was that I wanted to bring to your attention, which I think you'll just love.
	No.
	No, if you don't mind, just hold that up for a sec.
	Okay.
	So, when I started asking about your friend's history, your friend's childhood, you didn't know?
	He had an alcoholic father, somewhat abusive, that kind of thing.
	Right.
	Okay, so, I mean, I think it's important to talk to him about his history, in my opinion.
	I mean, if he's a friend, you've got to, right?
	You don't start learning a language.
	Instead, you start learning all of the basic words, and the basic words of friendship is childhood.
	I mean, then you can get more complex, but after that.
	But let me give you my two-second speech.
	I will move on to another caller.
	But this is my Al Pacino pep talk, so let me hope that I can rise to the occasion and bellow out in a vaguely New Yorkian fashion.
	It is a calling.
	It is a calling.
	It is the future that dials us.
	When I face despair, when I face the hopelessness, the seeming hopelessness of the situation, when I have conversations with the blind about colors that they can't even imagine but claim to know, then I try to recall that it is the future that is calling us.
	The future is free of illusion.
	The future is free of evil.
	The future is free of deception.
	It doesn't exist yet.
	And the degree to which it is going to be nurtured on lies or the truth is the fight that we have now.
	Yeah, the number of people you can talk to who are actually going to become enlightened It's tiny.
	I mean, I do this show with 50 million downloads.
	It's still pretty tiny.
	There's so many layers to get through.
	And you can't make anybody want to do this stuff.
	But the true innocents are those who are yet to be.
	And it's the decisions that we make now that is going to determine what kind of life They have.
	First people who figured out that slavery was evil never lived to see the end of slavery.
	First people who wanted equal rights for women never lived to see equal rights for women.
	Those of us who oppose spanking will never see a world where it is universally, publicly at least, condemned.
	And if we measure our effect on those around us, that boa news of despair We'll close on us, surely.
	Because what we're doing then is we are handing our sense of efficacy and control and power into the chainmail fists of other people's emotional defenses.
	That will always make us feel futile.
	Because we say, I want to be good.
	I wish to achieve good.
	I wish to spread virtue.
	And then we basically have to get on our knees to those around us and say, can I? Can I please?
	Will you let me?
	Can I please?
	Will you let me?
	Please?
	I want to spread virtue.
	Will you agree with me?
	Is that okay?
	Will you let me?
	Please?
	I really want to.
	Well, fuck that.
	Yeah, how many people will respond in a positive and compassionate way to that?
	Or how many other people will say, ah, here's somebody with a need.
	I will squelch it to ensure and reinforce my own sense of power, control, and efficacy.
	But you can't ask.
	Now, if you say to the future, if you ask the future, what do you want me to do, what will it say?
	Spread virtue.
	Spread virtue.
	Please, dear God.
	Please, dear God!
	Try and get.
	And they don't care.
	The future doesn't care about the Federal Reserve.
	It doesn't care about foreign policy.
	It doesn't care about national debts in particular.
	It doesn't care about legislation, regulation, fiat currency.
	It doesn't care about any of that shit.
	What the future is saying is, please help my parents to stop hitting me.
	Please convince my parents not to bully me.
	It's not just the parents, though.
	I mean, it's everyone.
	I mean, I wasn't a parent, and I obviously didn't.
	Parents control access.
	True.
	Parents control access to children.
	I mean, barring those countries where you are forced to send your kids to government schools.
	It's not only parents I agree, but parents control access.
	And that's all that the future wants is to not be hit when it's helpless.
	All the future wants is to not be hit when it is helpless.
	To be treated with some degree of respect, mutuality, rationality, concern, curiosity, intimacy.
	I mean, if there were a God, I would swear to God that my daughter is the best person that I have ever, ever known.
	She is funny, smart, courageous, intrepid, vulnerable, emotional, compassionate, passionate.
	And she soars like an eagle above the wreckage of this world.
	My daughter is magnificent.
	I am humbled to be in her presence.
	She is amazing.
	And who wouldn't want as a child to be in an environment of peace and respect and virtue?
	All souls spinning the world like the rings of Saturn, who can't speak, who can't change anything, are sending thought waves down to us to encourage, to inspire, to motivate people to be kind to their children.
	And that is something that we can achieve.
	Now, there's a paradox here, which I want to be clear about, which is a don't try to change people.
	But you really got to get the parents to stop blah, blah, blah, right?
	But you put ideas out.
	You don't try and change individuals.
	You see, there has never been a weapon in the hands of virtue like the internet.
	There has never been a weapon.
	Because beforehand, you would have to try and change people that you met, like way back before the printing press.
	You would have to try and change people that you met.
	And since very few people can be changed, virtue would become a curse, and then everyone would say, oh, that dude, he's the guy who's really interested in virtue.
	You see how he's not breeding and he's miserable?
	Okay, I guess I won't get involved in that, right?
	And then the people who were willing to sell their skills in virtue to the priests and the kings became the intellectuals and lectured everyone else while taking government money or church money or whatever, right?
	And so we had this...
	And now, things changed a little bit where you could put books out and then you could...
	You didn't have to try and change everyone in your immediate circle.
	But books are not conversations.
	Books, I mean, great evil came out of...
	There was a philosopher who was a big fan of Immanuel Kant.
	And...
	Came and met with Cairns, and after a couple of meetings, it didn't work out so well, they really hit it off, and that guy went on to found the Prussian educational system.
	The horror.
	But we have the capacity for these conversations, that there are so few people in this conversation.
	This is, I believe, the best show in the world.
	And what do we have?
	56 people in the chatroom?
	Yeah.
	I mean, I know many more people will listen to it.
	But if it's that rare...
	Without the internet, without this capacity for free communication and the publication of those conversations across the world forever, for anyone who wants it for free, pretty much, without that, virtue would continue to be squelched by the indifference of others.
	So I will give you this last piece of advice, and then I'm going to shut the hell up and let someone else talk, which is do not squander your hope on the indifferent.
	Do not cast your pearls before swine.
	It's an old saying.
	It's very true.
	You have a limited store of hope, my friend.
	Do not abuse the reserves.
	Do not drive out into the desert with half a tank full of gas and hope you find a town.
	If people won't change, won't listen, accept that.
	It doesn't mean you can't ever talk to them, but do not expend your capacity to motivate and change others where there is no empirical hope.
	That is how good souls, good people are depleted and frustrated and turned against themselves.
	People, it's the oldest trap.
	They will invite you in.
	Oh, I'm very interested in this conversation.
	And they will resist.
	And they will evade.
	And they will avoid.
	And they will counterattack.
	And they will slander.
	And they will sigh.
	And they will whatever, right?
	Pretend all this mock superiority.
	And the lure is, and I fall prey to it.
	Please, God, hope you understand.
	I'm not lecturing from any state of perfection.
	But they will lure you in.
	And they will get you...
	To shadow box yourself into exhaustion thinking that it's a heavyweight championship.
	Then when the heavyweight championship comes along, you're too tired and exhausted.
	Well, I feel like that, yeah.
	Been fighting fights that are futile, and so be it.
	So, in order to let you move on, last thing before I go.
	There's a TED Talks thing that was just on that I think you would be really interested in, and it basically goes into why it's an advocate for...
	I don't know.
	He's never an advocate.
	But bottom line is, he points out, well, how many of our heroes in stories and so on are of parentless children?
	We've got Superman, Moses, Batman, um, Spider-Man, um, you know, all these different characters, you know, characters that exist, um, you know, Cinderella.
	Well, and sorry, just to interrupt.
	I mean, just because I'm reading The Hobbit, um, I mean, he has parents, Bungo or whatever, but they're gone.
	And Ayn Rand's heroes have no parents, right?
	Yeah.
	All these heroes that we have have no parents.
	And why is that?
	Well, maybe because parents are people who are the first instigators of tyranny.
	And the acceptance of an authority figure that says, you must be ruled.
	And these people have broken that paradigm, and they no longer have this mindset of, you must be ruled.
	And they're the only ones that are free to actually create a new reality that says, you might have advisors, but you're your own ruler.
	Yeah, I mean, if you look at the new world, right, the founding of America...
	A lot of it, look at all the immigrants, right?
	A lot of it was people who left their families, right?
	They left their families.
	You know, why was America such a, you know, miraculous outgrowth of potentiality?
	I mean, because there was a cycle that was broken.
	There was a new world.
	I thought it was because of all the criminals that came here.
	No, that's Australia.
	Well, Australia was great, too, for a time.
	Right.
	It is, you know, I mean...
	I've thought about this a lot.
	The degree to which parents encourage or limit a child's potential is a very interesting question.
	And certainly if we could get parents to encourage children to blast through their delusions, it will be quite something.
	Isabella was at a social gathering and a kid there was missing a tooth and One adult said to the kid who was, I think, four or five, and did the tooth fairy come and give you money?
	And Isabella said, oh, come on, that's just a story.
	Come on!
	There was so much packed into that.
	Just a little phrase.
	Irritation to the adult.
	Exasperation at the You know, mock, ooh, did the tooth, like the condescension and all that sort of stuff and sympathy for the kid.
	I mean, it's great.
	I think I've only mentioned the tooth fairy once.
	So, I mean, obviously she got that.
	But that's, I mean, that's fantastic to me.
	Well, anyway, yeah, fuck you.
	Fuck you very much.
	Fuck you for everything that you've done for me.
	No, I hear you.
	I hear you.
	And I'd like to both take pride in it and apologize.
	I'm just making a note of this so that I can put this on the book jacket of my next book for my satisfied listener.
	Fuck you very much.
	How are you feeling, man?
	I just want to check in on that before I move on.
	I'm feeling better.
	And try and stay in conversation with people who are into this stuff.
	Yeah.
	Right?
	I think that's really, really important.
	And thanks.
	Look, I mean, I know it's hard.
	Thank you for not harming that kid.
	I mean, take some pride in that.
	I mean, given where you came from, given your own history of rape, given, right?
	I mean, thank you for that.
	I mean, I hate to say good job for something like that, but good job for something like that.
	Seriously.
	I mean, I did harm...
	I know, but it didn't do as much harm as I could have.
	Yeah, and you stopped, and you've never started again.
	So that is something to take some peace in.
	I know it's not perfect, of course, but so thanks for that, and thanks for the conversation.
	And I'm sorry for everyone, of course, who's been listening.
	I mean, we've got a lot of positive comments about the conversation, but thank you for everyone who's patient.
	Do we have another call-up?
	Yes, we do.
	We have a couple of callers.
	We can go a little over because I definitely milk that can until it fell over.
	We also started a little bit later today.
	We have three in the line, so we'll do what we can, I guess.
	Steven is up first.
	Hit me.
	Good morning.
	Can you hear me?
	I was going to ask you about grad schools.
	I've been looking at grad schools that have Austrian economists.
	I'm looking at business school.
	Listening to the last caller, I'd much rather talk about my past since that's probably a better place to Take your ear, since I have it for the moment.
	Well, I grew up in a broken home.
	Parents divorced before I could remember, so maybe between one and two.
	My father was an alcoholic.
	The event in their lives that triggered the divorce was after a company picnic.
	He was drunk on the way home.
	They were arguing.
	My mom is...
	She grew up in a very religious family without drugs or alcohol, so she doesn't drink.
	At the time in the past, they came home and out of an act of violence, he shot at her.
	She got away through the back door.
	This triggered their divorce.
	Growing up, at the age old enough to be told this story and knowing the past, I'm not really having a good relationship with my father.
	My mom then raised me as a single mother and found a family that adopted children and watched children and had a huge heart for, I guess, children in general.
	They had eight children in total and with me and their family being babysat, it was another child I added to the bunch.
	But along the lines of being included involuntarily with a family, especially one that is not blood-related, was an interesting childhood because I was, in comparison to the other ages of children, I was at the very bottom.
	But I would go home at night and be in my own bed with my mom and be an only child again.
	So it was this part-time Youngest child in a big family and then part-time only child.
	And all my extended family live out of state.
	We would fly twice a year to visit family.
	And it's a very complex childhood.
	And I haven't heard anyone bring up a story that goes along the lines of what I've experienced, although different parts of the story I've heard.
	The problem is now I'm college age.
	I just mentioned that I'm looking into business schools, but in the recent past I've had an episode of surrounding myself with friends who do not the best things, you know, sit around and be lazy and do drugs or drink or party, etc.
	And I've learned through the last five years of college and undergrad About myself and my habits and where they stem in my past.
	But especially recently, I've stopped smoking, but I've turned to drinking.
	And I've noticed that it's probably been every day, and it's hard to remember a day when I went without.
	And it's in social gatherings or even sometimes on my own at home.
	It's not always to get totally wasted, but just something to enjoy to relax, and I use it as a crutch, kind of.
	But my main concern is that growing up, knowing the effect that it had on my father and my family, it concerns me now, knowing that I've had myself in a bad spot, and my mom doesn't approve.
	It's a concern, so I'd like to start there.
	Alright, and what in particular would you like to start with?
	I guess my developing alcohol problem that I'd like to stop.
	I've used the counseling services talk therapy at school that's provided to address other issues in my life.
	The death of a close family member six years ago, other things.
	But it didn't feel good enough to...
	Go deep into my issues.
	And I've had a business card and I've looked up therapists in the area.
	I just haven't put my feet to the pavement to go out there and start.
	I've thought of every excuse not to take advantage of going out there and getting into a session and addressing my issues.
	I can think of a million reasons.
	Being busy with school, classes, work, etc.
	But if there's any...
	Anything that this conversation can help me with, put fire under my ass or anything, I'd like to get that much out of it.
	And do you want me to ask questions or tell you my thoughts?
	Please, please, yes.
	Pick away.
	Alright.
	So, why do you drink?
	In what circumstances do you drink?
	I mean, obviously, social gatherings.
	Sorry if you mentioned this.
	Is it family?
	Is it friends?
	Where do you drink?
	As far as any stressors as factors?
	No, not stressors.
	Just under what circumstances?
	Oh, yeah.
	Social gatherings.
	Not with family.
	Like I said, my mom doesn't drink.
	So it's not with family.
	It would be with my girlfriend or other social situations or at home just after a long day have a beer or two or a drink or two.
	And it's not always necessary, but it's something to relax to.
	Almost kind of how I have coffee in the morning to get my energy up to do work.
	I don't know.
	Okay.
	And what are the alternatives to drinking, right?
	So if you don't drink, what happens?
	Well, I used to go out on my bike and enjoy a nice bike ride or exercise.
	If I don't drink, I... It would fall into another vice.
	I mean...
	Watching videos...
	Yeah.
	It would be some sort...
	Something would fill the gap.
	Right.
	So what's the gap?
	I mean, that's the essential question, right?
	Ah, the gap.
	The gap.
	Well...
	Because it's a self-distraction, right?
	Right.
	You know, all of these negative habits are, at least to my mind, tiny parts of self-erasure.
	Right?
	In other words, I... I am not at peace with myself, and so I need something to self-medicate with, to avoid what I'm not at peace with myself about.
	Right.
	I've labeled it in the past as a lack of structure in my childhood, but that's just a...
	Wow, that's some pretty abstract stuff, man.
	Just a big labeling of just the events that happened.
	Yeah.
	The hate that came from my father and just the neglect of the relationship that he had with me.
	That would be a big gaping hole in my past.
	I've looked towards male teachers, male role models, and I've noticed this habit throughout my life, let alone my mother's father was a great role model as a male figure in my life, but that's the close family member that died six years ago.
	It's hard to even talk about that because he was almost like my true father as far as the role model and That position in my life, and then losing him was really difficult.
	Fortunately, with my biological father, he's a truck driver, and in the summer after my freshman and sophomore year of high school, I was able to spend a month with him on the road, where all throughout the Before that, my longest time of being with him was like a week when I'd visit him when he was living with his parents in Delaware.
	So I had these two months with him one year after the other and with his sister and her family.
	So in high school, I got to spend time with him and it kind of changed my attitude.
	And I guess even one day on the road, it was like, It was really hard to be with him stuck in that truck.
	And there was one instance where he hit me, and it was because, I don't know, I was so frustrated, and I yelled at him, and I cursed at him while he was getting out of the truck, and he came right back in the truck and hit me.
	And I never really thought that that incidence was so significant to But it's a symbol of his relationship with me.
	But he was mainly absent than being present and abusive, which I see as a silver lining or something good out of the evil.
	But absence can be abusive to you, in terms of its negative effect on a child, right?
	Right.
	I mean, if your parents are away...
	I mean, just to take an extreme example, if you're five and your parents go out for the evening and you're hungry and you can't make your own food, right?
	Their absence is actually hugely problematic, right?
	Yeah, that's why I say that it was some sort of blessing that my mother's father kind of was a father figure in my life.
	Because if I really had a total absence of a good male role model, I don't know what I'd be like.
	To say, losing the only good male role model in my life six years ago was really tough.
	I was lucky enough that we flew up there.
	He went through a slow medical integration, so it wasn't a sudden death.
	I was able to say goodbye and everything, but Um, that was really tough.
	And that was, uh, right before I graduated high school.
	And now, my whole life, I've been, I've had issues with, um, weight.
	And I was always the fat kid.
	And which, you know, now explaining some of my past, it's, uh, understandable why that was.
	So, uh, being overweight, um, kind of like self-abuse through, um, short-term satisfaction.
	Um, After high school, there was an incident where a combination of going to the doctors for a pre-op approval, the doctor told me I had all these precursors for bad health issues like high blood pressure, diabetes, etc.
	And in combination with my closest friend at the time attempting suicide, kind of put the essence of life in front of me.
	So I started to...
	Go out and exercise and eat right.
	And that's kind of when my global awakening started on the internet.
	It was just shortly after I started exercising and looking to improve myself.
	And so, Zeitgeist, movie, et cetera, et cetera, keep watching other things, keep learning, end up finding your stuff and everybody else online.
	And I love it and I learned a lot while I was losing weight as far as health goes.
	Trying different diets, finding a new appreciation for cooking and eating vegetables and I really went through this whole 180 helping myself.
	But I've come back home or I'm still at home and I find myself still in the same environment that my childhood was or all the bad things that happened or not all the bad things but If I can get the point across that, I'm still at home where my path is the same environment.
	It's still hard to move on.
	I don't know.
	I feel like I'm in a rest of development because I'm still in this bedroom where 10 years ago I was...
	Going through some bad things, you know, obesity and family issues.
	Right.
	Can I, first of all, I really want to express sympathy.
	I mean, it is, it's tragic.
	I mean, it's the alienation, the hitting, I mean, the instance that you talked about, deeply shocking, deeply shocking to be hit as a child.
	And the circumstances of the parents' divorce were just, I don't know at what age you learned them, but I mean, that's pretty hellacious, right?
	So first of all, I just really want to give you sympathy for that.
	And then I'm going to be really annoying and advance a theory.
	And I think it will be helpful to you.
	I hope it will be helpful to you.
	And let me know.
	I'll try to be brief, okay?
	I'd like you to examine the possibility.
	It doesn't mean believe it.
	It's not proven.
	It's a possibility.
	I'd like you to examine the possibility that fundamentally all dysfunction is the avoidance of legitimate grieving.
	That all dysfunction is the avoidance of legitimate grieving.
	So, to take my own example, right?
	So, I grew up without a dad.
	I mean, I saw him occasionally, once every couple of years.
	I spent a summer with him, my brother, when I was six.
	I spent a summer when I was 16.
	But essentially, I grew up without a dad.
	And...
	I know what you mean about the search for father figures.
	And for me, it didn't work.
	I don't think it works very well for anyone.
	You didn't search for a father figure like in any abstract sense because you had your mother's father who was a positive role model, and that's great.
	It doesn't really explain why she married your dad, but that's perhaps a topic for another time.
	But...
	So I would look for these things, but here's the thing, and it's a pretty significant problem.
	Now that I have become a father, and I've been at this almost four years now, now that I've become a father, I realize that there is no replacement.
	There is no replacement.
	The continual interactions, the continual shaping of And guidance that is mutual in the relationship with the child.
	All of the tiny little intimate correction moments and enjoyment moments and shaping moments and so on, they cannot ever be achieved in any other context.
	So, for me, it's sort of like If I needed a good father to be happy or I needed to find a way to replace or substitute my history with someone else or some other group or some other paradigm or some other person, and then I could be happy, it would be the equivalent for me of saying to myself, okay, I was born in Ireland.
	Now, I can only be happy if I wasn't born in Ireland.
	And so I'm really going to work at a plan to make myself happy called, I need to have not been born in Ireland.
	Well, I was born where I was born.
	Any idea that I can go back and change that history by some appeal to some different circumstances or goals or energy expenditure in the present is an illusion.
	I did not get what I needed when I needed it.
	I got quite the opposite.
	I will never get what I needed when I needed it because that's in the past.
	I will never, ever get what I needed when I needed it because that's in the past and I just didn't.
	Now, if you can imagine, if I had a plan called, I'll be happy when I was not born in Ireland, we would get that that would be kind of nutty.
	But if I really believed that, do you know what would happen?
	How many shamans, charlatans, and hucksters, if I really believed that, would come along offering to help me out?
	Huh.
	Oh, yeah, listen, I can, hey, you want to not be born in Ireland?
	I can make that happen.
	For a fee, for an allegiance, for obedience, for whatever.
	I can make it so that you weren't born in Ireland.
	Not only will I adjust your birth certificate for you, but I will go back in time and I will move your mother and then move her back.
	So if I have a belief about the possibility that my needs can be met Then I am open to all kinds of manipulation.
	Because I have a need that is impossible to fulfill, I believe that it is possible to fulfill it for two reasons.
	One, to avoid grieving what was lost and is irreplaceable.
	That's number one.
	And number two, because there's lots of people around in my life who don't want to accept the irrevocable harm that was caused.
	So, that's a way of approaching it.
	I mean, I still get letters from my dad.
	It's like, dude, I'm 46 years old.
	Wow.
	I'm 46 years old.
	And being a stay-at-home dad, it's irreplaceable.
	The time with your children when they're developing is irreplaceable.
	Let's say that my dad had some epiphany when I was 20 and came over and wanted to be a really great dad for me.
	I would still have an enormous amount of grieving to do because I would have 20 years of not being shaped by my interactions with that person in a positive way.
	I will never be, ever be, The person who had a good dad when he was growing up or who had a good mother when he was growing up.
	I will never be that person any more than I will ever have not been born in Ireland.
	And yet I think we stagger on and we pretend and we lash stilts to our stumps and think that we're tall and we avoid and we distract from The essential grieving.
	And if we distract ourselves from the essential grieving long enough, we end up re-inflicting so often.
	And so I think that there's something to be learned from your room.
	That's why you're there.
	I think the room, so to speak, is trying to tell you something.
	Which is the irrevocability of your loss.
	So I just need to go through grieving and self-exploration.
	And in time, just as a child settles down after a fit, I can find a moment to move on.
	Well, I mean, accepting the truth.
	Right.
	Look, I'm no expert in child development or child psychology, but I'm pretty much an expert in reality.
	And the reality is that if you did not have a father who was around when you were growing up, Then you will never be someone who had a father around when he was growing up.
	And that's not psychological, that's just philosophical, right?
	That's just a reality.
	If you were hit by your mother when you were growing up, you will never be somebody who wasn't hit by a mother when he or she was growing up, right?
	I mean, if for whatever reason you had Less nutrition than you needed when you were growing up, and that made you a foot shorter than you should have been.
	You can eat all you want later, but it won't make you taller, right?
	Does that make sense?
	Yes.
	Yes, totally.
	If someone knocks out your adult teeth, you don't get your teeth back, right?
	Right.
	And so, if we were harmed or damaged, As children, we will never ever not be that.
	You're totally right.
	I am running away from the truth.
	And I do it often.
	And that's natural.
	I hope you understand.
	That's perfectly natural.
	That's perfectly natural.
	And we all do it.
	But I think we have to remind ourselves So much of what we do that is dysfunctional is the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
	And Lord knows, there's lots of people out there in the world who would try and sell you the story called, you don't have to be born in Ireland.
	Parents abused you?
	Well, you can have a great relationship with them.
	You just need to work at it, right?
	If you love enough, if you use enough...
	Giraffe language or whatever, I can't remember, NVC. If you're positive enough, if you love enough, then you could, you know, but no.
	But no.
	I mean, you can be fine, and in fact you can be even better, but first you have to accept the truth.
	There's nothing but the truth that liberates in the long run.
	And the truth is that you were missing some very essential things in your childhood, And you will never, ever get those things.
	Because you needed them then.
	You will never, ever get those things.
	It's like, there's a language window, right?
	If you don't have any exposure to language between, I don't know, like 18 months and 3 years old or whatever, you never learn language well.
	And I don't think it's that...
	It doesn't matter if people talk a lot to you when you're 10 then, you just miss that window.
	Like if you're born blind and you later regain your sight, your brain just didn't build that part that processes.
	There's neuroplasticity, you can change these things and so on.
	I think the language thing is more firm.
	But even if your perfect dad showed up now, which isn't going to happen.
	You can wait for it, but I think it's rarer than winning the lottery.
	If your perfect dad showed up now, you would still have an enormous...
	Amount of suffering to process, a loss.
	And all of the attendant anger and frustration and pain, that comes with that.
	Right?
	Because when you lose things as a child, the tendency is to get angry, but mostly the adults can't handle it around you, and so they're more than happy, so to speak, to have you internalize that and blame yourself.
	I mean, I envision a world where the children's needs are first and foremost, but sorry, go ahead.
	Well, another issue is that my mom was complacent and kind of an avoidance also, and so allowing me to internalize And be avoidant of the issue also.
	Her father was abusive and not until he had a major medical issue did his attitude on life turn around.
	In time for me to reap the benefits of him changing his attitude on life, that's why he was a good person in my life, but to her...
	And her siblings, he was an authoritarian, yeah, to catch irony in the story.
	And so she was complacent in my father's personality, I guess, the five years while they were married before I was born, and his habits, everything.
	And she has her own issues that she shows that she's still being avoidant.
	She has issues with her weight and...
	It was her father that died that I'm grieving.
	That was a good role model, but in her life was an authoritarian, abusive in many ways, and absent at times.
	And it's tough because being at home, I'm surrounded by her...
	The same environment.
	Her avoidance and my avoidance.
	When my grandma, her mother, comes down to stay for four months, then she's here and she has bad habits and avoidance.
	Then it's like a perfect storm of three people with similar issues and with similar grievances that they're all avoiding.
	It's really rough to live at home.
	I'm looking forward to moving on.
	Yeah, look, I want to sort of point out, like, everyone in our lives is infectious.
	Everyone in our lives is infectious.
	We can't avoid that.
	I mean, again, I see that as a father.
	My daughter spends time with someone, and she has that person's mannerisms for a while when she comes.
	Like, every personality we have is infectious.
	And that's just, everyone we surround ourselves with inhabits us.
	And so, infectious can be infectious laugh, as well as, you know, a virus or whatever can be positive things, but everyone who surrounds us is infectious.
	I think that's just a very important thing to understand.
	And so, if you find yourself becoming more avoidant when surrounded by three historically avoidant people who shaped your personality and so on, that's not, to me, that would be kind of inevitable, if that makes sense.
	And you can challenge that, right?
	I mean, if you want, you can try and set up a different standard in your family.
	Oh yeah.
	It's just difficult to focus for myself when I'm surrounded by the environment of the infection still.
	And I feel like I need to escape, which I've done in the past where I'd move out and live with a friend near home and then one that was in a town five hours away.
	But, you know, the urge to escape the environment, needing to get on on my own and get on my feet.
	And so it's a very complex issue.
	Yeah, but your loss, I mean, if it's still unprocessed or avoided, then your loss will come with you and shape all of that, right?
	Yeah, because, I mean, if you're avoiding loss...
	And again, I don't mean this is a conscious decision or anything, but if you're avoiding loss or grieving, then you can't really surround yourself with people who are going to ask these kinds of questions, right?
	It shapes everything.
	It shapes your romantic life.
	It shapes your social life.
	It shapes your community life.
	And it also is, you know, everything we are is an invitation and a rejection.
	Mm-hmm.
	Right?
	And so, if we are self-avoidant, then we avoid, people who are not self-avoidant will avoid us too, right?
	Because we'll trigger their own self-avoidance, and so people who are perceptive tend to shy away from people who are foggy, right?
	And, you know, vice versa and so on.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah, just need to come face the facts.
	Yeah, face the facts and accept the loss.
	Yeah.
	And accept the loss.
	So, I mean, there's practical things you can do, right?
	I mean, like you can write down all the things that you wanted and didn't get.
	And I guarantee you that until you become a dad, you won't know it all.
	In fact, you may miss lots.
	I certainly did miss large sections of it.
	But it's...
	It's a huge thing.
	It's a huge thing.
	It's continual.
	I mean, my daughter's awake, you know, 13, 14 hours a day.
	And, you know, other than my shows, that's what I'm doing.
	Other than my shows and FDR work, which is, you know, I mean, I spend time with her.
	And it's a continual process of negotiation and intimacy and interaction and guidance and all of that.
	And you can't backfill it later.
	You can't go back and say, okay, well, I'll be a good dad to you now when you're three, now that you're 20.
	Can't change where you were born.
	Can't change what happens to you as a child.
	Does it still hurt?
	So it seems like it's a never-ending process that you're finding out that there's new things that you didn't get being a dad now.
	So you still go through a process of...
	Reflection and what you missed out on?
	No, not really, because I just lecture people.
	I don't really live by this.
	Not many people know I'm in the army.
	This is all just a massive pseudonym.
	And I'm running for office.
	I guess I know the answer to my own question.
	No, there is some of that, but the great thing about providing what was not provided to you, the great thing about Providing to others what was not provided to you is that your loss has a purpose.
	Your loss becomes the fuel for your virtue, right?
	Wow.
	And so your loss takes on a happiness propulsion, so to speak.
	I mean, if I had not been parented so badly, I would not be such a good parent.
	And that's the only way to turn vice into virtue, the only alchemy that I know of.
	And so I am, of course, sad, but it is a lot sweeter than...
	because I've tried to use it for as much good as I can, and I think I've used it for...
	As much good as possible.
	And so it is somewhat sad, but it's not sad like empty, hollow, horrified, existential loss.
	It's sad like a sad movie, which has a sweetness and a depth to it, if that makes any sense.
	Totally.
	I thank you very much for your time.
	You're very welcome.
	And I think we can do maybe one more person because we did start a little bit late.
	And who's next?
	Next up is John.
	Hey, Steph.
	Hey.
	Sorry, I'm a little nervous.
	And patient, so thank you for that.
	Yeah, so I became an atheist not too long ago, and that was emotionally pretty hard, but lately I've came to kind of a new aspect of that, of atheism and science.
	It's really emotionally uncomfortable to me and just wanted to see if maybe you could help me out with that.
	So, religion has the soul to explain what a human being is, but Lately I've been looking at sort of DNA and what makes up a human being and basically it comes down to a human being is just basically a bunch of ones and zeros,
	a bunch of just basically different mechanical parts and That's had me in kind of a depression for the past few months and I just can't seem to get out of that any time I hear about how science will be able to replace the human brain with just a bunch of silicon parts.
	It just makes me feel hopeless, like there's...
	Like a robot, right?
	Yeah, like a robot.
	And I just can't seem to get out of that, because I know...
	Yeah, it's the Lucretius thing, right?
	On the nature of things, as a listener said, there's nothing but atoms and the void, right?
	So, if there's no magic, there's no meaning, right?
	Isn't that the challenge of the de-religious experience?
	If there's no magic, there's no meaning, right?
	Yeah, that's what I feel.
	We are mammals.
	We are livestock.
	We are replicating machines of meat, right?
	Yeah.
	Good, then we're in agreement.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	I confirm your depression, and right?
	Okay, so if this is true, if we are nothing but atoms in space, then why are you talking to me rather than a tree?
	Yeah, I understand that.
	Do you?
	I mean, yeah, I mean, the fact that I'm talking to you means that there must be something more to being human than just atoms.
	But at the same time, I feel like...
	I mean, it is true that That's all we are.
	I feel like there is no me.
	It's just a bunch of component parts.
	Right.
	Soulless, right?
	Yeah.
	It's funny, you know, like soulless is sort of meant to mean cold, calculating, sociopathic, empty, emotionless, that kind of stuff, right?
	Yeah.
	But...
	I don't know, if I took my notebook in to get repaired and the guy told me he'd driven a demon out, I wouldn't say, oh good, now my machine is soulless, right, or whatever.
	I mean, it would just, well, there wasn't one there, it's a machine, right?
	Now, of course, nobody can explain consciousness.
	I mean, it remains an irreducible mystery, which is fine.
	I mean, there's nothing wrong with mystery.
	It doesn't mean that there will forever be ignorance, and it doesn't mean that we won't be able to explain it forever and so on.
	I repeat myself.
	To me, it's all the more astounding and, quote, magical, right?
	In the sort of, the Northern Lights are pretty cool fireworks, though they're not fireworks.
	But it is amazing and magical that this little couple of pound bag of wrinkled juice called a brain can produce songs and horrors and dreams every night and conversation and insights and ideas and so on, right?
	It is truly amazing.
	experience to be in here, as I'm sure it is.
	I mean, amazing doesn't mean like it's always wonderful, but when you really think about it, it's a bunch of neurons firing and from that we get Bohemian Rhapsody.
	I mean, it's just amazing.
	It is really astounding just how much can be produced from such a tiny little bag of meat, right?
	Yeah.
	Now, as to the personality, as to the self, as to the identity, Well, science seems to be supporting, in fact, science is supporting my view for a long time.
	It's not just my view, but I call it the MECO system, that we are an aggregation of various personalities and alter egos and so on.
	And some of them are just inflicted on us, and some of them we pursue voluntarily, and some of them are sort of more original to us and so on.
	But we are sort of a jostling set of perspectives.
	And so it's hard, I mean, I think it's hard to say I, I sort of think we, you know.
	I think about myself.
	I think of it as sort of a we.
	And some of them are here by choice and some of them are here by circumstances or history or whatever.
	But it is a self-negotiation and brain scans seem to indicate this.
	Various personality matrices within the brain are activated in different circumstances and so on.
	But the one thing that people have that nothing else has is the capacity to Compare actions to ideals.
	I mean, we protect our young, so does everyone else, right?
	We take care of our immediate community, so do so many other mammals and so on.
	So we're not unique in any of that.
	But to my knowledge, no other animal has the capacity to compare standards or behaviors to ideals.
	And that to me is the essence of choice.
	It's the reason for philosophy.
	It's the reason for the necessity of mathematics and engineering and science and double-blind experiments in medicine and so on, which is that we have the capacity to separate truth from illusion according to abstract standards that are universal.
	And that really is the root of everything that is around us as human beings.
	It's the root of, you know, the sciences and many of the arts and...
	Although there's some subjectivity in art, there is an objective difference of quality between a two-year-old's scribblings and the Mona Lisa.
	So we do have some standards.
	And whether those standards are in economics, called price, which is a subjective value and so on, that is acted upon.
	Whether those standards are beauty.
	There are ranges, of course, in standards of physical beauty, but I don't think any leper is considered physically beautiful.
	And so we do have these standards, these ideals, and we do have the capacity to take proposed actions, proposed choices, and compare them to these ideals.
	And where we achieve these ideals, if they're virtuous, then, you know, the goal, of course, is happiness and so on.
	And where we don't, then, you know, the result is a lack of virtue or possibly even the presence of vice and so on.
	I mean, there's no such thing as a hypocritical cow, but there is such a thing as a hypocritical human being.
	And so we have this capacity to abstract to the point where we can project our actions relative to an objective standard, and that gives us morality.
	That gives us virtue.
	That gives us vice.
	And that's a kind of like-it-or-not situation.
	Like, we have language capacity, like-it-or-not.
	We're exposed to language, we learn language, like-it-or-not.
	We hit puberty, like it or not.
	We have virtue, like it or not.
	We have the capacity for virtue or the capacity to use abstracts, abstract standards, which are the most powerful tools we have, to use them for good or for evil.
	And so we can have an abstract standard called the scientific method or we can have an abstract pseudo-standard called faith.
	And we can tell the truth about our abstract standards And call violence violence and peace peace, or we can lie about our abstract standards and call violence government or whatever, right?
	And so this capacity that is innate to almost all people is, I think, the essence of what differentiates us.
	And, I mean, I think in a pre-scientific way, I mean, religions have understood this, which is why they have this thing called a conscience.
	I mean, we are UPB all over the place.
	Language is UPB Even our sense data is UPB, and of course we're all exposed to math science and scientific method and so on.
	So UPB is everywhere.
	It's inescapable, and so our capacity to compare our actions with ideal standards occurs involuntarily, which is why bad people are not happy.
	And so the conscience is simply the manifestation of UPB in the unconscious.
	Of course, we hope to make it conscious and all that, but the conscience is very real.
	And I believe it has actually, it will be found to have a physical component where when we act against our stated values, there is some brain activation that is different than when we act in, right, which is negative.
	And so we have all of these capacities that I believe that religion, Accepts or encourages.
	We have some aspects of free will.
	We have a conscience.
	We strive towards virtue and virtue is really nothing more than universality.
	And we experience happiness when we achieve that and we experience unhappiness when we don't.
	And so I think that everything that is presaged by religion is something that is innate, an innate aspect of almost all human beings.
	And so I don't think you're going to lose much.
	Other than illusion, by transitioning to a more physical view of the universe, if that makes sense.
	It does, sort of.
	I just feel like there's...
	I've never felt as happy Since I've learned about the physical basis of things as I was when I thought that there was a magical component to it.
	So, like, if happiness is just a chemical reaction in the brain, you know, why not just do meth till you die?
	I feel like real happiness is impossible.
	Sorry, why not do meth until you die?
	Well, I mean, the Aristotelian argument, which is, I think, a fairly good argument, is that you want to maximize your happiness.
	And doing math is, you know, you'll die much sooner, your teeth will break, you know, you'll end up pursuing math, you know, stealing or whatever it is, you'll be unresponsive to your relationships, you're Life will leave you.
	So, I mean, it's like, so why not just inject heroin, you know, five times and then OD? Well, because that's actually, that does diminish your happiness to some degree in the long run.
	And of course, if you want to, though, of course, that's, you know, as long as you can't inject other people, right, with that stuff.
	But if you want to, that's certainly not immoral.
	But the other thing, too, is that I don't see how religion solves that, right?
	I mean, if heaven is the best place, why not just kill yourself or put yourself, if you don't, you know, if suicide is banned, put yourself in increasingly risky situations.
	Until you're dead, and then you get to heaven quicker.
	I don't think you solve the problem of why not just get to the happiest thing you can most quickly by having free will, sharp objects, and heaven.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, maybe the drugs were a bad example, but if you could just live in a fantasy world where you were completely happy all the time, and since happiness is a physical thing, As a physical basis, I assume that that could be possible at some point in the future.
	No, I don't think that is possible fundamentally, particularly if you have children, right?
	Because if you live in a fantasy world and you have children, your children are not in that fantasy world.
	And so you will have to tell your children that your fantasy world is real, right?
	Right.
	And that's bad.
	That's bad.
	And also you will have to surround yourself with people who are in a fantasy world, which means you can't ever speak about truth or doubts or feelings or history or anything like that with them, right?
	So you end up in a situation where your relationships are not even relationships, but just mutual masturbation to the poster child of whatever fantasy object you're working with.
	And you will end up having to lie to children while proclaiming the virtue and value of truth to them and suck them into this crazy world or whatever.
	So the argument, and I think it's a fairly good one, is that it is really not sustainable to live in a fantasy world and remain happy because you have to become the enemy of truth.
	And that takes a lot of work.
	Like, I mean, people who lie, I mean, it's a lot of work.
	Again, they can see this show up in brain scans.
	I mean, it's a lot of work to lie and to maintain affection.
	It's kind of exhausting.
	And so the idea that it makes people happy in the long run doesn't seem to be very sustainable.
	Now, if you're surrounded by liars, then telling the truth also creates stress and problems and so on, right?
	So, you know, it's not simple.
	Like, oh, if you accept the truth, you'll be happy and everything will be great, right?
	Because we live in a...
	a pretty deluded planet.
	And so there are those challenges, but I still think it's a weapon.
	weapon.
	Okay.
	I don't know, I just...
	And the last thing I'll say, sorry, the last thing I'll say, I mean, and I'm sorry, but I do have to sort of go, but the last thing that I'll say is that, and I'll just leave this as a possibility, because I haven't asked you anything about your sort of emotional surroundings, but...
	If there is a meaninglessness that creeps into life with an acceptance of reality, of truth, which is that the people around you who are full of illusions or delusions or lies or whatever you want to call them, errors, to be as nice as possible, that those people are going to have...
	that those relationships are going to feel emptier.
	So I just sort of open up...
	I mean, you say...
	If you came from a religious background, that meant that you were raised, usually, in a religious family, and may have religious extended family, and religious friends, and religious community, and so on.
	And so if you, you know, take the pill, if you accept the truth, then those relationships tend to become somewhat hollowed out and problematic, right?
	Because you can't participate in the way that you used to.
	And it becomes somewhat stressful to be in a situation where people are saying things that you know just aren't so.
	And, you know, do you say it?
	Do you not say it?
	Do you become guarded?
	It's like suddenly being gay in 1950s Alabama.
	It's a real challenge.
	So it may be that you're mistaking your existing relationships and the problems that your belief system is causing in those relationships for something existential.
	Does that make sense?
	Yeah, like that's what's causing this.
	Well, it's a possibility.
	It's certainly something worth examining, I think.
	Do you think that might be a possibility?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, I do.
	And please feel free to call in next week if you'd like to talk about this further, because it is a significant challenge.
	I've got a video called God is Really the Fear of Others, which you might want to check out on...
	On YouTube or in the podcast stream.
	But, you know, whenever we're tempted by existential questions, the first place I suggest looking is to the relationships.
	We don't want to excuse the relationships through an appeal to false universality.
	And so I really think it's important to look at, rather than some philosophical content, to look at what's happening in your relationships, first and foremost.
	And to see whether that's influencing where your issues are coming from.
	Because, I mean, in my mind, again, just one sort of last thought, and again, I'm sorry for not asking more questions, but one last thing that I would say is that, to me, the people who accept delusions are robotic, not the people who are in pursuit of truth and who are accepting truth.
	So, I mean, you know, if you debate with the statists, I mean, they're like machines.
	If you have a conversation with someone where they're actively thinking and being present in the moment, then...
	That to me is a very lively and deep and wonderful and meaningful experience.
	But if you're dealing with people who've been propagandized, then they have prefabricated answers.
	And they're not answers, right?
	I mean, they're just rebuttals or responses that have no intellectual or factual content.
	But, you know, it's like you...
	You bring up a free society and you know, like you bring up a stateless society, you know the ten questions you're going to get.
	And they come with incredible robotic, dare I say, regularity or predictability.
	Or if you argue against the existence of deities, you know the objections that you're going to get.
	And you know the responses that you're going to get.
	And so, I think that when you accept the truth, you expose those who are propagandized as machines.
	And it's, again, it's important to look at the relationship.
	And you can see, this is not made up, I mean, you can see videos on YouTube where children are being programmed with these responses, right?
	So, at some creation museum, some sort of creationist museum, they actually rehearse with the children.
	They get them to chant out the responses to questions or objections from people who accept evolution.
	And how do you know?
	And they, you know, what about this?
	Or what about that?
	They actually get them.
	They're programming them.
	Not with thought, but with reason in, garbage out.
	Rego.
	Or what's known as talking to most people.
	But they're actually programming them.
	And in the same way that in government schools, you are programmed.
	The absence of government is the absence of regulation, of order, of peace.
	If the government doesn't do it, it will not be done.
	Government is society.
	You are programmed all the time.
	Without the government, it's impossible to pay for roads.
	An answer which has not changed since the invention of the GPS. You could be charged for every little piece of road that you use.
	No problem.
	And so...
	People who are propagandized are robots because it's input-output without the intervention of thought, reason, evidence, curiosity.
	It's push button, get response.
	That is robotic.
	So again, I don't think that the issue of soullessness is solved by the programming of propaganda.
	And just again, Maybe as you sort of wake up, as you become irrational, maybe, just maybe, I would say more than maybe, the robotic feeling that you're getting or the concerns that you have about roboticism is actually what you're seeing in the people around you rather than what reason and science and philosophy is leading you to.
	So I would really strongly suggest that because I can tell you, my experience of talking with people who are enlightened versus talking with people who are programmed or propagandized is vastly different.
	So I would really strongly suggest, and of course, you know, please, I'm sorry we've gone way over, but please do call back in if this didn't make any sense, is completely wrong, or you'd like to talk about this issue further.
	So with that, given that it's almost quarter to one, I will stop trying your patience so much.
	Thank you, everybody, so much.
	It was great questions, great, wonderful, amazing.
	So thank you everybody so much.
	Again, if you'd like to donate, freedomainradio.com.
	I live and breathe by your approval.
	And I hope that you will chip in a few bucks to help this conversation continue to grow.

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