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Nov. 11, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
40:39
2254 Save Me from My Evil - Freedomain Radio Sunday Philosophy Call in Show, 11 November 2012

0:00 Introduction 4:20 I Hate Work! 35:00 My Parents Went to Therapy! 54:40 Save Me from My Evil 1:43:00 The Danger of Money.

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Time Text
Oh my goodness, we're starting on time.
Oh, let the record show that this day, 11-11-2012, the Freedom Aid Radio Sunday Philosophy Call-In Show started on time.
So, welcome everybody.
I guess one or two items of note-taking and bookkeeping and updating.
I will be speaking Saturday, April the 20th, 2013, from 3 to 10 p.m.
Actually, I'm not going to get the whole time.
Those bastards.
But I will be speaking in New York, and you can have a look and get some tickets.
You know, you should come.
If you're anywhere in the neck of the woods, you should come.
I mean, it's five bucks if you go ahead of time.
So you've got to come and check it out.
Location is TBD, but you can go to anarchynyc.eventbrite.com.
That's B-R-I-T-E. It's anarchynyc.eventbrite.com.
That's going to be Saturday, April 20th, 2013.
Come on down!
And I hope that you will...
It's going to be a lot of great speakers.
So come on down and support your local voluntarious community.
And if I do say so with not a hint of modesty, you really have to come see me live.
It's a great experience.
I'm really, really Getting good.
So I hope that you will be able to come down and check it out.
Other than that, I believe the documentary is coming along and I'm very, very pleased with it.
We have the first 20 minutes of, it's about 50 minutes and change, so we have the first 20 minutes mostly done and we are plowing ahead.
Of course, we accelerate as we move forward and we have A new set of animators coming on board tomorrow, which should help grease the wheels.
So again, anything that you can do to help out with the somewhat surprising costs of everything to do with the movie, I would really appreciate that.
You can go to freedomainradio.com forward slash donate to help out.
And remember, the quality of the movie is really going to be dependent upon the amount of donations.
So help us not make it suck, because I certainly think that the script is great.
I was chatting with another filmmaker who's just released a very successful documentary and he wanted to see to hear the audio so I sent him a copy to keep private and he said that at the end of it he was in tears so I think it's going to be very good but the only thing that I would recommend is you know obviously we'll we'll spend what we can to make it look good if it comes out and you feel it looks cheesy and you never donated and you could have donated Well,
I'm afraid that's mirror time for you, my friend.
So if you'd like to help out, it would be greatly, greatly appreciated.
So that's it for my updated duties.
And thanks to Adam Kokesh of Adam vs.
The Man.
We did two shows last week.
If you ever do want to hear me do a fair amount of podcasting or video interviews in the voice of Martian the Marvin, then you really want to go to adamvsvstheman.com.
I've got it out as a podcast, but he's got the juicy video.
I'll probably republish that too.
Thanks again to Mises.ca for having me down to the University of Toronto where I gave two speeches.
And it was all fantastic.
I had a great time.
Went out for dinner with listeners and we stayed up chatting until the wee hours.
So, I mean, I was listening to an audiobook called God Know by Penn Jillette.
Who is a very intelligent and articulate, but a surprisingly coarse man.
And he was talking about at the end of their shows to hang around and talk to listeners.
And as he put it, where the fuck else have I got to go?
Now, I do have the fuck else place to go, but I really do relish and enjoy the chance to chat with listeners.
So it's a private live show.
But not the kind where you end up having to go to the bathroom with a handful of Kleenex.
Well, never say never.
Anyway, so that's it for my intro.
Thanks again to James for hosting.
If you would like to have a chat, I think we have at least one in the call.
So let's get down to the listeners, baby.
All right, next up we have Biffo.
Hi, good morning, Steph.
How are you doing?
I'm very well.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm doing pretty well.
Thank you very much.
I have a question today about work.
Basically, just let me lay down the whole story here.
In recent months, I've come to the realization that I fundamentally don't want to work.
I guess that's just the most succinct way I can put all of that.
It began with me coming back to where I grew up for summer, and I started working at several jobs.
The longer I worked, the more I found that every day was just unbearable.
And I thought I had acquired a job which was something that I desired.
I always had this dream that I would get into a job that was entrepreneurial.
And in this job, I got to teach, I got to do marketing, I got to do all these skills which eventually would We'll look good on our resume and eventually I had this whole vision for my life that I was going to go ahead and make something of myself, be a high-powered salesman or be some sort of marketing whiz.
And there was always this fantasy that played out in my head that I get out of college and do something along those sort of lines.
But this summer I've just been taking a break from college and the more I work and the more I think about it, that prospect just terrifies me.
I'm done with that job now, but whenever I would go to work, I'd feel like a sense of stress.
And a sense of discomfort that this was going to be the rest of my life.
And I asked people who were sales managers, I asked people who worked up in the chain of the industry I was working at, and they're all like, oh yeah, I work 10 hours, 12 hours a day, no problems.
No problems.
Just get up at 7.30 in the morning and get off work at 7 o'clock at night.
And they just seemed to, this was just their lives.
And they didn't have any problems with doing overtime.
And this just seems to be the cost of, to me, this deal was sold to me as the cost of growing up.
You grow up, you got to do more work.
The more work you do, the more money you make, but you got more work to do.
But recently, I've just been really struggling with that idea.
And I used to want to be a salesman.
I used to want to do all these entrepreneurial things.
But now I just don't want to...
I just want to lie in a hammock sometimes and just forget about all those things for...
Just leave me alone for a few years.
But then there's always a part of me which is like, oh, you're throwing all your talents out the window.
And you're weak.
You're not...
You're not able to cheat.
You're not like Howard Rourke or Hank Reardon or all those figures, and I don't know how quite to reconcile that.
Yeah, I mean, you want to be careful about bringing Ayn Rand characters into the mix.
You know, that's like me saying, well, I can't sing as high as Mickey Mouse.
You know, they're fictional characters, and you don't want to get body dysmorphia because you compare your curves to Jessica Rabbit.
So anyway, just be careful with the Ayn Rand stuff.
And she said exactly the same thing.
She said, my characters are not prescriptions for actions.
They're metaphors.
So I think it's important not to confuse what's possible with Ayn Rand's characters, right?
Who never get pimples and never have a bad night's sleep.
It's important.
So I guess my question is, so you want to exercise all of your abilities.
And I think that Aristotle is pretty right.
He's not philosophically right, but he's kind of intuitively right when he says that happiness is the exercise of your faculties to the maximum extent.
But in pursuit of what?
You can be a really excellent axe murderer.
You can be really good at selling your candidate in the political arena, none of which is good.
And so I guess my question is, You said all of these things you want to do.
I want to sell, do marketing and all this.
But to what end?
Like for what?
What products?
These are all form.
It's all form, not content.
Does that make sense?
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
I absolutely have no idea what I want to sell.
The vision I had in my mind was that I wanted to sell.
The whole sales process was just fascinating to me.
I remember asking you about sales advice once.
I was asking, how do you do cold calls better?
How do you get prospects?
All those sorts of sales process things.
I was very fascinated in the idea of sales being a hunt.
And that I could achieve things relatively well in that.
But the more I think about it is that I don't really want that with my life.
The stress, the idea of the stress of that hunt.
And the more I think about it, it's not only to do with selling any particular product or any particular thing, but doing any form of work.
Even just...
The most simple jobs now seem horrifying to me when I think of, oh, if I'm a waiter now, what if 10 years later I'm doing the same thing or I'm doing something else except it's harder and harder?
There's no form, I guess, I can put to it.
Well, I mean, obviously you're putting a lot in here.
I wanted to point out that these guys who I got up at 7.30 and then I get home at 7, it's like, So, okay, they're making money and they're selling stuff, which I guess is fine.
But, you know, what are they not having?
They're not having time with their children.
They're not having time with their friends.
They're not having time with their wives.
And these are the kinds of people who, when they grow up, because I don't think that's very mature, what they're doing.
There's no balance there, right?
So, when they grow up and they get older and, you know, they get into their 50s and their health begins to Do it slow, steady march down to the grave and they have money, but they don't have, maybe they're divorced or maybe they're not close to their adult children and so on.
You know, it's the cats in the cradle song, right?
Yeah.
And then what happens is they look back and they say, well, shit, the hell was I doing all that work for?
I have more money than I can use, more money than I need to live on.
And, you know, what's the point of being able to fly to Bali if nobody will come with you?
What's the point of having a big house and If you wake up and your only breakfast companion is an iPad or the television.
So be careful of the hard work ethic.
It is something that is put in place to make you more productive to your bosses.
You really got to watch out for that.
Protestant work ethic is a subtle, smoky little bitch that will steal decades from your life Make you extremely productive to your bosses.
I mean your bosses don't care if you see your children.
I mean obviously good bosses do, but I mean the merely economically driven bosses, they don't care if you see your children.
What they care about is you close the deal.
And if closing the deal means that in 20 years you're not close to your children, what do you think they're going to go for?
What do you think they're going to encourage?
So the cult of excellence, I'm extremely skeptical of the cult of excellence.
I mentioned this before on the show, but excellence usually just means making other people, like being convenient for other people.
And so if you don't know what value you're going to add to the world, then it's really hard to be motivated to do anything.
I think.
I mean, if you're not just some robot that's programmed by propaganda to make other people wealthy and powerful.
And so what I would say is to look into your history, to look into your childhood, I guess I'll ask the question now, and to say what was considered or what was portrayed as the good life in your environment when you were growing up.
What was considered to be the ideal?
What was the good life?
The good life?
Well, that's pretty evident to me now that I think of it, because all throughout my childhood, my family is a family full of professionals, and I got relatives, and they're all doctors, engineers, and lawyers, and the message that I always got from my uncles and my father and my mother was that, oh, yeah, you could be poor, But if you're poor, you can't afford all the things that we have.
And that'll make you a pretty miserable person.
The only way to a good life is you become a professional.
And when you become a professional, you make enough money to have things, to be happy, to have cars, to have houses, to have women, and all those sorts of things.
And the more I think It seems more and more ludicrous than I did because they weren't really happy people themselves.
But it definitely was sold to me hook, line, and sinker that the way to a happy life was to become rich and the way to become rich was to study hard, work hard, and get a good job.
That's the way it was sold to me.
Right, right.
I mean, it's tough because I've been rich, well, not rich, but I've been fairly well off and I've been, you know, completely broke.
And certainly having money, I mean, of course, all other things being equal, having money is better, but everything comes with a cost, everything comes with a price.
And I would love for society to ask children What they want to be when they grow up, and for the children to answer two words, virtuous and happy, rather than have a pretty colored Visa card and buy sex through excess resources, right?
Because that's what they're saying.
They're saying, have money so you can have a woman, right?
And we all see this advertisement, right, which is the rich guy with the hot woman, right?
Which is, I have money, so now I can buy myself a tasty little piece of flesh, a high-class prostitute who's willing to be with me because I can help her buy things, right?
I mean, they're both whores in reality, right?
But that is not, of course, the recipe to happiness.
You can't escape the unconscious short of decapitation, and if you accumulate resources in order to If you buy a pretty breeder, then you are below the apes.
At least the apes are honest about it, right?
So I guess the question is, if the good life is acquiring skills and acquiring resources, well, that's an empty animal existence.
Now, if they said, well, become a doctor so that you can help people, Become a lawyer so that you can do some pro bono work and give to charity.
Because once you have resources, you can really help people.
That's a slight...
You understand there's a difference in ends.
But if they say, well, get resources so you can spend stuff on your own pleasure and buy a pretty wife.
I mean, that's pretty narcissistic, right?
That's not about the good of the world.
I mean, I know I'm going to get, oh, you shouldn't.
You have to live for the good of the world and so on.
Well...
I don't really agree with that.
I think that the world is in a tough enough state that anybody who's not calculating in some manner what good they can add to the world, that person is problem, is part of the problem and not even potentially part of the solution.
And I'm not saying that people got to quit their jobs and go screaming about philosophy to people on the sidewalk, but what I'm saying is that if We all have the capacity to heal the world.
We all have the capacity to help the world.
And dear God in heaven, the world desperately needs to be helped and healed at the moment.
So since we're all doctors and we're all stepping over bodies and people with spikes through their hands and horrible infestations on their skin and fingers falling off and all that, and we have a bag that can help them of morphine and of disinfectant and antibiotics and whatever, right?
If we are doctors and we step over bodies every day, And don't even acknowledge them?
I don't think we're really good doctors.
In fact, we're pretty bad doctors.
And so since we all do have the capacity at some level or another to help what is truly a dying world and a world that when it dies is going to fall on us and our aspirations and our hopes and our pretty wives and our expensive cars and our big houses and squash them flat as powder.
Then anybody who is making life calculations with no thought whatsoever to how to save the world, well, I think that person is kind of...
Because, I mean, particularly if you're in this kind of movement, right?
Or if you've even heard anything about philosophy or virtue or whatever.
And so it doesn't have to be, you know, maybe it can be you find some internet resource like this one or some other one and, you know, just spend 20 minutes or half an hour a week sending it around to people.
That's all I'm really talking about.
And so I think that what's missing from what you call work is purpose and virtue.
Does that make any sense?
That makes absolute sense.
Um, I have one last question for you.
What you have said is all I completely understand.
I think I already realized that to an extent.
I just have one last question, though, which is, you know, back in your entrepreneurial days, not saying that you're not entrepreneurial now, back in those days, I heard podcasts of you talking about, like, oh, work for the software company and we'd be working 12 to 14 hours a day to push out the next software and get...
That request for proposal and doing all sorts of things and I'm just wondering what gave you all the energy to do that?
What gave you the drive to go out there and become effective?
That's a good question.
I was intensely thrilled to have even the opportunity and I think that's I mean I came from such a Decrepid, broken up, broken down.
Not just family, but entire social environment.
That for me to have the opportunity to write software, to manage a group, to go and give sales presentations, to write RFPs and all of that kind of stuff, and to negotiate, I mean, it was an unbelievable, unexpected delight.
I certainly believed that, and still believe, that The software that I was working on did some good to the world, helped people make the air cleaner and so on, kept the government off their backs.
So I think that it was doing good environmentally.
I think it was doing good philosophically.
And I really wanted to create an environment in the workforce where people could enjoy coming to work, where people could have opportunities, where a boss was a resource, not somebody who was scary.
Because I really knew that if people had exposure to that in the world, that would change their lives.
It would change their relationship to authority, and it would also change their relationship when they became an authority.
Particularly if I was their first boss, that was going to change how they were going to be a boss.
It was also going to change how they were going to be a parent.
It was going to change what they expected from business or economic environments and so on.
So, I mean, I knew I was doing some good, and I was very happy to be doing that good.
I was enormously enthusiastic about having the opportunity, which was quite unexpected, about having the opportunity to do what I was doing.
I felt very lucky, very privileged, and I was also terrified, right?
Entrepreneur is, you know, half love, half fear.
Maybe the proportions swing back and forth a little bit, but because I liked it so much, All love comes with fear, right?
All love comes with fear because everything that you want, you fear to lose.
The more you love your life, the more you're afraid of getting sick.
The more you love your wife, the more you're afraid of her getting in an accident on the road.
The more you love, the more you have to lose and the more scared you are.
And I loved the opportunity.
I loved the...
I also, I loved the way that I was able to handle power.
I was very pleased and proud of that.
I didn't have any good examples of how to handle power, but I really thought it through.
I journaled a lot.
I was in therapy, of course.
So I really worked on how to not be a threatening authority figure, but to be a resource.
And it's tricky, right?
I mean, you want to be the employee's resource, but you also need them to get stuff done.
So how do you achieve all of that?
Well, it's challenging and it's complicated.
And I didn't want to be the, you know, Steve Jobs reality distortion field kind of guy because that erases other people and that's megalomaniacal and that doesn't build an organization that lasts.
And the organization that I co-founded and that I was largely responsible for growing has lasted.
The employees bought it out and they're all still working there because they love the environment and so I did create a good nugget of Positive economic energy that has continued to this day, which I'm enormously thrilled and pleased about.
So, I mean, those were my motivations.
There was the exercise of unguessed abilities very much to their full potential.
And also that I felt and I knew that I was doing economic, political and social good through what I was doing.
Well, all I'd say is that that is much food for thought.
That's quite a beautiful vision and I hope that I could share that one day.
Yeah, if you want to be a salesman to do good, then you will be motivated.
If you want to be an entrepreneur to create a great place where people want to come to work.
I mean, we had staggering amounts of fun when I was The boss, when I was the Chief Technical Officer.
I mean, we would go whitewater rafting, we took everyone to cottages, we went to Palladium.
I remember being on a very contentious conference call with a client and somebody shot one of those little rubber sticky things with the stick on the end of the suction cups.
It looked like it shot at my forehead.
Now, admittedly, that is not a small target.
But it was funny and actually just the right thing to do because it really broke the tension for me having to continue that call while attempting to pull this suction cup off my head.
So I think that kind of stuff is, you know, we would stay and play, you know, late night.
After we'd finished doing the coding for the day, we'd stay and play late night online games and all that kind of stuff.
I mean, We all would go for coffee, go out for dinner.
We went to each other's houses.
houses.
I mean, it was really, it was really a great environment.
And so I think that, uh, um, uh, you know, I'm very, so, so it was exciting for me to go to work.
Uh, If an employee wanted to do something different, there was one guy who came on as a coder.
He was really interested in doing the sales presentation.
I flew him out and we went to a couple.
Then he did one and he really liked it.
So I was happy to help him expand his skill set.
It was great for me and it was certainly great for him.
So another guy had an R&D project that he wanted to do where he wanted to replace our reporting structure with direct coding RTF files to the hard drive.
And I mean it took him months.
But it was actually a really great idea.
And so, you know, the code read through our reporting structure and recreated the reports using RTF, which was much more portable.
And so there was lots of really great stuff that people wanted to do and wanted to try.
And, you know, because I'm not a central planner, I wanted to create that kind of environment and that kind of possibility.
So, yeah, it was a huge amount of fun, a great experience.
And Taught me a lot about how the existing financial structure that we have is really threatening to long-term business interests.
Anyway, so...
So yeah, find something that you can do that's good in the world and, you know, as Niji says, give a man a why and he can bear almost anyhow.
But if you're just looking at, I want stuff and so I'm...
I mean, you can't...
Because then it just becomes a calculation.
So let's say you can get a house that's twice as big if you go to school for 10 years.
Is that worth it?
No.
It is worth it if you're totally in status driven, right?
So if you say, well, I get a big house and a fast car and a pretty wife if I go to school for 10 years and the alternative is that everyone in my social circle thinks that I'm a failure.
I will never be respected in my community.
Everyone's going to be embarrassed for me and look down on me.
Then it becomes worth it, right?
But it's not worth it if you actually have some self-respect.
And recognize that being judged for the mere gathering of material wealth, being judged for that, is shallow, petty, slave-on-slave, controlling verbal abuse.
I mean, you know who gathered a hell of a lot of money?
Hitler!
So did Stalin, and so did Lenin.
All these guys were incredibly rich.
Bill Clinton makes a fortune.
What is he, $200,000 a speech?
It's crazy.
Barack Obama, what did he make?
Millions and millions of dollars last year.
I mean, okay, so 72 hours after he wins the re-election, he's sending drone strikes into Yemen.
Look at the guys.
I said, Bear Stearns or the Lehman Brothers, they make an unbelievable fortune.
They do that by pumping dogshit stocks On the financially incompetent by cold calling people up to some degree and saying, I used to get these calls all the time when I was in business.
People cold calling me to sell me some stock that they were promising was going to go to the moon over the next month or two.
To which, of course, I replied, well, why are you telling me?
Right?
I mean, you should just call yourself.
I mean, that's crazy.
But those guys all make a huge amount of money.
And there are shallow people, I would argue, with sociopathic tendencies, who simply look at the accumulation of economic wealth, regardless of its source, and cry envy and cry power.
And of course commercials do all this kind of stuff, right?
Commercials are the absence of philosophy and to a large degree in the absence of religion, right?
I think it's really important as a society that we really understand this.
Because philosophy used to give us a road to the good life, called virtue.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness.
And religion used to give us a road to the good life, which was, you know, obey the egos of the church, do good in your community, and you will get to heaven.
And we have taken those two structures, particularly away from the young.
Religiosity has declined by about a third among the young, just in one generation, right?
So, I mean, by 2050, we will be a non-religious culture.
But...
The definition of the good life has not magically filled in with reason and virtue, filled in the vacuums left behind by nationalism, by racism.
Racism used to give you a route to the good life too, which was racial purity and a rejection of the minority underclass.
And a ganging together and a banding together and a protection of the women and all that kind of stuff.
So, you know, racism, nationalism, even your local sports tribalism, Religiosity, philosophy hasn't had that job for a long, long time.
But all of these used to define what virtue was, what the good was, what the good life was.
And they've largely, not everywhere, but largely fallen by the wayside.
And what has taken their place?
Well, what always takes the place of any deeper principle?
I didn't say better principle, but any deeper principle.
Everything that takes the place of service to others I mean, you need to travel, what the hell is a Maserati doing in there?
You know, your clothes on your back, what the hell is a $6,000 Hugo Boss suit doing in there?
But that's all because people have no capacity to negotiate on rational terms, so they end up Negotiating or dominating on status.
This is very common, right?
Because they don't have the capacity to meet as equals and negotiate and love or respect or even fight each other as equals, they end up having to have this status display.
And this is very common in the animal kingdom.
Animals don't actually want to injure each other because that's not good for the gene pool, but they need to have ways of showing dominance.
And they do that through various displays.
Chest thumping, the rams have horns that they butt each other's heads with.
So animals have ways of showing or establishing status non-lethally.
And in the absence of philosophy, and even in the absence of religion, we revert to the bestial.
We revert to the animal.
And if you look at human society, in the absence of What you see is a bunch of bald apes, all climbing on top of each other, using status, using rhetoric, using power, unable to meet, unable to negotiate, and unable to find anything of any depth or satisfaction in their own lives, driven on by an empty hungriness for power.
Whatever food they eat makes them hungrier.
Whatever drink they drink makes them thirstier.
And the only satisfaction they can get or the brief alleviation of the discomfort of emptiness is to climb on the back of one more person to get a slightly higher view, to feel slightly taller.
That person then sinks into the general mud of irrational hierarchical dominance to which they need to climb someone else.
So it's like climbing a set of There's that it's continually sinking into the mud faster and faster and faster.
That is the addictive nature of status, and that's all that we're left with when our values evaporate.
My sentiment is exact, Steph.
I guess my search for the good life continues.
I have a good idea of what it is, but it continues on the bus.
But thanks very much for your words.
It's really helpful.
Keep up all the good work.
Thanks, Biff.
I appreciate it.
Let me know how it goes if you can.
Have a good day.
Bye.
Thanks.
Up next, we have Mike.
Hi, Steph.
Hello, Mike.
Hi.
How's it going?
Good.
This is the first time I've called you.
We've had a couple of short email conversations.
I wanted to thank you for all you do with FDR. It's made a huge difference in my life so far.
Well, thank you.
We are certainly – our major mission statement is to reclaim the initials from that ratbag socialist president, so we're well away.
We are at least a half of 1% of the way there.
Yeah, that's a good goal.
Yeah, in fact, I started a conversation with my parents who are in their late 70s, early 80s, and the result of that so far has been that they actually entered psychotherapy.
How cool is that?
Yeah, I was really surprised and really thrilled.
Wow!
Tell me what happened.
How cool!
Well, basically, it became fairly obvious from conversations that I'd had with them that my set of beliefs had changed quite a bit.
And that resulted in my mom sending me an email with kind of her...
You know, her take on things and wanting, obviously, a response.
And I just kind of went, well, she's asking.
I'll give her the whole story.
I will take her at place value and assume that she wants an answer, right?
Exactly.
And she didn't quite know how to respond, but my father kind of stepped in.
And that resulted in a fairly long back and forth with him.
And...
And there was some tension.
There was definitely a lot of tension.
Well, if there's no tension, then you're not doing anything real, right?
Yeah, sure, sure.
And he kept interpreting what I was saying as being a direct attack on him, where essentially I was putting things in terms of my relationship with my son And allowing him to draw the parallels, well, you know, between how he related to me.
And I actually did not have a...
My childhood, if you were to compare it to, I guess, the norm, was not bad by any stretch of the imagination.
But, of course, everyone has issues with...
Well, you mean relative to your parents, right?
Because, I mean, I assume you went to public school and all that kind of crap, right?
Yes, exactly.
Sure.
So your childhood at home with your parents was...
Okay, good.
Yeah.
But of course, we all have issues, or I certainly had issues with being marginalized and not feeling like I was being considered...
Valuable.
Things like that.
Psychological issues.
No real...
I mean, I suppose the only abuse I ever suffered in terms of physical was I probably was spanked two or three times as a young kid.
So, I mean, certainly nothing there.
And having his parental choices questioned came as a big blow to my dad, but he did come around and...
I got this surprising email and phone message saying that they had entered psychotherapy, and I was just floored.
Wow.
I mean, that's fantastic.
Do you know why...
I mean, obviously, you had a lot to do with it, but do you know why they may have taken that rather surprising turn?
I mean, I wish everybody would, but do you know if they have any...
I mean, were they interested in self-knowledge or psychology?
Well...
On and off in the past, they joined some kind of S thing, I think, when I was probably in my pre-teens and early teens.
Oh, yeah.
That was the forerunner of the Landmark Forum, if I remember rightly.
Yeah, it was a thing in the 70s, which was pretty confrontational, kind of shrieky, like you weren't allowed to go to the washroom, and pretty intense, but very confrontational kind of assault on illusions, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, exactly.
Something like that.
Okay, so there's some precedence for, however clumsy and aggressive it may be, but some precedence for an interest in self-knowledge or a lack of mere historical inertia for how they were working with things.
Yes, definitely.
And, I mean, they had had probably what I would call a little scare a few years back when my older sister actually kind of She disconnected herself from the family in a rather kind of angry and confusing way to the rest of us, so I think they were a little nervous.
Do you know why your sister did what she did?
Do you know why she did what she did?
She has reconnected.
I don't really know why, and I'm quite sure she doesn't know why.
How do you know?
Have you asked her?
I have talked to her a little bit and basically she came up with this idea that she had a friend at work who had Asperger's Syndrome which is on the autism spectrum and she had some conversations with him and as a result of that she ended up taking some kind of online test that It led her to the conclusion that she might in fact be autistic,
which I consider to be Personally, ridiculous.
We have a son who has been diagnosed as autistic, and her behaviors are nothing like that in any way, shape, or form.
So she basically used that as an explanation for, oh, this is why I've always had problems with mom and dad with their authority, and boy, it must have been so difficult for them, because how could they have known how to deal with a child like me?
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