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March 12, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:47
2342 Stefan Molyneux's Writing Approach

Stefan Molyneux, Host of Freedomain Radio, discusses his approach to writing.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Roland from Freedom Aid Radio.
So, a listener writes, Hi Steph, I'm used to constantly writing essays, papers, novellas, research papers, etc.
I think that because I'm no longer depressed, I simply cannot write.
Maybe it's something to do with the selfish introspection of depression.
I certainly do not miss being depressed, but I have college papers to write, newsletters that expect me to publish, speeches to write for congressmen, etc.
I suppose my question is, do you have a writing process and what is it?
For whatever reason, I cannot rely on instinct right now.
I need to discover a certain discipline that I hadn't previously needed.
So, a fine question and a very interesting question.
Writing process.
Writing is one of the greatest challenges of any communicator.
Because, I mean, I simply will talk about the way that I write nonfiction.
I mean, fiction we can talk about perhaps another time.
But I will talk about how I write nonfiction.
Now, just be aware, I'm not a published nonfiction author.
I've self-published a bunch of books, and they've been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and they seem to be quite popular.
But I'm not Stephen King of the non-fiction set.
So take what I'm saying with as many grains of salt as you can fit in your double-cupped hands.
So the first thing when you're looking at a writing process is to understand what writing is.
And generally, I think all writing is an argument.
It is an argument for a perspective, an argument for some syllogisms, it is an argument for truth, or it is an argument for the desire to replicate a subjective experience.
So, if you look at something like Macbeth, Shakespeare is making an argument that murder is bad.
If you kill the king, well, let's be fair, I actually played this part.
If you kill the king's enemies, you're a hero and sleep well at night.
But sadly, if you kill the king, you do not sleep anymore and you go mad.
And you welcome death.
So, that's an argument for a particular perspective.
Don't kill the king.
A pretty popular argument for the king to commission.
And if you look at, I mean, I was just, I've listened to a couple of Harry Bosch series by, I think, James Patterson.
I can't remember the guy's name.
Anyway, he writes these sort of whodunits, or police procedurals, I guess they're called.
The guy who wrote The Lincoln Lawyer.
And they're an argument for a particular kind of steadfast Humphrey Bogart-style dedication to virtue that is housed inside a corrupt exterior, right?
So, this is a good guy because he will do whatever it takes to get the bad guy and he will, you know, move mountains and insult people and attack people and all of that just to be able to get the bad guy.
And that's an argument for a perspective, that these are the kind of cops who are out there, that there are these kinds of cops out there, that the system as a whole may be kind of flawed, but the system in this example or the person can survive despite a corrupt system and can achieve good and so on.
So that's another kind of perspective.
And if you look at, I mean, romantic comedies, you know, love is good, love is salvation, pop songs, I mean, really, almost all forms of human communication are arguments.
Not arguments like contentious, but the putting forward of a position with the attempt to change your mind about something.
Commercials, obviously, are arguments.
Something like prison break is an argument against the death penalty and for fraternal dedication and against the state, really, as is the good wife and a bunch of other, the burn notice and other things that I mentioned before.
A movie which I saw recently called Grey with Liam Neeson about wolves.
It's like sharks with fur on an ice, man.
Well, this is an argument for the emptiness of life, the fact that we live in a spiritually vacuous universe.
And in a true Nietzschean fashion, then it becomes, it's a good day to fight, it's a good day to die.
very similar to House of Cards, the remake of the British series with Kevin Spacey.
He is an atheist, and lots of people around are atheists, and, you know, this is the...
Like, you can be an atheist on TV, with the exception of the lead, Juliana Margolis' character in The Good Wife.
You can be an atheist on TV if you're crippled like House or evil like Kevin Spacey.
I guess the character in The Good Wife, she has a monstrous husband who's a complete sociopath, and, you know, a real mafia-style shakedown artist.
Watch the scene where he's trying to get his kids into school.
It's true organized crime.
This is what Vladimir Nabokov says.
You can't show a happy romance between a black and a white, and you can't show a happy atheist with a long-lived marriage.
You simply can't, because the atheist in the media has to be put forward as somebody who's tortured.
And that is a huge progress, because before you saw a lot of happy Christians, and now you just see unhappy atheists.
That's what we call progress in philosophy.
But everything is an argument, right?
So, in House, the argument is that truth is better than politeness.
That getting things done is more important than sparing people's feelings.
Doing the right thing to heal people is more important than cozying up to their insecurities and cultural prejudices.
Seeing things boldly for as they are, there's an argument for that.
I mean, again, I could sort of go on and on.
Lord knows I do, but...
A congressman is making a speech and, you know, dude, I mean, please don't, don't write for congressman.
I mean, God, I mean, you touch your dick with those hands?
Ew, they're all covered with congress slime.
They got political goo all over them, man.
Yee, out, out, damned spot.
They shall never come clean.
But, of course, if you make a speech for a congressman, it's putting forward an argument.
Putting forward a proposition, a perspective.
And, of course, most politicians' speeches, at least the really good ones, I just read over, because I really like Dragon Naturally Speaking, and I had to retrain for a new computer, and one of the things you get to read is the inauguration speech of Kennedy, 62, I think it was?
Anyway, on Monday.
And what he's trying to do, and this is what Barack Obama does so effectively as well, And Churchill, I mean, was the master of all of that.
Politicians, particularly the more sinister style of politician, will try to lure you into a grand drama, right?
This nation, we...
Torch has been passed to a new generation, forged in the fires of war, enduring a hard and bitter peace, right?
They're trying to get you into sort of a Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones kind of mess, right?
They're trying to get you...
To put yourself as a character into their grand story.
When Lord Gort, in the fall of France, was defending some outpost, Churchill messaged him and says, Lord Gort, the eyes of the empire are upon you.
So you're being watched and you've got to stand tall and be noble.
Nobility is just invented so that you'll die for people.
It's nothing else, nothing more, nothing less.
The desire to get you into a grand narrative.
The story of our island shall not end this way.
The desire to get you into a big story is the desire for you to offer up your blood and limbs and kidneys to be spattered all over some usually foreign field.
And Obama does this, you know, masterfully with the sentimentality and the grand scheme and the human condition and the, you know, the fact that the grandest and most abstract language is owned by politicians is one of the greatest tragedies in the world since it is a tragedy which gives birth to almost all other tragedies.
And it's so shameful, it's so shameful that philosophers have allowed these Blood-soaked, power-hungry parasites to take control of the furthest and most exalted reaches of human thought.
I mean, nobody hears anything grand and noble and motivating from your average philosopher, but they will hear it from a politician who is doing it for the most nefarious ends imaginable.
But that's what happens when you surrender the power of grandiose and ethical language To politicians, they will use these syllables like sound guns to push the young through the meat grinders of conflict.
So, that's, I think, the really important thing to understand.
William Styron, if you ever get a chance to read his book, instructive on many levels, some of which I would argue he's not particularly conscious of, Darkness Visible, About his depression.
I mean, he hadn't even noticed that in the majority of his novels, people killed themselves.
You know, he's the guy who wrote Sophie's Choice.
I mean, that's an argument.
It's an argument for the existential horror of life, of existence.
So, that is something that we really need to understand.
Dostoevsky is writing novels about The helplessness of virtue in a corrupt world.
This is the argument, really, for nihilism, that virtue is that which enslaves you to people.
I mean, there's truth in that, but that's only false virtue.
I mean, real virtue sets you free.
But Dostoevsky was making many, many arguments about The horror of the shallow, shameless, power-and-money-grubbing people around him, as was Maxim Gorky, as was Ivan Torgenev,
and I don't know enough about, I mean, the other great writer, the war-and-peace guy, to know enough about, I don't know enough about his, I've never been able to make it through a book of his, but Tolstoy, Tolstoy.
But everyone's making an argument, and that's what communication almost invariably is.
I'm not talking about, you know, intimate end of the night lying in bed with your wife conversation, which is just really around sharing.
But almost all written communication is the making of an argument.
Include poetry.
This is the making of an argument for intense experiences that are attempting to replicate themselves through the vividness of language from one unconscious to another, right?
I mean, language, particularly written language, but, I mean, no, I shouldn't say spoken language, but language is fundamentally the It's driven by the desire for unconscious experiences to leap like lightning from one brain to another.
And that's why writing is so dangerous, right?
You know, you sanitize your hands after you go to the washroom.
You wash your hands after you go to the washroom.
Man, you should really be careful about what you read, careful about what you write, careful about what you expose yourself to.
And in particular, the better the communicator, the more this arc of electricity of subjective experience portraying itself as a universal, the more that experience is going to transmit itself to you.
Always be conscious when you pick up a book to read it.
You pick up a book.
Somebody is making an argument.
John Bradshaw makes an argument.
I make an argument.
Nathaniel Brandon makes an argument.
Everybody is making an argument.
And you need to be aware of that.
Fiction writers are making arguments.
Script writers are making arguments.
I mean, so, a play that I mentioned, I think, a week or two, two weeks ago, a week or two ago, A Long Day's Journey Tonight by Eugene O'Neill.
I was making an argument that we are doomed to To remain lashed to the people we happen to be born next to or with, no matter what.
I mean, there is no escape from that family.
Same thing with Tennessee Williams.
There is no escape from the family.
It's similar to the way that marriages were portrayed in the 19th century.
I'm thinking of a book called, I think it's called The Egoist, about a narcissistic man, or Pamela.
By, I think, Samuel Richardson about a woman trying to, a maid trying to escape the relentless, lusty advances of her master.
That when women were helpless to escape marriage, then marriage was a pretty nasty and clamorly portrayed kind of thing.
And so, if you're not free to even think of the possibility of escaping abusive and destructive families, then you have what's called a tragedy.
A tragedy, somebody dies at the end.
A comedy, somebody gets married at the end.
I'm not sure how many people would put that last one in the same category.
But in Eugenia Neal, the family is so horrendously dysfunctional and nobody gets away.
Nobody escapes.
Nobody says, oh my god, this is too dysfunctional.
I'm out of here.
In The Glass Menagerie, Tom Wingfield escapes but doesn't.
He escapes from his household and his claustrophobic, oppressive, southern barnacle of a mother, but his schizophrenic sister haunts him everywhere he looks.
He can't escape.
So even if you run, your past comes with you, multiplies like bacteria in your head.
There's no escape.
That's very different from the literature around women and marriage, right?
I mean, for the most part, if a woman leaves a man in a movie, it's because the man is not good and she ends up in a much happier place.
And there's escape, right?
There's escape.
Unlike Anna Karenina, where she has a lover she really cares about, but her children are there and she ends up having to go to her children and stays with a man who she doesn't love.
Again, that's an argument.
That this is what she chooses, and it's the only choice available, and it's tragic.
All the dystopian science fiction, they're all arguments, right?
Beware corporations.
I mean, that's all it's about.
It's like all the imagination of science fiction writers goes into imagining the future rather than analyzing economics or politics in any real fashion.
Well, I mean, as I've argued before, The idea that robots are taking over is just a metaphor for the government's increasing fascistic tendencies.
Anyway, so I think I've made some reasonable inroads in that case.
So, when you're writing, say, what's the writing process?
Well, the first aspect, at least, to think of a rational writing process, my writing process, is saying, okay, well, what case am I trying to establish?
What argument am I trying to make?
In everything that I write, I mean, from an email to a board post to an essay to a book to a novel.
What am I trying to write?
What am I trying to communicate?
So in revolutions, if you don't go through the suffering of your early childhood, if you're not humbled before your own pain, then you will be destructive to others.
In almost my monstrous historical epic, which some kind listener is currently reviewing and giving some edits to, the argument is that the most abstract and grand schemes of world affairs come down to early childhood experiences.
It could go on and on, but the reality is that what argument are you trying to make?
You need to be conscious of that, I think, before you sit down to write.
Otherwise, you will just be writing unconscious arguments, and they diminish over time.
Unconscious energy needs to be replenished.
I mean, if you've written for any length or period of time or any sort of series of books or articles, you know when you sit down near the grip and the words come easily and you're in the zone and it flows and so on and you look up and you're like, wow, I just wrote this beautiful stuff.
I remember that with great vividity about the end of everyday anarchy, the description of the village across the desert.
It was lovely.
And that's the kind of unconscious energy that But once unconscious energy gets out and manifests itself, particularly when you become conscious of it, then it tends to dissipate.
Right?
In the same way that the Underground Railroad tends to dissipate when slavery becomes illegal.
Not a lot of people hiding Jewish girls in their attics in Germany these days, right?
Because...
It doesn't have to be underground.
So once you dissipate the intellectual energy in the unconscious, then you're going to run out of steam.
And this seems to be where you are.
Now, there are a number of ways to dissipate the emotional energy that's locked up in the unconscious.
The first is to not challenge it.
To simply use that energy, like just ride a horse till it falls over.
So, I mean, most artists have 10 to 15 years of productive energies and then they don't.
And I think it's because they keep going over the same thing over and over again and they run out of steam or they hit the sort of perfect expression of what it is that's unconsciously driving them and then they dry up.
I don't think John Cleese has written a good film since The Fish Called Wonder and it tends to be quite a common phenomenon.
It's a little different for actors because actors are not generating in the same way.
They're mimicking, right?
You just have to be a good imitator to be a good actor, but to generate is a different matter.
And so you need to challenge yourself, and that brings up more emotional stress, tension, and energy, right?
I mean, energy is just another word for stress.
I don't mean like stressed, stressed out.
I mean just a stress, a conflict, a challenge for yourself.
And if you continue, like if you keep writing the same, you know, like Bertolt Brecht, keep writing the same communist drivel, then you kind of dry up, right?
Or if you're like Marx and you write these incredibly influential books and then you reject all criticism of them and don't debate, then you're going to spend the last 30-odd years of your life poring over abstract stories.
Statistics about Russian grain production and not responding to any serious criticisms of your, say, labor theory of value or proletariat economic forces driving history or not respond to data which goes counter to your theory, such as the increased wages of the working class throughout his lifetime and so on.
So, I mean, his emotional energy, I mean, why was he so passionate and powerful?
About capitalist exploiters, because he was a savage capitalist exploiter himself.
He had a maid, he got her pregnant and dumped her on the street with a baby.
I mean, the man was a complete moral fucking monster.
I mean, only one step behind Rousseau.
Rousseau wrote tenderly of the need to care for children and dumped all of his children in the most brutal orphanages you could imagine.
And, I mean, the hypocrisy of these intellectuals is...
If we'd harness that, we could power three new sons.
So, he got to project his own evils onto this abstract class called the owners of the means of production and then got to rail against them with all the emotional intensity that would have been realistically directed against himself and his own capacity to exploit and destroy women.
I mean, destroyed.
He completely destroyed this woman and her child.
It was monstrous.
Monstrous.
Or Shelley.
I mean, again, a seduce-and-destroy kind of guy.
Wrote so tenderly about love and then just, you know, fucked women up completely.
Or Hemingway.
Guy used a machine gun to shoot up his toilet when he was drunk.
He was such a monster.
Such a monster.
In the way that he treated women in particular.
I mean, just...
These are the people that we take our instruction from.
Terrifying.
Terrible.
I mean, the guy really wanted to write about the bald, bare, tight-fisted, gritty grip on truth that was necessary for a life of integrity and, I mean, couldn't even face up to even basic honesty about himself.
A man who hated his mother, perhaps more, at least according to reports, Hemingway hated his mother More than almost anyone else that anyone had ever met, and yet never processed that, and therefore treated women like hell.
Treated women like shit throughout his life, because his mother treated him like shit.
Ah, the infinite vengeance of the unprocessed emotions, how little it solves, how much it destroys.
So what argument are you kind of making?
Are you proud of that argument?
But if you sell the energy of your unconscious for money, if you write for congressmen, then, by God, my friend, your unconscious will not be blind to that.
Your unconscious will notice that.
If you turn your skills into the whores of power, or whores for power, then don't expect to respect yourself in the morning.
I'm sorry.
I mean, it's not my blame.
I mean, this is just...
This is UPB. You understand, UPB is inherent within humanity, because it's about universals, and our brain is entirely designed around processing universals.
That is our essence as thinking beings, is the processing of the universals.
And UPB, why do people have such difficulty with this?
This is a whole podcast which goes out to subscribers, so I'll just touch on it.
But why do people have such difficulty with UPB? Because UPB is already within them, and it's called the conscience.
As the conscience is that which processes the universal ethics you claim and then compares them with the empiricism of your actions and lashes you for hypocrisy, If you deviate, that's what Socrates called the daemon, or what Walt Disney called Jiminy Cricket.
UPB is already an operating principle, an essential, fundamental operating principle within all sane human beings.
And why do people get so screwed up by UPB? Because UPB connects with their conscience.
Because UPB is the conscience.
It's the inescapable universalization of the ethics we claim compared to the way we live.
This is why UPB fucks so many people up.
Because...
It is their conscience.
And if you have an uneasy relationship with your conscience, then UPB strengthens your conscience.
And therefore, it's going to feel like UPB is triggering self-attack within you.
And if you are immature, then you will get angry at UPB and angry at me and call me a bad guy and call UPB bullshit and all this.
But this is just a pathetic, ridiculous, immature, wretched defense against an awakening and strengthening conscience.
So If you're going to hold a value, and you are going to act in opposition to the value, then you are going to dry up your creativity.
I mean, look at Ayn Rand.
I mean, I won't go into the details, but I think we can, you know, she didn't write anything.
As Mickey Splane wrote to her, when's Atlas going to shrug again?
When are you going to write something?
She made a couple of notes.
But, uh...
She didn't write anything after, what, 1957?
I mean, she wrote some non-fiction and so on, but just didn't have a whole lot of energy.
Now, of course, she was pretty disgusted by the culture she was in.
As she wrote in her Q&A sessions, or as she said in her Q&A sessions, the culture is at such a low point that it's hard to imagine how it could get any worse.
Well, imagine it, because we're living in the after-effects of that.
The only salvation is this kind of communication, this openness of communication.
So, are you proud of what you're writing?
If you're putting words into the mouths of congressmen, well, you are carving up and serving your bleeding, twitching conscience to the man, meatball by meatball.
And, you know, the one thing about the conscience is that it is relentless in its opposition to hypocrisy.
And unconscious.
I mean, I find that if you're conscious of stuff, your conscience doesn't really mind.
Like, if you know.
But if you lie to yourself, your conscience will get you.
Right?
God lies to himself, and therefore he has a devil who hounds him.
And so, are you proud of what it is that you're writing?
And if you're not proud of it, are you conscious of that difference, right?
So let's say you've got to eat, and you choose to write for a congressman because you've got to eat.
Let's just say, I mean, I'm not going to get into the ethics of it, but let's just say that's your perspective.
Well, if you look in the mirror and you say, I'm going to do some pretty shitty stuff here to get some money.
I'm not proud of it.
I'm gonna find a way to make it right, but I gotta eat.
This is the only way I can get my food, so I believe at the moment, so I'm gonna do this shitty stuff, write for congressmen, and whatever, right?
Then your conscience is like, okay, well, so we know.
So I don't need to bug you so much, because we know.
But if you're not conscious of it, Well, like, so if you're going to write a whole bunch of shitty stuff you don't believe in to get ahead in academia, well, if you're conscious of it and you say, well, I think I can do good in academia, but I have to write all this shitty socialist stuff to get there, well...
At least you're conscious of it.
Although, of course, it's a lot harder to do wrong if you're conscious of it.
Being unconscious is really the only way to sustainably do wrong.
And then your conscience becomes your enemy, and therefore your unconscious, which is where the conscience resides, becomes your enemy, and then you're cut off from yourself, and cut off from your instincts, cut off from your body, and you are a floating, metallic, empty-headed...
Squid sword lashing void of self-delusion, and it's a very, very ugly place to end up.
And I would strongly hike you against ending up there, to say the least.
So, try to avoid that.
That's what I'm saying, if you can.
To maintain your unconscious energy, which is where you can't squeeze words out of you any more than you can squeeze words out of an empty toothpaste tube.
If you want to maintain the richness of your emotional self-expression, then you need to continue to challenge yourself.
You need to take criticism from people.
I make myself available for over 150 to 200 hours a year to be criticized.
Every two hours, anybody else who wants to debate, I don't think I've ever said no to a debate.
I make myself available for, you know, at least two hours a week for anybody who wants to call me up and criticize me.
And people have, and I think it's been great.
A lot of people criticize me who don't have the guts to call in and bring my criticisms to me face to face, which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about their integrity.
But, yeah, I mean, I don't, you know, if James on the Sunday show says, we've got somebody who's really critical of you, I'm not like, oh shit, well don't let him on.
Yeah, bring him on.
Tell me all about it.
Tell me all about it.
And, yeah, let us reason together, sayeth the Lord.
So, be at ease with your conscience, continue to challenge yourself, and most importantly, I would argue, I mean, have a moral mission for what it is that you're doing.
I mean, don't have like a sick mission of making other people fucked up because you're fucked up.
You know, like you talked about the creativity in being depressed.
Well, that's like saying a guy's really creative because he's, you know, clawing at any piece of vaguely floating wood that he can get a hold of after a shipwreck.
No, he's just trying to keep himself from drowning and he's got a lot of energy in keeping himself from drowning.
And the way that most people work when they're depressed is they make a case for depression.
They make a case for hopelessness.
I mean, this is modern literary novels to a T. I mean, they're all full of such unbelievable brain-scouring horrors.
Oh, my God.
It's deeply shocking to get involved in any kind of modern literature.
It's just this relentless parade of horror.
Well, that's because people are depressed and they're horrified and they're emotional voids and so on.
Give Anne-Marie MacDonald's novels, I mean, just one cavalcade of horror after another.
And that's pretty much modern novels as a whole, I mean, outside of the airport rack set.
I mean, even a novel like The Corrections, Franson's novel, pretty wretched stuff that goes on in there.
I mean, what they call comedy is.
Same thing with Tom Wolfe's novels.
I mean, just horror after horror.
And don't get me started on Stephen King.
I mean, I know that's not literature exactly, but it's a very powerful argument for the...
I mean, he's the modern populist Dostoevsky in that the universe is horrible and horrifying.
And the best you can hope for is to draw with evil.
So, what are you using your intellectual energies for?
Well, if you're depressed and you're writing about horrifying things, well, are you not then just attempting to make yourself feel less depressed by making other people feel more depressed?
Well, that's a pretty shitty use of your energies and that's not going to last you very long, I would argue.
Unless it's completely unconscious for you, which it's not, because you're asking this question, what is the writing process, which means it's not completely unconscious for you.
So, I would say that you have a moral mission if you want to write.
Challenge yourself, allow yourself to be criticized, to be challenged, engage with people who disagree with you.
And from there, you would be, I think, quite surprised at the amount of energy and the amount of focus and the amount of passion that you can bring.
When you are pointed in the right moral direction, when you're at peace with your conscience, when you know that you're doing good in the world, then I believe...
That the moral and creative energies will be inexhaustible.
I certainly have found that to be the case, so I hope that that helps.
Thank you so much for listening.
If you find this advice and new feedback kind of useful, if you could drop me some coin at freedomainradio.com, I would very much appreciate it.
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