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March 19, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
13:17
2350 What Is The False Self?
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Yo, Stefan Waller, New Freedom Made Radio.
What is the false self?
At least in the way that I use the term.
I've been asked that question.
Well, the false self is the aspects of your personality that are adapted to threats.
I think that's really the most fundamental...
I thought about this, right?
It's the most fundamental description that I can give of the term.
Now, the false self has sort of one...
That's sort of the basic thing.
It's the part of yourself that is adapted to threats.
And it's kind of permanently adapted to threats.
That's the first element of it.
And the second element of it...
It's the part of you that has adapted to threats...
And no longer consciously recognizes either the adaptation or the threat...
Let me repeat that.
The false self is the part of you that has adapted to threats, but no longer consciously knows or processes either the adaptation or the threat.
So, if you're a Jehovah's Witness, If that's the way you were raised, then of course there was a lot of threats.
Threats of hell, ostracism, social damnation, whatever, God's disapproval, and so on.
Well, these are threats.
If you threaten to set fire to someone, that is a threat.
That actually would land you in jail.
But of course, if you threaten to set fire to a child forever, if he doesn't obey you or listen to ghosts, then that is not considered a threat.
That is considered Sunday school.
And so, the part of you that adapts to your parents or your priest or your teachers threatening you, and which is so calamitous that it is psychologically almost impossible to hang on to the fact that there's this terrible threat, that is the part of you that I call The false self, right?
So you're threatened with hell or whatever it is.
It could be secular, of course, but you're threatened with hell or spanking or beating or being sent to your bed without supper or, you know, whatever threat is occurring, you will adapt to that.
You have to, right?
I mean, kids have to adapt to what their parents say.
Parenting is the ultimate power trip, right?
Because there's no greater disparity in power between anyone, between a parent and a child.
So, if the parent is making threats, then the child must adapt to those threats.
Now, most parents who are making threats believe that they're doing the right thing, right?
So, people who, say, support taxes believe that it's how we help the poor and have roads and all this kind of stuff.
And parents who threaten a child with hell believe that they're doing the right thing, they're saving money.
Saving the soul from Satan's power and so on.
Like, so I got an email from a guy who said the usual argument, you know, you should spank a kid who's going to run into the road because the spanking is less bad than running into a road, right?
Like, those are the only two choices.
And if you spank, that is really, then it really quickly becomes the only two choices.
And so, no parent, I mean, no body, I would argue, really does something that they consciously and knowingly and openly describe as evil.
Evil, almost by definition, is the opposite of whatever anyone is doing, which is why people who are doing evil have to redefine what they're doing as the good, and anyone who interferes with it as the evil.
So, parents who are threatening children, bullying children, hitting children, threatening them with all kinds of terrible secular and supernatural punishments, threatening them with all kinds of terrible secular and supernatural punishments, obviously believe that they're doing it for the I'm sorry.
And so, if, as a child, your parents tell you all about hell, and you'll burn in hell if X, Y, and Z doesn't happen, or you don't do A, B, and C... And if you say to them, Mommy, Daddy, I will do A, B, and C because I'm frightened that you're threatening me.
I'm frightened of your threats.
What would the parents say?
The parents will say, That's not right.
We're not threatening you.
We're saving your soul.
This is God's law.
We're just the messengers.
We're here to help and so on.
They instantly have to redefine it.
That's something virtuous.
And so, if you obey your parents out of fear, and you openly say to your parents, I don't respect anything that you're saying.
I think that what you're doing is evil, but I will obey you because you're bigger and you've shown your capacity to be abusive.
So, I will, out of fear, surrender to your abuse.
I mean, maybe there'd be a few completely crazy, sadistic parents who would get off on that or find that thrilling or whatever, but most parents would not.
They would say, no, I don't want you to obey me out of fear.
I want you to obey me because it's the right thing to do and all this and the other, right?
And so you have to begin the process of pretending that a threat is not a threat.
Right.
So, you hear this all the time, you know, well, my parents hit me, but I turned out well.
My parents hit me, but that's because I didn't listen, and I was a hell-raiser, and I was willful and disobedient, right?
All this nonsense.
That's what people say.
So, they have changed the threat into a necessary virtue.
A regrettable, but necessary, virtue.
And so they have gone through the process of adapting themselves to a threat and forgetting both the adaptation and the threat.
And now it's simply become, I conformed to good behavior.
I was rescued from bad behavior.
I acted well.
I acted rightly.
Not, I conformed to a threat.
And this, of course, whatever we describe as virtuous behavior It's what our future will become, right?
If we describe spanking as virtuous, then we will spank.
I mean, almost certainly.
I mean, how could it be otherwise?
How could you define something as virtuous, have the full power to enact it, and not do it?
Especially when not doing it creates pain and trauma, right?
If you were spanked and you don't spank, then that's difficult and painful, right?
Because you have to return to your original experience of the threat and the adaptation.
Now, the reason, of course, that we recast the actions of our parents as virtuous is because they do, and because if we don't, then the punishments will escalate.
The way that you diminish punishment from somebody who's acting aggressively towards you is you praise them for the virtue of acting aggressively towards you.
And that will almost certainly diminish the punishment.
Now, if you're morally accurate about the behavior of a person who's aggressing against you, then the aggression will almost certainly escalate.
And no child wants to find out where the escalation will end, right?
What if the child is...
It's going to be spanked and the child runs away.
And then when the child is grabbed, the child bites and the child kicks and screams.
What does the parent do?
Does the parent then just give up and say, oh, okay, well, you're really fighting back, so I guess I'll stop.
No, they will tend to view it as a battle of wills wherein they must dominate or forever lose their authority or whatever it is.
And it's going to escalate to the point where serious injury can result, if not death.
I think in the U.S., there's five children a day murdered by parents.
It's quite a lot.
So...
The way to minimize potential injury from the threat is to praise the immorality of the parent or teacher or preacher or whoever is threatening you.
And that kind of moral compliance is a habit that is best perfected By becoming universal.
Right?
So, I mean, defenses are originally designed to protect us from a difficult or dangerous situation.
If the situation is repetitive, then the defenses spread and harden and become a suit of armor.
And initially we clank around in that suit of armor and then eventually we just...
It just hollows out.
We just turn into a vapor and a ghost and all that.
We then...
Empty armor.
Right?
And the more universal things are...
Or the more universal that things are required, the more the defenses become the very personality that they were originally designed to protect.
So if you're threatened by a parent, and the threat is continual and universal and moral, and if the parent is particularly controlling, in other words, they don't sort of lash out like an angry bear whenever they're discontented, but they're You know, proactive and fetishistic and micromanaging and helicoptering and hyper-controlling, then the threat is omnipresent, right?
The threat is perpetual.
And if the threat is perpetual, then the defense must be perpetual.
And thus, the defense will jump to the defense of the attacker, because the defenses of the attacker and the defenses of the victim have merged.
Because the attacker thinks that the attack is moral and the only way to minimize the attack or escape the attack is to agree that the attack is moral and therefore the defenses of the abuser and the defenses of the victim merge.
And that's very hard to undo because fundamentally it's a moral argument.
So the defense of immorality which arises out of a merging With the defenses of the immoral actor, the abuser, is very hard to identify, very hard to undo.
And it's a very rigid and deep defense, in my experience and opinion.
It's very, very hard to dislodge.
And certainly, I think, once the true self, which is the original empirical UPB philosophical, moral, and ethical experience of being harmed, of being threatened, of being bullied and abused, If the defenses have become so merged with the attacker that the defenses are now the internal abuser,
then in a sense the inner child can never come out because the abuser has been internalized and therefore cannot be escaped and therefore the inner child cannot be recovered.
And at that point the defense has become terminal to the true self.
And, you know, we really don't ever want to get in that position, trust me.
It's not a pretty thing to see or to even imagine.
And this is why, you know, our defenses harden unless we work to break free of them.
The armor thickens.
We go from snail without a shell to spiky dragon crustacean entombed in obsidian.
So it's really, really important to go back to use philosophy, to use UPB, to...
To universalize what you experienced, to denormalize what you experienced if it was traumatic, and to begin to chip away at the conformity to virtue, which is both forgetting the conformity and forgetting the evil that was done to you.
That is the best way to recover the true self, which is the only part of you that really is capable of intimacy, of love, of attachment, of generosity, of all of the virtues.
Because everything else is done through fear, which is not virtuous.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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