All Episodes
Previous Next
May 12, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:07
2380 Hatred of the Market

In the aftermath of the StormCloudsGathering debate, Stefan Molyneux discusses a theme amongst those who hate the market.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
So, after we did this debate, Aaron from Stormcloud's Gathering, he of the fiery interface on YouTube, I was thinking about this pervasive notion that corporations are all-powerful and they dictate things and they're mean and nasty and all this, that, and the other.
And I'm sort of rounding up all the thousands of people I've talked to over the years about this issue.
There seems to be a pattern that I think does kind of make sense.
And the pattern runs a little something like this.
Most of the people that I've talked to who are anti-corporate or who argue that corporations are tyrannies or that corporations have vast amounts of power and so on, I think are saying something that's quite true, but only in a very limited circumstance.
Or it feels true, I should probably say, but only in a limited circumstance.
And that something is like this.
So, when you start in the workforce, you don't have, you know, any real skills, for the most part.
I got my first job when I was, I don't know, nine or so, painting plaques.
I got my first more real job when I was 11 in a bookstore.
I got a paper route, and then I worked cleaning offices, and then I worked as a waiter for a number of years, and then I started temping, and then I ended up computer programming, and then I ended up founding a company.
And I, of course, was a gold pounder and prospector and so on.
And the one thing that was true when I was younger was that...
I didn't have much hold over the companies that I was doing business with, that I was the employee.
And the reason why was because I didn't have any real value to them, like qua mi, right?
So, how many people can you get to carry food out to a table and to tell people about the specials?
Well, a lot, right?
It's like a cab driver.
I mean, How many people can you get to drive a car?
Well, a lot.
How many people can you get to clean offices?
Well, a lot.
Because it's very low-skill labor.
And so, I think for people, particularly if they were treated badly by their parents, in other words, if they felt unimportant and inconsequential to their parents, then when they get their jobs when they're young, they feel inconsequential.
With regard to the people who are employing them as well, because they don't really have any sway, right?
I mean, if you have a movie starring Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt doesn't want to do the movie suddenly, that's a big problem for you, right?
Like huge amounts of funding are going to fall through and this and that and the other, right?
And the marketability of your movie is going to go way down and so on.
But if there's some extra who doesn't show up, I mean, you don't care.
You don't care.
I also did extra work once or twice.
It doesn't matter.
It's just a face in the crowd.
Spalding Gray in the Cambodian film, Killing Fields.
Could be anyone.
Not particularly important who it is.
And I think that's something really important to understand.
If you come from an environment where your parents have not treated you as important, in almost all public school environments that you can imagine, the teachers do not treat you as important, and certainly all the ones I experienced.
You're sort of an irritant in their shell that doesn't even produce a pearl.
If that occurs for you, then you've had two experiences, right?
Your home and your school, where you're treated as inconsequential and unimportant and, frankly, a burden on people, perhaps, or whatever it is.
If you've gone to church, I mean, maybe you had a nice, warm, fuzzy priest, but more likely, certainly the priest would view your rational questions and skepticism with annoyance and so on, I mean, for the most part.
And so there's another situation where you're not really treated as really important as someone who has great value.
Maybe this occurred in college where you're one of 10,000 undergraduates and it doesn't matter if you show up or not.
Nobody really cares.
They have all the power because they can give you a passing or failing grade based on some pretty subjective criteria, particularly in the arts and so on.
So it's like obey or be squashed academically.
And so then you get a job, and, you know, maybe you're some Juna person, or you're a fry cook or something, you know, and you're interchangeable.
I mean, anybody could kind of step in and do what it is that you're doing.
And so, again, you don't feel like you have any sway, right?
Over your employer, right?
Like, you go in and say, I want a 10% raise or I'm going to quit.
They're going to say, eh, bye.
You know, don't let the old saying goes.
Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, right?
And the people that I've spoken to who believe that, you know, corporations are these sort of all-powerful, don't care about their employees, greedy, mean, whatever, right?
Well, they tend to be people who have not been successful in the economic realm, at least not successful in any kind of structured environment, a corporate environment.
And structured doesn't mean good, right?
I mean, am I structured?
No, not particularly, but it doesn't mean good or bad.
It just means that they have not made a success of themselves in that realm.
Because, of course, an interesting thing happens when you make a success of yourself in the business world, then suddenly these all-powerful corporations are kind of fawning and begging for you to join them, right?
Like, if you're the top sales rep at Oracle and, you know, you've sort of put out that you're interested, SAP is going to Or whoever, right?
IBM, Microsoft.
They're going to take you for lunch.
They're going to offer you signing bonuses.
They're going to offer you moving expense payments and so on, right?
So, they're going to woo you.
And suddenly, these all-powerful corporations that just strut around and dictate to everyone look like...
You know, homely guys at a bar trying to get with the cheerleaders, right?
They just look all kinds of subservient and needy and then it's the employee who has, or the potential employee really in this situation, who has the power.
And that's a very, very important thing to sort of process and understand, that the people I've talked to, again, this is not scientific, but it has, I think, psychological validity, rational validity, and certainly it has, as far as I can tell, a 100% consistency in my empirical experience of dealing with people.
Now, if you've had a tough childhood, then you're going to have a problem with authority figures.
I mean, tragically, that's just the way it is.
You're just going to have a problem with authority figures.
It's going to be all kinds of challenging for you in that realm, right?
And so, if you have a problem with authority figures, then that's going to condition the kind of authority figures you're going to be in touch with.
So, if you think authority figures are assholes, let's say, if you think that, then is it more or less likely that you're going to end up with such a hole for a boss?
Well, I would argue it's more likely, right?
Because...
Existing biases come with their own set of confirmation principles or confirmation bias, right?
And if you come in with an attitude and an astute manager, like a good manager, will immediately recognize someone who has a problem with authority...
And we'll not hire that person.
Whereas somebody who's a bad manager and a bully will probably like someone who has a problem with authority because they get to get into some ancient historical Simon the Boxer style tussle with that person, thus reaffirming all the habits of their history.
If you've had this experience as a child of being bullied or being treated as inconsequential and that sort of stuff, then when you grow up, you will very likely end up with very little human capital.
The human capital I'm talking about is basic sort of negotiation.
My daughter and I have been negotiating since she was about 18 months of age.
So by the time she gets to be 18, she has 16 and a half years of negotiating experience where she's treated with respect and dignity and curiosity and win-win negotiations.
You can't just sort of...
Graft that onto someone else, right?
It's a very complex language of negotiation, and there's a lot of skills that are being learned during the process of negotiation, but if you treat it as a thing by your parents, if you treat it as an object, you certainly treat it that way in public school, and I mean, nobody frankly gives a shit what you want,
you just do what they say, then you are missing out on a huge amount of I would argue, particularly in the modern economy, failure of parents to negotiate with children is really destructive to their potential economically as human beings.
And of course, when you get into the realm of...
When you get into the realm of negotiating in personal relationships and so on, then it's also, you know, pretty bad for you if you've not had these 16 and a half years of negotiation.
And this doesn't even count the negotiation that my daughter sees my wife and I doing and my friends and I doing and so on, right?
So she sees it, she experiences it, and this is a huge amount of human capital that's being injected, so to speak, or she's being exposed or being injected into her.
So, if you emerge from a neglected, abused, or dysfunctional household, then you are, I mean, pretty crippled in terms of economic skills, basic negotiation skills, self-confidence skills, positive reaction to legitimate authority, capacity to be mentored, capacity for deferral and subjugation, to that which is true and valuable and useful, and so on.
An inability to admit faults, an inability to self-correct, an inability to sort of talk comfortably with people in terms of social ease, you know, all of that kind of stuff, that is not...
I mean, that's how you should be raised.
And if you're not raised with that, I mean, you're crippled.
It doesn't mean you're permanently crippled.
I mean, I did a lot of work to bring that stuff back into being in myself, but it means that you're going to have a significant problem with that.
Now, is somebody who lacks a huge amount of human capital as a result of their upbringing and probably a lack of work and a lack of awareness on their upbringing, is going to be far less valuable in an economic environment, right? is going to be far less valuable in an economic
I mean, good employers want employees who can negotiate, who can self-correct, who are mature, who don't pointlessly fight, who aren't resentful, who don't pick fights with co-workers, who don't alienate people, who don't lose their temper, who don't slam doors, who who aren't sullen, who aren't right, all the things that can come out of a tragically negative history.
And so, the good employers won't hire the bad employees.
And so, you end up in a kind of self-perpetuating cycle where you say, well, people in authority are jerks and bosses are jerks and corporations are jerks.
And that's because there's a tragic historical imbalance in your value.
Right?
And so, people...
Who have these bad histories end up with vastly diminished human capital, end up with worse bosses, bad bosses, mean bosses, dysfunctional bosses, and usually they will have dysfunctional relationships in every sphere.
I mean, unprocessed history is the second greatest universality after ethics or reason.
And so there's this sense of not my experience has conditioned me to X, but the world is X. Corporations have all the power, and corporations bully workers.
I mean, just look at Marx, right?
And Engels, to some degree.
Engels just inherited all of his wealth, and Marx was ridiculously incompetent.
He couldn't even get a job as a railway clerk, couldn't make any money on the stock market.
I mean, he was just hopelessly incompetent, and therefore felt that corporations had all the power, and the workers were...
Useless to them and could be exchanged at will and were inconsequential and so on.
But the question is, well, why are the workers inconsequential?
Why are the workers inconsequential?
You know, Steve Jobs was raised without being hit.
Do you know how rare that was in the 50s?
It's crazy.
He was raised without being hit, and his father was gentle enough to look out for the welfare of other children in the neighborhood as well.
I mean, still a kind of dysfunctional guy, right?
Had a kid, but the reality is that his economic value was enhanced certainly by not being hit, because not being hit isn't just like being hit minus hitting, right?
Like, making love is not just sexual penetration.
It's not the same as sexual penetration with rape without the rape, right?
I mean, it's a completely opposite experience.
Because if you're not hitting your children, then you are doubtless negotiating with them, right?
You have to find some other way of interacting with them if you're not hitting them or bullying them.
And so, it's not just like being hit...
It's not the same as being hit, and then everything's the same except you're not being hit.
It's the complete opposite experience.
So I would certainly put forward the thesis that people who have abused histories, abusive histories within their families, within their schools, within their religious institutions, within their environment as a whole...
We are naturally drawn to find substitutes for the wrongs we have received.
We are naturally drawn to find substitutes for the wrongs we have received.
So, for instance, if our parents were mean to us, but we can say that meanness is somehow human nature, then our parents weren't bad, right?
If I say, my father died young, he was only 97, people are going to say, well, sorry, that's not young.
If I think that people lived to be 400 years old, then 97 is young.
But if I accept that that's not doing too bad in the age category, then that's quite a different matter, right?
And so, if what my parents did is somehow human nature, or the way people are, Then, you know, my parents are off the hook, right?
Because it's like blaming my parents for being bipeds or carbon-based lifeforms.
It's like, well, that's just the deal, right?
That's just the way it is.
And so the desire to extrapolate what my parents did to human nature as a whole is the root defense mechanism of normalizing my experience, right?
Right?
Like, if I say, all women are crazy bitches, then, okay, so my mom gets off the hook, because all women, right?
But the problem is that then I have confirmation bias, I have to really limit my exposure to empirical evidence that contradicts my thesis, which is why I tend to hang around women who would only be the aforementioned crazy bitches, right?
Since you can find crazy bitches in the world and crazy bastards and all that kind of stuff, you will have no shortage of people willing to act as a junk confirmation bias mechanisms to continue to keep your parents off the hook, to allow you to pretend that your parents weren't bad.
Another way that this shows up is in this forgiveness commandment.
You have to forgive or there's some ancient pharaoh curse put on you around your happiness and so on.
I think that's silly.
Forgiveness is something that's earned.
It's like love.
It's earned.
It's not something you just will and bestow on people.
I don't think we have that capacity.
But we like to be in control of that and imagine that we can make things better with our parents simply through our own willpower.
And I don't think that's true.
I think acceptance is important, but acceptance usually is quite opposed to the magical thinking which extrapolates our parents' immorality into other environments completely, right?
Into sort of universalizations that aren't valid.
So that's one way that it happens.
Now, another way that it happens is...
Because when you...
When you say, well, it's just human nature to be mean or greedy or whatever it is, The pain doesn't go away.
You understand?
It just gets buried.
It has to find its way out somewhere.
The unconscious is always crying out for truth.
The unconscious is always striving for truth because that's what we tell it to do.
We tell our unconscious, if there's a door in front of you, tell me.
We tell our unconscious, if there's an animal chasing me, let me know and I'm going to run away.
So you do that with the legs.
We're constantly striving for our unconscious to tell us the truth about reality and it gets a little baffled when it says, okay, but lie about my emotional history.
Lie about the morality that I grew up in.
So it's constantly striving towards truth.
And if you make up a lie, you know, I say this with all sympathy, but if you make up a lie to pretend that what was painful and shocking to you was not painful and shocking, or that it was immature to find it painful and shocking, or that was just naivety and that's the way the world is,
if you develop that hard exoskeleton that hollows you out and originally is designed to protect your softer heart and eventually eats it, becomes an empty black echo chamber of past justifications or justifications for the past, Then that's really tragic.
Because the pain still has to find some way out.
And of course, when you were a kid, if your parents were mean to you, you don't have this human nature argument as a kid.
It just hurts.
It just hurts.
It's frightening.
It's horrifying.
All these kinds of things, right?
So that all occurs.
Now, you can come up with these adult justifications if you want later, but that certainly was not your original experience.
Like, there's no kid who gets...
Hit by a parent and then says, well, it's human nature to hit, therefore this doesn't hurt, this isn't shocking, this isn't upsetting, this isn't any kind of problem.
So whatever you come up with later doesn't do you any good in terms of processing the original pain or the original problem.
And so the original pain and problem are still there and it comes out in somewhere.
And so I think that for a lot of people, they rail against corporations because they can't or haven't been helped or have avoided making the connection with their own histories, you know, with their teachers, preachers and parents who may have harmed them And when you combine that with the really tragic stripping down of economic capital,
of human capital that comes from, say, hitting your kids or ignoring them rather than engaging them and negotiating with them, then I think it all starts to make a lot of sense as to why there is this anti-corporatist mentality.
And again, I'm happy to hear about this, of course, from your experience and from other people's experience, one way to...
Rebut this would be, you know, if you're really successful, if you've been really successful in corporations but still think that they're, you know, monstrous and so on, call me and I'd be really happy to talk about this further.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
Lots of love.
Talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection