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June 4, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:15
2399 Negotiation Part 2: The Challenges
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So this is Negotiation Part 2, the challenges.
So as we talked about in Negotiation Part 1, Negotiation is looking for Plan X, which is superior to Plan A or Plan B, that is truly a win-win, in that both parties would choose Plan X over either Plan A or Plan B, which they thought was their best plan to begin with.
Now, one of the reasons why Plan X is so hard to come by, is that Plan X requires that you really have a fairly deep understanding of what the other person wants, of what motivates the other person.
Most of sales is about listening for what motivates the other person, for what the other person wants.
And, I mean, in things as relatively simple as selling someone a car, it's really just about a very deep listening about what the person wants and attempting to find a way to provide it in such a fashion that they're motivated to complete the transaction.
Now, I go in to buy a car, and the car salesman is fairly clear that I'm looking for a car, because, you know, it's...
Come and say, I want a lovely bunch of coconuts.
It's not what I go to a car dealership for.
Unless it's Beamer Luau day, in which case, well, inevitably we start dancing.
So, the...
The reason that it's so hard to negotiate with a lot of people, and I'm going to put you as a listener in the category of having empathy.
And empathy is simply a really deep understanding of what the other person wants.
That doesn't mean sympathy.
Sympathy is when you both understand what the other person wants and want the same thing.
If you're in an alley and someone sticks a knife in your ribs and says, give me your wallet, empathy is, hey, this guy really wants my wallet and he's probably going to do me significant harm if I don't give it to him.
Empathy is correctly processing the needs, intentions, desires, preferences, and either real or potential, well, really potential actions.
You don't really have to try and figure out what somebody's already done.
But it's a correct understanding of desires, needs, preferences, and potential actions on the part of another person.
That's empathy.
Sympathy is, you know, and you agree with it.
So, if you see someone who's trying to drive in snow and they're stuck, then empathy is they don't want to be stuck.
They want to be able to drive off.
Sympathy is, well, yes, I've been in that situation before.
I'm going to give them a help.
To push the car.
We get some friends and everybody who lives in a cold climate does this a couple of times, at least a winter, where you see somebody and you don't give them necessarily a big nag about the need for snow tires, but you just dig in and give them a hand.
On the other hand, I had a friend many years ago.
Who was not making the decisions to move on or move forward with his life.
The decisions are necessary.
He was lonely but didn't want to...
You just take the necessary steps that you need to take to get into a relationship, which is to risk rejection and so on.
And he was also drawn towards the wrong type of woman.
I don't know, just by the by, it's funny how a woman...
It's funny, it makes sense, right?
But, I mean, a woman will generally care about how successful a man is, and a man will not generally care about how successful a woman is.
It's like, hey, we're both in our 30s, and you're a waitress, but you're cute.
It's just, I don't know, just silly, but...
It's still something that happens.
So he would be, you know, he was a coder and he was just interested in barmaids and stuff like that.
And it's not that being a barmaid is a huge problem or anything like that, but it just wasn't a good fit with his own level of ambition and capacities.
But anyway, so as I was sort of moving on in my life, professional successes, getting involved in getting engaged, getting married, he began to, when we were socializing, he would tell stories that were always detrimental to me, right?
In which I had made a mistake or done something silly or foolish or something like that.
Of which, you know, frankly, there's not exactly a national shortage of these stories about me.
And I went along with this for a little while, but I sort of got that...
I really sort of began to understand that he felt insecure and needed to sort of level up.
So as my life moved on pretty successfully and his life stagnated and began to decline...
I got that he needed to level and therefore in social circles he would tell stories to my detriment because you know rather than lift himself up he wanted to pull me down.
Now I had had enough experience at this point in trying to help other people to recognize that to sit down and have a conversation where I would say hey Bob, not your real name.
Bob, this keeps happening.
What do you think is going on?
If people aren't in the process of self-knowledge, if people aren't in the process of therapy or just really trying to dig in and understand their own history, and if they're not in the process of having honest conversations with the people around them,
Then, having conversations with them about significant differences, particularly differences which can only be resolved with reference to self-knowledge and the humility that self-knowledge inevitably brings, well...
Those conversations don't work.
I mean, all you get is defenses.
I mean, because it's like asking someone who's not gotten off the couch in a year to come and join you for a marathon run, right?
I mean, it's irrational to imagine that people not in pursuit of self-knowledge are going to have access to self-knowledge.
Hey, you've never learned Gaelic.
I'm going to start chatting with you in Gaelic.
Well...
I'm really into reason and evidence, right?
And self-knowledge is not something that someone can spontaneously acquire in the middle of a very challenging conversation when they've been acting out of a complete absence of self-knowledge for quite some time.
I'm never going to learn Mandarin.
Mandarin sucks.
Mandarin is stupid.
Mandarin is ridiculous.
And someone keeps saying that and suddenly...
You start talking to them in Mandarin and are you surprised when they can't or don't or won't respond?
Of course not.
You don't get the muscles without lifting the weights.
Thank you.
And asking someone who's been lying in bed for a year to come and join you in a really hard workout is irrational.
And of course, it downgrades your own work, right?
I mean, the self-knowledge work is extremely muscular and essential and unrepeatable by any other process.
Working to really understand what makes you tick, working to really understand your history and its effects upon your past, present, and future.
Having the humility of recognizing that there are vast areas of knowledge within you that you do not have direct access to.
This is all, and working to explore those things, going to therapy.
This is work that does not bring you to the normal.
It does not bring you to the normal.
I mean, normal is the avoidance of self-knowledge.
Normal is the defense of evil and the attack of good.
Normal is the blame of others and the magical absolution of the self.
Normal is the claim to adhere to universal principles that always unconsciously exclude the adherent.
I could go on and on.
Lord knows I have, but that's the normal.
So, when you start to go towards self-knowledge, You don't go towards the normal, you go away, in the direct opposite of the normal.
Because the normal is the dysfunctional, to put it mildly.
If you're in a tribe of people who lie around on couches eating Cheetos all day and you get up and start stretching and jogging and running and doing somersaults and gymnastics and weights and so on, you are not becoming more like the couch people, right?
You are going the opposite direction of the couch people.
Right?
And you can't ever become a couch person again even if you stop exercising because you've had the experience of exercising.
And all the well-being.
But you get off the couch and you start actually doing some work.
You are not getting closer and closer to the ideal of the couch people.
You're in the opposite direction.
I mean, I'm definitely one for, you know, talk to people.
If you have doubts, right?
If you have doubts, then talk to people.
I don't continually count pebbles to be sure every day that two and two make four.
I have no doubts about that.
I have no doubts that I don't wake up every morning and say, I wonder if I learned Mandarin in my sleep.
And the purpose of really speaking to and listening to people is to gain Knowledge.
To gain certainty.
To gain all that closure is is certainty.
I don't have any doubts.
And once you talk to people, you can find out whether they have empathy.
If you have doubt.
There's people in my life, I don't imagine that they've woken up With the capacity for empathy.
I don't imagine that they have suddenly turned the corner and developed extremely complex and multifaceted brain systems like empathy out of nowhere.
But it's more complicated, far more complicated to learn Japanese than it is to learn empathy.
I mean, if you're raised with Japanese, it's pretty easy, right?
I assume it's pretty easy.
If you're raised with empathy, it's pretty easy.
But if you do not know Japanese, then it is years of dedicated study to learn it.
And it is far easier to learn Japanese than it is to learn empathy.
Because learning Japanese comes at no moral cost to you, and learning Japanese generally is considered to be a positive thing, whereas gaining empathy, if you have not had empathy, learning to really gain empathy is an excruciating moral and emotional process, where your former actions and their harshness are cast in an extremely unflattering light.
Right?
It is.
And learning Japanese does not require that you re-evaluate all your existing relationships.
Learning empathy, if you don't already have empathy, learning empathy will cause you to re-evaluate all your past decisions, all your existing relationships, and everything that you have adapted to emotionally, romantically, sexually, professionally, everything that you're doing, which was predicated and really only possible because you lacked empathy, Well, suddenly you have empathy, or you're working on empathy, and all of that has to be re-evaluated.
And all of that is doubtless going to change.
The development of empathy is the greatest single change that a personality is capable of, greater even than death itself.
Death happens to everyone, but empathy happens to tragically few, or is pursued and developed by tragically few.
So, talk to people until you get that Until you learn to respect self-knowledge and learn to respect the work that you've put in and really sort of understood that you can't just expect other people to develop it in the course of the conversation.
That's like expecting someone to learn Japanese while you're talking to them in Japanese when they don't understand Japanese and when the learning of Japanese is morally abhorrent to them.
So the reason that we're talking about this is because people who lack empathy can't negotiate.
Because to negotiate means that you can creatively search for solutions that are more beneficial to the other person than the other person can imagine.
Right.
So if you're going for a car and you say, give me $1,000 off, and then the guy ends up giving you $2,000 worth of extras...
Well, clearly, if you prefer that to $1,000 off, you would have suggested that in the first place.
Whatever somebody suggests as the opening point of their negotiation is the best thing that they can think of.
And if you can come up with something better, Than what they're thinking of to the point where they say, well, I'm glad you came up with $2,000 worth of options because that's more valuable to me than $1,000 off because I really want those options, but I just didn't think I could afford them, blah, blah, blah.
It's better for the dealer because it costs him only $500.
It's better for the guy because it saves him $2,000 or gives him stuff that he wouldn't otherwise have bought, which is worth something to him more than $1,000.
So...
If you come in and you sit down and say, give me $1,000 off, that's the best thing you can come up with.
Because if you could come up with something better, you would have.
You'd have said, give me $2,000 worth of extras, and we got a deal.
But to come up with something that is a better solution for the other person than the other person knows...
It requires some pretty substantial empathy.
Now, please understand, I'm not saying that the car salesman has empathy for you as a full-on human being and this and that about all your dreams, hopes, desires.
No, he has empathy for you about price and the car, right?
He has empathy for what you want.
To come up with the plan X, which is better than plan A or B, means that you must deeply understand what motivates people, what people want, better than they do themselves.
Now, knowing what someone wants better than that person knows themselves, to the point where you come up with plan X and they say, wow, that's even better than what I was thinking of.
I think we've all had those interactions where somebody's come up with a solution that's just like, wow, that's perfect.
What a win-win.
Fantastic.
Well, that does require substantial empathy.
How many people genuinely have empathy for To the point where they're willing not to just grant someone what they want in the moment, but grant someone something that will make them happier in the long run, even at the expense of the current, and able to make that case in a way that the other person understands?
Good Lord!
I mean, that seems to me extraordinarily rare, remarkably rare.
And most people absorb win-lose negotiations.
And all they're doing basically is biding their time, accumulating power until they can reverse the equation.
Right, so most children are basically taught win-lose negotiations.
Either they dominate their parents through whining and pleading and resistance or whatever, or their parents dominate them through the exercise of power and punishment and bribes and all that kind of stuff.
That's win-lose.
And if they're on the losing side of the win-lose as children, then basically they're biding their time and they're accumulating power until they can do unto others what their parents did unto them.
Sometimes for girls it's like, I'll get pretty.
I'll get attractive.
Most of the reason that people want to become pretty, the girls want to become pretty, is for vengeance, right?
For power.
I will get pretty.
I did not have any power over my father, or my father had unjust power over me.
And so I'm going to become pretty and desirable and then I'm going to exercise unjust power over boys and make them pay for everything my dad did because that's what you do.
You gain power and then you exercise it over others.
And one of the best ways to gain power is to be desirable, right?
To be wanted.
And a lot of the accumulation that men do in terms of resources is basically to gain power so that you have power over others, right?
And you can then do unto others what was done to you as a child.
And so the idea of sort of win-win negotiations, of creatively expanding the options until you provide better solutions than the people or the other person could even imagine, it's extremely rare.
And also if you throw in that there's a moral dimension, that's essential as well, that what makes people happy in the long run is virtue, then you are constrained in your solutions to those which promote virtue and also which are, you know, it's very hard.
It's very hard.
I mean, once you get the hang of it, I think through chats I've had with people over the years, which, of course, you can hear most of them, I've had...
Some success in promoting this kind of stuff, but win-win negotiations are very important.
And the lack of empathy that is endemic to the population is something that is revealed through the pursuit of win-win negotiations.
And that's very important to understand.
The deficiencies of the culture are revealed through the promotion of win-win negotiations.
The deficiencies of our institutions, the deficiencies of our parenting, the deficiencies of religiosity are all revealed through the pursuit of win-win negotiations.
So, if you're in negotiation with some bulky, recalcitrant, stubborn family, brother or something like that, and you try and, you know, sort of say, well, you know, let's really try and put our heads together and figure out a way where we can both win.
And he sort of pouts and says, no, I just want this.
This is what I want.
This is what I deserve.
This is what you owe me.
This is what is right.
I don't always use the moral club, right?
All immature people use the moral club.
And...
If you sort of are trying to find some other solution, it's really tough, right?
So let's say that the fathers died and there's a cottage and whatever, right?
My father said, you both get the cottage and you're fighting about the weekends and so on.
Like, you can do other things, right?
You can say, hey, we'll turn it into a B&B, we'll rent it out, and we'll take the profit to each buy our own cottage.
Or, you know, we'll invest in a bunch of improvements and then we'll improve it to the point where we can sell it for a profit and then we can each get our own cottage.
Or, you know, just things that you could do that might be a little bit outside the box and also give you some fun brother time together and all that kind of stuff.
But it's just like, no.
I just want all these weekends.
Well, as you continue to keep trying to come up with solutions and the stubborn clinging to that position is revealed, well, a lot more than cottage allocation is revealed in that situation, right?
In those circumstances, a lot more is revealed.
I mean, just having a position and repeating it until other people give in might get you the cottage, but it's going to cost you a lot more than that.
It'll cost you a lot more.
You see this in marriages as well.
People just have a position here.
We've got to do X. And if I don't get X, I'm going to get pouty.
And so on, right?
That's all pretty harsh stuff.
It's all pretty harsh stuff.
You know, once...
Again, I don't mean to overuse the language metaphor, but I really want to make the case.
I really want to make a strong case for this thing.
You don't learn...
Whether other people around you can speak Japanese until you start speaking Japanese?
Take an absurd example.
If everyone around you has just been pretending to speak Japanese by making up silly kung fu noises, and you actually start learning Japanese, then their ignorance of Japanese is revealed.
And more than just their ignorance of Japanese, but their willingness to commit to this ridiculous facade called pretending to speak Japanese and their motives for doing so, these are all revealed.
Because very few people will walk up to you and say, well, I'm going to exploit you by pretending that I care about your desires, but just basically going to bully and manipulate you to get more than my fair share of whatever we're negotiating about.
I mean, people don't say that.
They will always pretend that they're negotiating in good faith and they're looking for win-win and they'll give you lots of arguments about things and so on.
Now, when you take someone like that in your life, if they're only pretending to negotiate a good faith, but they're really just looking to get what they want at your expense, if it's win-lose, the moment you start negotiating from a win-win position, you can, of course, come up with solutions that work for you both.
You can.
For sure.
And if it is genuinely, you know, if Plan X is better for them than their position B or whatever, then they'll probably go for it or whatever.
But you'll notice that they're only going for it because it's advantageous to them, right?
And if you ask them to come up with solutions, they won't be able to because they will view that as some surrender of their position.
And then they will view you as attempting to dislodge them from their position for nefarious means.
Most of what people suspect in others, they're enacting it themselves.
That's just basic projection.
The con man always thinks that people are conning.
The liar always doubts other people.
That's the price you pay for whatever it is that you do.
For the immoralities you do.
You surround yourself with the hooks that you use to catch other people.
We create a world of our own actions.
You lay minefields, yours end up in the middle of them.
That's the price that very few people see, but it's as real as sunlight.
And the other thing that I'll mention, just to close this topic off, and I really want to be really clear about the pitfalls, at least as I see them, of developing empathy, of really attempting to work empathy into your existing relationships.
It's that as you begin to develop your empathy with other people, you will come up against the hard obsidian barrier, I imagine, in some people around you at least, of the recognition that they do not empathize with you.
Do not empathize with you.
Right, so an exercise that I promoted with people a while back in the show.
I don't think it's a good exercise.
I promoted it, but it was to say, oh, my parents, they really know me well, and so on.
Okay, well, what's your favorite movie?
What's your favorite music?
What's your favorite books?
Who's your favorite author?
What do you believe philosophically?
What do you reject philosophically?
What are you drawn to?
What are you repelled from?
You know, what are you looking for in a romantic ideal?
These are just questions that anybody with empathy should be able to answer.
You know, and they should be able to answer in some ways even better than you know yourself because they've got the outside view and you have the inside view.
This is just an empirical test.
Somebody knows me really well, okay, well then they should be able to answer some basic questions about my preferences and motivations.
You know, in a non-mocking way.
Oh, he's just a slave to Ayn Randall.
It's displaying self-knowledge in the same way that a torturer displays knowledge of the human body.
Please use it for good, not ill.
So as you begin to apply empathy, the principles of empathy, to other people, you will find out, and it's a tragic transition, you'll find out that there are at least some people in your life who don't have empathy, who don't have the The extremely complex brain structure,
the mirror neurons, all that kind of stuff which help people to genuinely and automatically understand the feelings, motivations, desires and potential actions of others.
Once you expand your vocabulary, the limits of other people's vocabulary are revealed.
That is a tragic moment.
Now, it's a slow burn tragic, and I'm sort of trying to help people with that.
Have respect for the incredibly complex mental state called empathy.
Have respect for the fact that it's tougher than a kanji-based language to understand.
And also understand that if people lack empathy, then it's not going to just happen to them.
And you, they have to want to learn it.
You turn on a Japanese channel where they're discussing philosophy, you're not going to learn Japanese from staring at that channel.
So if you're in the presence of people who don't have empathy, and you show them empathy...
This does not mean that they're going to learn empathy from your example.
I mean, if they're babies, yes, right?
In the same way that, you know, but even then, with babies, you still have to teach them, you know, the language, or Japanese, or Croatian, or whatever it is, right?
Afrikaans.
But it's a lot easier.
They'll sort of absorb it or pick it up and so on, right?
I teach my daughter maybe half a dozen words every day.
But the rest of it, she's just picking up through context in that wildfire of language acquisition called the toddler's brain.
Fire doesn't acquire anything.
Not the best metaphor ever, but that's okay.
Every now and then, there's a swing and a miss.
But empathizing with people will not teach them how to be empathetic.
If they're interested in learning empathy, then they can begin the multi-year process, a multi-year grueling process of complete life revisioning.
You don't know how much changes.
I mean, you don't know how much changes.
Before I really worked on developing empathy, I was...
A software executive in a bad relationship.
Now, I have nothing to do with software and coding.
That relationship is completely gone and has been replaced by a successful marriage.
None of my friends and family made the transition.
And please understand, this is my experience.
It's not necessarily predictive of other people.
But I'm a fairly good communicator, and I certainly did work extremely hard to try and get other people to understand.
Because when you first reveal, when through your actions you reveal other people's lack of empathy around you, your first mad hope is that they'll pick it up.
I'll just keep speaking Japanese until other people become fluent in Japanese.
They don't have to learn anything.
Even if they resist my Japanese, even if they think Japanese is stupid, they'll just pick it up from me speaking it and they'll just learn it and speak it well.
I have to go to school for 20 hours a week to learn Japanese.
That was me and empathy, right?
I have to go, oh my god, it's horrendous.
So much time I was spending in therapy and journaling and all that stuff.
This is what I mean by self-respect, if you're learning empathy or expanding your empathy.
Say, well, I have to go to school for 20 hours a week and study and learn and grueling and grinding.
It's painful to learn Japanese.
But other people, they're so smart and I'm so dumb, they'll just pick it up from me speaking it.
They'll just pick it up from it being in the air around them.
That's not having respect for the self-work.
And it's understandable, right?
I mean, I get it.
I mean, people have that belief.
They have that delusion because they're afraid of what it means to develop empathy in an uncaring social environment.
It's really hard.
That's brutal.
I mean, how many people are going to make that transition?
For me, it was zero.
And I was around a bunch of extremely verbal, extremely intelligent people.
And boy, oh boy.
Didn't make it.
Again, I didn't have the knowledge that I'm trying to impart In these conversations, I didn't have that knowledge, and that may have altered things, but I doubt it.
Because the reality is that nobody that I was interacting with in those long-ago days ever decided to go into therapy and study empathy.
Yeah, one guy I knew ended up, you know, he frightened his wife.
She called the cops.
He ended up in jail.
He didn't hit her or anything, but that's a wake-up call.
I was in therapy.
I was like, man, you've got to go.
You've got to go.
This is not, you can't be like this.
I mean, you've got kids in the house.
I mean, you can't, like I said, begged him, laid down the whole case.
I'll think about it.
He converted my need into power, right?
Because I needed something and therefore he had power.
He could choose to provide or reject what it is that I needed from him, which was to go to therapy.
Because he thought it was my need rather than my offer.
So he converted it to power, and then he exercised his power by not talking to me about therapy, which is designed again to provoke me, then asking him, begging him, cajoling him, beseeching him to go to therapy again.
Most people will convert your needs into their power, and they do it by avoiding the topic that you want to talk about most, so that you have to bring it up again, so they get that petty hit of being able to withhold or provide something that you need or want.
That's just the way It's the way human nature works in its currently contorted and distorted configuration.
So I just, I really want to, I really want to point out, you're in a marriage, you both speak English, and you say, well, that's it, I'm going to transition to Japanese, I'm not going to speak English anymore.
Well, your wife either learns Japanese or your marriage is over because you ain't speaking the same language anymore.
You're not speaking English.
I'm only going to speak Japanese.
I'm not speaking English anymore.
Well, if she steadfastly refuses to learn anything to do with Japanese and scorns and mocks the learning of Japanese and you're giving up speaking English, your marriage is done.
You don't speak the same language anymore.
People, I understand it.
I did too.
You cling to the wild hope that somehow, somehow, They're just going to pick it up from proximity, right?
Somehow, they're just going to...
Okay, they hate Japanese.
They don't want to learn it.
They scorn it.
They mock it.
They mock me learning it, but I'm just going to keep speaking it, and they're going to just pick it up and then learn to love Japanese.
I get it.
I'm going to...
Oh, man.
Wasted years on that shit.
It's some hard-won knowledge, I will tell you, my friends.
Some hard and bitter-won knowledge.
And I want to point out as well, I mean, some of this, of course, is my experience and my opinion.
Some of it is fact, right?
I mean, I think, I can't remember, there's 12 or 14 complex brain systems involved in empathy.
They don't just spring up.
They don't just appear.
They're not just transferred through exposure.
You know, watching somebody work out does not give you the benefits of working out.
Watching someone be empathetic does not generate.
You have to work at it.
You have to really commit and work at it.
And empathy is one of the hardest things to acquire because empathy undermines almost everything about our society.
The development of empathy undermines almost everything about our society.
All the existing power structures, the exploitations, the profits that come from the lack of empathy, which think of the school system or the tax system or religion or whatever.
All of that, all of our existing social constructs and profits and hierarchies are all based on no empathy, a rejection of empathy.
So then imagining that from there, with all of that, all of those profit centers and exploitation centers and resource transfer hierarchies and organizations, that the development of empathy is not going to be extremely threatening.
I mean, also just, I mean, parents.
Parents who want the benefit of having adult kids around them, even though they may have been crappy parents or abusive parents or destructive parents or whatever.
They all want the benefits of good parenting without actually having done the work of being good parents.
When you develop empathy, when you work in your empathy, and we can all work on expanding our empathy.
It's a continual process for me.
In particular, my empathy for evil remains deficient, just because I had to survive as a child by ignoring the reality of evil for so long that surrounded and had power over me.
So, the development of empathy remains a considerable challenge, I think, for everyone, for all of us.
And as you develop empathy, you are developing the anti-hierarchy.
You are developing the society of the future.
You're developing peace and virtue and all that kind of stuff.
And so, yeah, I wish you well in your work on that.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Stefan Mollett, Freedom Aid Radio, fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
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