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July 5, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:26
2738 Overcoming History, Moving Forward

How to escape the shadows of your past and find the future of your dreams. Includes: free will, moral responsibility, the photocopier of history, false forgiveness and the acceptance of rage.

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
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So, a question I often get is, how do I overcome my terrible childhood and have a healthy, happy relationship with a romantic partner as an adult?
I get this in particular from kids as single moms, so I'm a...
Offspring of a single mother and a doozy, as they would say.
And I have a wonderful, wonderful marriage with a woman I consider to be the absolutely greatest human being ever invented by space aliens seeding dinosaurs.
So, I don't know if I can give you what you need, but I can certainly give you what worked for me.
So the first ingredient, of course, is to fully accept without reservation just how terrible your childhood was.
Your brain is always poised to photocopy.
Your brain is like, okay, so shitty childhood, are we doing this again?
Any chance for change?
Are we stuck inside a terrible tribal-based matrix that we can't escape?
Are we just doing the same thing again?
Because remember, you're here...
Because people got to have sex and reproduce.
In other words, you're here and made it to adulthood because a man found a woman willing to accept his sperm and raise his children.
And that's the purpose of life and that's the reality and the reason as to why we're here.
And there's no other reality and reason as to why we're here.
So your genes...
Are constantly seeking for a willing egg holder, right?
A smiling egg cup is your pointy bit's destination.
And this is, I mean, I'm just talking for the men here.
We'll talk a little bit about the ladies in a sec, but...
So, you're driven psychologically and emotionally and biologically to do that which is necessary to gain access to ovaries and to a willing mother for your offspring.
And so, if you had a terrible childhood...
Then it means that bad women give eggs to bad men, right?
That's what your biology interprets, right?
So if you had a crappy childhood, if your mom was violent or neglectful or abusive in other ways or just a horrible human being in general, then your balls are like, oh, okay, so it's like horrible woman fest.
And so what type of man...
What does a horrible woman want?
Well, a horrible man, right?
So, if you want to reproduce, they will say, then you have to be a horrible man, right?
And that's why children who are raised by horrible women generally turn into fairly horrible human beings without, you know, self-knowledge and all that, right?
In the absence of any reflection or anything, they generally reproduce.
The mindset, because the mindset is why they're there.
The mindset is why the genes got to be reproduced.
So, trying to figure out, for men, trying to figure out what is the kind of woman who will give you the eggs that you need to reproduce, right?
What kind of women are out there?
Who are they giving their eggs to?
That's very foundational to your sexual success as a human being.
So, given all of that, I think it's fairly easy to understand that without intervention, you are going to grow into the type of man that your father was, right?
Because your father was the guy who successfully got a woman impregnated, and that's all that your balls want to do.
So that's really important to understand.
And that's sort of the basic foundation of the reasons for psychological reproduction of early childhood trauma.
So the first thing that you need to tell your body or that you need to tell your unconscious is that there are choices.
This is not an absolute.
So in a tribe of 70 people or 50 people or 100 people, you really don't have choice.
You simply don't have choice.
And so your brain is like, are we in a tribe or are we in a city?
Are we in the country or are we in the city?
In the country, there's precious little choice.
In a tribe, there's precious little choice.
Frankly, none.
But if you're in a city, then you can change your social circles.
You can change your social circles.
Isn't that cool?
And so, remember, your psychology, your biology is not aiming for happiness.
Philosophy will aim you at happiness, but biology and base psychology, the reptile part of your brain, the fucking breed part of your brain, is not aiming you at happiness.
It doesn't really care if you're happy.
It cares that the sperm hits the egg at the right angle.
I mean, frankly, it's all it cares about.
Reproduction, reproduction, reproduction.
You don't have a sex drive because your sex drive will make you happy.
I think there are hundreds of millions if not billions of men around the world and women who will say that their sex drive has made them enormously unhappy.
So biology is not aiming you at happiness but eggs and sperm and philosophy will aim you at happiness.
So the first thing you need to do is you need to say how my mother was was not an absolute.
In other words, you need to inject The free will aspect into your mother's life.
Because if she didn't choose to be that way, and we universalize, then fundamentally you cannot choose to be that way.
If your mother didn't have choice, you are not going to have choice.
If your mother didn't have choice, then your father didn't have choice.
Then you don't have choice.
I mean, you can create some sort of artificial division, but that's pretty exhausting and debilitating in the long run.
Holding two opposing thoughts in your mind is extremely dangerous and damaging to your energy, to your self-respect, to your integrity, to your morality, because you're always keeping fire and ice at bay in your brain and they're constantly trying to mate with each other and you're constantly pushing them back and you can't rest and you can't relax and there's this constant battle.
If you set up Mother, parents are human beings.
I am human being.
Parents have no free will.
I have free will.
We're both human beings, so human beings both have free will and have the opposite of free will.
I mean, that's just exhausting, and I would not recommend that path at all.
So, the first thing you need to recognize is that your parents had choice and you had choice.
Now, this is true of everyone who's alive now.
Yes, I will fully grant, in the Stone Age, people, frankly, didn't really have choice.
They couldn't move to any place more sensible.
They couldn't move to any place more rational.
There was no particular possible or even remotely possible way of even trying to deal with that situation.
But in the 20th century, there was mobility.
There were choices.
There was philosophy.
There was self-knowledge, there was psychology, psychiatry, you know, in its original form, sort of the pursuit of self-knowledge, this, that, and the other.
So all of that was available to people, even in the country.
They could move to the city, and people did, right?
I mean, if there was a gold rush, where did people go?
When people went to the gold rush, they hit it hard.
All the people in the 18th and 19th centuries, they came to America.
And why did they come to America?
To pursue a better life.
So people were able to cross entire oceans on rickety boats and all this, that, and the other, able to get all of that stuff done.
So that they could live a better life.
And so the idea that people can't move to be with healthier people or look for healthier situations.
I mean, look at what's happening in the U.S. border in the South at the moment.
You've got people willing to risk death, ride on top of trains through tunnels just to get their kids over the border.
And this is what people are able to do to pursue better opportunities.
Well, that's exactly what they want to do.
They want to pursue better opportunities.
And so, given the mass human migration that occurred in the 20th century and continues in the 21st century, despite all legal impediments that are conceivable, well...
What can I tell you?
It's hard for people to say, I didn't have a choice.
Of course they did.
Of course they did.
So, your parents had a choice.
Your single mother had a choice.
She could have been a better person.
She could have pursued self-knowledge.
She could have done the right thing.
Or she at least could have recoiled from doing the wrong thing.
I know my mother, at points in my childhood, recoiled from the abuse that she was pouring upon myself.
I assume my brother as well, though I can only speak for myself.
I remember the times of regret, the times of, you know, never openly, but I could see it in her eyes, that she was pretty horrified at what she was doing.
And then she just slipped right back into...
Doing the crappy thing.
The other test, of course, for whether somebody possesses free will is do they punish you for the effects of your choices as a child, right?
So if your mom hit you for doing the wrong thing, then she was saying, you are already responsible for your choices.
You're doing this and you must be punished for your choices.
You didn't study.
You get an F.
You hit another kid.
You get suspensions.
You don't listen to the teacher.
You're in the hallway without a pass.
You don't ask before going to the washroom.
Then you get a detention or something like that.
So you make choices and you're punished.
All of society punishes children for their choices.
And And, you know, you chose not to listen to mommy.
It's time for a time out.
You didn't do the right thing.
You hit mommy.
You know we don't hit.
You made that choice and you should be punished, right?
Nobody hits a child for having an epileptic attack.
At least no sane human being would consider that to be morally justified because the child has no choice about his or her epileptic attack.
If you tell a 10-year-old three times to put on sunscreen and then they forget and get a sunburn, then you might get sort of annoyed at them.
But if the child puts on sunscreen and it turns out that the sunscreen was defective, they get a sunburn, they get nothing but sympathy, right?
So, these are all...
With my own daughter, I mean, if she just accidentally knocks something over, it's no problem, right?
If she's waving something around and I tell her three times not to and she keeps doing it and then she spills something, well, then I'm a little annoyed because she didn't listen and she made a choice and so on.
But then I also have to remember the number of times I tell her not to do something, she keeps doing it, and there are no problems.
It's important to serve up both sides of the equation, so to speak.
So, yeah, the first thing that you recognize is that your parents had choices.
And they chose badly.
And they willed what happened to you as a child.
They willed what happened to you as a child.
You know, there's that old saying, live by the sword, die by the sword?
Yeah.
Inflict free will.
Have free will inflicted on you.
Hit a child for his choice or her choice to misbehave, then you cannot claim that you were doing the best you could with the knowledge that you had and you didn't really have a choice and you'd had a bad childhood and so on.
Well, guess what?
The child you're punishing is having a shitty childhood and that doesn't seem to give you much capacity to excuse the child, now does it?
So you can't claim excuses.
For what you did when you were 30, when you're not willing to extend those same excuses for what a child does when he's three goddamn years old.
That is pathetic.
It's inevitable, in a weird kind of way, but it's absolutely pathetic.
I could not lift this 50 pound weight when I was 30.
And so I punished my two-year-old child for not being able to lift that 50 pound weight.
Well, if we should be excused for not lifting a 50-pound weight, then certainly the first person who should be excused is the toddler, right?
So, to recognize that your parents had choices and chose to act the way that they did and chose to maintain acting the way that they did is important to understand.
It is important to understand.
Now, of course, when you're older, if you had abusive parents, if you're older, then your parents will seem incredibly fixed in their ways.
Yeah, I get that.
And so you may happen to sort of try and change their minds, reach this incredible resistance, and then say, well, I guess they never really had a choice because they can't change their minds now.
But let's say that's true.
Okay, fine.
If you have smoked enough cigarettes, you can't win a marathon.
Right?
So you don't have the choice to win the marathon after you've smoked X number of cigarettes.
And yet, your choice to smoke those cigarettes was your choice to smoke those cigarettes.
Thank you.
Right?
So if you end up with diminished choice later on as a result of prior choice, it does not excuse anything.
A man who's 300 pounds cannot win a marathon.
I get that.
I would not say that he has that choice.
But he does not have that choice because he ate too much food and did not exercise previously.
Which is deep down to say that he did not pursue his self-knowledge with regards to his trauma.
Which is incredibly well known.
I mean, nobody...
There's nobody around who's had access to a television or a bookstore or a library who has no idea that self-knowledge is important.
I mean, the number one show on daytime TV for, like, years is Dr.
Phil.
And Oprah talks about it all the time.
And it's a self-help section in bookstores.
It's huge.
And Deepak Chopra and Chicklet Teeth Banana Hands, Tony Robbins, also...
Have these shows, and it's sold out.
Anyway, so the idea that self-knowledge is important, plays a role in the past, plays a role in the future.
This has been known for thousands of years, but it's certainly entered popular culture for probably 120 or 130 years.
I mean, just look at the etymology, I guess, of the term Freudian slip, which is not just the undergarments that your mother was wearing when she was inappropriate.
So, they had choice.
And once someone has choice and acts badly in a way that harms you, then you get to be angry.
In fact, you will be angry.
I mean, that's virtually a guarantee.
You will be angry.
Of course you will be.
If someone consciously acts in a manner that harms you permanently, and don't misunderstand, don't underplay, when you have a bad childhood, you are permanently harmed.
Doesn't mean that you're permanently broken, but you are permanently harmed.
Even with all the self-will.
I mean, look at me.
I got cancer, right?
It's because I had a hugely elevated chance of getting cancer as a result of childhood trauma.
You are permanently at risk.
You are permanently harmed.
And even if you do everything that you can to fix yourself, you are still permanently harmed because you had to spend all that time and energy fixing yourself rather than doing something else.
I spent, I don't know, trying to think now, Couple of years.
Six hours a week.
Lordy.
Crazy.
So, what, a thousand, twelve hundred hours in therapy?
1800, yeah, it's a lot.
Yeah, 1800, 36, 4,000, I don't know, 3 or 4,000 hours in therapy and huge amounts of money on therapy and time.
And this is just in therapy.
I also did journaling and writing stuff.
I don't know, 10,000 hours of self-work to get myself, well, that's 10,000 hours I could have spent becoming an excellent guitarist or learning Japanese or any number of writing songs, any number of things.
That stuff's all taken from me because I had to do all of that work just to get back to functionality.
Not back to normality, but back to functionality.
So yeah, I was permanently robbed and will forever.
My life will be forever shortened.
I mean, most likely it's going to be shortened by a history of child abuse, but it is also shortened by all the time that I had to spend dealing with the effects of child abuse.
So yeah, that pisses me the fuck off.
I mean, that pisses me off.
You know, if somebody had injected you with a drug that raised enormously your risk of cancer, Or ischemic heart disease or, I mean, you go through the fdrurl.com slash bib or go to bombinthebrain.com, you'll see.
If somebody had injected you with that kind of drug, you would actually be justified.
Oh, they were waiving that kind of drug in a...
Right?
You would be justified in shooting them in self-defense.
If somebody was going to inject you with that kind of drug, you would be entirely justified in shooting them in self-defense and In order to save yourself from such a fate, right?
So yes, it is a murderous level of rage when you have been attacked consistently as a child.
You will end up with a murderous level of rage.
And anyone who has not experienced that or denies it is just not prepared yet, not ready for the reality of what has been done to them.
So...
When you get angry, then you are signaling responsibility on the part of another.
Exasperated or frustrated is more to do with, this person did a bad thing by accident.
So, if my child hands her helium balloon to another child who accidentally Let's it go, then I'm sort of frustrated and exasperated, but I'm not really angry.
I'm not angry at all, actually.
And especially if the other child bursts into tears for having lost the balloon, I'm more likely to be sympathetic and comforting.
In fact, I can't think of a situation where I wouldn't be like that.
So...
On the other hand, if the child who has my daughter's balloon smiles in a malicious manner and consciously opens his hand to let go of the balloon, then I'm going to be angry.
Because it's accident versus choice.
So once you grant choice to your abusers, you reclaim choice for yourself.
And the price of choice is rage.
The price of choice is rage.
Because the price of choice is the acceptance of and rational assination of moral responsibility to yourself and to others.
And with moral responsibility comes...
Well, with choice comes moral responsibility, which comes evil for harm.
And rage is our response to evil.
And murderous rage is our response to...
To life-threatening evil.
If some animal is trying to attack you, you will feel rage to the point where you will kill the animal rather than let it harm you.
I mean, we do that for the most part with mosquitoes and all they're threatening to do is take a bit of blood and give us a minor itch.
But we, you know, we'll often slap them, right?
So rage is the healthy response to evil, to life-threatening evil, and significant child abuse is a life-threatening evil, right?
It permanently harms you physically, raises cortisol levels, raises stress levels, permanently changes the brain, and causes nervous system realignments and It creates hugely elevated chances of becoming an abuser.
It's a life-threatening experience, even if you don't become suicidal or if you don't become addicted to something dangerous, whether it's fast cars or heroin or sex or gambling, something that could get you killed.
Or just become a smoker, right?
I mean, people who've gone through a lot of child abuse have a 20-year life.
20 years less life expectancy.
So, murderous rage is what you're going to feel at having been so harmed by people making choices. murderous rage is what you're going to feel at having Right?
Thank you.
Thank you.
If somebody is going to inject your child with a life-threatening disease, you have the right to shoot them dead.
And I would sort of question people who didn't do that, I guess you could say.
So, you know, if that was their only choice.
I certainly would.
Because I don't have the right to let somebody harm my child in that manner.
So...
Rage is the recognition of choice and moral responsibility, and rage is to say, I reject it, I reject it, I reject it.
And you need to reject it at such a fundamental level that your brain begins to reorganize at the unconscious level.
So, this is why everyone teaches you forgiveness, so you don't get angry, so you don't change, right?
It's the abusers who teach you forgiveness, so that they can further abuse you then for being angry at the abuse they provoked, right?
So if your mom abused you and you're angry, she can say, well, you need to learn to forgive and forget and things are in the past and move on.
So she gets to further humiliate you for being angry at the abuse you suffered at her hands and perhaps fists and tongue.
So forgiveness is just another abuse mechanism that is eminently encouraged by people who are abusers or those who serve the needs of abusers by blaming the victims.
Forgiveness is a way of blaming the victim for not being over your abuse, right?
And it's usually only applied to children.
All right.
We don't say to victims of the Holocaust that they should give up trying to catch Nazi war criminals or get their money back from Swiss banks and so on.
We don't tell them to forgive and forget.
We don't tell rapists that they need to forgive their rapist, rape victims, sorry, that they need to forgive their rapists and so on.
It's just, it's children that this is always applied to.
So this is why I just have such a hate-on for what is talked about as forgiveness.
If forgiveness is such a fucking virtue, then why do we not focus on having parents forgive their children rather than punish them?
Because children have no power and we side with the powerful and hold the victims down while they can kick and beat and scold them and all that, right?
That's natural.
Natural now.
It's not human nature.
It's just natural as it stands.
So, yeah.
Your parents had a choice.
They're responsible for their choices.
And when you fully accept that, that is going to make you very angry.
And that anger is incredibly healthy, but incredibly dangerous.
And you will be criticized for that anger.
From every cowardly and broken human being on the planet.
Because anger threatens the cycle of abuse, which so many people are participating in, right?
Anger breaks the cycle of abuse.
You know, just as I've said before, if you want your immune system to get angry at a disease, to kill it, to kill it, to kill it, well, in the same way, you want to get angry, though not kill, right?
You want to get angry at your abusers.
And anger, which we're always told to not have, right?
I mean, slaves can't be angry because...
The anger of the slaves ends enslavement.
So, of course you'll be told to don't...
Well, don't get angry, for heaven's sake.
How could you possibly think about getting angry?
You need to forgive.
You need to forget.
You need to move on.
It's just poisoning you.
It's not changing the other person.
Well, of course, the Hawaiian anger...
Yeah, I mean, what the hell does anger have to do with changing the other person?
I mean, if a lion is attacking you and your fight-or-flight mechanism kicks in, is that because you want the lion to turn into a gazelle?
Of course not.
Anger is simply recognition of harm.
Of chosen harm.
So, no, the idea that you get angry so that you can change someone, of course.
I mean, but why would you want to stay around an unrepentant abuser?
That's just continuing the cycle.
And, I mean, I guess you can make that choice if you're an adult, however unwise and masochistic that might be.
But I would certainly not argue that you can easily make that choice when you have children, because you can choose to expose yourself to toxins.
I don't really think that you have an easily defensible right to expose your children to toxins.
And unrepentant abusers are toxic to both your children and to you as a parent, right?
Because it harms you.
As a parent, it harms your capacity to be a parent and thus interferes with what you can productively do for your children.
So that's my argument.
I hope it makes sense.
I fully understand that's not exactly an A, B, C argument.
Sequence of action, and I'm sorry for that.
That is the path.
Those are not the steps, right?
And basically, it's a GPS destination with a couple of waypoints, but not exact driving directions, because that's not something which I can really talk about in general, because it tends to be rather specific to each individual.
But yeah, I mean, the Sith are right.
Embrace your anger.
Turn to the dark side.
That's where the light is, right?
Kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight, it's the singer.
Once said.
And you really need to, I say, embrace and accept your anger at evil.
Otherwise you'll end up taking out your anger on the good or the innocent as your parents did.
And you don't want that.
You don't want that.
That becomes very, very hard to recover from.
Thanks again.
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