Aug. 26, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:41:08
2781 Withholding Sex as Infidelity - Sunday Call In Show August 24th, 2014
In a free society, would we need a system or ethics or philosophy at all? What is the role of a divorced parent compared to that of a parent in a traditional family setting? My therapist describes me as being unable to experience joy, how can I nurture and experience joy in my life despite an incredibly difficult history? Also includes: hidden narratives in fictional stories, being distant from reality, postpartum depression theory, emotional affairs, withholding sex as infidelity, teaching your children through the empiricism of your example, protecting victims and the difference between predator and prey.
Of course, last week I flew down to L.A. for an exciting conversation with Mr.
J. Rogan and we have brought a pretty in-depth discussion of anarchy and peaceful parenting and the voluntary family and anti-war and all kinds of good and juicy stuff to number one.
On iTunes.
So I'm very thrilled about that.
And thanks everyone, of course, who's making all of this possible.
Your donations are massively, gratefully, tenderly, even sexually appreciated at fdrurl.com slash donate.
All right.
So, Mike, who do you have for me to feast my intellectual proboscis on tonight?
Alright, so up first today is JP, and JP wrote in and asked a question, in a future-free society, would we even need a system of ethics?
Would we need philosophy at all?
Great question.
No, next!
Now, that's a great question.
Do you want to expand or expound upon it at all?
Sure.
Can you hear me, Steph?
Yeah.
Okay, great.
I also sent Michael a long version, a longer version.
I typed it out nice, but I don't have it in front of me.
The longer version was something like, if we were space aliens on planet Mars watching humanity from afar, an accurate assessment of history, it seems, would be that philosophy was used as sort of a An antibiotic to get rid of all the clutter that was there as a result of abuse and propaganda.
And then once human beings are able to grow and be nurtured sort of in a peaceful environment where they're not like Confused between what's up and what's down and just completely disoriented as far as the truth is that we will be able to just or they will be able from the perspective of the alien to just trust their instincts and intuition and
rely solely on human nature to guide them successfully through their lives or to enable them to be happy.
Right.
Right.
I mean, I think those are great questions, and I suspect something along the lines of the following.
This is, of course, far from definitive, and this is more of a fun question to chew around with than anything that can be definitively answered, certainly by me.
But I would say something like, I don't need to teach my daughter Practical ethics.
It's useful to teach her theoretical ethics, but she hasn't got a mean bone in her body.
She's never had a tantrum.
I've never seen her be mean.
The worst that ever happens is, and I certainly can't claim to be immune to this, the worst that generally happens is that when she's tired, then she can be a little cranky.
And I don't really consider that ethics.
That's just biomechanics.
And...
So I don't need to teach her, like, share or be nice all the time.
I mean, some reminders and so on I think are important, but I don't think when she grows up she's going to have to have this massive discipline called ethics when it comes to her own personal relationships.
Now, when it comes to examining society as a whole, well, that's going to be still quite a challenge for generations to come.
But in the far future, when children are raised peacefully and this stuff is just not a question anymore, you know, the people who dance to the tune of the NAP are only seen as mad by the people who can't hear the music, right?
To paraphrase from Nietzsche.
And so when it is simply self-evident that you raise children peacefully and they bond with their parents and you breastfeed them for 18 months and you don't hit them and you don't yell at them and so on, then we really won't have crime.
We really won't have – people will compete and people will want to win.
You know, we're still going to be hunter-gatherer DNA that wants to climb the human pyramid of excellence, but it won't be win-lose as a whole.
And the desire for dominance over excellence is not the same as the desire for dominance over – through coercion, right?
A battle of the bands is quite a different thing from a battle of bands beating each other up with crossbows.
And so I think that it will all be taken for granted.
I think there will be situations wherein ethics will still be needed as a discipline, but mostly for new capacities.
Like?
If some new space alien race is discovered, how do we deal with them?
Do we reveal ourselves to them?
Do we interact with them?
Do we help them?
Do we whatever, right?
Do we just come down like big giant black domino cubes in 2001 and tickle their ape brains into throwing bones into spaceships?
So there will be, I think, a question in the future.
If we have the capacity to heal or cure people, I think stuff will be handled by the free market, but there will be some ethics, I think, that people will guide themselves by.
I'm trying to think of others.
So if there's situations where we can grow...
There are still questions that are dicey.
Abortion, euthanasia, And so on.
These are challenging questions that I think ethicists are still going to continue to work on.
And of course, every time you answer a question around euthanasia, it seems like the question gets raised again because medical technology advances and cures advance in different situations, which were unbearable before, become more bearable later, and so on.
With regards to abortion, if you could take a baby out of a womb, even in the first trimester, and either grow it in someone else's womb or grow it in some I would say that for the majority of people, I don't think that ethics is going to be a significant discipline.
Because we are constantly wanting to seek out more calories than we consume.
So I think nutrition is going to be a discipline as long as we are carbon-based life forms until we get that, I don't know, Hitler's brain in Venezuela in a tank swimming in a saline solution of its own evil.
We are going to be dependent on biology.
Biology has a long and distinguished history of attempting to get as fat as humanly possible.
So I think there is going to need to be other disciplines, exercise, nutrition, and so on.
But I don't think we have innate...
Any innate drives towards human evil.
I think that they are developmentally provoked.
So I don't think the majority of people are going to need ethics the way that the majority of people or everyone pretty much needs nutrition and exercise.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, that was when you bring up the human nature.
The whole thing that...
The issue that prompted me to want to call in and talk to you was I think I was listening to, I don't know, one of your podcasts.
One of those goddamn podcasts.
One of them out there.
There's a lot of them.
But I remember you talking about determinism and free will and just...
You were kind of talking about how maybe you were in college.
I don't remember how old you were, but you said you just couldn't deal with the concept of determinism.
You had a deep kind of visceral emotional reaction to it, which kind of...
To me, I interpreted that as that was the impetus for you to really dive in and come up with your own theories and ideas.
Or to look into what determinists sort of argue and see for yourself if it's valid or not.
And I just remember you first saying that you had a visceral reaction.
Sorry to interrupt for just a sec, but what I felt and what I still feel is that if somebody had a gun that could turn me into a robot, I would dodge the shit out of that bullet.
And that's what determinists.
They're just firing bullets at you that will literally turn you into a robot.
And I don't want to be a robot even if I get to live forever.
But sorry, go ahead.
Right.
And I'm just using that example to sort of communicate to you that that was how I felt when in another...
I think one of the podcasts where you're talking to a group of students, I think in New York City, about, I don't know, they were just kind of bombarding you with questions.
I think it was like a panel or something.
And I think that, and one of them, one of the classic questions that you would get from a statist, not that the guy was a statist or anything, maybe he was playing devil's advocate, was the idea of, you know, bad human, human nature.
What you said was, well, human nature is whatever you pour into a glass that's shaped like that, it becomes that.
If you pour into a glass that's shaped like this, it becomes that.
It's whatever the environment is.
That's what human nature is.
And for some reason, that stunned me in my tracks.
I was like, oh no.
Oh no, that means that we could just...
We can't trust ourselves.
We could be...
You know, prone to doing things that we would consider evil or something.
You know, I don't know.
I just...
I had a visceral reaction to that.
I'm not sure why.
It does make sense what you said, because the environment essentially is the glass.
So if someone is...
No, no.
Look, let me take a guess.
And it's a guess, of course, right?
So dismiss it as you see fit.
But my guess would be that the moment you talk about human nature as water that fills a container...
Then you are shining a very high and very incandescent flare up into the world that reveals the near-infinite low-lying presence of monsters around you.
Because if human nature is that which is created by parents and priests and teachers, the major unholy trinity in many cases of the development of what is currently called Humanoid.
Then if the evil is the result of the containers put forward intergenerationally, you know, pour into Muslim, pour into Arabic, pour into whatever it's going to be, then the presence of evil is the presence of corruption.
It is not excused by human nature.
Once you take the human nature argument away...
Sorry, I just slapped a bug on my arm.
I almost never get to do that.
Every now and then, I don't know how, a bug finds its way into the studio.
And normally, I'm not even close to fast enough, but I actually got it, and that's very unusual.
I normally like to just catch them instead of free, but anyway.
So, when you take away the human nature argument for the prevalence of evil, then you see that evil is manufactured.
Let me just give you another tiny example, an analogy.
Years and years ago, when I was working up in the North doing my gold panning and prospecting days and all that, I would see, even in the remotest mountain streams, this brown, bubbly, fuzzy stuff.
And I thought, how the hell can there be pollution?
All the way up here.
I mean, we're almost north of the tree line, we're north of the highway.
We've flown for two hours to get here.
How can there possibly be pollution up here?
And someone explained to me, and this is off my memory from a long time ago, but it was some, I think it was the natural acid that comes off pine leaves or pine trees or something like that.
And that's what that, it was perfectly natural.
And that changed my entire view of that stuff.
Because I felt like, how the hell far away do you have to get from people in order to not have crap polluting up these streams?
And I thought, I can't drink this stuff.
I don't know what that is.
It could be poison.
Is there some battery acid plant?
I mean, how could there be?
It's like there's barely any animals out here.
And the trees are like shorter than me.
But once I understood, okay, well, it's so rain leaches some acid off the pine trees or the pine needles and it goes in.
And I'm like, okay, so it's all natural.
And the whole thing just changed for me.
I looked at it like, oh, I can drink this stuff.
I can have a swim.
I can do my Irish Spring commercial takes and all that.
And it just changed it.
Once it was natural and not man-made, my whole view of that junk in the gunk just changed.
Just a natural effluent.
I saw it as no more polluting than a lily pad.
But it wasn't bad for you.
It wasn't bad for me at all.
So it's the same thing kind of in reverse.
With human nature, there's this belief that society reflects just how people are.
And that produces an unbelievable complacency in the face of society.
Yeah.
Like, nobody thinks that Mount Rushmore is carved by natural forces, right?
Right.
It's man-made, with the president's faces on the mountain.
But the moment people take refuge, and literally they take refuge from the necessary combat of virtue in the argument from human nature, then you become passive.
Like, there's no movement out there that says, let's make people eight feet tall, right?
I mean, people rarely, if ever, grow eight feet tall.
And if they do, like most tall people, they die.
early because the heart has to work so hard.
That's like determinism.
Well, yeah, human nature is sort of an argument from determinism, but it doesn't work because either people are saying that humans are innately evil, in which case if human beings are an innately evil species, we can't have a state.
Because the only way you can limit evil is through negative consequences.
And once you have the state, then you can get free evil.
You get evil without negative consequences.
You can go and make money by running the printing presses at the Fed without actually having the risk of going out and getting shot by a security guard robbing a bank.
If you are a bank, you can rob the public through the Federal Reserve.
And you don't have to go door to door and maybe get shot by someone who doesn't want you to take their goodies and so on, right?
And so if human beings are innately evil, you can have a state.
Now, if human beings are mostly evil but a little bit, a few people are good, you can have a state.
Because the evil people will vote to have evil policies and they'll overwhelm the good people.
because evil people want power more than good people want power.
If people are kind of half and half, well, you really can't have a state, because the half that are evil will try and corrupt a few more points to get their votes across in a democratic majority and impose their evil will on everyone else.
Now, if human beings are mostly good but only a little bit evil, then the evil people will end up running the state and dominating everyone else, whether it's through democracy or their program, the evil people through public schools.
I think that's kind of mostly where we are now.
Most people, I find, are actually pretty good in social situations.
Parenting may be a little bit of a different story.
But most people in social situations are pretty nice, helpful, and so on.
But they are propagandized by the evil people who then warp them towards evil or warp them towards a blindness towards evil.
And then end up ruling over the good people with the evil power of the state.
So under no circumstances is there any justification for the state, no matter where you put the slider bar of human evil.
So I just sort of wanted to mention that.
But people just, they shrug their, ah, it's human nature!
And therefore...
No, yeah, right.
I can't stand, yeah.
I just think that, can't we move on past that?
I mean, it's pretty obvious that The human nature argument is not valid if you're going to argue for the state, and it's not valid as far as arguing that human...
I mean, we already know that abuse causes damage of parts of the brain that are responsible for empathy.
You mention a lot on your shows the mirror neurons and how those develop and stuff like that.
I just...
I don't know how people can say that humans are evil if we had to depend on our community and empathy to survive through evolution.
There's no way we would have banded together and beat Sabertooth Tigers and watched each other's back if we didn't have sort of this empathy to develop between the caregivers and the younger ones.
I don't know if you've heard these arguments, and I'm not skilled in these arguments.
I'll just pass them along.
Because I think it's a book called The Troublesome Inheritance, which you might want to check out.
It's by, I think, a New York Times science writer who's been writing for like 20 or 30 years on science issues.
And his argument is very interesting.
And I'm really paraphrasing and cutting it down here, but I'll just put it out there very briefly.
So we grew up as hunter-gatherers.
Now, with hunter-gatherer societies, you need a lot of stamina, you need a lot of strength, you need a lot of speed, you need a lot of brutality.
It's not really that cooperative a venture, at least relative to farming.
Now, when people fled or left or were driven out or whatever and went into colder climates, well, with colder climates, you've got this son-of-a-bitch thing called winter.
And winter kind of demands that you get into farming because you need storable food, which you can't really guarantee just by trapping animals and so on throughout the winter.
And so his argument is that for like a hundred thousand years, human beings were domesticated through agriculture.
And you had to become smarter.
You had to learn how to defer gratification, because if you eat your seed crop, you might make it through the winter, but you've got nothing to plant in the spring, and then you're all dead, right?
And so there were evolutionary pressures for human beings to develop intelligence, to develop deferral of gratification, and to develop...
Social cooperation, which means obviously less aggression, fewer receptors for testosterone and adrenaline and so on, and generally more calm and more placid and more cooperative.
You know, you think of the Amish all raising the barn together, right?
So I just wanted to...
mentioned that various evolutionary pressures across the world and throughout history have, you could argue, at least some scientists argue and some, I don't know what you call them, ethnologists argue, that there have been different evolutionary pressures on different groups within society, a lot of it having to do with The colder things get, the more evolutionary pressure there is for a brain's deferral of gratification and social cooperation.
And so again, even if you're talking about humanity as a whole, you're not talking about groups that developed with all the same evolutionary pressures, right?
I mean, you could argue that in the origins for sure, but since the races sort of split up, there's all of these different...
The races, not cultures, races, and so on, all split up.
There have been different evolutionary pressures.
And they found...
In Sherpas, which are the, this is a group of people, yeah, they hived off, I think, about 5,000 years ago from the Chinese.
And they're in Tibet, I believe.
And they've seen that there have been very specific genetic pressures that have allowed them to adapt to higher altitudes, just over 5,000 years of history.
There's ways that they can actually, and please don't even remotely ask me how to explain how, but there's ways that geneticists can figure out how long a gene has been present in a population.
So even when human beings have a relatively small split off of only 5,000 years, there are significant genetic adaptations to new environments.
So even then, human nature, you say, well, you know, there's more aggressive cultures, there's more placid cultures, there's more polite cultures, there's whatever, right?
But a lot of this has to do with having to adapt to particular environments around the world.
So that's why even when people say human nature, it's like saying dog nature.
It's like, well, I don't know, lots of different kinds of dogs.
Anyway, does that make any sense?
Yeah.
Yes, it does.
I think, you know, there's probably obvious degrees of empathy in different cultures, I would say.
Yeah.
I mean, it makes perfect sense.
Yeah.
But, so, this is what kind of brings me to one of the things I really have been wanting to ask you as far as where do people get their ideas of, you know, I was watching a movie the other day, Lord of the Flies, and I think someone I know referenced that movie once about what happens if civilization falls apart and we're just a whole bunch of kids on an island, how to organize.
I think a lot of the ideas that people have about human nature, like human nature being bad, if everyone left their own devices, it would be chaos, Mad Max, and just dog-eat-dog world, comes from fiction.
I don't think there's a lot of non-fiction examples of that.
And that made me think a lot about fiction.
Now, I love fiction.
There's a lot of books that have helped me in my life, even though it wasn't true, it was made up stories, but they really did help me.
And not only just through enjoyable reading, through great writing and great prose and everything, but just the concepts in the book that I interpreted as meaningful, they helped me in my life.
But I can't get over how much damage fiction does.
I remember when I was taking piano with one of my teachers, one of my 20s, and he was the type of piano teacher that would sit there and talk philosophy the whole time.
It was not much.
I really didn't, you know, there was some playing, but he was sort of an eccentric man, and he would go off on his tangents, and this was around the time of 9-11, and he was very affected by that, and he would have these rants.
I mean, epic rants, man.
I mean, Molineux caliber epic rants, you know?
Right.
We were talking about relativity, Einstein's relativity.
He'd always apply things to piano somehow.
He'd always apply it back, you know, physics and stuff like that.
And I remember I told him I was reading a book one day.
I brought it in.
It was a book by this guy named Alan Lightman.
And he's, I guess, a science fiction writer slash regular science scientist.
I don't know.
But it was fiction that I brought in.
And I brought in this book, and I wanted to talk to him.
I put it on the piano, and I'm always trying to impress this guy, because he's getting intimidating.
And I say, oh, look what I'm reading.
Look what it says in here about...
Now I understand.
And he looked at me, and he's like, you come to me to talk about science, and you bring in fiction?
And it just stopped there, and he waited for me to answer.
And I was so embarrassed.
It just had such a profound effect on me.
And yeah, he might have been overreacting, kind of, I don't know.
But ever since then...
I had this thing about fiction as if it was a double-edged sword.
To me, it seems that all these people, a lot of statists, almost all of them, they get their ideas from somewhere.
They get their ideas from the imaginary world, the fairy tale world.
I don't know.
Lord of the Flies, I think, is deep in a lot of people's subconsciousness.
And it kind of, they get fooled, you get tricked into thinking this is real when it's not.
And that's just an example.
Yeah, look, all fiction is an argument usually for an emotional position.
And it's really important to understand that when you are analyzing fiction.
People choose a story, they choose protagonists, they make it as believable as possible, they make it as naturalistic as possible in order to overcome your skepticism.
But they're making an argument, an emotional argument, For a particular worldview.
And this is true of all fiction writers, including myself, right?
So there's no such thing as naturalism in fiction.
People make it look more real in order to overcome your natural skepticism.
Now, I don't want to get into a long thing about Lord of the Flies, but it's been a pretty influential book.
And I've read it quite a number of times.
And it sucks to your asthma.
But the important thing to remember is that these are children...
But they seem between the ages of sort of 7 and 12 or 8 and 13.
But these are children who have been raised in England in the post-war period.
And they are, if I remember rightly, they're in boarding school.
And the idea that this is somehow representative of human nature is as lunatic as taking animals raised in a zoo, dumping them in the jungle, and then saying, well, look, you see, it's animals' nature to not survive in the wild.
Thank you.
Right?
So there's no examination of the differences in the parenting that the kids have.
A few hints here and there.
But he could have made the case to say, well, look, humanity divides into the compassionate and the brutal based upon how they were parented.
Yeah.
He doesn't make that case at all, which to me would have been not a novel about how human beings turn to violence as part of their nature or anything, but to say, look, there's a war between people raised peacefully and people raised violently, at least those in the latter camp who don't pursue self-knowledge.
And now honest writers will say, look, this is my emotional argument.
And dishonest writers will try and make it as naturalistic as possible so that...
And naturalism means manipulation in general, which is why I prefer science fiction and fantasy.
Can you give me an example?
Oh, make things as naturalistic as possible?
No, could you give me an example of...
Demonstrate for me like a writer who does...
Use as a naturalistic method to deceive as opposed to, you know, could you just give me an example, like a concrete example between the two cases?
Oh, yeah.
No, I mean, you could look at almost all of the Marxist writers in the Bertolt Brecht.
I mean, for instance, you can look at Mother Courage and her children and Galileo.
And he's got a quite naturalistic sort of forms of dialogue and so on.
And George Bernard Short is the same thing, but it's all presenting a very powerful concept.
A message that, if you're not aware of it, is really, really hard to resist.
George Bernard Shaw was an out-and-out socialist, which meant he had some great stuff around anti-imperialism and anti-war and some terrible stuff about the helplessness of the poor and the need for overarching social programs to help them.
And so if you look at Arms and the Man, you have this guy who's a soldier and basically what he does is he takes the money and he tries not to get involved in any fights, you know?
Now, how do you make this guy appealing?
Well, the way that you make someone appealing in a play is you make that person have no problem with his position, but everyone else has a problem with that person's position.
That's how you make that person sympathetic.
So it's been a long year since I've read the play, or seen the play for that matter.
But he ends up breaking into this woman's house, this girl's house, and they think that the soldiers are these big fighting guys like superheroes and so on.
And he's like, hey man, I'm trying to hide from all these bullets.
I want to go out there and get shot.
I want to get my paycheck.
I want to get my food.
I want to get my sleep.
I want to go home.
I'm going to get out there and fight.
I want to medal.
What the hell do I want to medal for?
Now he's perfectly content with his position as a mercenary.
But the women are all outraged.
You must go and fight for honor, for country, for flag.
And he rolls his eyes.
He's like, whatever, you know, I mean, you can make all that noise you want.
I just want four solids a day, you know, a shower, shit and a shave, as the truckers used to say up north.
And so you make him perfectly comfortable and non-susceptible to guilt, non-susceptible to manipulation.
And then he's the rock, and other people's outrage smashes against him in vain, and then he is incredibly sympathetic, and everyone else just looks progressively more hysterical.
That's the Howard-Rourke-Elsworth-Tooie combination.
He's a rock, he's centered, and everyone else is outraged, but doesn't really bother him, whatever they're doing, and so on.
So...
These are a variety of methods.
Of course, you make the person physically attractive.
That's another wonderful way of doing it.
You make them funny, and that's the Oscar Wilde approach.
You make that person wonderfully engaging that way.
And you give them an ease of manner and an ease of communication and a wit and intelligence and physical attractiveness.
And then you can stuff whatever bullshit you want up their ass, and they cough up rainbows every time people listen to them.
And you see this, you know, in Ayn Rand, she's pretty obvious about it, and it is romantic, not naturalistic.
So in Ayn Rand, you know, the heroes are all slender and lean and copper-haired and beautiful and blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, the villains are all these golem-like hunchbacks and all that stuff.
Yeah.
And so she's pretty obvious about it.
Now, there is some valid truth in that, in that people who take care of themselves generally have some levels of health as long as it's not obsessive and so on.
But yeah, I mean, I really like to read fiction, but I am constantly, constantly, constantly on the alert.
For whatever propaganda is occurring.
And you really see this propaganda in the portrayal of parents, particularly in American television.
In American television, parents are portrayed as...
until sort of the 90s, maybe mid-90s, they were really portrayed as wonderful, as perfect, as non-aggressive.
You never saw spanking.
Yeah, you never saw spanking.
You never saw hitting.
You never saw timeouts.
They were talking sticks.
There was negotiation.
And this is why when people say, well, my parents did the best they could with the knowledge they had, it's like, did they have a TV?
Did they watch sitcoms?
Then they had thousands of hours of instruction on how to parent without using aggression, right?
Yeah.
Because if you've had a television over the past 40 years, I mean, when I would come home at lunchtime to try and literally scratch for food, I was a hunter-gatherer in my own rent-controlled apartment.
But when I would come home at lunchtime, sometimes I'd flip on the TV and I'd watch Leave it to Beaver.
I don't know if you ever watched that show.
Yeah.
I mean, a long time ago.
Reruns, there was...
Did you ever see the parents being aggressive?
I don't know.
Was it Eddie Haskell in it?
Yeah, Eddie Haskell.
Okay, yeah.
Yeah, but I mean, you never saw the father was genial and positive and the mother, Barbara Billingsley, was perfectly made up and calm and peaceful and good-natured.
And there was never, as far as I remember, spanking or timeouts or aggression of any kind, right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah, same with the Brady Bunch, right?
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, Brady Bunch, Family Ties, Full House, you name it, right?
There was even shows – oh, gosh, what was that show with all the girls who were in the boarding school?
There was the one – the lesbian, the black girl, the princess.
Anyway.
Oh, they lived with the old lady?
Yeah.
I can't remember.
Somebody will put it in the chat room, I'm sure.
But even with a show like that, where there was some dysfunction among the kids, yeah, there was an old lady there.
Everything was calm and peaceful and negotiated, right?
And so this is what is so interesting to me.
And I've written about this in a whole book, which I'll put out at some point, but it is fascinating to me the degree to which people act aggressively and violently towards children and consider it perfectly justified, and yet are desperate for...
Shows wherein nobody acts aggressively and violently towards children, right?
So parents say, well, I had to hit that kid.
I had to hit that kid.
That kid was mean.
That kid was tough.
That kid was not listening.
That kid was rebellious.
Had to hit him.
Had to put him in a timeout.
Had to yell at him, right?
And yet, when those parents watch television, they want the Huxtables, right?
They want the family ties family.
They want a family where everything is peaceful and everything is...
They don't want to see themselves.
Yeah, and there's no aggression.
And that, I mean, if you really sit and think about that, literally that's like people saying...
The war against Nazism was the major and most beneficial moral crusade the West had, Western Europe had in the 20th century.
It was the most noble human endeavor ever possible.
And then, when they make war movies, nobody ever hurts a German.
They hug, they reason, they negotiate.
It's that insane.
It's that completely mental.
When you think of...
I mean, a friend of mine was watching an old...
Oh, where is my brain?
A Little House on the Prairie.
And in Little House on the Prairie, they don't even show, if I remember what he was saying rightly, they don't even show the spanking on screen, but there is some spanking off screen.
Yeah.
Sorry, somebody...
But in that show, you even saw spanking offscreen.
Somebody's in the chat room just saying, the very first episode, Cosby Show, Bill told the boy, I brought you in the world, I'll take you out.
That is true, but that was never taken seriously.
I'm not saying it's good to say that to kids at all.
Oh, you mean it was implied that they were going to get spanked?
Okay.
Well, no, I mean, but there was never anything like that.
And the kids showed no fear, right?
And if somebody shows no fear and all that, So, this is sort of...
I've hammered this point before, but I just feel I can't hammer it enough.
And I've got a whole book on the voluntary family that I've been meaning to reread for the last while, to say the least, but I'll get around to it.
But it's really important to really understand that people cannot claim...
If they've had a TV or any exposure to popular culture, parents cannot claim that they didn't know any better.
Because if you imagine the insane outcry that would have occurred if Bill Cosby had taken that littlest girl in his family and bare-ass spanked her on screen, or even underwear spanked her on screen, people would have gone insane.
In other words, if they'd seen what the average mother does three times a day to a child of that age and younger, if they'd seen that reflected back to them, They would have been absolutely shocked, horrified, and appalled.
And that is really insane.
I mean, it's so deeply insane.
It just tells you how much the world needs philosophy and consistency.
Parents say, well, I didn't know any better.
It's like, did you ever watch TV? Did you ever see parents spanking them?
What the hell were you spanking for?
Did you ever see parents yelling?
No, then what the hell were you yelling for?
The parents were calm.
The parents were patient.
The parents were negotiating.
They were peaceful parents, reasonable parents.
They never lost their temper.
They didn't have any substance abuse problems.
They didn't go fly off the handle.
And then people say, well, I didn't know any better.
And literally, that is like me putting headphones on and spending 2,000 hours Learning Japanese and then saying, but I never knew any Japanese.
I never had any possibility of learning Japanese.
I was repeating stuff and this and that and the other, right?
And this is what's so bizarre about human beings as a whole.
And this is why I can't extend the ignorance, didn't know any better, couldn't do any better.
Because if people really, really thought that spanking was a great idea, they would demand it in their television shows, right?
It's funny that certain things they imitate in fiction and other things that we want them to imitate, they don't.
I guess we can't have a cake and eat it too.
One of the worst crimes of fiction, I feel, is what I call the faceless enemy in war.
There's always people, no matter what the film is, the ones getting killed have no back, no personality.
They're just these These, you know, guys screaming, running at you, just falling over across the board to the point where, I mean, that's the worst crime of fiction.
I mean, in a book, maybe it'd be different, you know, a good novel.
But for the most part, people don't read novels, you know, they watch the movies.
I had a kid come to my house to sell me magazines, and it was trying to raise money for this or blah, blah, blah.
And he was, you know, peddling something.
And I started talking to him.
And he said he wanted to join the army.
Now, I could have just sort of said, all right, well, we're not interested, you know, scoot along or something.
But I asked him, I was interested.
I said, well, why do you want to join the army?
I mean, he's like 18.
I said, what else do you have?
You know, because he was using it as a pitch for me to give him money.
He was saying, well, you know, I want to serve my country and join the army.
My father was in it.
You know, I want to do good.
And so I was thinking, well, I'm not going to give you money for that.
What else are you interested in?
And then he started talking about cars and trucks and stuff.
And I ended up finding out that he wanted to go and join the army because he thought it was honorable.
I said, why do you think it's honorable?
Because he watched the movie.
He's telling me about, I don't know, Saving Private Ryan.
He's like, well, I want some of that brotherhood.
I want a sense of accomplishment.
I really got pumped when I watched that movie.
I'm like, man, that's not real.
That's fiction.
You're going to go jump into a...
A meat grinder for a made-up make-believe?
I don't know.
I'm sure he's not the only kid that thinks like that.
How else do they recruit?
Every kid who gets recruited thinks that way.
They haven't had that experience in person.
They wouldn't be getting recruited if they did.
They don't.
They have their imagination.
Yeah, no, that's very true.
But I mean, most people live in fiction.
The Matrix is language.
The Matrix is stories.
People have very little contact with reality.
They live in fictional countries.
They worship fictional deities.
They worship fictional teens.
And people live almost entirely in magical, cyst, bubble-sphere tribalism that has...
Virtually no contact with reality.
Almost everyone in a war who's fighting each other has far more in common with each other than they do with the rulers that they're supposed to be fighting for.
Right?
Which is why in the First World War, as I've talked about before, the soldiers played football with each other in No Man's Land on Christmas Day.
And they sang songs together and they shared drinks.
Because they had everything in common.
And they were fighting each other.
other, and the people in charge had things in common with each other and that they were in charge, and the generals have much more in common with each other on opposite sides than the soldiers have with the generals.
I agree with you.
The shattering atom bomb that philosophy lands on people's biosphere of language matrix is really deeply and terrifyingly shocking to people.
People live a lot in fictional universes, and that is how they make their reference.
It's very rarely to reality.
Just think of video games.
In video games, people go into fictional universes.
And those fictional universes are very prescribed.
You know, there's combat.
Maybe there's a few people who help you.
There's some puzzles and so on.
But you never become really an entrepreneur.
I mean, I guess you can still privateer or something like that.
But even that's just basically moving numbers around.
You don't invent anything in these games.
You don't write novels in these games.
You don't find the love of your life in these games.
You're in these constant little train tracks.
Not even Minecraft?
Sorry?
Is it not even Minecraft?
Somebody else tried to show me Minecraft yesterday.
This seems to me like Lego without hurt fingers.
Anyway, so you think that people go from TV, which is a fictional created universe, all of which has an emotional argument to it, right?
You see a cop show, is there anything about corruption in the police force, or are the police all quiet, dedicated heroes?
Are you in a cop show?
Do you see the murder take place and see the murderer and then see the cops getting closer and closer?
Well, that's not even remotely how police stuff works.
I mean, there's whole essays written online you can find about how much programming goes on into the general population about police work.
I mean, I grew up back in the days of a Hill Street Blues where...
The cops were this exhausted thin blue line between, you know, trembling middle-class whiteys and the entire multiverse of, you know, Marvel-style antiheroes who were going to take them down.
And they were all dedicated, heroic, exhausted, and some of them were goofy and funny, but they all had their hearts in the right places.
And it's just this insistent, non-stop, it's like looking at the military in Marvel movies.
They're just square-jawed, heroic, sacrifice yourself for this, that, and the other.
It is relentless the degree to which people have no contact with reality.
The media is an entire, one of the most dangerous fictions because people think that it's true.
The media is the furthest thing from the truth because at least the word fiction appears on a fiction story.
The word fiction, which should appear on the media, doesn't.
And that's why it's even that there's nothing further from the truth than the media as a whole.
Because they are influenced by the prejudices of the listeners.
They are influenced by their advertisers.
They are influenced by governments.
They are influenced by government regulators.
They are influenced by their connections with politicians.
They are influenced by the regulatory capture that they're revolving door in and out of.
And all of that.
They present themselves as truth when everything that they even remotely might talk about as true has gone through so many levels of lawyers and vetting and is this going to annoy the advertisers?
Is this going to affect subscriptions?
Is this going to affect...
That what you're getting is so incredibly biased.
Particularly, I mean, and not even to count cultural Marxism that goes on in the media, where any group that you can turn against the free market, you will provoke.
You know, whether it's blacks or Hispanics or the middle class against the caricature of the free market known as Wall Street, Whether you can get people against Monsanto and think that Monsanto somehow operates in the free market.
Cultural Marxism is just finding any group you can and telling them this shitty thing that's happening is the free market.
That's all that people are doing and that is another huge driver of the media.
So it is absolutely essential to try and break through but it's deeply shocking to people.
When anything parts these foggy clouds of media and video games and pornography and all just the goo and the patriotism and the religion.
I mean, people are so incredibly distant from basic, tangible reality that it is deeply shocking when anyone comes up with anything approaching the truth.
Yeah, so that's just been my battle with fiction in my mind.
I keep, you know, thinking, Jesus, you know, is this...
Is this really something that's gonna lead to, has led ultimately to all the problems?
And whether it's, you know, religious fiction, just things made up that don't exist, you know?
And it exists in all kinds of forms and mediums.
And to bring us back to the whole human nature bad thing, corporations are evil.
You could go on – oh, the noble, violent man who is also peaceful too.
You know, that's in every single action hero movie, you know?
That person doesn't exist.
Doesn't exist.
I mean, there's no such thing.
The female fantasy of the guy who's fantastic at getting resources and also really tender towards her and the children.
I'm not sure about...
Anyway, listen, we've got to get on to the next caller, but I really appreciate it.
Great and enjoyable call.
I literally could talk about...
Art was, of course, going to be my primary occupation.
I've written like 30 plays and 6 or 7 novels and I was at Canada's premier acting school studying acting and playwriting.
Art was going to be my thing.
Unfortunately then, I actually spent a lot of time around artists.
But that's a story for another time.
Alright, thanks very much.
You're welcome anytime.
Very thought-provoking.
Bye-bye.
Alright, take care, man.
Up next is Matthew.
Matthew wrote in and said, I feel as though I failed as a father to my daughter due to divorce.
A year ago, I accepted a position out of state in an attempt to possibly provide her with a more consistent environment.
I realize this is my worst decision ever to date.
I'm moving back to be with my daughter as soon as I can, but when I return, is it right to keep my daughter 50% of the time?
What is the role of a divorced parent versus a traditional family setting?
Wow.
What happened?
Do you think that you moving away has something to do with, assume you do, had something to do with the divorce?
Ask the question again.
I'm sorry. - Well, Do you think that you moving away, taking a job in another state, did that precipitate the divorce, do you think?
Oh, no, no, no.
I've been divorced for almost three years.
Oh, so you moved and then you spent less time in contact with your daughter, is that right?
Well, no.
I got divorced and I stayed in state and then we did the 50-50 split and it really was very hard during that time to just emotionally Uh, for the fact that, um, my daughter was always asking, you know, where am I going to be at tomorrow?
Who am I going to be with?
Who, you know, where am I going to be at this weekend?
Who's picking me up?
And, um, there, there was some financial problems.
The, uh, job that I was working at, um, there, the scheduling, um, was not very good.
And, uh, There was quite a few weeks that I wouldn't have work.
So, you know, obviously I took financial troubles and everything.
So I accepted a position within the company that I've been working for and for a better, stable paying job.
But just being away from my daughter and everything for the last year Even though I've got to see her, you know, four times and she spent a month with me here this summer.
Sorry, I'm nervous and pretty emotional.
both are fine of course so who was let me just ask you a question Who was the bad person in the divorce?
And trust me, in the divorce, there's always a bad person.
Hopefully it's not both people, but two people are good people, they're not going to get divorced.
They're going to stick it, they're going to work it out, unless, I don't know, some weirdly extraordinary theoretical situations are going to occur.
My wife and I are both good people, never getting divorced.
People can say, oh yeah, wait till it happens.
Never getting divorced, people.
You will regret every calumny you threw at my marriage.
When it stands the test of time.
But anyway, so in the divorce, was there a bad person?
Well, I'm the one that started the, or pushed the envelope for the divorce.
As far as what drove that, it was control, being controlled, and just the relationship was not what it was for.
Oh, no, no.
You can't give me divorce cliches.
We grew apart.
The relationship wasn't one.
My wife doesn't understand me.
None of that means anything fundamentally, right?
What does it mean?
What was it that you couldn't stand to the point where you pulled the cord on the family?
Okay.
I'm trying to...
Again, like I said, just being controlled was the number one thing.
Okay, but what does that mean?
That's very abstract.
What does that look like?
How did you know you were being controlled?
I was ridiculed consistently for having to buy tools for my job.
I'm a mechanic, so it's tools of the trade, and that's something we...
Fought with throughout the relationship and everything.
Then we had our child.
I'm sorry.
Are you self-employed?
I assume that's right, right?
No, not self-employed.
I actually work on private jets for a company.
But why were you buying your own tools if you weren't self-employed?
I'm sure you're right.
I just want to make sure I understand.
Because the facility that I work at, they do not provide tools.
And other than from that, I'd had some problems with staying emotionally connected to my wife just being...
In the relationship and wanting to be with her for the fact that I just was tired and fed up and didn't feel appreciated or in love, especially after the child came.
There was a lot of issues with the child...
After she was born, my ex-wife had postpartum depression.
For 11 months, myself and her mom tried to ask her to go and get help and see somebody.
And she wouldn't do it.
She, you know, said that nothing's wrong with her or whatever.
Even though that there would be times where, you know, it's like she would call her mom and tell her mom to, you know, come and get the kid.
She didn't want her daughter anymore.
She was threatening to give her away and...
I just couldn't handle the pressure from her and the relationship, I guess.
Okay, so, I mean, as a mother, at least for the first year or so, was pretty non-functional.
In fact, if she was talking about giving your daughter away, then she was...
Not doing well as a mother, to say the least, right?
Yes, to say the least.
Now, am I way off base in assuming that your wife had not such a delightful childhood?
No, you're pretty much right on there.
She didn't...
I mean, she knew her father and everything, and she hasn't had a relationship until...
Here more recently.
And so, you know, there was a lot of problems in our relationship that I believe that came from her not having a dad around.
And, you know, she would always tell me that there's a lot of times that he was supposed to come in and get the kids, which she has two other siblings, and he would stand them up.
And not come, no call, no show or anything.
So she knows that she had it rough as a kid, but she chose to not get help about it when her parenting was falling apart.
Yes, and I'm not...
As far as I can remember, it was one of her friends, one of her co-workers that, you know...
Finally was able to talk to her to get her to go to a doctor that suggested that she may have some type of chemical imbalance or something.
But other than that, I don't remember what drove her to finally going.
But that's pretty much what it ended up being.
She went to the doctor.
They ran some tests and Blood tests, a neurological test, and it was a chemical imbalance within her brain.
A few months after some medicine, she was back to...
pretty much back to herself.
Oh, what?
They actually found an objective chemical imbalance in her brain, which they corrected with medication?
According to what...
What the doctor told her and what she told me.
Wow.
So they, yeah, so they, wow, they took a blood test and they found that maybe she was hormone deficient or maybe there's, you know, hey, I mean, hormones and general health.
Maybe there was some, I don't know, thyroid, chemical, God knows what.
All right.
So she had some problem with postpartum depression, which turned out to have a biological course.
Fair enough.
She got the medication and she got better.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yes.
During this time, I, like I said earlier, had pretty much checked out of the relationship.
I had reached out to some of my friends and made the huge mistake of listening to, accepting Input from some of my childhood friends.
She gave me this book over emotional infidelity.
I started talking to this girl that I grew up with and everything, and that kind of went down a bad path.
Were you and your wife having sex at the time?
Or I guess when she was postpartum depression, there wasn't a lot of sex happening?
No.
No.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, this is one of the traps, I think, of the depressed or anxious or whatever unstable woman is no sex.
And then if you end up even having an emotional affair with someone else, you get the shit kicked out of you, right?
Pretty much.
Yeah, which is basically similar to parents saying to a child, no food for you.
You can't eat.
The kid gets hungrier and hungrier and hungrier and then goes down and steals some food and then punished for stealing, right?
it's a no win right Because, you know, I mean, it's not like she owes you sex or anything like that, but if there's no sex in the relationship, then that is a problem for everyone.
And there's a shocking number of marriages, I can't remember what it is, like one in five, a shocking number of marriages where there's no sex.
And...
Inevitably, disaster happens, and then everyone's shocked.
And it's like, well, duh.
If you don't drink anything, you get kind of thirsty.
There's only so much injection of the one-armed bishop magnet that you can do before you want something with a little bit more meat and balance to it.
And so, I'm sorry about that.
Again, look, I mean, people are saying, oh, there's no such thing as a chemical imbalance.
Look, I've had...
The skeptics on this show, and I subscribe to that particular perspective, but this is not to say that there's no such thing as legitimate medical problems that produce negative mental or emotional states, right?
So I'm just going to go with, you know, if there was no blood tests or anything and people just say, oh, you have a chemical imbalance, take these SSRIs.
I personally think that's nonsense from my amateur position, but there are, of course, legitimate underlying medical problems that can cause I'm just going to go with that being the case here.
What do I know?
Just going by what I've heard.
Okay, so the role...
I think I get where the marriage went.
So she got all upset that...
Was she having sex with you at the time that you were having the emotional affair?
No.
Right.
So there's no sex, no intimacy, no prospect thereof.
And then if you start to find any solace in the affections or intentions or attentions of another woman, suddenly you're just a monster who's unfaithful and blah blah blah, right?
And to me, either partner not providing sexuality in a relationship is infidelity.
That is infidelity.
Now, just before everybody piles down my throat, let me just give you a very two-second reason as to why.
I'm not saying you owe anybody sex or anybody owes you sex, but if you're married, marriage is sex.
Marriage is sex because that's what the vows are about.
Can you lend money to a friend of yours when you're married?
Yes, you can.
Can you lend your penis to someone when you're married?
No, you can't, right?
Can a woman sleep over with a female friend of hers who's sick?
Absolutely.
Can she sleep over with a fertile man who's sick or not sick or in the same bed?
No, she can't.
Marriage is the naughty bits...
Rubbing together until the spark and fire of a new generation is lit a light, right?
Marriage is sex.
Now, let's just say in your situation, if the woman is not giving you sex and is not actively working on why and how and sorting it out and figuring it out and so on, then she is breaking the marriage contract.
The marriage contract is sex.
That's what it's fundamentally about.
Because we know that if two people are living together and they are not having sex, they're roommates.
And so if you have devolved in your relationship from sex to non-sex, then you have broken the contract called marriage.
Now, I'm not talking about people who are sick or erectile dysfunction or whatever the hell is going on.
I'm talking about the intention and working on trying to have sex.
If you're in a sexual relationship and you are not providing sex for non-legitimate reasons, right?
Like you're in a body cast or something.
If you're in a sexual relationship and you are not providing sex, you are not in a sexual relationship.
That is unfaithful to the very essence of what marriage is.
Marriage is sex.
And the effects of sex being human beings, right?
It's a big person's game that makes real life people.
That's what you need the marriage contract for.
Because there's no way you don't get alimony from your roommate, right?
And roommates split the bills, right?
And so marriage is a very complex mishmash.
Of sexuality and baby making and resource production and resource consumption.
But it fundamentally predicates on sex.
Nobody really gives a shit how the living arrangements of roommates are worked out.
But when it comes to marriage, it's fundamentally around sex.
Now if a woman then starts withholding sex from the man and doesn't try and figure it out, doesn't talk about it, doesn't go to get therapy, doesn't try and figure out how she can overcome this, work with him, talk with him, all that kind of stuff.
If the woman withholds sex from the man, she is being unfaithful.
She is breaking the marriage contract.
And I will go further and say that if the woman is breastfeeding the man's child and the man withholds money from her, he's being unfaithful to the marriage.
Because the money for babies is kind of the resource transfer, right?
And so...
If you say, well, my wife wasn't having sex with me, and then I ended up unfaithful, I personally would not agree with that.
I would say that first your wife was unfaithful in a very practical sense, and then you ended up being kind of unfaithful in a very abstract sense, right?
With the emotional affair stuff.
Does that make any sense?
Yes.
Withholding sex is...
Breaking the marriage.
Without sex, there is no marriage.
There are annoyed roommates facing away from each other in bed, but there's no marriage.
So I'm sorry about all of that.
Thank you.
That's pretty much how it felt, just cohabitating, you know, just sharing the house with somebody else.
Yeah.
Was your wife working at the time when she was not having sex?
She took off...
Yeah, pretty much after...
If I remember correctly, pretty much after the child, there wasn't a whole lot of sex at all.
And, you know, she was home with the child for...
Three months or something like that before she went back to work.
Right.
Yeah.
So, and again, I'm not trying to say that the woman has to give you sex because it's obligated under the marriage vow, but the marriage is sex.
And a woman who withholds sex is breaking the marriage.
And so I just really wanted to make that clear to people.
And a man who withholds sex is breaking the marriage.
This is absolutely egalitarian.
We just happen to be talking to a man at the moment.
And let's see here.
She needed love and understanding, says the woman, and I bet she wasn't getting it.
Postpartum depression needs tons of tender loving care.
I don't know that that's verifiable in any objective standpoint.
Because if you're saying postpartum depression needs tons of tender loving care, then there's no chemical imbalance, right?
An imbalance like I don't have insulin in my body is not cured by tender loving care.
So if you're saying it's cured by tender loving care, then it's not a chemical imbalance.
Now, in order for someone to benefit from tender loving care, they have to be open to tender loving care.
But the problem is people who are depressed often kind of dislike themselves.
And therefore, if you bring tender loving care to someone who dislikes himself or herself fundamentally, they don't believe you.
They won't respond.
They think you're manipulating them.
They reject it.
They push back.
Because it doesn't match.
It's like trying to put the plug in, you know, the two sideways plugs and you're trying to put them in too vertically.
Doesn't work.
You can't love somebody who doesn't love herself.
I mean, you can...
But it usually just pushes them further away.
The great challenge then is the relationship with the self.
Now, my admittedly and completely unscientific and non-empirical theory about postpartum depression is that when babies do not receive the love and affection and mirroring that they need when they're babies,
if there's a huge amount of Dysfunction in the baby's environment, you know, fighting parents, financial instability, drug addiction, criminality, depression, anxiety, alienation, sociopathy, psychopathy, you name it.
If there's a lot of dysfunction in the baby's environment, that stuff can lie buried down for a long time.
And women in particular can try and cover over that underlying disease.
Disaster, dysfunction and need through being sexually appealing in the youth and the flush of their sexual power and so on.
And then what happens is they can keep all of that pushed down, but then when they have a baby and they haven't done the self-work and they haven't overcome the agony that they experience as babies with a lack of bonding, they don't have the emotional...
Mechanisms necessary to bond with the child.
And then if you can't bond with your child, it's just like, if you can't bond with your baby, it's just like having a tiny asshole in your house who relentlessly needs, who never gives up, who doesn't give a shit about your feelings, who wants, who wants, who wants, and you don't have any resources to give because you haven't done the necessary work to Get the mechanisms of empathy and connection with your baby.
And so when the baby comes, it's a little you that you have rejected for 25 years, who was rejected as a baby, who you can't connect with.
You can't connect with your inner baby.
Your mother never connected with her inner baby.
You have a baby.
You can't connect with your baby, so your baby becomes your demanding, selfish mother.
And you withdraw and you feel hostile and you get depressed.
Could be and probably is a completely bullshit theory.
I'm just putting it out there as a possibility that if you have and know of significant dysfunctions when you were a baby, which you can hopefully get by talking about these things with your family, then you know in advance that you're going to have problems bonding with babies.
I know In my own parents' marriage was just falling apart.
I think they divorced like six or seven months after I was born.
And my mother was hospitalized for depression or whatever it was.
I don't know what they were calling it at the time.
But...
She was in the hospital for months after I was born.
So, I mean, I knew when I was going to become a father that I needed to do work on myself to make sure that I was going to be as emotionally prepared for bonding with that baby as humanly possible.
So, this is so important for men.
And it's not important for women.
We just happen to be talking to a man here.
Which is...
Do not, do not have babies with women who experience significant dysfunction in their early life and who've not done any work to treat it, to deal with it, to work on it.
It is going to turn into exactly the kinds of problems, I would argue, that is occurring for Matthew.
In his life right now, right?
I mean, I'm guessing, I'm sure you love your daughter.
I have no doubt about that.
I mean, your concern for her is palpable.
But it would be better if you'd had a different mom for a baby you could love equally well, right?
Yes.
You need to know who you're going to have a baby with.
You need to know and you need to understand that the baby will not fix them.
The baby will demand from them.
The baby will pull resources out of them, like somebody pulling sheep intestines out of a ghastly Scottish dish named Haggis.
The baby is just going to pull and pull and pull at resources.
And if you have massive and unresolved childhood issues, particularly infancy issues, that baby is going to pull at your heart and is going to fall forever because there's going to be nothing there for them to hang on to.
And you're going to fall with them, but even faster.
So I just really want to put that out there.
Hopefully you become a father again in your life if that's what you want.
But, you know, you grill, you grill, you grill the living shit out of your potential egg receptacles.
I mean, you cross-examine, you get a swinging light bulb, you get someone from the Stasi if you need, you cross-examine and you grill and you talk to their parents and you talk to their siblings and you ask and you ask and you ask about what it was like for them.
Did their parents divorce?
Did they get hit by their siblings?
Were they spanked?
Were they breastfed?
Did their parents go back to work after three weeks?
What happened to them as babies?
Do they have any consciousness of what happened to them as babies?
Do they have any sense that what happened to them as a baby is going to have a huge impact on how they parent?
Is it fair to say, my friend, And please correct me if I'm at all off base.
Is it fair to say that there were some signs ahead of time about what happened with your wife and her happiness and her capacity to connect after the baby was born?
Sure.
Yes.
She...
Okay.
It is primarily the mother's job to bond because she should be the one breastfeeding, right?
I mean, the father bonds and I help my daughter as much as humanly possible.
But it's the mother who is going to be breastfeeding.
It's the mother who's going to be doing more of the cuddling.
It's the mother who needs to give the eye contact.
But if you're staring into your own shattered and crated babyhood history...
You can't look at that child's heart.
It's like staring at the sun without blinking.
You can't look at it.
It's like that old Seinfeld joke about cleavage.
It's like the sun.
You don't just stare at it, right?
The baby needs relaxed eye contact and mirroring.
You need to be relaxed and present and comfortable and welcoming in the presence of the baby in your arms.
And trauma makes the baby Like an open wound you can't touch.
Unresolved trauma.
And this is equally true for men and for women, but I would argue that since the woman is going to be the one who's going to be the primary bonding and caregiving person, that it's even more important for the woman to have worked on resolving the issue.
So, the question being, how is the mother of What's your daughter doing now?
Much better.
She's very good with her.
I feel that I don't know what it is that she decided to change.
I know she's been going to counseling ever since the divorce, and so I guess that's helped her out a lot.
And now, have you worked to fix what's broken in you that mated with what was broken in her?
I was going to counseling after the divorce.
I don't know.
I didn't feel that...
I didn't feel that it was really...
I don't know.
I guess I felt that I didn't need to go anymore shortly after that.
And I'd started to go here about a year ago and wasn't able to really connect with the counselor.
And since I moved...
Would you say that...
I mean, what's your happiness level 1 to 100?
Sorry for interrupting.
What's your happiness level 1 to 100 at the moment these days?
What these days?
Probably in the 60 range.
Do you think that you're 60 talking to me right now?
No.
I'm just curious, people in the chat room, if you were rating this call as Happiness 1 to 100, what would you put?
Well, I mean, no, I'm very happy about the call and everything, but just the emotions coming up and everything, and remembering what I went through.
You know, it'd definitely probably take me very depressed and down into the 20s at max.
Right.
Yeah, you certainly seem down to me.
And I sympathize with that.
I mean, that is very hard.
It's very hard what you're going through.
I mean, you know, I think it's great what your ex-wife is doing.
And, you know, kudos to her and applauses to her for getting the help that she needed.
It would have been great if she did it earlier, but, you know, that's great that she's doing what she's doing.
I think that you...
Do you know why you married and had a daughter with your wife?
I mean, I was in love with her.
I felt that we had a good relationship.
What did you love about her?
I love her passion about being outgoing and trying new things.
She was very smart.
She had a great job.
There's a lot of things that we met kind of young.
You didn't have a good template for love from your family, right?
No, I wouldn't say so.
I mean, they...
My parents say so, but, you know, it's that whole, we did the best we could routine, and, you know...
I feel bad about that also because I did not take the proper steps before having a child and learning more information about not spanking or peaceful parenting or ideas such as that.
I thought that I had the tools necessary and was stubborn and did not do the best job that I could have.
And is it fair to say that you've fallen, even with the changes, the positive changes that she's done since the divorce, have you fallen out of love with her?
I mean, would you get back together if she was willing?
No.
No, I wouldn't.
Why not?
I just don't.
Um...
I don't know.
I just don't think that I could connect with her on that level after being broken and like that.
Going through what I went through during that time frame and just hearing, you know, I can say that I have nightmares about some of the things that she said and that she has our daughter right now.
Some of the things she said about you during the divorce proceedings?
Well, no, no, no, not about me, but about I mean, yeah, there's obviously she was very upset and everything during the divorce, but as far as what I was talking about was, you know, just listening to her say that she didn't want her child and that she couldn't believe that she had a kid with me.
But wait, wait, wasn't this during the time when you said she had a chemical imbalance in the brain?
That's, yeah, I mean, that's what I was thinking.
Isn't that sort of like getting angry at someone for hitting you when they have an epileptic attack or that somebody seems aggressive when they have a brain tumor?
That, yeah, I would say so.
But it just, I still can't control the emotions that I still felt during that time.
It's not, you know...
No, no, no, no.
Yes, you can control the emotions.
Yes, you can control the emotions.
Of course you can, because the emotions result from value judgments.
Look, I'm not saying get back together with your wife, but if you're saying, well, she told me these terrible things when she had a chemical imbalance in the brain, you cannot hold her morally responsible For what she said when she was ill in the brain.
If she had a brain tumor and she got really aggressive and then she got the brain tumor removed and she was nice, would you hold her aggression against her?
No, I would guess not.
But you told me this and I asked you and you said, yes, there was a chemical imbalance and yes, she took the medication and now she's better.
So it was the chemical imbalance that was talking, not your wife, right?
If there is such a thing, you know...
No, no, no.
I asked you very clearly.
Very clearly.
You gave me the chemical imbalance thing, right?
Now, you can change that if you want, but I was pretty clear about that.
Now, if you want to change that, that's a different matter.
Like if you want to withdraw the chemical imbalance stuff, right?
But right now, it sounds like You are confusing yourself in order to avoid processing your emotions, right?
So you can feel sad by feeling and angry about all the things that your wife said to you and said about your daughter, but then when the ramifications of that, but then when we talk about her, you say, well, she had a chemical imbalance and she got it fixed through medication and now she's better, right?
Yes, that is what I said.
Right.
So what that means is that you are confusing yourself and going round and round in order to avoid processing, in my humble opinion, in order to avoid processing some deeper emotions, right?
Okay.
Because when I started to talk to you about how you felt, and you said, well, I'm upset about...
You gave me the whole thing about...
Chemical imbalance.
And then you said, well, I'm really hurt by what she said when she was ill in the head, right?
Yes.
And then when I said, well, no, it said you can control your feelings because if she was ill, she's not responsible for it, right?
Yes.
I mean, during that time, yes.
Right.
Right.
So that is obviously confusing from the outside, right?
And the confusion is not accidental, right?
Okay.
No, no.
Now you're disconnecting from the conversation with me, right?
No.
No, not at all.
I understand what you're...
Do you hold your wife responsible for what she said when she was depressed?
I'm not saying, like, this is not, like, a right or wrong answer.
I'm genuinely curious, because I've heard both sides.
I want to know what you feel deep down.
Do you think she could have done better than she did, or do you think she was like a diabetic, but no insulin, she just was sick?
Oh, I mean, honestly, I think she could have done better than what she did.
Okay.
So then, it's not just chemical imbalance time in your mind, right?
Maybe it was objectively.
I don't know, because I'm not a doctor, right?
But But in your mind you hold her accountable for at least some portion of what she said when she was depressed?
Yes.
Has she apologized for what she said when she was depressed?
No, not to me.
Why?
Listen, and I'll tell you, if I had an epileptic attack and I hit my wife, I would be so sorry.
I wouldn't say, I'm a bad person.
I would say, I'm incredibly sorry I hit you.
That must be really scary.
I really wish it hadn't happened.
And what can I do to help you feel more secure, more safe around me, right?
So even if, like you say, well, my wife had this chemical imbalance, she's taking this medication, she's taking therapy, she's getting better.
Has she ever said to you, by God, I said some terrible things.
Like if I had a brain tumor and I told my daughter, I hate you.
And then my brain tumor got better or got removed, and I felt myself again, I would say to my daughter, I am incredibly sorry that you heard that.
I feel terrible that you heard that.
I'm not like a bad person.
I had a brain tumor, for God's sakes, but I'm incredibly sorry that you heard that, right?
So if she's better...
Look, I'm not saying you didn't do anything wrong in the relationship, but this particular issue that is hardest for you...
Why do you think she hasn't apologized for saying terrible things about, like, basically, I wish I hadn't had your kid, or I wish I wasn't a mother, or whatever?
I'm sure she said other stuff, too.
Other than she is resentful towards me, or, you know...
I'm sorry, say that again?
...that she's just...
she resents me, you know?
She's angry at me.
She's angry at you now?
Not now.
No, I mean, she's angry that I'm not there, and my daughter needs me.
Wait, she's angry that you're not in the neighborhood?
Well, not in even the same state.
Right, right.
Now, was part of why you left the fact that your wife was being so difficult, or your ex?
Well, during the divorce...
I mean, it really wasn't that difficult.
I mean, it was uncontested as long as I agreed to her getting primary custody, primary physical custody.
And what does that mean?
Was that 80-20, 70-30?
What is that?
I don't know what primary means.
Certainly no lawyer.
Say again.
No what?
What does primary custody mean?
Oh, uh...
In the state of Nevada, it's automatic 50-50.
Well, that wasn't good enough for her.
She wanted 100% physical custody of our child, but we still negotiated.
Why did she want 100% custody?
Because she felt, from what she had said to me, was she felt that I would leave.
Is that enough for you for her to get 100% custody?
I feel he's going to leave.
There you go, 100%.
Is that how it works, where you are?
No, but it had to be...
What she would have done was prove that I was an unfit parent, and she didn't have the proof to prove that in court, but I couldn't afford to go to court.
And pay her lawyer and my lawyer.
Why would you?
Oh, you would pay her lawyer and your lawyer because you were contesting what she wanted?
But she was deviating from the state standards, right?
Yes.
But you would still have to pay for both lawyers in order to contest that.
So you basically said, I can't afford that.
I'm not going to get any custody.
And then I ended up moving to another state for a job, right?
Yes.
I had met with a lawyer as she had met with a lawyer.
I did a free consultation and everything and was advised that the best thing that I could possibly do would probably be to go uncontested and just try and negotiate the best terms possible.
Well, How do you negotiate the best terms possible with 100%, 0%?
She ended up with primary physical custody, but I still had my daughter 50% of the time because there's another part of the divorce that talks about You know, visitation and such.
But then we are joint...
What's the term I'm looking for?
I forgot.
Well listen, we don't have to get into the minutiae because this is certainly not a legal show.
But basically, you kind of had to give up the ghost because you couldn't afford to fight it.
She wanted 100%.
Are you paying alimony and child support?
Oh, yeah.
To the bank.
Right.
And because she's got 100% on paper, she's getting a lot of alimony and child support, although you're still responsible for 50% of the cost, or whatever, 100% of the cost when she's with you, right?
Your daughter.
Yes.
Yeah, so...
Tragically, you've become kind of like an alimony serf for a while to come, right?
Pretty much, yes.
But I'm incredibly sorry about that, and that's a hell of a thing to get into.
I mean, going anywhere near the U.S. family court system is like basically riding a Dr.
Strangelove bomb right down to Hiroshima, right?
I'd say it's worse than that.
Yeah, because at least with the Hiroshima thing, it's over at some point, right?
So I'm incredibly sorry.
And I'm sure you've watched Divorce Corps, and if you haven't, Divorce Corps, you should.
I hugely sympathize.
It's a horrible mess of a system that is so destructive for everyone involved.
But then it's the government, so what do you expect?
Anyway, so let me just – I'll just give you two sacks on what I think – Is the right approach?
And this, look, I mean, take everything I'm saying with a huge grain of salt, as always.
I've not been in this situation.
I've certainly seen people who are in this situation when I used to work at a At a trading company like a stock trading company as a programmer there was a guy I knew who was getting divorced and I mean he spent half the goddamn day on the phone pulling out his kidney and stuffing it through the telephone receiver as payment to the lawyers that he had to pay for and he just basically progressively lost the will to live and couldn't focus and couldn't concentrate and I mean it's just like having this giant Leachy vampire draining
your spinal fluid that you can't scrape off.
So I'm incredibly sorry about getting caught up in this kind of system.
And it reinforces you have to be so careful who you get married to and who you have children with.
It can't turn quite this disastrous.
Now, that having been said, your daughter is your daughter.
She's not responsible for the state.
She's not responsible for your choice of who to get married to and have children with.
So I think physical proximity is important.
To my...
Obviously, outside eye for what it's worth.
A person who has not apologized has not grown.
A person who has not apologized for significant wrongdoing has not grown.
Now, apology is kind of like a balance, right?
I mean, we all know those people who just keep apologizing until it gets annoying.
And we all know those people who can never admit that they're wrong or change their position.
Also annoying.
But...
If someone has told absolutely horrible things to the father of their children, including I wish you weren't my father or the father of my child or whatever, given that you guys are bound together and she's taking your money, then she owes you an apology.
I'm not saying you don't owe her apologies, but just from what I've heard.
So given that that's not forthcoming, I think it's important to remember that you need to remain, in my opinion, a very positive and consistent influence in your daughter's life.
Which means, you know, move to be close.
Move to be present.
Move to listen.
To listen in a non-judgmental way about the issues that she's doubtless going to have with her mother.
Be open to the issues she's doubtless going to have with you.
And be as present as you can.
And the most important thing is you must teach her through the empiricism of your example.
The gravest danger that A girl's face with dysfunctional mothers is the desire of the mothers to photocopy their own mistakes onto their daughters.
Just talking about women here at the moment, not trying to say only blah, blah, blah.
Anyway, but you, I would argue, I don't know how you can do it with alimony and child support.
But if you can get any kind of therapy, if you can't afford it, you know, journaling.
John Bradshaw has great stuff.
Nathaniel Brandon has great stuff, in my opinion, which are great for journaling and self-knowledge.
There's lots of things that you can do to really learn about your own history and how you ended up in this situation, which I hugely sympathize with.
And some of it is political and some of it is the bullshit of the state family court system and all that, which is positively medieval.
In lifetime alimony comes out of the goddamn Catholic Church because...
Because remember, God himself, right?
Mankind cannot separate what God himself has put together.
You're married for life, and therefore you are alimony for life because you can't fundamentally get divorced.
That's how primitive the divorce laws are in the U.S. They come right out of religion.
And, yeah, DivorceCorp.com just...
Everybody who's alive needs to watch that movie.
And particularly if you're a young man, a young woman, you must, you must watch that movie because you are going to embark upon a marriage with a human being of questionable stability who's going to be influenced by a huge load of cultural Marxist and feminist assholes who is going to look at you.
There's going to be huge sectors of society who are going to try and turn that woman's view of you into an ATM with no balls.
And 50% of these marriages may end in divorce.
And you can literally be eviscerated financially.
You can be destroyed emotionally.
You can triple or quadruple your risk of suicide.
Exposing yourself to statist marriage is a highly dangerous and toxic environment.
Do not go in uninformed.
And this movie, I think, is a great way of explaining that.
So keep working on yourself.
Keep staying present with your daughter.
Be open and curious about her experiences.
And apologize for the decisions that you have made.
You can't apologize on behalf of your wife.
That's going to be presumptuous, and it's going to be inflaming and infuriating for her.
But you can apologize.
Not every day, not all the time, because it's going to get exhausting.
But you can apologize for having her be in the situation.
You know, there's an old line from, gosh, is it Ally McBeal or something like that, where...
Portia de Rossi plays a woman whose parents are divorced and she's like, hey, you know, I got to have two sets of toys.
I got to have two sets of bikes.
I got to have two sets of bedroom furniture and all that.
You know, how many kids get that?
And he said, well, too many, I'm afraid.
Too many, I think.
And that was a real moment.
It was a very good moment in the show where, yeah, hey, look at all these great things.
How many kids get that?
Well, way too many.
So it is a mess for your daughter.
She'd much rather you guys be together.
And decisions that you've made that you can own about who you chose to have kids with and maybe how you chose to handle it afterwards.
I would say that you have some apologizing to do to your daughter in an age-appropriate manner, if and when she's ready.
But I think that's important.
Keep working on yourself, stay present to your daughter, listen to her experience, and apologize for the situation that she's in, and obviously commit to make it as good as possible.
Does that help at all?
Yes, it does.
Well, thank you so much for calling in.
I appreciate it.
And do let us know how it goes.
If you If you get a chance to, I really obviously care about what happens after the calls as well.
All right, Mike, who do we have next?
All right, Michael is up next.
And Michael wrote in and said, I've been in therapy for the past five years with four different therapists.
My most recent therapist describes me as not expressing joy.
Can someone nurture joy in their life when they've endured a terrible childhood?
Oh, you therapy whore.
You are just, you are couching around, aren't you?
Are you there?
I'm here, yeah.
Okay, okay.
So why?
Why four therapists in five years?
Well, one, because the first one was basically a Christian therapist.
She tried to get me to apologize for some of my family's, or not me apologize, but me to accept the apologies of my family's abuse and stuff like that.
So she wanted us to stay together, and I was like, nah, I'm not taking that.
So it was your job to sort of actively forgive those who sinned against you?
Correct, yes.
Right.
So I saw her for a couple months and then I left.
And then the next one was out of a, I guess you would call it a public hospital.
It was basically like free therapy.
She wasn't very good at it.
She actually ended up transferring from being a therapist to actually being the register clerk.
So not very good.
Then the last one I've been seeing for the past two years, and she's been the best, and I also pay for her myself.
But she has described that I don't seem to enjoy anything.
If I do anything, it seems as if I'm trying to mitigate being depressed with everything else.
I don't really understand what that means.
What does that mean?
Let me describe that.
Let me think.
So...
No, no.
You're going to give me a very abstract description.
I'm afraid I'm going to have to interrupt you there.
If there's that long a pause, then you're assembling words to confuse me.
All right.
Now, you have an ACE, Adverse Childhood Experience, index of, do you remember?
Of, according to your questions, nine.
Well, they're actually not my questions, but according to Dr.
Vincent Felitti's questions, they're nine.
Do you remember what that's out of?
10.
Right.
Yeah, so I think the only thing you didn't get was spontaneous combustion, demonic possession, and an asteroid strike, right?
So, I mean, some seriously bad stuff happened to you as a child, right?
Yes, I actually have some criticisms of the ACE score because it doesn't count everything that could happen.
No, it certainly doesn't.
And it certainly doesn't count things that I would count.
But what are your criticisms?
Um...
For one, the things on the ACG score are pretty bad, but there are various different types of neglect.
In some studies, neglect can be worse than actual physical abuse.
So that's one of my biggest criticisms.
Not only did I get a lot of physical abuse as a child, I was extremely neglected as a child.
And even worse than being neglected, I was constantly referred to as being a burden.
Right.
Right.
And what do you I mean, it's a big question, right?
It's a big question, but what do you feel in general about your childhood now?
Well, it wasn't that long ago.
I'm only, I'm only 21.
So, um, extremely, extremely angry.
And, um, I have had periods of, um, like realizations from things of the past where I literally feel like someone has died.
What do you mean?
Kind of emotions.
Who died?
What do you mean?
That could be you, that could be others.
I mean, what does that mean?
It's usually feelings of the childhood that I could have had has died.
So, such as...
Let me remember back to something.
I never...
I was raised by my grandparents and I never really remember anything...
Never...
Remember doing anything really fun with them.
I constantly just being remembered as being this object that they had to care for because, hey, we have family and we don't want to seem...
It was like they couldn't just give me away to someone else.
My mother was rendered incompetent.
By a court of law and unfit to raise children, and so my grandmother felt socially obligated to raise me and my twin.
Sorry, was your grandmother your mother's mother?
Correct, which I have a criticism of the court for doing that.
I'm like, my grandmother contributed to creating my mother, and you're going to give me to the exact same person.
And then she calls you a burden, although she raised a daughter who was unfit to be a parent who became a parent.
Correct, yes.
Well, I guess that's the kind of stuff we expect from the States.
The same woman strapped my mother down when she was 16 to a bed and whipped her multiple times because my mother is schizophrenic.
My grandmother believed at the time that she was being demonically possessed and found that whipping probably would get them out.
So that's kind of how messed up my family is.
Wow, so really primitive religious mania, right?
I actually went to a...
Do you know what primitive Baptist is?
No, but I have a feeling my life is about to become noticeably less light by finding out.
Primitive Baptist is basically like regular Baptist, pretty bad, but they also believe in the Calvinistic doctrine of the elect.
There's 144,000 get to go to heaven or something like that, right?
That people – you don't get saved technically.
You are already saved and therefore will act virtuously.
And those people are the people who get to go to heaven.
Right.
Wow.
And your grandfather?
My grandmother was married twice, so the one that she was living with died when I was 12.
He was a veteran.
He was actually against physical abuse, but he was disabled and confined to a chair, so literally could do nothing about it.
Wow.
And he was not always competent.
My grandmother basically made an arrangement with him saying, you need someone to take care of you.
If you let me have your pension check, I'll take care of you.
Kind of arrangement.
Oh, wow.
Okay.
Okay.
Right.
Got it.
Got it.
So this is who you were raised by.
And there's pretty much no layer of hell that could be experienced as a child that you did not experience.
Is that fair to say?
Let me put it this way.
My current therapist, her speciality is dealing with children that have been sex trafficked.
She finds my situation a bit more difficult to deal with.
Not that she said that, but I kind of pick up from it.
You should ask her.
Look, I mean, it's not needless to say because it always needs to be said, but my friend, I am so incredibly sorry for everything that not only happened, but that the system allowed to happen, encouraged to happen, and that society and her community and her church and her extended family allowed and encouraged to happen.
This is not child abuse.
It does not occur in isolation.
Child abuse is something that requires the explicit and implicit support of everyone in earshot of the child at any time during the child's existence as a child.
People always say, well, you know, my mother beat me and my grandmother.
And yes, this is all true, but this can't occur in a vacuum.
Sorry, go ahead.
That's what really infuriates me.
When I was growing up, I lived with two other of her sisters who never said anything, never tried to stop her.
I went to school several times with black eyes and no one said anything.
Sure.
Oh yeah, I went to school hungry, smelly, holes in my clothes, unwashed, bad breath.
You know, it was rough there for a couple of years.
I mean, I turned it around from my early to mid-teens, I guess, sort of 14, 15, but holy crap, like 11 to 13.
I mean, it was Lord of the Flies without even any decent sunlight.
So I get it.
I can relate to that.
Right.
So...
Yeah, I mean, this is...
You know, why do people abuse children?
And there's lots of complicated answers, which...
We've gone into many times in the show, which we've had experts on to discuss.
But there's really only one answer.
There's really only one answer.
Why do people abuse children?
Because they can.
Because they can.
Because everyone else lets them.
Everyone else encourages.
Everyone else turns the other way.
And everyone else is the enabler.
They are enablers.
Everybody who's in orbit of that child, who does nothing, is part of the child abuse.
And is as much as part of the bank robbery as the getaway driver.
And you can't have a bank robbery without a getaway driver.
And you can't have child abuse without the enablers.
Child abuse is not a parent-child situation.
Child abuse is an extended family, a teacher, a preacher, a school, an environmental situation.
It is only possible because of the averted eyes.
The crime only occurs because people blind themselves.
And it's like this weird thing.
Everybody sees razor sharp.
And then they look at what's child abuse and everybody becomes really broadly pixelated.
They can't see a thing.
I don't know what that is, right?
Move on.
And this is why people who've been abused as children have such trouble with society.
Because we all, right?
I mean, man to man, right?
We get that this was not fundamentally the women in our lives.
Your grandmother, my mother.
This was not the fundamental issue.
The fundamental issue was society as a whole.
That basically what it is, is you're standing there.
I wrote a poem about this many years ago.
It's like you're standing in a line waiting for a bus.
And everyone's, you know, back in the day before tablets, everybody reading their newspapers, listening to their Walkmans.
You're all standing in a line.
And there's a kid right in the middle of the line.
Right in the middle of the lion.
And then, out of the bushes, comes a lion.
And everyone can smell the lion, and everyone can hear the...
of the lion.
And everyone can hear that little pad, pad, pad, pad of the lion.
And everyone can hear the lion...
sniffing for the scent of young flesh.
And everybody...
Everyone raises their newspapers just a little bit so they don't have to see what is coming next because the only person without a newspaper in the bus lineup is the child.
And the child sees the lion and the lion sees the child and everybody raises their newspapers a little bit higher and everybody turns their Walkmans up a little bit louder.
So the Metallica can drown out the sound of canine giant yellow teeth On the young ribs of a child.
And then...
The lion jumps, takes down the child, feasts upon the child.
Everyone turns up their Walkman and raises their blood spattered newspaper a little bit higher.
And then the bus comes and everyone steps over the body.
And the child is never spoken of again.
And then the next day, there's another child at the bus stop with the Walkmans and the newspapers.
And it plays over and over and over again.
And when I was a child, my fundamental problem was not with the fucking lion.
It was the fucking lineup.
What do you think?
I can definitely agree with you there.
Because...
I know several people.
I told my teacher once upon a time how my grandmother had slapped me with a sapphire ring and it had scratched, really tore a gash into my face.
And all she did was hug me and she said, it'll get better.
And I'm like, well, not at the time, but now I look back and I was like, it could have got tremendously better if you had done something.
But no, you let me go straight back to that house, not a word to the administration, nothing.
Just a little hug, and it would get better.
Let's put a little Band-Aid on this problem.
What Band-Aid?
Even a fucking Band-Aid would have been helpful, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, and this is the truth that is revealed to us victims, right?
Right.
And then I have the weird conflict of...
I right now have a good job.
I'm pretty successful given my psychological history.
And then people are like, oh, you're such an inspiration.
And I'm like, oh, you don't even know.
So...
Does it show up anywhere, this ACE of nine, does it show up anywhere in your life at the moment?
Um...
What do you mean?
I mean, do you have any...
Because you say to people, oh, if only you know.
Do you just mean that about the past?
Or, you know, I mean, do you have any dysfunctions kicking around in your life at the moment that would make people go, oh, well, you know, that explains if I know the history.
Um...
No, I don't.
I think I have a pretty good life right now.
I think I don't have anything really dysfunctional.
I've completely defood.
So right now it's just working away and trying to find decent people to be friends with.
So inability to feel joy, that's your big issue, right?
Yeah.
Yes, I look out and I go to the park and I see all these people that are so happy with their lives and I don't know what that is.
I don't know what they're feeling.
It's like the strangest thing to me.
Do you think, I mean, I don't want to sound overly cynical, but I mean, do you think that they're feeling happiness?
My therapist has tried to describe to me that sometimes people feel happy but their lives might be a complete wreck and you wouldn't know otherwise unless you asked, in which case they might not be honest.
Right.
So there's no really way to know how to gauge your emotional level against everyone else's.
People just appear to seem to be better or something like that.
Those people who are happy, who aren't helping the victims, are stealing that happiness from the victims.
This is a really important equation to understand and probably has one reason why you're having trouble with the joy.
Let me say it again, just so it's really clear.
Those who are happy without helping victims have stolen the happiness from the victims.
Yeah.
So...
Was it your aunt who said it'll get better?
No, that was a teacher.
A teacher.
Okay, a teacher says.
Now, would your teacher have been happy if your teacher had taken on your grandmother?
I don't think so.
No.
Come on, seriously.
Um...
Your teacher would not have been happy to take on your grandmother, right?
Definitely not.
I mean, your grandmother sounds, you know, truly satanic, right?
I would have to apologize behind her in public after she would leave a bank because of how awful she was to the tellers.
Yeah, and that's just a bank teller.
So let's say, you know, come not between the Nazgul and his prey, right?
When you step between the abuser and the victim, Which is pretty much the mandate of this show.
Step between the abuser and the victim.
What happens?
You might get eaten.
Yeah.
If it's my grandmother.
Yeah, I'm putting down my fucking newspaper.
I'm taking off my fucking Walkman.
And I'm not leaving the adult children to face the lion alone.
Not going to do it.
Not going to do it because I care about the world.
I care about the future.
And now, even more so, I am a father.
And I cannot have my happiness as an adult be at the expense of ignoring the victims on the planet.
Can't do it.
That is a form of theft.
And I was stolen from enough that I know how hard it is to have your happiness stolen by people who ignore your pain.
When you talk about your child abuse with people, with people for the first time, how do they react?
I have with some people.
They're usually flabbergasted.
Sometimes I'm pretty sure I know when it's Socially appropriate.
I mean, I don't like talk like, hey, I go to a bar and then like talk to a stranger and be like, oh.
No, no, I know.
But whether it's appropriate or might you bring it up.
Does it ever get brought up again?
Do people follow up?
Or do they just basically, whoa, then whoa, and then never comes up again?
It usually occurs that way.
Right.
Right.
So this is the reality, too, that people just feel really uncomfortable, like, whoa, I don't really want to know that stuff happens in the world, because if I get that that stuff happens in the world, I get what the world is really like and how everybody enables.
So I'm just going to ignore it because it makes me uncomfortable.
So fuck you.
I wish you hadn't brought it up, right?
Yeah.
A really good example of that, I was at the Boys and Girls Club.
Club in my town, and all the other guys that I was with, they were trying to get this thing together to replace the toys the kids were having there, and I had to have a talk with them about how you actually help these kids.
I'm like, the center that they're in sucks.
And they're there voluntarily.
So what are they running away from?
That's what you need to fix.
And that conversation just ended so quickly.
It was surprising to me.
I could see them all, light bulbs going on, and then them turning it off.
Extremely quickly.
Come not between the abuser and his prey.
That is the mantra of a comfort-seeking society.
You know, we used to be some pretty fucking tough people.
We used to, you know, we used to, I mean, we took on woolly mammoths.
We took on saber-toothed tigers.
We carved wildernesses out of the living rock.
We took on bears.
And now it's like, there's meanie mommies and daddies.
I'm running away.
What ever happened to our spines?
What ever happened to our balls?
I guess it's because I can fight the bears because I have no guilt about formerly being a bear or currently hiding and pretending to be a bear or pretending to not be a bear.
I have zero bareness in my environment.
So I can take on abusers because I don't have any guilt or shame about doing bad stuff.
And so, yeah, I mean, and tragically, you've been, you've had society illuminated to you, and it's a pretty vile petri dish of child abuse enablement, right?
Mm-hmm.
And somehow, you are the bad person, or you are the person who makes people uncomfortable for bringing it up.
You know, let's talk about women who report rape.
Don't shame them.
Yeah, okay, I agree, don't shame them.
What about the men who report child abuse?
Ooh, let's all take a step back.
That's not comfortable.
Why?
Because patriarchy!
Um...
I'm still extremely surprised at the number of people that when I get in conversations with them about child abuse, they're still extremely defensive about it.
Like, it blows my mind.
Like, oh no, spanking is okay.
And I was like, you're taught...
That's because everybody has a U, maybe not to the degree of U with nine, but almost everybody has some kid they know who needs some help, right?
Right.
And so they are guilty.
Right.
And they're begging for people to not poke the viper of their guilt that will fasten its fangs on their future.
Well, as I said before, I am a giant cash register.
I pay the bills.
I pay the bills.
If people have earned the guilt, I will not withhold it from them.
I am generous in justice.
And a lot of people Have earned a lot of guilt by not helping children.
I don't mean five-year-olds or whatever.
I mean, that's really tough and complicated.
Teachers have a legal and moral responsibility to report.
Doctors have a legal and moral responsibility to report.
Psychologists have a legal and moral responsibility to report.
Social workers, in most places, in most circumstances, and again, look at the details in your own neck of the woods.
And, you know, they don't.
I don't know where you're from, and you don't have to tell me, but I'm pretty sure that teacher, if he saw signs of child abuse, had a legal duty to report, right?
The county I'm from is constantly under review for the amount of abuse that doesn't go reported.
Right.
And then you get failed for a test in school because you didn't learn how to spell antidenominalistic.
And yet these guys don't have to report child abuse and they get summers off and pensions, right?
Even though they're supposed to report child abuse, they don't, right?
So they're actually doing criminal actions or definitely discipline-based actions, right?
Mm-hmm.
So, Joy.
Yeah.
Well, I can't give you any, you know, there's no secret sauce to joy, but I can give you some surprising things to joy.
Joy and cruelty to evil can be very satisfying.
And it's a challenge, right?
Because if you have empathy, you also have empathy for evil, which means that you get the desperate desire of evil to escape its own bad conscience, if it even has such a thing, which some do and some don't, right?
There's the evil of pure sadism and there's the evil of inattention and neglect and just trying to play it safe and avoid problems and not being honest about it.
Patting yourself on the back as a good person because you send 50 bucks a month to some kid in Peru and then there's some kid being beaten bloody next door and you're not calling anyone or doing anything about it.
But having the capacity to have empathy for the victims without being paralyzed by empathy for the victimizers is the great challenge of changing the world.
So there are so many people who are absolutely desperate that no consequences fall to their inattention.
Everyone knows that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.
Right?
Right.
And how does the evil of child abuse triumph?
And let's not kid ourselves, it triumphs.
Because good people do nothing.
Which means, guess what?
They're not There are people who know good but won't do it, and that's the worst kind of person.
How do you communicate that to them, though?
I mean, you can't tell them straight-faced that they're a bad person, because then the conversation won't go anywhere.
Well, where is it going now?
What are you losing?
Not much.
You could just ask them and say, wow, you seem really uncomfortable with this.
Why do you think that is?
Do you think it's my fault?
You know, my number six podcast, I think, was everybody talks about self-defense, but the only time I was ever beaten up was as a kid.
I had no self-defense, right?
Right.
You can just be honest, right?
Honesty is cruelty to a bad conscience.
You understand that?
Honesty feels like cruelty to a bad conscience.
Curiosity feels It feels like sadism to a bad conscience, right?
Oh, you seem really uncomfortable with me talking about my history of abuse as a child.
Why do you think that is?
What are people going to say?
Just be honest.
Hey, it wasn't my fucking fault that I was born into crazy, bad shit, sadist, axe-arm-swinging, boob-laser-tweaking...
SS Lady from Hell, a.k.a.
Berlin.
I mean, it's not my fault.
Just, ooh, bad luck falling off the giant titty of platonic pre-emergence.
Not my fault.
Not my fault.
Hit by lightning on a clear day.
Not my fault.
Right?
So why would people feel uncomfortable about something that's not your fault and isn't their fault?
It's not like the people you're talking to now about this are responsible, right?
Right.
So why would they feel uncomfortable about a tragedy that befell you that wasn't your fault and wasn't their fault?
Like if somebody comes to me and says, I had a bad childhood.
Well, shit, I'm sorry, man.
Why would I feel uncomfortable?
It's not your fault and it's not my fault you had a bad childhood.
So why can't I listen?
You came to me and you said, you know, I got on an Amtrak and I got leprosy.
I'd be like, shit.
That's bad.
You know, I got Ebola at a bus stop in North York, Canada.
And you're like, oh wait, you weren't eating bats in Africa as part of some bizarre tribal ritual?
Okay, that's bad luck.
Wasn't your fault.
Not my fault.
I can really sympathize with you about Ebola or leprosy, right?
I got STDs from a lamppost.
That's really bad luck.
Not my fault.
Unless you and I were playing lamppost.
Not my fault.
Not your fault.
Bad luck, man.
So why can't people sympathize with your child abuse since it wasn't your fault, clearly?
And it wasn't their fault.
What's the problem?
Usually what I've seen is that they have people in their lives that are not to the degree to which I was abused, but are abusing children and they don't want to have to deal with that situation.
Yeah, because they are guilty.
Because they are guilty.
I just have to get this stupid joke out of my head.
Talking about having sex with a lamp post?
You have to come home when the lamppost turns on.
Well, let me turn it on for you.
All right.
Because they are guilty, right?
Because you are bringing up something they're uncomfortable about, right?
Right.
And so they are, in a vague way, responsible, right?
So when I stand, and please, I'm certainly not the only person doing this by any stretch of the imagination, but I'm a pretty public guy doing it.
When I stand there and say, my God, I'm so sorry about what happened to you as a child.
Well, people get that I can do that because I've never harmed a child.
I've never hit a child.
Even when I was a child, I've never hit a child.
It's not like I've never harmed anyone, but I've never harmed a child.
And I have, as best as my capabilities can do so, tried to stand up for the victims of childhood consistently my whole life and very publicly over the last eight years.
I have stood up as strongly and as consistently and as empathetically and with as much outrage as I honestly feel stood up for the victims of child abuse.
So it does not harm my conscience to hear that you were abused because I'm not sure if I could be doing more to help.
And I'm not trying to make this about me.
I'm trying to help you understand, which I think you do, why people feel bad about it.
Because they're part of the matrix that keeps the children in these situations, right?
Last year, I was at IKEA, and there was this woman literally thrashing her child in the parking lot, and I was the only one who did anything about it.
And it's just little things like that, that people are not willing to say, stop that.
Don't do that.
That's not right.
Like, they don't even have to get into a physical altercation.
They just have to call the person out on doing it.
And usually, they'll stop.
Yes.
So, yes.
Yeah, and you don't, you know, you don't have to do it in a shaming way.
You don't have to do it in a way that's going to rain down holy hell on the kid.
You can do it in a sympathetic way.
And, hey, listen, man, you seem really stressed.
You need a timeout.
I mean, not a timeout.
You need some time to calm down.
You can do it in a way that doesn't escalate.
Because you don't have authority.
You see a guy beating up a girl, you call the cops, right?
But children are still not people to us.
They are empty clay vessels within which we can pour our shame and guilt and bullshit and culture and lies and venom and crap, right?
But you are seeing as somebody who has been victimized, who knows that he's been victimized, and who asks for sympathy, you are seeing What the world does with the only true victims there are.
And this is why the victimhood continues.
And this is the entire structure of the world rests upon this continued victimization.
So, joy, well, you're going to have to take joy in kicking the whole fucking rotten structure down, my friend.
Because it ain't coming down without us kicking at it.
And as sure as shit should not be standing on the bones of children, right?
You rip the fucking newspapers down and you say, there are lions and there are children.
Get thee between them, motherfuckers!
Take that fucking Walkman off and get between the lion and its prey.
Otherwise, the lion eats upward through height and...
Appeasement is the goal of running away from the lion and hoping you get eaten last.
So you're going to have to, I mean, in my opinion, right?
In my opinion, I take joy out of other things too.
But, you know, Superman dispatches Lex Luthor with a smile.
And kicking down the rotten structure of Of fingers-across-the-water bullshit, empty hugs that hide child abuse, kicking that whole fucking rotten structure down?
You've got to take some joy in that.
There is joy in bringing truth to a bad conscience, much though the bad conscience hates it.
It is what is necessary.
Sunlight is the best disinfectant.
I don't care if the truth hurts a bad conscience.
It's not my fault you have a bad conscience.
I'm not talking to you.
It's not my fault you have a bad conscience.
And your bad conscience is sure as shit not going to stop me from sympathizing with a victim of child abuse and reminding them that they don't have to submit to that abuse from here to goddamn eternity.
Right?
right there is fun in being a superhero There is flight.
There are tights.
There's a cape.
There's some usually vaguely dildo-shaped skullcap.
but there is also the solid joy of metaphorical knuckles on bone.
I don't...
I wish that there was not a need to take joy in the protection of the victims.
I wish there wasn't.
I wish that I would look, hey, it would be wonderful if there was not.
But if your wife dies of cancer and you're a cancer researcher and you produce some great fucking serum that kills cancer cells, don't you feel good?
You say, oh, but the cancer cells want to live too.
Yeah, but I don't want them to.
Because they took my wife.
Anything which harms the cancer is good.
Now, I'm not trying to liken people to cancer cells.
But what I'm saying is that if it harms evil, well, it gets a seat at my table and I listen quite deeply, right?
And helping the victims harms the victimizers.
Of course it does.
You've got a therapist who deals with sex trafficking victims.
If you go and interview the sex traffickers about people who rescue the sex trafficking victims, what do they think?
Those assholes!
I hate them!
Right?
Very few of them.
Very few of what?
You're saying that the people who are helping the sex traffickers are usually like...
No, no, who help the victims of the self-trafficers, who get the victims free, right?
Who get the kids that these assholes are sex trafficking, freeze the kids.
The sex traffickers hate that person.
Oh yeah, yeah, definitely.
The shadow of the height of a moral man is measured by the hatred of his enemies, right?
Right.
And people think somehow, if you're hated, you're bad.
No!
No!
If you're hated by an evil world, you're good.
You're good.
Hatred is not this blank, whatchamacallit, that just everything it touches, not like venom or acid, anyone it touches, good or bad, makes them ugly.
God.
Hatred is the coin that evil pays virtue with.
I mean, You're getting paid.
You're reaping your rewards.
And it's hard.
I mean, I get that it's hard to make, because we're empathetic and we care and all that.
But this, again, this is the idea.
I've talked about this before.
before I won't get into great detail, but it's just, it's fundamental.
To be able to accept the anger of bad people in the rescue of good people.
We get it.
We get it.
We understand, right?
Right.
And if you can find a way to...
I think...
If you can find a way to understand that the discomfort...
If the discomfort of the present is essential to the peace of the future, then you can have a moral mission that will take you through your whole life with a great deal of excitement and satisfaction.
The discomfort of the present is essential for the peace of the future.
We all know that at a personal level in terms of therapy and stuff.
But learning to love the discomfort of the present.
Thank you.
Thank you.
You know, if you want to be a bodybuilder, it feels like shit for a long time, right?
Right.
I mean, it hurts like hell.
And if you want to be a champion skier or, you know, you name it, you know, you get strain, you push, it's hard.
But you want to lose weight.
You want to whatever.
Whatever.
The discomfort of the present is the peace of the future.
And there is joy in the natural consequence.
There is joy in not subsidizing immorality.
And how do you not subsidize immorality?
You just don't agree with it.
You don't hide the consequences of immorality from itself.
There's no such thing as too big to fail in ethics, right?
If people have done wrong, fuck them.
They're going to feel bad.
I'm not going to pretend that's different.
I'm going to waive that away.
And certainly, if I waive people feeling bad for their wrongdoing away from them, who pays the price?
The victims!
Right?
If you let the bank robber get away, who pays the price?
the customers of the next bank.
So, no.
I I will not subsidize.
People think subsidies are something to do with money.
Subsidies are fundamentally about ethics.
The money is just the nonsense side effect of it.
No, you know, you support the state.
I'm going to tell you what that is.
What you're doing here, you're subsidizing crime through nodding.
And the crime only exists because if you're nodding, you are an accomplice to a crime.
To all the crimes fundamentally.
To most of the crimes.
Now, you can't do much about the state other than disagree.
That doesn't do much in isolation.
But you can do something about child abuse.
Everyone can.
So, I think that the joy...
Can you really take joy in the inhabitants of the world...
Who enabled your vicious, multidimensional abusers as a child, and who continue to back away from honest expressions of pain as an adult.
Can you really feel joy in the presence of people like that?
Definitely not, no.
Right, so where can you feel joy?
In death.
Making action that will produce a world where a childhood like mine would have never occurred.
Right.
And that means taking joy, taking satisfaction in the discomfort of the wrongdoers.
Look, you catch a serial killer, and you're a cop, you catch a serial killer, you lock him away, how are you going to feel?
Pretty good.
Hey, no lying at this bus stop tomorrow, right?
Right.
Right.
In other words, when evildoers reap the consequences of their wrongdoing, good people feel satisfaction, right?
And recognizing that we are not the same goddamn species as abusers.
Different species!
Different species!
There's no soul that ties us all together.
We're not one common blood.
There's not a mixing bowl.
There's predator and prey in human relationships.
Sociopaths and victims, this is not even doubted in scientific circles to my admittedly amateur knowledge.
Different species!
It definitely felt like that growing up.
Yeah, well, it's more than a feeling, right?
Look, if a hyena is running towards my daughter, I'm going to machine gun the shit out of that spotty little bastard, right?
I'm going to hope to hit and hope to hit the spine and hope to blow it to smoke, right?
Why?
Different species can't reason with it.
Different species!
Well, I'm not talking about shooting people, obviously, right?
Right.
But there's predator and there's prey.
We're not the same.
There's no soul.
That binds us all.
We're not all God's children.
There's not a human nature that covers us all in the same conceptual goo.
And it does good to harm the harmers.
And the only thing we need to do to harm the harmers is tell the truth.
We don't need guns or airstrikes.
Just what Zenoam Chomsky says.
Nothing complicated.
Just tell the truth.
Stand there and tell the truth as clearly and compellingly and I would argue as compassionately as possible.
So maybe you're just trying to be too nice.
I don't know about that.
Some people say that I can be a bit offensive at times.
Yes, but joy in the pursuit of virtue feeds or rests, does not solely upon, but it rests to some degree upon pleasure in the discomfort of evildoers.
I mean, if you were a cop and you felt terrible every time you locked up a killer, I don't know what you'd be doing, right?
I'm not saying you've got to dance around like, yay!
But you're happy.
I think you've got to be satisfied in a job well done.
Despite the fact that the killer doesn't want to be caught, doesn't want to be tried, doesn't want to go to jail, right?
Too bad.
You killed someone.
You get to reap the rewards.
You get to reap the consequences of your actions.
I will not withhold consequences from people.
And, yeah, say to people, hey, seem kind of uncomfortable when I'm talking about my history.
Are you okay?
Oh, I'm fine!
You don't seem fine to me.
I'm pretty good with these things, right?
What's going on?
You know, anybody who has any kind of heart is going to be honest with you.
Oh, yeah, you know, when I was growing up, there was this kid down the street.
Oh, my God, blah, blah, blah.
Listen to that person.
And through listening without saying, oh, it's fine.
Oh, I get it.
Oh, I understand.
Oh, I'd have done the same thing.
Oh, it's impossible.
Oh, you don't know what to do.
Oh, there's nothing you can do.
Oh, it's terrible.
No!
Let them hurt!
That we change.
Let them hurt.
Let the fat guy, when he bends over, split the ass of his pants.
Rush to sew it up.
He's got a big ass.
Needs to lose some weight.
Right?
Right.
Right.
don't give people the false forgiveness that stagnates the planet the discomfort of evildoers is necessary for the guidance of virtue How does the cancer...
Researchers know that he or she is doing a good job.
Because the cancer cells are dying.
That's how you measure your progress.
The discomfort of the cancer cells is the measure of the progress of the cancer researcher.
Right?
Right.
It's what Andrew Breitbart said.
Fire's coming anyway.
You might as well walk towards it.
Right?
Right.
- Right. - You can't escape it.
Walk towards it, you'd be surprised how quickly it backs away.
Anyway, this is one possibility.
I mean, again, I can't give you any sort of magic switch, but this is the world, and I'm sorry that this is the world that you live in.
I'm happy that there's this little corner of it where I don't think you've...
You're certainly not making me uncomfortable.
I have incredibly deep sympathy for what you went through as a child, Michael, but...
I don't know if we can feel joy, relaxation, and happiness in a world largely populated by hyenas until we learn to take some comfort and happiness in driving the hyenas back.
Right.
Yeah, that does make complete sense.
Superman never going to be happy with a paper route, right?
Right.
When you have gone through that kind of fire...
I mean, you are hardened steel, right?
It doesn't mean that you don't have a heart and you're not compassionate and so on, but you're not built for the mediocre.
And also, the last thing I'll say is that the other joy trick is, hey, how'd you like to go back 10 years?
What if you woke up tomorrow and you were 11?
Oh, no.
Hey, you know what?
No.
You're not 11!
Yay!
Right?
That actually worked pretty quickly.
No, seriously.
I think about that.
Oh, I think I might be having a tough day.
Really?
Are you 11?
No.
So, yay!
Right?
Right.
It's all behind us now, baby.
I do have to say that almost every single day since I've gotten, well there's been some down days of course, but every single day since I've gotten away from my family and got my own job, it's been better.
Tremendously better.
The amount of improvement is surprising to me.
I don't know how a person who got from where I was got to where I am.
Massive kudos to you.
In all seriousness, Michael, what an amazing thing to have done.
To have survived, to have achieved adulthood with The capacity for self-compassion, for empathy, for curiosity, for productive therapy, for judging a therapist and moving to a better, I mean, fantastic.
I mean, what an incredible achievement.
I mean, joy can also be just in the, not just the act of survival, but of flourishing.
And when people do wrong, I'm not putting you in this category, I'm thinking about the people I've known in my life.
They keep returning and they keep returning and they keep returning to those stories they have about the time when they didn't do the right thing.
And they knew what the right thing to do was and it wouldn't have killed them to do it, but they didn't do it.
And that story stucks like a non-burning freeze frame in an old movie.
It sticks in their head and they got to keep revisiting it.
Like when you get a tooth pulled and your tongue keeps going back to the same hole.
It defines them in many ways.
And they, as I said before in a show, sadness can be the coward's anger.
And when you circle back to those choices that defines empirically people's actual level of cowardice or courage, It's really uncomfortable for them.
It's really painful for them.
And it's absolutely necessary for the world.
Thank you.
And you will never regret A courage you walk away from.
In fact, you won't regret a courage you don't walk away from because you'll be dead.
But you will never regret a courage that you walk away from.
And what I talked at the beginning of the show about our capacity to defer gratification.
All courage is, is the deferral of the gratification of cowardice.
That's all it is.
All courage is, is the deferral of the gratification of cowardice.
Until it's so far in the future, it doesn't even exist.
It's just a muscle you've got to keep working.
And you have that because you're here and you're on this call and you're in therapy.
But yes, you can find capacity to joy, capacity for joy.
But I don't think it will be a placid capacity for joy.
It will be a Socratic gadfly capacity for joy, right?
Right.
Right.
It's one possibility.
I'm putting it forward as a possibility because I think I understand the world as you see it.
I didn't experience it as bad as you did as a kid in some ways, in many ways, in most ways, I would say.
But I experienced enough of it to know that that is a significant part of the knowledge of victims of child abuse that people don't really want to talk about.
And I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I mean, I'm sorry.
It has to be talked about.
It has to be talked about.
If I can watch weepy Tennessee Williams plays about women with regrets, well, I can have my regrets too.
And I can have my hostilities too.
And a man's heart is as deep as a woman's heart.
And I've watched all these after-school specials when I was a kid about the woman in peril.
Well, man's hearts are in peril.
Male victims and female victims of childhoods Child abuse, our hearts are in peril.
And I'm sorry if it makes the world uncomfortable to listen.
I'm sorry if the world feels shitty about not doing anything.
The fact is, the world didn't listen and didn't do anything.
And facts do not fall in the face of discomfort.
Discomfort must conform to facts.
Otherwise, we live in a magical universe where feelings create reality.
And that is the world of a madman.
So does that help at all?
It definitely reassures a lot of feelings and ideas that I've had for a while.
It was good just to get all of this out because a lot of people are, as I've already said, just kind of retract from it.
You're keeping on with your current therapist, is that right?
Yes, I am.
I've been seeing her for two years, and we just started going from every week to every other week.
Okay, good, good.
I think that was about my time frame as well, for what it's worth.
Good for you.
Will you keep us posted about how it's going?
I mean, again, massive sympathies for one of the most hellacious childhoods that we've heard of in the show.
You win.
I've done a statistical analysis and it comes down to maybe 20 people in the entire Southeast.
If you account for how well I've done It's like virtually near zero.
Yeah, you probably have to be unique.
Basically, you have as much odds of winning the lottery as losing your childhood, right?
Losing with your childhood.
So, you know, that is a precious metal that you have become.
And that's why I'm, you know, so strongly urging you in time as you get more comfortable with it that the hardened steel heart that you have would be of great service in the pursuit of virtue.
And there is a certain screw you That we have to the bad consciences of this world because things have to be made light.
Things have to be brought into the light in order for us to see the way forward.
And if that means people feel uncomfortable, that's too bad.
You know, when I was a kid, if I failed a test, I felt uncomfortable.
And people said, well, that's how you learn, son.
Well, welcome to the grown-up who's saying that to the whole wide world.
Sorry if you feel uncomfortable.
That's how you grow, son.
So, anyway, thanks very much.
Keep us posted if you can.
And congratulations again on emerging from this absolute hellscape of a nightmare scenario.
So intact and so functional.
And you will.
You will find joy.
I can guarantee that in your life.
But it may be more of a warrior's joy than a sitting watching the sunset over the lake joy.
Which you can also have too.
Anyway, I'm going to pack it in for the night.
And sorry we didn't get to the last caller.
But we will...
We'll get to you, I think, coming up next.
As quickly as we can, we may do an extra show.
Mike, do we need to maybe do an extra show this coming week?
We absolutely need to do an extra show.
I'm sort of sensing from Mike that we may be doing an extra show.
It's hard to tell.
He's so ambiguous.
It's like trying to read a riddle wrapped in an enigma, wrapped in a fortune cookie.
Oh, now I'm hungry.
Anyway, so I actually set that up.
I'm sorry?
One thing before we go.
My twin will be on here next month.
Oh, really?
So I'm not sure what date.
Yes.
Actually, you know what?
You could just be making that shit up, right?
Because you're probably going to sound the same.
Like, oh yeah, I'm the twin!
Oh, no, no, no.
His voice is a bit deeper than mine.
All right.
I don't know what he's going to be on about.
Tell him to come to Helium first.
It really screws up.
But no, you don't have a Helium.
All right.
No, that's cool.
I appreciate that.
Will he mention that when he comes on?
I'm pretty sure he will.
Okay, great.
All right.
Well, thanks again.
Sorry, Mike, you were saying?
I wasn't saying anything.
I look forward to the next Overrun show.
And if that's before or after Wednesday, we don't know yet.
