2881 Was Jesus a Libertarian? - Wednesday Call In Show - January 7th, 2015
I think the message of Jesus Christ is the most liberating in history, and if Jesus were on earth today he'd be a libertarian, if not an anarchist - do you agree? What direction will movies, books and fiction in general would go as humanity moves away from statism and more towards a free and peaceful society? Would you say that you're better off having gone through abuse as a child since it's made you a much stronger human being through overcoming it?
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Is that our plan?
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I didn't find that to be the case.
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All right.
First today is Isaac.
Isaac wrote in and said, I think the message of Jesus Christ is the most liberating in history.
And if Jesus were on earth today, he'd be a libertarian, if not an anarchist.
So why, and how, has humanity insisted upon making yet another controlling religion out of such a liberating message, especially when Jesus himself was very much at odds with the quote-unquote religious types of the day?
Yeah, I've heard this Jesus is a libertarian argument before.
I've never delved into it in any great depth, but perhaps you could tell me what you mean.
Hello.
Yes, thank you, Stephan.
I've been so excited to hear what you think about this.
Yeah, I mean, just how the question was phrased, it really kind of sums it up.
I mean, I come from a place where I was raised in the kind of household where the message and teachings were there, but it was never a forced issue.
You know, Dad didn't go on Sunday, Mom did.
It was always optional.
So I guess I have the fortunate situation of having that option afforded to me since a young age.
It was never that fire and brimstone that you've mentioned recently, being pounded in or anything like that.
Okay, so if you don't mind me asking, what was your religious instruction?
How did it occur?
Do you remember the earliest part of it?
Um, just, uh, stories, you know, little storybooks about Jesus.
My mom's, uh, Catholic born and raised and still is.
And, uh, dad would go to church on Easter.
Basically, that's about it.
But, uh, yeah, just, you know, little storybook tales and, uh, you know, mom, you know, trying to, you know, kind of explain the, the point and message of Jesus, you know, uh, in her, in the best way she could, you know, just showing his charity, showing his Forgiveness and forgiving nature.
And it kind of led me...
After various points in my life where I was kind of flying off the handle and finding my own way, I guess you could say.
It kind of all came together.
And I guess to explain my previous question the best I know how, the crux of it really is I've come to this point where I feel that...
A major thing that I think a lot of Christians have literally backwards, and I think this really turns a lot of people off from what they otherwise could see.
It could be expressed in the saying that goes, righteousness is the fruit and not the root of salvation.
In other words, we're not saved from our sin because we are righteous.
Rather, we are empowered by To be righteous because we're saved from our sin.
So you see, that's kind of like backwards from this idea of if you do good, if you be a good person, then you're going to be saved.
You know what I mean?
Well, I mean, that's delving a whole ways forward.
So you did hear about sin as a child, is that right?
To an extent, yeah.
But, I mean, it was—my mother was always very adamant about you're saved from it.
You're not— It's not something you need to be afraid of.
In other words, you'd be a good person because Jesus loved you first.
That inspires you to love others.
But the consequence of doubting Jesus would be then irredeemable sin, followed by hell, right?
Yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the message is there that through Christ is the way to salvation or the way to avoid hell and damnation.
And was this true for you as a child?
As a child, you would be perceived as sinful as a child?
No, no.
It was never brought up as a child, no.
I mean, I had my own ideas going in my head as a teen in my early 20s, but I actually kind of blamed that basically on myself hanging out with some very fundamentalist types who kind of put a message forward that wasn't really along with what I learned as a kid.
And I think that I had to kind of go through that and get back out of that in order to really get back to that place where You know, it's about being—because I was loved first, that's the reason I love others and be a good person, you know?
Okay, so you were told about Jesus, you were told about sin, but if you accepted Jesus, you would be saved from sin and wouldn't go to hell, right?
Exactly, yeah.
Okay.
And the reason for—I mean, I think it's significant that the reason why I was told about sin— Was not necessarily just to, like, scare me, but it was more about, like, so that I understand what it is exactly that I'm saved from, you know?
No, I get it.
I get it.
No, I get it.
So, libertarianism is, I mean, anarchism is without rulers, not without rules, but without rulers.
Yeah.
Libertarianism is basically having as small and squishy a set of government rules and regulations as humanly possible.
And I don't think there's a libertarian alive who, if he or she could be convinced that no government was better than government, would not become an anarchist because that's the consistent application of the non-aggression principle, right?
Mm-hmm.
And for there to be no rulers, there can be no arbitrary punishment, right?
Mm-hmm.
And for there to be no rulers, you cannot have an authority which displaces the conscience and reason of the individual.
Like, you can't have a scientific community if one guy gets to tell everyone what the results of their scientific experiments are, right?
Right, right.
Or he'll set fire to them, right?
Yeah.
That would be a weird kind of club.
But it would not be science, right?
Because science relies upon the cognitive processes or the pursuit of the scientific method through each individual, right?
Yeah.
So philosophy, of course, as well, is a discipline that aims to give people the tools for reasoning out problems and must, as a discipline, be somewhat simple enough That all people of reasonable intelligence or even below average intelligence can follow its dictates, right?
Because if someone can't understand why a certain action is good, then they're not morally responsible.
They would have, I don't know, an IQ of 60 or whatever it is, but they would be not somebody who would be mentally competent to be moral.
Right, right.
And so philosophy couldn't have...
I'm going to set fire to you, but if you agree with my moral principles or if you agree with my moral commandments, then I won't set fire to you as long as you continue to believe them and give my representatives money or whatever, right?
And pray to me and beg for my forgiveness and so on.
That's despotic fundamentally.
If you threaten people and will withdraw that threat only if they obey your commandments – That is closer to the statist military model than a libertarian or anarchic model, if that makes sense.
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely.
So how can Jesus be a libertarian in this situation?
Well, that's definitely a provocative question, and it brings to mind, I don't know why, I have no idea why, but when you were just saying what you were saying, as you were saying it, it popped into my head that Back when the original sin,
quote-unquote, happened in the Garden of Eden, when they ate from the knowledge of good and evil tree, it occurred to me for some reason that, oh, before that, we had plausible deniability.
Right, right.
I didn't know what I don't know, so I can't be held responsible.
Yeah.
But then, to your question just now, how can...
Where does Jesus fit into that?
If it's not despotic, I think is how you asked it.
Well, if Jesus is not convincing people through reason, if Jesus threatens people or if the religion threatens people with eternal torture, damnation, burning, and all sorts of foul things that go from here to eternity,
or you obey, how could that possibly be compatible with With free association, the free market, freedom of conscience, freedom from threat, freedom from threats in particular of violence, and also free speech.
Yeah.
Well, I've always thought that there being a big difference between Jesus and quote-unquote Christianity, and I feel like it's...
I feel like I'm trying to grab a bar of soap in the shape of a human brain that's wet and squishy and keeps slipping out of my hands.
Right?
Because you're going to filibuster now, right?
Which is you're going to give an unrelated topic about Jesus versus Christianity when we're trying to talk about Jesus and libertarians.
Because you made a claim at the beginning, right?
You said Jesus is a libertarian.
Right, right.
Jesus' teachings are compatible with libertarianism, and I put a rebuttal in, and now you're talking about Jesus and Christianity, so you're not actually processing my rebuttal.
I'm sorry to be annoying, but I kind of need to fence you in a little bit there, brother.
No, I apologize.
Sometimes I need to listen to you real careful, because your arguments are so good.
Let me give it to you very briefly because I know we covered a lot of ground.
I'll give it to you in like 20 seconds.
I put out a podcast which says, believe my Ten Commandments or I'll set fire to your house.
I don't know that many people would say to me, like say about me, what a great libertarian.
Right, right.
The only way I can respond to that is...
What makes sense to me is that, and I know that not every Christian agrees with this, but Jesus essentially had, if you believe what he said and so forth, he had one commandment and basically put in place one commandment in place of the former Ten Commandments.
And that one commandment was to love each other like I've loved you.
And that, of course, I know that— Okay, okay, okay, all right.
Okay, see?
Now, this is the challenge.
No, but this is—I'll accept that that's true.
I have not studied the philosophy of Jesus to any significant degree.
But I'm going to go with what you're saying.
So Jesus says, love each other as I have loved you, right?
Yeah.
Now, Jesus basically says, do what I say or hellfire.
Because there's no hell before Jesus.
In the Old Testament, you die, you're dead, right?
But Jesus brings along this hell thing.
Now you've got eternal life, and you've got heaven or hell.
Now, if I say to my wife, obey me, or I'll throw acid in your face.
Yeah.
I don't think that that would be an instruction on quality loving, right?
Well, and she'd have no option to love you because if you take away the free will, then there could be no real love, right?
Well, I'm not talking about taking away the free will.
She can still choose to disobey me and throw acid in her face.
But it's not a question of free will.
It's a question of psychotic punishment for disobedience.
Right, right.
Now, I don't think that – look, because I'm an annoying universalist, right, which is to say that if people are going to make claims, they need to be universal, right?
So if I say, well, see, there's this pygmy in the Amazon who doesn't murder.
Well, that's good.
Respect is whatever, right?
That's nice.
Good for her.
And – If there's a guy in Philadelphia who respects property rights and is nice to kittens, that's fine.
And if there's a guy in Kampuchea who does the same thing, that's all fine.
If I do it, it's universality.
That's sort of the key, is the universality.
And so, if Jesus or anyone puts forward moral arguments, then they should be universal.
In other words, if I If someone respects property, like I say, oh, you should respect persons and property.
The basic rules, the one-two punch of a decent society.
Do all that you say you're going to do and respect other people's persons and property.
So if I do that, great.
If the head of Coca-Cola does that, great.
There's no difference between who enacts the moral principle.
So if Jesus...
If Jesus says, obey me or burn in hell, then if it's a universal principle, if it's universally moral, if it's good for everyone, then it should not only be Jesus who can do that and be moral, right?
Would you agree with that?
Yeah.
If I say, I have this dollar, which has a dollar's worth of value, I give it to you, it has a dollar's worth of value to you too, right?
Yes.
Yeah.
But, you know, within limitation, it's a universal standard.
Yeah.
Now, so if I do what Jesus does, it should not be startling, unusual, immoral, or weird, right?
No.
No.
Right, right.
So if I say, obey me or I will torture you, that would clearly not be moral for me, right?
That's, yeah, right.
But that's...
In many ways, the essence.
I mean, why do people listen to Jesus?
I mean, I think a lot of it has to do with the hellfire thing, right?
This is what you said as a child.
You were taught about sin.
Don't worry, though.
Jesus will save you from the sin, right?
Yeah.
So, obey me or I'll psychotically punish you forever is not moral if a human being does it.
It's not moral if a husband does it to his wife or a wife to her child or a child to whatever, right?
And so that's the challenge, is that if you're going to say, well, Jesus is a libertarian, libertarianism has universal values and principles and so on, respect the persons and property of others and so on.
And if you're going to take the New Testament, obey or be tortured forever, then if it can't be transferred to other people, it can't be moral.
In other words, if a human being tries to do that, then you're like, whoa, whoa, that's totally evil.
Right?
Yeah.
You don't have a halo.
So, anyway, go ahead.
What do you think about, because when it comes to the idea of sin, I mean, I feel like there's different perspectives that someone can have on it, and punishment as well.
I mean, because just for simplicity, I mean, I don't think of sin as something that God punishes anymore since Jesus.
In other words, I think that It's not, don't sin or I'll burn you in hellfire.
It's like, I'm telling you that you shouldn't do this because I love you and it could hurt you.
Kind of like if you run into the street, if you get hit by a car, it's not punishment.
It's just that you did something that wasn't really healthy and intelligent and wise.
So I kind of look at it more like that way.
What do you think about that?
Well, I mean, hell is not physics.
Yeah.
Right?
So hell does not exist independently of God's will.
Hell does not exist, and punishment and handing people over to demons and so on does not exist independently of God's judgment and preference, right?
I mean, he's all-powerful, he's all-knowing, and so on.
So it's not like, oh, a boulder fell down.
Get out of the way of the boulder, kids!
Right?
I mean, God's pushing the boulder, and God can stop the boulder any time he wants, right?
So...
The punishment that occurs in the afterlife is entirely subject to God's will, pleasure, and displeasure.
Therefore, he is 100% responsible for the environment and the punishment and the eternity.
So it's not – you can't just sort of say, well, hands off.
I'm just trying to keep you safe from mysterious external circumstances.
No, not at all.
I mean, God could choose to accept everyone into heaven.
He could choose to send everyone to hell.
He could choose to eliminate hell because that's what it was before Jesus and all that.
So I don't think that – We can make it some sort of third-party thing like I'm just trying to save you from these crazy drivers on the road because God is the crazy driver on the road as well as the parent.
I see what you're saying.
That's very interesting.
I appreciate it.
I appreciate your thoughts.
I love to listen to all your shows and to hear you talk about something so close to myself, it's especially cool.
Now, I appreciate that.
Now, you know, to take your side of things, or, I mean, because, of course, every time I talk about religion, 12,000 messages pour in that it's allegorical, right?
And, you know, I get that.
I understand that.
And in which case, it should be taught allegorically, not factually, right?
Yes, the Emperor's New Clothes is an allegorical story, so we don't say that it really happened.
Anyway, so...
Because, I mean, to compare someone like Jesus to someone like Socrates, I think is very instructive.
Oh.
Because Socrates did not have any supernatural backing, right?
Socrates did not say, you must do what I tell you to do, or, you know, Luigi and Viscotti are going to visit you in the middle of the night with baseball bats and put your kneecaps where your eyeballs should be and vice versa, right?
Yeah.
Because then he probably would have had quite a few more listeners.
Yeah.
So Socrates went down and he reasoned with people.
And he was killed, of course, so he was murdered by the mob in the same way that Jesus was murdered by the mob with the insult, the additional insult of the mob choosing to free Barabbas the thief rather than Jesus was not put towards the mob attack on Socrates.
So Socrates reasoned with people and urged people towards virtue and had the challenge of convincing without threat.
And that is the huge challenge of philosophy, is how the hell do you convince people to be good when you can't threaten them?
I mean, the government can throw your ass in jail.
So they've kind of got, which is probably as close to hell as people can make things without outright concentration camps.
But the government can say, be good or jail.
And religion can say, be good or punishment.
Philosophy is like, be good or nothing.
There's nothing.
We got nothing.
There's no existential backup for philosophy.
We don't have bodyguards for virtue.
We don't have punishment fireballs for vice.
And this is the great challenge.
Philosophy can say things like, be good or you'll be poor.
Because so many despots and monstrous and sociopaths and psychopaths and bankers, I'm repeating myself here, they all are pretty immoral and Are fabulously rich, right?
We can't say, be good, or you'll get very sick.
Because, you know, bastards live to a ripe old age, and good people get struck down on a regular basis quite young.
Well, there's no real choice.
We don't have...
There's no or else.
Yeah.
Give me this money, or I'll release your browser history.
We don't have...
I'll release your browser history.
Philosophy doesn't have any or else.
Now, you can say virtue will make you happier, except you'll often be lying, if you say that.
I think that in general, consistency leads to a better state of well-being and so on, but in an irrational society, Think of these guys in the Islamic countries and other countries who question the religion around them and are sentenced to 40 lashes or death or have to flee their country.
Can anyone say that integrity and truth and virtue are making them happy?
No.
They've got giant religious-based lasers swarming all over them like a bunch of Glowing ants.
What is the payoff?
What the fuck is the payoff for virtue?
That's a big, challenging question.
And people's frustration with that question.
I really, really, really need people to do the right goddamn thing.
And so often, it is so much more profitable.
To do the wrong goddamn thing.
It's so much profitable.
It's so much easier.
It makes you more friends.
You don't bother anyone and nobody targets you and you can just pass through this life like an easy, deep eel of inconsequentiality in the great blue sea of forgotten history.
So people get crazy frustrated with – these stories are all over.
All over the Old Testament.
Like, my God!
If you people don't shape up, I'm drowning the whole lot of you!
If you people don't shape up, I'm going to take giant fireballs and blow up the entire goddamn city!
I am so frustrated with you people!
Being greedy and selfish and mean and vicious and grasping and deceitful and manipulative.
Well, yeah.
It's like you watch some artist struggling with a picture and at some point it's just like, fuck it, I'm starting over.
This is bullshit.
Proportions are all wrong.
I can't fix it.
I've been drawing in pen.
Nail eraser.
I'm doomed.
So in the Old Testament, and to some degree, of course, in the New Testament, there's this incredible frustration.
Do the right thing.
For God's sakes, people, these Ten Commandments, they're not insane.
Stop killing people.
Just stop stealing.
Yeah.
Right?
Just leave your neighbor's ass alone.
I don't care if she's Kim Kardashian and it's spilling over into your back 40 every time she bends over to tie up a shoelace.
But leave it alone.
Leave it alone.
And so there's this frustration of people who want – like philosophers think as moralists.
Jesus was a moralist, though not a philosopher.
Moralists.
Just stop stoning people to death, for God's sakes.
Yeah.
Stop stoning people to death.
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Can we get a little shame up in this business?
Can we get a little embarrassment?
Can we get a little guilt up in this business?
Stop putting the brakes on insane certainty is a huge challenge for moralists.
Stop doing crazy shit all the time, people.
And because people generally don't listen to reason very well...
Everybody who's a moralist gets so frustrated they just want people to do the right thing and whatever it takes.
The end justifies the means.
If it means, like, stop taking drugs.
Stop taking drugs.
Okay, we just make them illegal.
Fuck it.
Can't convince you.
We're making them illegal.
Stop drinking.
I'm making that illegal too.
Oh shit, well that didn't work.
I guess we'll make that legal again.
I really want to help the poor.
I can't get people to give enough to help the poor.
Fuck it.
Welfare state, taxes, jail for non-compliance.
I have tried.
I have reasoned with you people in ways that obviously aren't working.
Too bad.
The reasoning part is over.
In come the goons with the guns.
And Jesus had that same frustration.
For God's sakes, people, stop stoning each other.
Stop stealing.
Stop lying.
Stop cheating.
Stop worshipping the wrong gods.
And he got, I think, frustrated enough to the point where he said, Okay.
I'm laying down a new number on you people.
We're going to call it hell.
If you don't listen to me, you will have the living shit burned out of your bone marrow that bubbles out through your eyeballs and out through your nipples and up through your armpits from now to evermore.
Do I have your attention yet?
That's what the moralists are basically saying over and over.
Do I have your attention yet?
I have your children in a bag.
Do I have your attention yet?
Will you do the right thing?
Will you put down the playboy and talk to your wife?
I mean, that's the basic frustration that moralists have.
Now, Socrates exited the world, and I've got a whole series which I did five or six years ago called The Trial and Death of Socrates, which people can find on YouTube at freedomainradio.com.
I'm sorry, YouTube slash VDomainRadio.
And he got so frustrated, I believe, he just left with a giant fuck you to the world.
He did.
He did.
He's like, oh, you know what?
It's an irrational state that put me to death.
Here's my curse on you.
Obey the state.
Obey the state!
That's how much I fucking hate you people who wouldn't listen to reason and voted to have me put to death.
Yeah!
Yeah!
Obey the state, because he was a smart enough bald little bastard to know what obey the state would do to humanity.
Hey, you can put me to death, but I'm a philosopher.
I can cast a curse on this world that was stretched from here to Alpha fucking Centauri, and that curse is obey the state.
Welcome to 2,500 years of war, the worst, last, and best curse of an embittered philosopher.
And we know that he was happy to die because his last words were, Have a friend of mine sacrifice a chicken to this particular god.
And that actually means this is what you do when you're given a great gift.
And his great gift was, I don't have to live with you people anymore.
I don't have to live with you people anymore, you crazy, stupid, blind fuckers.
Who worship idiot gods, run off to war, vie for political power, vie for money, vie for prestige, vie for status and care.
Nothing!
For the gold of your souls.
So frustrating.
And he's like, yeah, fuck it.
You all just obey the state.
I'm going to drink this hemlock like it's the finest wine and either I go to heaven or I sleep forever.
Either way, it's better than hanging with you a lot.
And I believe that Jesus basically did the same thing.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Fuck.
You're not going to listen to me?
Okay, fine.
That's fine.
That's fine.
Now you get sin.
Because look, if people had listened to Jesus, would he have needed sin?
Yeah.
He wouldn't have.
He wouldn't have.
Sin is the...
Shadowcast by the giant plugged ear of willed ignorance.
Oh, you're not listening to me?
Hellfire and damnation forever, baby!
Yeah.
Do I have your attention yet?
Well, yeah, and I totally see what you're saying.
I mean, I'm still trying to figure everything out, but I know that all I know is, for me personally, it's like all of the or else stuff, I know it It contributed to a lot of self-destructive behavior on my part in the past.
To me, the thing that really saved my hide and got me out of those holes was knowing or believing anyway that when it came to all that super long list of requirements and the Ten Commandments and all these other rules and stuff that Jesus, to me, was basically saying that I already did all of that stuff right so that you won't have to worry about it.
And then, believing that, I just know personally, it helped me to not be self-destructive.
So, that's what makes it so interesting to hear your perspective on it.
And I really appreciate it.
It's really, really stimulating.
I appreciate your call.
Thank you very much.
And I guess we'll move on to the next caller.
Thanks, Stefan.
Alright, well up next is Tim.
Tim wrote in and said, As a writer by hobby, I sometimes wonder what direction movies, books, and fiction in general would go as humanity moves away from statism and towards a more free and peaceful society.
What are your thoughts on this?
Go on.
Tell me more about your thesis, if you could.
Okay, well, I... Write is a hobby.
It's not something I do for a living, just because I like it better that way.
And you've talked a lot about movies, about how a lot of things you see in stories are just manifestations of statism and people's own problems they've had in the past and all that sort of thing.
What I've wondered is, what kind of changes might we see in fiction and stories and all sort of thing as society becomes less accepting of...
And institutionalized violence and all that sort of thing.
That's a great question.
I certainly have had some pondering of that.
I was talking to a pretty famous musician a while back who was saying basically that he and his friends, who are generally the kids of famous musicians, you know, what do we...
What songs are we going to write?
We've had it pretty easy.
What's our inspiration?
What do we work on?
And it is a challenge.
The question of the relationship between art and happiness or unhappiness, I have talked about before.
Now, the transition time, I think, is interesting.
And I think actually we're already in it.
I think we're already in this transition time.
Do you watch any TV?
Not anymore.
I mostly watch stuff on YouTube and everything like that.
TV just hasn't offered much that I'm really interested in.
And you can watch like Netflix has TV shows and so on.
Do you watch any sort of TV shows?
If there is a series that does strike my fancy, I'll just buy the CDs or DVDs or download it or something like that.
Okay.
Okay.
So, yeah, I get it.
I mean...
Watching stuff with commercials is like, oh my god, what is this, like hand puppets from the 14th century?
Anyway, but you may have noticed that crime shows now almost never, at least the most popular ones that I've seen, but crime shows these days rarely have only police in them.
So I'm thinking of a couple of shows that I've seen a couple of.
A castle.
There's a woman who's a cop and he is a mystery writer and he goes along with her and they solve crimes together, right?
All right.
And so this is state and not state, right?
Because he's just a mystery writer.
The show Monk with Tony Shalhoub, he's not a cop anymore and But he's solving cases.
He's an obsessive-compulsive guy.
And so the show Psych has two non-cops interacting a lot with the police department and they're essential for solving crimes.
There's a show called Bones, which is about a forensic anthropologist, I think she is.
And I'm pretty sure...
The sister of another sitcom actress, Zooey Deschanel.
They've got the same voice.
It's kind of eerie.
Anyway, and the same startled baby blue eyes.
Anyway, and she is a non-cop.
She's not allowed to have a gun, but she solves the crimes.
Now, this is quite different from how it was in the past, you know, sort of the dragnet days where it was the cops who got things done.
Not, well, the cops really need non-cops to get things done.
And so I think that...
Oh, wait, Mike, you have one?
Something I've watched a couple episodes of, White Collar, a show where an FBI agent teams up with a former criminal that they actually spring from his prison sentence.
So a current criminal teams up with a former criminal.
The FBI agent that caught him springs him out to help him on various cases in a mutually beneficial win-win relationship.
Yeah.
House of Cards?
How does that fit in?
Oh, I was just thinking of series that wouldn't have been made a decade ago.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.
No, I was thinking sort of, so this public-private partnership, because there's generally this idea now that government can't get shit done.
Government is ridiculously incompetent, right?
The approval rating for Congress is like 5% or 6%.
And Mike, if you want to have a little fun, why don't you look up...
It's not funny.
Approval rate of confidence.
No, no.
Have a look up, if you would.
They just broke ground on a high-speed rail system in California.
I think from San Diego to San Francisco or something like that.
If you could just have a look at that and just give me some numbers about how much the cost has grown, how much the speed has dropped, how much the subsidies are expected...
The price has gone from like $50 a trip to $80 a trip and the subsidies are going to be half a billion dollars a year.
Just have a quick look because I just passed – I just blew past this the other day and it was – I think it was put in – like it was voted on years and years ago and people have been fighting it and it's – they're finally breaking ground and everybody, absolutely everybody, I think even the people involved know it's a completely doomed boondoggle.
Oh, God.
Look that up and just interrupt me when you've got it because, I mean, that's – so nobody believes the government can do anything.
There's no – nobody – not much these days.
Like you don't hear much these days about let's get more spending on government schools.
I mean, nobody says that.
I mean, I don't believe it anyway.
Because the rebuttal is, well, no, per capita income-adjusted spending has tripled in 20 years, and schools are even worse than they were before.
Oh, here we go.
Here we go.
You got it?
Okay.
Is it as good as I remember?
Because I just remember it being like, oh, wow, that's a juicy bit of status tidbit.
I'm bracing myself.
Oh, man.
Voters were told the project would cost just $33 billion.
Once experts crunched the numbers, however, the price tag soared to $98 billion.
Now, just before you go on, here, I'm going to show you some yoga moves wherein I pull this number out of my ass with a toilet plunger and a reverse jet engine.
So it's like, here's how much it costs.
And then they say, well, you see, once experts actually looked at the numbers...
Let's get someone that knows what they're talking about.
Who the hell came up with the first set of numbers?
That's what I was about to ask.
The guy in the corner urinating on himself said it cost $33 billion, so I think we'll go with that.
And the wheel stops at $33 billion!
You are the winner of a $98 billion boondoggle.
Does any sane human being in the world imagine it's going to actually come in at $98 billion?
I'd imagine no.
No, of course not.
Anyway, what else?
Anything else?
It was supposed to whoosh riders from Southern California to the Bay Area in less than three hours, but now it's more than four hours due to changing track configurations and route adjustments.
Now, do you know why the route adjustments are occurring?
No.
No, I don't, actually.
Well, I don't know either, but I would imagine it's a combination of either environmental concerns or there were a bunch of railroads being made in the 19th century and the ones that were being run by the government had to go to everyone's county.
And so they just took these ridiculously circuitous routes, whereas the ones that were done privately just went where the hell they were supposed to go without any political, oh, we've got to have to stop at my county and station and jobs.
person, right?
So because it's political, it's going to have these ridiculous roots.
When the railroad was getting built, they got paid by the mile, I believe.
And so it had the same thing, the very weird winding routes throughout land, which happened to be owned by interests that were somehow tied to the project.
Shockingly.
Shockingly.
There's a railroad I know, all that glitters is gold.
Yeah, no kidding.
And she's buying a spiral to nowhere.
The train was supposed to get people off the freeway and reduce carbon emissions, but a panel of experts now say any carbon savings will be nominal.
So it was touted as a green project, and it doesn't look like that's going to be the case.
It's green!
What did the experts say?
Oh, okay.
Ridership projections have been cut by two-thirds from a projected $90 million to $30 million a year.
Hey, wait, a number that's going down.
Sure.
The only reason that number is going down is it makes all the other numbers go up.
Fewer riders means higher prices.
Apparently tickets will exceed $80 and not $50, which was the original claim.
And the system will require annual subsidies of more than $300 million annually.
Yay!
And does anyone believe that?
So, I mean, does it say in the article when it was first approved?
I think it was the 90s.
Oh gosh, let me see.
Surface is scheduled to begin in 2018.
Let's see when this thing started.
Yeah, there'll be a lot of people standing on the tracks in 2018 just waiting for the train to come on.
Here it says the projected completion date is 13 years behind schedule.
13 years!
13 years.
Oh my god.
That's like my wife saying, I'm pregnant, I'm going to give birth to an adult.
He's hanging in there.
He's fenced himself in.
He won't come out.
He's locked it from the inside.
It'd be hilarious if it wasn't harming so many people.
Good lord.
Just see if you can find out when it was – I really, really believe it was the 90s that this thing was approved and it's basically been fighting its way through this, that and the other.
But this is like a zombie you can't nuke from orbit.
So much opposition has been thrown at this thing and it just can't be killed.
And I assume it's because there's just so much money that the governments can dole out to special interest groups to get this thing built.
It's better.
It's better than what you were saying.
80s?
Plans for a high-speed train system linking northern and southern California were first proposed by a California governor in the 1980s.
And it looks like 1992 and 1996, things happened in those years where formal planning for preparation for the ballot initiative began.
Right.
And I think they voted on it in 1998.
There you go, yeah.
And...
And they voted on it with numbers that were lies.
And they voted on it during, of course, California was going through a tech boom, right?
I mean, the crash hadn't happened yet.
So we're rolling in money and it's going to be cheap and unicorns are going to fight out your ass.
It'll be a two-hour tantric sex orgasm with the way we've got these tracks rumbling along through your gonads.
And so people, and of course now, it's completely, now Canada's, I mean, sorry, I think Ontario is even worse than California as far as debt goes.
But California is a complete basket case, and nobody would want to do this now, and nobody wants to do it now.
I bet you they've just signed all these contracts as well that would make cancelling them very expensive.
Well, it looks like they started planning for the ballot measure in 1996, and it didn't end up getting put on the ballot until 2004.
So just even to get it on the ballot so people could consider it took forever and a day.
I mean, 20 years, 30 years?
I mean, how long does it take for Steve Jobs to envision an iPhone before we have it in our hands?
A whole hell of a lot shorter than that.
Right.
Good God.
Right.
Yeah.
And so if we say it started in the 80s, it's probably, if it's ever finished, like if it's ever finished, it will be finished in the 2020s at some point.
So it'll be 40 years from inception to maybe completion.
By then, California will have fallen into the ocean for all we know.
Actually, I think that the rest of America is just going to go to the San Andreas Fault and jump up and say, fuck it.
I'm sorry.
You gave us Nancy Pelosi.
You're the new Atlantis.
We're all pulling a Gene Hackman from the original Superman, and you're just going into the big drink, man.
Forget it.
This left-coast bullshit, we can't take it anymore.
And Hollywood.
So there's not a huge amount of new giant government initiatives, right?
The last was the war on terror and I don't think that that's considered to be very popular among a significant number of people.
So I think we're already in that transition insofar as for government to be plausibly shown as working – There have to be non-government people involved, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
So this public-private partnerships, I mean, it's so weird when you think about it.
Sorry for this rant.
I'll keep it brief.
But it's so weird when you think about it.
The government's putting out all these contracts.
We need something done.
We need 12 billion cards for illegal aliens to naturalize them or whatever.
You can see all these things popping up.
The government, we need a bridge built.
We need roads repaired.
We're going to contract it out.
It's like, what?
What?
You're already taking our money.
We're already paying you to do this shit.
Why are you contracting it out?
Because we can.
When you think about it, it's completely bizarre, but the reason they have to contract it out is like, oh shit, this actually has to get done?
Well, fuck, we can't use the government.
We've got to contract this shit out.
I mean, it's really mental.
I think people have kind of got that the government doesn't do shit, but they'll take your money, pay a bunch of people for not doing shit, and then hire people who are going to actually do it with more of your money.
They make a token effort to defend the idea that we need more government, but whenever I press them for details, I can't seem to get an answer anymore.
Well, I mean, and that's good.
Because at least the automatic answers aren't working.
Because, you know, the government ends, statism ends with an eye roll.
You know, where you sound like...
Like when I was a kid, there was this whole...
Sort of supernatural, paranormal crap floating around.
UFOs!
Sasquatch!
Ghosts!
There was all this...
And there were lots of not totally insane people who would talk about this kind of stuff.
Unexplained phenomenon.
ESP. Telekinesis.
And the walls of the bookstores were covered with all of this trash.
When I was...
I think I was 12.
My mom took me to a spoonbender who taught me how to bend spoons with my mind.
A friend of mine and I were there.
We actually got in the newspaper.
Picture of me in the newspaper at the age of 12.
Caption, mind-bending power.
Stefan Molyneux and his friend's name learn how to bend spoons with their mind.
Did you get James Randi's million yet?
I'm sorry?
Did you get James Randi's million dollars yet?
Sadly.
No.
But I mean this stuff was kind of not – it wasn't – I don't know.
What can I – it wasn't like mainstream, mainstream, but it was in the newspaper, kids learning how to bend spoons and stuff, right?
I mean that was – You know, this is astral travel.
Leave your body crystals.
Did you know that if you put a razor blade under a pyramid-shaped structure, it would be sharp the next morning?
Like, there was lots of ancient Aztecs.
Like, just crazy shit now.
But in the 70s, people were like, yeah, I can buy that.
I remember the bit myself, but it was kind of on its way out when I was a teenager.
I started hearing less of it and kind of faded out during my adult years.
Yeah, but it was a big thing.
Psychic phenomenon and bending spoons and out-of-body experiences and near-death travel paranormal shit.
I mean, it was floating around.
I mean, it was big time, close to mainstream.
And now you try bringing that stuff up.
I mean, what do people say?
Yeah, whatever.
Yeah, come on.
Yeah, and Mike, you wanted to say something about that?
Oh, James Randi had a lot to do with the debunking of Yuri Geller and the spoon-bending paranormal nonsense.
I mean, he had a couple of things on nighttime talk shows where he'd actually go in there and prevent Geller from doing his tricks and The spoon bending, and he'd just be like, oh, I can't do it today because...
Not because there's another magician next to me that knows my trick and is not allowing me to do it or changing my utensils so I'm not able to do it, but, you know, just the mood or the ambiance or the headache or God knows whatever.
If you doubt the process, the process doesn't work.
Oh.
Oh, I see.
I see.
Okay.
So if I believe I can fly...
Right.
I mean, that just all became...
Nonsense, right?
So you'd say, oh, prove to me your psychic phenomenon.
I'm thinking of a number between 1 and 10.
What is it?
And people would say, it doesn't work like that.
It doesn't work that way.
I can't control it like that.
It just happens.
And it's just like, oh, my God.
And I remember dating a woman who was older than me.
And she was – I'm embarrassed to say – this relationship didn't last very long – but embarrassed to say she believed she had psychic phenomenon.
And really, can you guess my response to that?
Can you guess how quickly this relationship is going to come to an end based on this?
And I was like, wow, you're not living in a big place.
Go get a million bucks.
James Randi had this million-dollar bounty for proving psychic phenomenon.
He still do, I believe.
Still open.
Yeah, he still does.
It doesn't work like that.
It's not for profit.
Really?
What are people doing on TV? Not-for-profit psychic abilities.
Not-for-profit.
It's socially.
You know, it's a million dollars.
I'm not saying join Lucifer's army of satanic Nazi undead.
I mean, go be evil.
I'm just saying go make some money.
He'll be happy and excited to pay you.
Hey, if making money is a big problem, win the million dollars and go give it to your favorite charity.
Yeah, yeah.
How is this a bad?
No, but it doesn't work like that.
No.
It doesn't work like that is correct except for two words.
It doesn't work!
Take off the like that!
The first part of your sentence I completely agree with.
It doesn't work.
Like that?
No, no!
It just doesn't work.
So, um...
What the fuck are we talking about?
Fiction and how it'll move.
Oh, no, yeah.
So, like, a lot of this paranormal shit was going on in the 70s.
And, you know, this is Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Aliens!
Right?
Because apparently people cross, you know, millions of, I guess, hundreds of light years to scope out what's in the ass of people living in a swamp.
But...
This all kind of just faded away and, yeah, a lot of scientists, you know, started – they didn't cough bullshit anymore.
They just openly said bullshit.
They put up all these double-blind experiments and there was a pretty good go at it.
And, of course, yeah, James Randi and his Skeptics Foundation had a lot to do with that.
And I think that we're – and you saw less of that stuff in movies and shows.
So now, again, just to pull out the show Psych, which is a pretty charming show.
And I didn't watch it all the way to the end, but it was a pretty charming show.
Dulé Hill is great.
I've liked him ever since the West Wing.
And what a talented and funny guy and a great actor.
But anyway, so in psych, he's got these psychic abilities, supposed to have these psychic abilities, but all he's done is been trained to observe things, right?
He just observes things very closely and pretends that it's psychic and so on.
And you can see this all over the place, that supposedly psychic phenomenon is not psychic.
And so when I was a kid, you could have, I've mentioned this before, but I remember making out with a high school girlfriend in a basement watching some show about Some woman who got kicked back in time to King Arthur's Court.
Oh my god, the mythology crossovers are just too horrendous.
You remember Saint Batman and the King Arthur's Robin?
Anyway.
She comes back through the portal of time.
And she has a scarf with her, and it's like it was the scarf that she had.
Was it real?
Was it not?
Like, you could leave that open-ended now.
Now they don't do that stuff anymore.
Now, like, there's a hard-nosed, factual, scientific explanation for everything.
And when you see a supposedly, quote, magic phenomenon in shows, it's never left ambiguous.
It's always explained away.
And so a lot of the supernatural, paranormal, telekinesis, UFO, Sasquatch shit...
Has kind of been pushed off to the fringe.
And there's been a lot of willpower.
And I remember having conversations with people.
And, you know, sad to say, mostly women.
You know, just about like, no, this stuff's not true.
I mean, I had so many conversations about this over the years.
Like, no, no proof.
Nope, never been established.
Nope, that doesn't work.
Nope, don't give me that quantum shit.
Nope, nope, doesn't work.
Not the way things work.
And...
And now that stuff is to some degree gone and people just don't really buy it anymore.
And if you do, you're obviously kooky rather than maybe just a little bit off the beaten path.
You're like so deep in the woods, you're in another dimension.
And so now – Faces on Mars and shit like that, ancient civilizations, the Martian canals.
It was nuts what people would believe and that stuff has been hammered away.
I think now with the state, we are seeing a pretty good transition to the point where there's some eye rolling.
Like if somebody says, let's have the government do some big giant dam.
I mean what do people think about these days?
How much money are you going to waste?
How many screw-ups are you going to have?
We're on the road to nowhere!
I mean, that's what they're saying.
The bridge to nowhere and these giant...
Have you ever seen these really eerie Chinese cities?
They just build these whole cities and nobody's there because all government bullshit just designed to...
Buy favors, get kicked back, get the hell out of China if you're an official.
You should Google these pictures.
It's eerie.
There's these giant cities in China.
Nobody lives there.
It's even worse that nobody lives there.
There's like 12 people there.
It's just horrendous what's going on.
The reality is that 700 million people have come out of poverty from the mid-90s till the present time.
700 million people have come out of poverty.
Was that because of foreign aid?
Hell no.
Was that because of government spending?
Oh, God, no.
That was because of the free market, because some elements of private property and contract and trade...
We're established, codified, and enforced in formerly heavily socialist countries.
Look at India and China.
The two formerly socialist slash communist countries respectively liberalized quite a bit.
People have had the laboratory experiment of East Berlin versus West Berlin, right?
West Berlin was this little island of capitalism in a sea of communism and it was as different as night and day.
You can see the pictures of North Korea, the giant dark spot in the Asiatics.
Because it's a dictatorship.
So there's a lot of momentum over government programs, but there's not a lot of new energy behind them.
There's not a lot of, well, you know, if you want to get something done, you really want to give it to the government.
You want your roads built really well?
You know, give the job to the government.
And the Department of Justice...
That's where you go for justice.
It's become so ridiculous.
Like 90% to 95% of government court cases are just plea bargained out because all they do is threaten people with crazy sentences, get people to bargain away years of their lives in exchange for decades of their lives and call it justice.
It's just an unbelievably brutalized shakedown.
Hey, you want to get rid of drugs?
Just have the government ban it.
Ban them all.
You'll be fine.
You know, it's like, want to get rid of drugs?
Well, it's like you get a bath.
Just pull out the plunger.
Pull out the little plug there.
All the water goes away.
All the drugs will be gone because we have a law, right?
So the ineffectiveness of government, I think, has been revealed.
And I guess we're getting back.
Well, so like there were like 2,000 plus murders a year.
I guess the last liberal mayor of New York before Giuliani.
Giuliani comes in and gets it down to like 600, 700 or less by the time he was out of office a year because he actually would find violent people and put them in jail.
I'm not saying that's the optimum solution in a free society but given that things are where they are right now, well, they're in jail.
They're not committing crimes against people who aren't in jail.
Probably committing lots of crimes against people who are in jail.
So there was this old idea that, you know, hey, look, if you've proven yourself to be a predatory sociopath, sorry, you and society don't get along.
Play well with other carbon-based life forms, so we're going to have to put you in a cage.
Sorry about that, but you've revealed yourself as predatory and you don't lock the lion up but the lamb.
So there was this old idea of how things would work.
And then, of course, in the 60s, there was this massive liberal experiment of let's hug him into not being predators anymore.
Let's fix him.
Let's love him.
Let's understand him.
And basically, sentencing went way down.
And violent crime went up like 300-400%.
Well, we released all these lions into the rabbit pen.
Weirdly, we're running out of rabbits.
It's just crazy.
And then Giuliani went back to locking up the criminals and look at that.
Hey, as he points out, you know, he saved thousands of black lives because a lot of these criminals would be blacks, preying upon other blacks.
So...
So...
There's just been a whole bunch of, like, crazy stupid experiments.
Nobody believes that government schools work anymore.
I mean, in the 60s, I remember seeing all these movies, you know, like, I guess the last one that was sort of around that was Dangerous Minds was Michelle Pfeiffer and Stand and Deliver with Jane Zerl Olmas, I think his name was, who later piloted a starship of some kind.
And these were like, well, the schools are shit, but if we get the right teachers in there, they'll turn around!
All we need is heroic, Marvel-based superhero teachers.
And once you're appealing to magic, all we need is really dedicated, focused, intense, and excellent government employees.
And then the system will work fine.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Yeah, that sounds...
All we need is young teenage boys without a thought of sex in their heads.
And the system will work.
It's kind of like when communists say, oh, it'll work if everyone just puts away their selfish needs and all works to the collectives.
So it'll work if everyone's all the same.
Well, if that's your plan, then I'm afraid you were born in the wrong reality.
You know, this plane would totally have flown if gravity worked the other way.
Yes, that's true.
But completely irrelevant to reality.
Right now.
I'd be sane if I wasn't crazy.
I'd be hairy if it wasn't for all this baldness.
I'd be female if it wasn't for all this giant penis I've got to drag around.
Like a third arm hanging out my butt.
Anyway.
So, yeah.
I don't think people really believe in the state anymore.
But the problem is that the half-life of stupidity seems to be near infinite.
And...
So you've got a lot of people who have just invested their lives into spreading this manure.
You've got professors.
You've got, of course, all of these teachers, government workers who are directly involved, and people who can't change the system.
I mean, someone pointed out a while back ago on this show that one of the reasons why government workers can't give up their pensions is they're all unbelievably fat.
And so they really need free healthcare for the rest of their lives.
Now, I mean, of course, that's an exaggeration.
I mean, they're not all fat.
But, you know, when you see the teachers union marching, they're not exactly 10 abreast in a narrow street.
Let's put it that way.
And so people just need this stuff and they feel entitled to it.
And so they're kind of like the tent has collapsed, but there's people out there with broomsticks just propping it up.
Because of their specific greedy needs.
We used to, as a species and as a culture, we used to be capable of sacrifice.
And we used to be capable of shaming people who weren't willing to sacrifice.
Now, that was often used for significant ill, like war.
Here's a white feather, you cowardly bastard.
Now go get shredded up in the front for no good reason.
But I miss our capacity to shame the living shit out of people who are doing wrong.
I really – I miss that.
I'm not saying this is right or rational.
I'm just telling you what I feel.
So like the government workers who like – oh, this pension.
Give me this pension.
And then they jury-rig the system or they jig the system so that they get maximum pension.
oh I got carpal tunneled That gives me disability too.
Oh, I'm going to not do any overtime until the six months before and then I'm going to get that prorated.
Like they just work to maximize the living shit out of this system.
And I'd like to, you know, you got four guys, you order a big pizza.
One guy eats three quarters of the pizza.
You're like, you asshole.
You unbelievable jerk.
What are you doing eating three quarters of the pizza when there's four of us here while hungry all paid equally?
Don't be a greedy bastard now.
Go buy me a new pizza, right?
And I would really like that.
I'd really like that back.
Like, no, sorry, there's no money.
There's no money.
You guys, there's no money.
And if you're going to take this pension, you're going to be taking from young, innocent people who are never going to have the opportunities you had, who are never going to have the kind of job security that you have.
So, yeah, you can take that pension.
Of course, you've got a legal right, but it's shameful.
It's shameful what you're doing.
It's shameful what you're doing.
You're greedy and you're hurting people.
And it's wrong.
And you got paid well enough that you could say for your own damn retirement, stop taking because this government doesn't have any money that's taking it from everyone else.
And you're taking it from kids who weren't even born when all of this stuff was done.
And I will get there eventually, right?
Because the young people who tragically are emotionally hurt and have little economically to gain, which is generally when peaceful revolutions or revolutions in states of mind tend to occur.
But I think we're in the transition point artistically.
I'm not a big expert on TV, but I can't think of a show...
I've never watched Parks and Recreation, but as far as I understand it, it's a complete joke about how politics works.
A House of Cards is really dark about how politics works.
Prison Break was pretty dark about how the government system of politics works.
Justice works, and...
I should note, too, because I want to plug this movie that everyone needs to go and see immediately, The Imitation Game, which is about Alan Turing, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, who's just awesome.
I don't think that movie would have been made a decade ago, where it pretty much comes out the state's responsible for his death.
The state ultimately killed him and sentenced him for indecency, because he was homosexual.
Oh, same thing that happened with...
I was just thinking about this guy today, Oscar Wilde.
Have you heard the jokes that people have made about his name?
I thought it was Benedict Cumberbund for a while, but apparently it's not something we're about.
It is Cumberbund.
Are you ready for some bumper nickel cockatrice?
Oh, God.
Beneficial cucumber.
No.
Bender Snatch Cumberbuckle.
Oh, that guy must have had a fun childhood.
I'm sorry?
That guy must have had a fun childhood.
Pindick Cum Splash.
Oh, jeez.
I thought I had problems.
Barcelona Far Quad Squad.
Beefy Shrimp Fried Dumpling.
Bumble Snitch Cunty Buns.
I don't know.
I just found the foot.
There is, in fact, a blubberdickcumberbundcumberbundcumberbund.com.
I'm just telling you, he's got a funny name.
In fact, somebody has written a program to generate a funny name like Benedict Cumberbatch.
My new name is Scramble Shack Bobble Scratch.
Umberquack Convictcrum.
Cumberbatch.
I don't know what that means, but I like it.
Crippleport Boondocktort.
I could really do this for the rest of the show.
The blow dart isn't working!
Bannerswart Boondocklink.
Stop me!
Go see the Imitation Game, everybody.
It's really good.
Stumblewhack Camelmink.
Also a fine actor.
You see him do imitations of other people.
He's Alan Rickman.
It's fantastic.
Anyway, need to hear that.
So I think there's a transition time where the government is now – it was drama.
Now it's tragedy and comedy, right?
So the government used to be Joe Friday, homicide, just a fact, man.
It used to be drama.
Now it's mostly comedy, as in parks and recreation or whatever, and it's mostly – Tragedy, as in, you know, House of Cards and stuff like that.
An irredeemably dark and ugly world.
And I think that...
So, in a show called The Good Wife, who, you know, which I watch mostly because I'm a huge fan of Alan Cummings, who's a Scots actor who's...
He's been big on Broadway, and he's got a Tony, and he's actually just written a book called Not My Father's Son, which is about his life, which I would recommend.
But anyway, in that show, the politics is grim and dark, and justice is not something that you expect to come out of the system.
And...
The guy who's the husband is to me at least just an out-and-out sociopath.
I mean just a complete politic hound monster and she decides to run for office and she goes through this vetting process and she goes through this – everyone digs into everything about her history and they scour and they get – They get private investigators to pore over everything and they review everything she's ever done in the hopes of finding dirt and discredit her and so on, right?
I mean, if you've done anything interesting or challenging in your life, you're unfit for politics.
People say, step for president.
It's like, no, I've had enough bad press that I've been effectively excluded from any temptation in the political realm.
Not that I'd ever want to go in, but it certainly has.
I believe that ship may have sailed at some point in the past.
But everyone understands that this vetting process and the amount of ugliness you're going to go through if you want to get into politics is going to be staggering.
Unless, of course, you're a Democrat, in which case all of your crimes will be hidden from view for as long as humanly possible and then reported in a resentful and desultory manner.
Oh, good lord.
Sorry, I just got to mention this because it drove me nuts earlier today.
Chris Christie is under fire.
The governor of New Jersey.
Have you heard of what he did recently?
The guy who lost weight?
The Bridgegate guy?
Yeah, the Bridgegate guy.
I'm not defending Chris Christie, but the...
He makes good cookies.
Come on.
The subject of conversation with Chris Christie has revolved around him attending a Dallas Cowboys football game in the box of Jerry Jones, the owner.
And he actually was shown on camera hugging.
Gasp, everybody.
Hugging Jerry Jones, I guess, when a Cowboy scored or something because he's a big Cowboys fan.
So now there's this big outroar about, oh, you know, he's in Jerry Jones's box.
And is there some type of conflict?
Wait, who's Jerry Jones?
Jerry Jones is the owner of the Dallas Cowboys.
No, I get that, but is he radioactive?
Is he covered in nettles or Venus flytraps?
Why is it bad to hug the guy?
It's not presidential, Steph, apparently.
It's not presidential.
It's not presidential to hug someone?
Apparently.
Which tells you a whole lot about the presidency, doesn't it?
Is that complaining that he hugged someone?
What about the whole kissing baby stereotype?
There is a side caveat of them saying, because apparently Jerry Jones has some interest somewhere under the authority of Chris Christie, they're saying this is inappropriate for that reason, but people were commenting specifically on the hug as well, saying like, oh, he shouldn't be doing that, or that's not right, and it's just like, oh my god, someone hug the guy!
They know that President Obama came out and sang some Barry White songs recently, right?
Yeah.
So in love with you.
It's not Barry White, but whoever the hell that singer was.
Obama took a picture with some school kids, some young girls recently, and he put a princess tiara on his head.
That also got some flack.
They were saying, that's not presidential, you don't do that.
Obama previously had said that one of the unwritten rules of the presidency is that you don't put strange things on your head.
And he broke his rule.
He broke his rule by wearing the tiara.
But this is what we focus on, you know, not granting amnesty.
Not, oh, Obamacare.
Yeah, we lied to you about it.
Oh, the costs are going up.
Shocking.
Look at that.
Oh, but, you know, Chris Christie hugged somebody.
That's important.
Mike, can you look this up too?
Because there was something that came out recently where some, I think he was a Republican.
And he was accused of speaking at a white supremacist conference.
Do you remember this?
Yeah, let me dig it up.
And as it turns out, he just used the rum in the morning that they happened to use later on that day.
It's got germs in it.
Obviously, it has swastika emblazoned mosquitoes that's still flying around, injecting pure Aryan blood into underlings.
But, and this went on for, like, I couldn't remember.
He even went and apologized.
It's like, oh, man, because he just assumed, oh, I don't know, some time ago, you know, how many times do politicians go and give speeches?
Billions, right?
It's like, oh, I guess I gave a speech at the wrong place, whatever.
As far as I understand it, it had to be a complete lie.
But, you know, the old thing, a lie gets halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes on, right?
But, so, you know, there is a transition point that is occurring in the realm of art at the moment.
The dedicated detective is not as believable in particular anymore.
Now it's always detective plus someone from the private sector or the free market who gets things done.
That's sort of a transition point because I think people recognize the government really doesn't do anything anymore.
It just takes your money and hires other people.
It's like me going to the dentist and paying the dentist 200 bucks for like Cleaning and all that kind of crap.
And then the dentist says, great, thanks for the money.
Now I'm going to hire you a dentist.
And now you're going to have to pay him too.
It's like, no, I just paid you.
You're the dentist.
No, no, no.
I'm the dentist who hires the dentist.
Well, why do you have to be a dentist then?
Because I get to charge more, you see.
What?
So that's the way the state is.
I mean, I think that the government will continue to be portrayed as comedic, as foolish, as destructive.
And at some point, that will simply change the emotions, the emotional reaction in people's minds.
So, I mean, I made this comment a while back.
It's not even my comment, right?
So, you know, you think of a proud black man, you think, oh, good, you know, he's proud of his heritage.
You think of a proud Native American, proud of his heritage.
You think of a proud white man, you think racist, right?
Because people have been programmed to react in that kind of...
The whole point of this kind of propaganda, just to program people.
Like a study came out recently that, I hate to say proves, but has strong indications or fairly conclusively establishes that cops are relieved when they shoot someone and that person turns out to be white.
You know, the cops don't, in America, they don't want to shoot black people.
Really don't want to shoot black people.
I don't want to shoot anyone I assume, or at least most of them don't, but they really, really don't want to shoot black people, right?
Because they know the shitstorm that can come down on them if they shoot a black person.
And so yeah, a lot of the cops are like, "Oh man, I shot this guy.
He turned out to be white.
Thank God." You know?
Because white privilege, right?
And yet, you know, you hear these shootings and everybody goes mental, right?
Because they're just emotionally programmed to react that way.
The headway of critical thinking in the human species, it's pretty much swimming against the current in a river of lava while meteors come down on your head.
So it will take a while to shift people's emotional investment.
There is a lot of nihilism among statists these days, and that nihilism expresses itself in defensiveness and desperation.
So let me give you a tiny example.
So when people talk about blacks not doing well in America, what's the general answer at least from the left?
They're not getting enough help from the government.
They're not getting enough money and white privilege and all the other taglines we've heard a million times.
What's the original cause?
The slavery and the racism.
Right.
Slavery.
Slavery is why blacks are not doing well in the United States.
This is not even close to true.
And it's not even in contest with anyone who knows the facts.
Black illegitimacy rates in the 1950s were like 22%.
Blacks, 100 years ago, were getting married at a rate higher than whites.
Black families were incredibly strong.
Endless stories of blacks freed slaves crossing states to try and find their wives and so on.
The black family was...
A significantly stronger institution 50 to 100 years ago than it is now.
And then they say, well, you see, illegitimacy is slavery.
And so what's happened to the black family between the past and the present, obviously Jim Crow and there was institutional racism, sure.
But there has been this whole left-wing agenda that You know, we're going to wade in there and we're going to help the blacks, right?
Welfare and government schools, more spending, affirmative action, and so on, right?
And opposing the endless bugaboos of white racism.
And it's been a spectacular failure.
Like, because it's a government program.
We're going to help these people.
Run!
Run!
Someone's coming with government help.
Run!
And call it an airstrike behind you.
And...
So they want to skip over all of the stuff that's happened for the last 50 years where people on the left have tried to, or claimed to at least, have tried to help the blacks, right?
And now illegitimacy and criminality and so on, very high.
So they want to skip right over all of the 50 years of left-wing interventionism that has occurred for the black community.
And...
They don't want to talk about the last 50 years.
They want to talk about 200 years ago.
That's the cause of the problems.
The fact that blacks were doing significantly better in the post-war period, the fact that there were many more black professionals emerging, the fact that all of this sort of stuff.
It's the same way they say, well, poverty is due to X, Y, and Z. It's like, well, it was being solved until you idiots brought in the welfare state.
So there is a lot of excuse.
There are a lot of excuses still being made.
A lot of people who have significant emotional investments Nobody wants to wake up in the morning and say, ooh, I thought I was serving good.
I guess I've been in the service of immorality.
That's not a great way for anyone to start their day.
So I think there is a transition point.
In the future, the question of what is art like in a peaceful, healthy society, I think art will be not a method of reinforcing prejudice, which is generally...
Yeah, I've seen a lot of that too and it annoys me greatly.
Oh yeah, I've been cooking this whole review of a filmmaker.
I like some of his films.
Richard Linklater made a film called Boyhood where he took this kid from like 6 to 18 over the course of 12 years and all the actors met for a couple of days a year to film scenes and stuff.
And it's unbelievable, relentless, mind-blowing film.
Leftist propaganda.
Democrat propaganda.
And I checked online.
The guy constantly gives to Democrats and all that.
Oh, my God.
It's so ridiculous just how propagandistic it is.
And, of course, all the movie reviewers who are generally middle-aged white guys who are on the left, they love the movie, and none of them see it.
Of course.
None of them see it.
I've read a bunch of reviews of this movie.
Not one of them.
Let me give you one example.
So these kids...
They're handing out Obama law and signs, right?
And this little girl, this young girl, I think she's like 14 or whatever, young girl comes up and she knocks on this woman's door.
And the woman's like, oh, you kids love Obama?
And they're like, well, you know, it's mostly our parents, but yeah, it's cool.
And she's like, oh, I have these dreams about Obama.
Like, I just, I'm snuggling with him.
I'm kissing him.
And she's all giggly and breathy.
And she's like, oh, he's just, he's so wonderful.
He's so great, right?
And that's the Obama supporter, right?
And then they cross over the street.
The boy crosses over the street.
Here it comes.
And he's trying to, he's saying to this guy, now this guy is fat, red-faced, surly.
He might as well have had fucking Bull Connor tattooed across his forehead, right?
Sure.
And he's like, hey mister, would you like an Obama sign?
And he's like, do I look like an Obama supporter to you?
Now get off my lawn!
I could shoot you, you know?
No.
Seriously, that's the script.
Good lord.
I just love President Obama.
He's so dreamy, I could just kiss those juggies until we get telekinetic signals from the ladies.
I'm gonna shoot you, kid, for being an Obama supporter!
And they walk it around and he's like, what a jerk!
And she's like, You know, he has a Confederate flag!
What were you thinking?
And they don't even notice it!
Well, Steph, in their defense, I mean, can you imagine snuggling John McCain?
I mean, I can't.
Well, try harder.
Stereotyping, because honestly, observing the real world takes too much work.
And it's non-stop propaganda for the left.
Like, literally everything.
I mean, the dad goes on a rant about the Iraq War to his children who are like, I don't know, 10 and 6 or 10 and 8 or something like that.
And there's a heroic single mother who overcomes all obstacles, becomes a professor while raising two children.
And all of the white men in the movie are abusive and mean and drunks.
And they don't even notice it.
Like, literally, this is like It's like the fish saying, water?
What water?
Is this all they swim?
It's absolutely non-stop.
Horrendous.
Horrendous.
Anyway, again, it was an interesting film to watch.
It's worth watching, in my opinion.
It's an interesting exercise in filmmaking.
Some of the scenes can be enjoyable, but by God, it's just literally out of the...
communism playbook of how to build a bigger government.
And they don't notice it.
Like nobody – if you'd reversed this, right?
Like if you'd had the McCain supporter or I don't know who was running against – It was McCain running against Obama.
Oh, Romney, right, Romney.
Right, right, right.
It came the first time.
Juggiers versus Bril Cream, right?
But if Romney would be, oh, I dream of kissing Romney and straddling him with my flabby American thighs.
And then they'd cross over the street to the Obama supporter who threatens to shoot them.
I mean they would literally go mental.
But when it's the other way around, they don't even notice anything.
And then, later, the kid in the movie is like, you know, there's all these people who are just trying to control me by manipulating me.
They're trying to control me by putting their hidden agendas onto me and stuff like that.
And they don't even know that they're doing it.
But I see it, and I'm like, do you even listen to their own characters in the movie?
My God.
Anyway, it's just crazy.
Anyway, so in a free society, I think that there will be a very intense celebration.
Of life and freedom.
And, of course, there will still be the temptation to make bad choices in a free society.
And art, I think, can do a lot to help with that.
That was one of Dickens' great strengths.
Dickens, of course, a 19th century novelist, had some great moral lessons.
I mean, I remember reading Dickens when I was in my teens.
He's got this great thing where he says, Income, 20 pounds, expenses...
20 pounds, one shilling.
Result?
Misery.
Income, 20 pounds.
Expenses, 19 pounds and sixpence.
Result?
Happiness.
And I thought, that's actually kind of true.
You've got this tiny little fulcrum.
If you spend a little bit more than you make, you're going to be unhappy.
If you save a little bit more than you make, you're going to be happy.
And there was one of six million great lessons that he had.
More so, I think, than Shakespeare was, Don't kill the king!
Okay.
You can go out and slaughter all the peasants the king points at, and you'll be fine.
But if you kill the king, you'll never sleep again.
So, I played Macbeth when I was younger, and it's a dark, dark role, but propaganda is strong in that play, too.
But at least it wasn't.
Here, would you like these King Duncan lawn signs?
I could stab you where you stand, kid!
So I think that there will be more of a celebration and a reminder of the happiness that comes from Wise Choices.
And I think a lot of stuff will just be genuine.
I think there will be a lot more comedies in the future.
And there won't be this grim agenda that you see behind so much art.
You know, like, I mean, all of the superhero movies are like, boy, without the military industrial complex plus superheroes, we'd be doomed.
Yeah, it's funny.
I write a webcomic.
It's a superhero comic.
And the government barely has any role in it.
Like, there's two characters in the entire thing with any government connections, and neither of them are very important characters.
Like, the government is just a non-entity, really.
But Tim, things don't get better when the UN gets involved?
What are you talking about?
Yeah, you'd think as an anarchist myself, you'd think I'd make a bunch of stories about how government is bad.
I really don't.
The government are just treated as completely unimportant for the most part.
Right.
So, yeah, I'm sorry.
That was kind of a long rant, but it's a fertile topic.
Yeah, it's what I was expecting.
For me.
But, yeah, I think we're in a fascinating place in the realm of art.
There is a huge, huge drive to capture young artists in the webs of socialism.
This is particularly true.
Well, they didn't do a good job with me.
Yeah.
Basically, I used to hang out at a message board where a lot of artists hang out.
When they found out I was not a leftist, they turned on me like a pack of piranhas.
It was absurd.
Oh, God, yeah.
Oh, yeah, no, I mean, I went to the National Theatre School, and it was pretty explicitly left.
It's like, if you're trying to convince me to be a leftist, this is really not going to do it.
Yeah, no, I mean, so, because, of course, if...
I don't want to get a hold of the big rant, but there is a very strong drive to capture as many young artists as possible and to bring them into the leftist fold, because it works so well.
But it also shows you just how weak the left is, too.
I mean, they need all of this.
So you get this left-wing propaganda about the noble helpless poor and the evil predatory capitalists.
All the kids' movies are like, this land developer wants to tear down the children's playground.
Yeah.
Let's team up to fight him.
That's a peeve of mine, people who don't know how to write good villains.
It drives me crazy.
I really make an effort to make them believable.
You can see why they do the things they do, even if you don't agree with it.
Wow.
I need a bigger cigar is pretty much the extent of most kids' evil motivations, you know?
My suspenders need some stretching!
Like when you talked about the people with the pensions and everything and all that sort of thing, like there's a villain in my story, I can't spoil too much because a lot of it's not been shown yet, but basically he made a bad decision and he's now doing worse and worse things to try to escape the inevitable consequences of it.
You can see a lot of parallels there.
Oh, yeah.
We need a new government program to fix the problems created by the last 12 government programs that were invented to solve a problem that was actually getting better.
So I think in a long-distance future-free society, there will still be some maintenance needed.
But I think that there will be very much – I think the music will be very happy and positive and I think there will be temptations or challenges in the arts.
But I think it will all be pretty joyful.
You know, when the relief that the species will feel at the end of oligarchy, at the end of tyranny, at the end of war, at the end of child abuse, at the end of fear, at the end of sin, at the end of anxiety, all of these pathologically and extremely unnecessary states for the human mind to pretend to function in, it will really be astonishing.
You know, I'm always skeptical of movements that need...
A new man, right?
You're talking about earlier with communism.
If people just won't be selfish, everything will be great.
So you have a selfish desire for everyone not to be selfish, so your system will work.
And you want to impose that system on other people because you're right and they're wrong, but they shouldn't have their own opinions and preferences.
Anyway, it's all nonsense.
So I'm really, really skeptical about the new man.
If you just get everyone to be fundamentally non-biological, then that would be great.
And I have looked in the mirror and said, you know, are you, staff, in need of a new species to fulfill the moral requirements of UPB and of a stateless society?
I mean, are you looking for a new man?
A new or different kind of human being?
I mean, I get that pushback a lot, and it's fair, of course, because if you are a moralist and you require a different species for your morality to work, you are an extremely dangerous human being.
Yeah, there's actually another villain in my comic who's like that.
He's just got a plan.
He's just got to change everyone to fit it, and voila, everything's perfect.
That's his idea.
Right.
And very dangerous, particularly if they have the gift of the gab and charisma and are excellent communicators and so on.
And I don't think that I do.
And I've examined this pretty carefully.
I don't think that I do require a new man.
The way that I analogize it is, as I've mentioned before, of course, in early parts to the middle parts of the 19th century – There was this foot binding going on in some oriental countries, right?
They crush these girls' feet and turn them back in on themselves and then end up hobbling around.
Don't look up the pictures, trust me.
I'm sorry?
Don't look up the pictures, folks, trust me.
No, it's really horrendous.
And if we say, well, if we stop crushing these little girls' feet and distorting and brutalizing them, Then we can have female runners.
Now, if somebody were to say, well, that requires a new species, I'd be like, no, let's just not torture the existing species.
And it may look like a new species, and it may seem to have the capacities of a new species, but all it is, is the species unharmed.
And so when I look at the...
I haven't looked at them, but...
Actually, no, I have seen a couple.
You know, I know.
They're like, ah, look away!
Please, be kind, rewind, undo.
But when I see those, the feet of the Chinese-bound women, that to me is the soul of the species, warped and mutated and brutalized and tortured through propaganda, schools, nationalism,
religion, irrationality, collectivism, subjectivism, nihilism, all the stuff that is floating around like The endless Nazgul around the shining bright light of leftover philosophy that has been struggling to drive them back largely unsuccessfully though these many thousands of years.
And I view what we call humanity now as the bound and broken feet of childhood victims.
I'm not asking for a different species.
I'm not saying as soon as human beings grow wings my cloud cities will work.
What I am saying Is that if we stop breaking the feet of these girls, they'll be able to walk easily as adults.
And if we stop breaking the hearts and minds of children, I'm not asking for a different species.
I'm just asking for an unbroken species.
An untraumatized species.
An unlied to species.
I know that that's not fast.
It's going to take a long time.
But it is essential.
And once we have that, I think we'll look back at now, in the future, the way that...
There was this thing called the St.
Vitus Dance in the Middle Ages where people would go so crazy that they would literally dance until their hearts exploded in their chest.
Religious mania, who knows?
I don't think anyone knows the exact cause.
But hysterical, crazy stuff.
We look back at all of that...
I was once – there's an art collector.
I'm one of the richest men in Canada, if I remember rightly, but it's not a collector named Ken Thompson, who was gracious enough to let me look at his private collection.
And a lot of the art that he had – this was part of a – in university.
And a lot of the art that he had came out of the Black Death.
And a lot of it was gruesome, twisted gargoyles and so on.
I remember very, very clearly there was this pearly, shiny stone that from a certain angle you could see a submerged, benign, mystical, half-face.
Just from a certain angle.
I had no idea how the artist did it.
And I remember that having that capacity to create something that had relative peace, though submerged, in a time of such universal horror, must have been an incredibly staunch and strong soul to achieve that.
In the midst of all of the other horrors of the art that was going on at the time, where people, of course, were regularly nailed up in their own homes because somebody had gotten sick and everybody else would just die in the same home with them and just all the horrible stuff that went on.
Of course, there wasn't one Black Death, a whole succession of them, I think, starting in the 14th century, the whole succession of them that came in waves, bubonic plague.
And during that time, it would be really impossible...
During that time of plague to say, in the future, people are going to live to 70, 80, 85 years.
They will rarely be sick and if they take decent care of themselves, they'll remain very active into their old age.
I just read this report of a woman who used to be an athlete, got kind of fat and out of shape in her 50s, decided to become a marathon runner and just up and did it and was able to achieve it.
The body's response to exercise at almost any time in life is astoundingly strong and positive.
And if you'd have said that during the Black Death, in the plague times, people would have said, well, what you want is a different species in a different world.
That sounds like paradise.
That sounds like heaven.
Ah, you'll be able to fly all over the world in giant exploding tubes.
People will have gone to the moon and back.
You'll be able to talk virtually for free, visually and auditory from anywhere in the world.
Amazing medicines will eliminate the most common infections and so on.
Glasses will allow people to read into their old age.
Just amazing things.
And all the stories from the 1800s and 1700s.
Well, you know, my grandmother was old, so I'd have to read to her every night because she couldn't read.
Now you get glasses.
This is paradise.
We live in heaven.
And if you go back through most times in history and you give them a day in this world, they'd say, I have died and gone to heaven.
It can't get any better than this.
And the paradise that we have now, which is a lurching, squeezing out under the shadows of the state and of superstition kind of paradise, the future will be to now as now is to the Middle Ages.
It's not a different species now than it was a couple of hundred years ago.
It is just a less traumatized species and there's no reason why that can't continue.
So no, I don't think...
I think wanting a different species is saying that everybody has to be different economically.
No.
The childhood has to be different because we know from epigenetics that the childhood is the genetics.
And we also know that trauma can transmit itself genetically from generation to generation.
So in the future when we're untraumatized, I think that art will be more of a celebration and the milder warnings mostly which take the place of comedy of making bad decisions.
There will still be things that need to be restrained in the future.
I mean teenagers who still want to have sex with room temperature watermelons and whatever.
I mean they're still going to want to have sex and there may still be STDs and probably will, right?
I mean there will be less of them because there's less promiscuity when there's less child abuse and trauma.
But there still need to be warnings about saving money.
There still need to be warnings about deferral of gratification.
There still need to be warnings about control of sexuality and turning it towards its intended use, which is the raising of children rather than the splashing of seed.
So there will still need to be things that need to be taught and learned.
There will be forever changing circumstances and situations.
We may come in contact with other beings in the universe, which will have its own challenges and so on.
So there will still be lots of stuff and challenges to write and to talk and to make movies about.
Or whatever happens in the future with these kinds of art.
And there will of course be, in the same way that, you know, what's that old joke?
Hey, it's Nazi Week on the History Channel.
Man, every week is Nazi Week on the History Channel.
They will have a fascination with us and how we got through the days without walking into walls rather than going through doorways because the world that we live in appears to be so insane that it will stretch their capacities for empathy and To picture how our minds flowed and worked.
Anyway, I hope that helps.
If you don't mind, we'll move on to our last caller before the end of the show.
All right.
Thank you very much, Stefan.
Hey, do you want to pimp your webcam?
Oh, okay.
Hold on.
Start at the beginning.
What's the first frame?
That's going to take me a little while.
It was a dark and stormy night.
Suddenly, a shot rang out.
That's right.
Okay, just going to the URL to make sure I get this right.
While we're waiting for you, Tim, I just want to say, anyone who wants to call in and talk about art or something of the sort, let us know.
Steph loves to talk about the subject.
I love to listen to Steph talk about the subject.
And no one wants to talk art.
So, writing, art...
I was wondering how I got on the show so soon.
Yeah, notice.
Like I was saying...
A, you disagree with me.
B, you think I'm a racist.
C, you think I'm a misogynist.
D, you want to talk about art.
There you go.
Lucky me.
Anyway, it is Lord T. Hawkeye, that's no spaces or dashes, dot deviantart.com.
There's other stories I've written there.
Some are more adult-oriented, but not too much.
But the comic itself is all in its own separate spaces, and it's pretty family-friendly.
It's drawn by my best friend's girlfriend.
I unfortunately cannot draw.
I tried to teach myself too and felt like a monkey trying to do a math problem.
Oh, you want to know the truly chilling and brilliant cartoon I saw today?
What's that?
So today being the day when a bunch of Algerian Muslims went into a magazine and shot up and murdered 12 people in France.
Oh, I heard about that.
And I think, Mike, you got an update on...
The cop they shot was also a Muslim.
There's a cop on the ground begging for his life.
They just fucking gunned him down as they drove off.
One of them, he was previously arrested for essentially terrorist-related items and sentenced to three years in jail.
And they gave him 18 months of a suspended sentence.
I don't know why, but you have people spending 12 years in jail for minor offenses or three strikes and you're out kind of thing.
And a guy that was involved in terrorist-related activities got out in 18 months.
And then, shock of all shocks, did this kind of thing.
So, ugh.
Wow.
Yay, state.
Terrible.
Well, this guy Epstein, who ran this, apparently, this sort of private orgy island that has been linked to people like Clinton and the prince, the Duke of York, and so on.
He was, he pled down and had a charge, I think, of 18 months or whatever.
He served 13 months.
But according to a commentator I heard, he His sentence of 13 months, he had to spend only eight hours sleeping in the prison.
The rest of the time, he could be in his private mansion.
So, yeah, I think...
Justice is not blind.
Justice is easily bought.
You know, it's like justice is not a way scale now.
It's just a chick in tight fishnets and a swinging purse.
Anyway.
So, all right.
Well, thanks for the link.
And feel free to check it out to the listeners.
And who's next?
All right.
Well, thank you very much, Tim.
Thank you very much, and you have a good evening, Steph, and keep up the good work.
Thank you very much.
I'll do it myself.
All right.
Up next is Eric.
Eric wrote in and said, Would you say that you're better off having gone through abuse as a child since it's made you a much stronger human being going through and overcoming it?
Better off than what?
Not having gone through abuse?
I've thought about this question a lot, and I can't say that I have a solid opinion on it yet, but it's something that I've thought about, and I wanted to get your input on it.
What got me thinking about it, and I'm really excited.
Oh, no, no, I understand.
Sorry to interrupt, but I understand the question, but I just wanted to make sure that I'm better off because I was abused as a child as compared to if I had not been abused as a child.
Is that right?
Well, if I could, you know, maybe there's a better way to phrase it, but that's sort of the general idea.
Like, for example, for myself, maybe if I had not been abused, I think I would have been a pro hockey player.
I got very close.
I just didn't quite make it.
I had too much going against me.
But whatever.
Wait, wait.
Hang on.
Sorry.
That was compressed and I want to make sure I sort of understand what you're saying.
So are you saying that you were abused as a child?
Oh, yeah.
I was horribly abused.
I'm so sorry.
First of all, I don't want to brush past that like to get on with the debate but – or the conversation.
I just want to say I'm incredibly sorry.
And is your impression that you may have been – if you hadn't been abused, you would have been abused?
Oh, yeah.
I definitely would have.
I mean, I got very close.
I played minor league.
And for a long time, it sort of bothered me that I didn't quite make it.
But I think that mentally, I wasn't there because, you know, just all the trauma of my childhood.
And so I look at it and I think, well, yes, I probably would have made it had I not been abused, had I been maybe raised in a different family that realized what they had and supported it.
But the flip side is that I now know all these great things about philosophy, about my health, because I've sort of been forced to...
You know, better myself and face these issues and demons and repair the damage that's been done.
And, you know, I've been in lots of therapy, and I've done lots and lots of work, and I'm pretty happy where I'm at.
And the quote that got me thinking about this is from Viktor Frankl, who was in the Holocaust, you know, he was in the concentration camps.
Yeah, he wrote Man's Search for Meaning, right?
Yes.
He said, what is to give light must endure burning.
So that's what sort of spawned the question.
I just wanted to find out what you think about it, because I listen to you a lot.
A lot of my recovery has been, you know, sped up by getting little details from your show.
It's immensely helpful to me.
And, you know, I'm a huge fan.
I support you.
I think you're great.
Well, thank you.
I mean, I was just reminded, I don't know if you know a hockey player, Theoran Fleury.
Yeah.
I don't know.
He wrote a book where he complained of some pretty horrific child abuse.
It was not from his parents, as far as I understand it.
It was a coach who sexually abused him.
A former coach.
That's horrible.
There's another story about Shelton Kennedy as well, who was abused, I believe, by a coach when the listeners in the chat has brought it up previously.
Oh, is that right?
Okay.
Let's see here.
Fleury, this is from Wiki.
Fleury co-wrote Playing With Fire, a best-selling autobiography released in October 2009 in which he revealed he'd been sexually abused by former coach Graham James.
Fleury filed a criminal complaint against James who subsequently pleaded guilty to charges of sexual assault.
Fleury has since become an advocate for sexual abuse victims and developed a career as a public speaker and he was a very successful hockey player.
I think that's counted by The small number of teeth he had at the end.
I've had a bit of a resurgence in my hockey fandom lately.
I'm feeling a bit nostalgic about playing hockey.
After playing it for like 15 years.
But yeah, Fleury was a big deal.
I was a fan.
A small guy too, right?
Oh, he was a speedy scorer, if I remember correctly.
Five foot six inches.
Oh, wow.
Didn't realize he was that small.
Yeah, he obviously could skate under.
But that...
Oh, wait, no, that's Boston.
Wait, am I showing the limits of my capacity to talk intelligently about things from Dickens to hockey?
Maybe he played a racket sport, Steph.
You could talk about that.
I think...
Ping pong!
I think you mentioned a couple shows ago something about how philosophy was a great thing for you because you had suffered so much abuse that there wasn't any self to destroy.
It wasn't intimidating for you to go into philosophy, but other people felt that philosophy was like this wave crashing down.
You described a dream.
Yeah.
No, I get what you're saying and I'm sorry about the incredulity because I'm just trying to sort of get to where your mindset is coming from.
Yeah.
And there are benefits to having suffered enormously as a child.
But the benefits often accrue to other people more than they accrue to you, if that makes sense.
So I have no loyalty to my society as a whole.
Now, I have loyalty to certain traditions that are part of sort of the Western tradition.
I was talking about those today in a short show that I did about the Paris slaughters by the Muslims.
Oh, I didn't even tell you the cartoon.
I didn't tell the last guy the cartoon.
I completely lost track of that.
Let me tell you the cartoon about the – it's a – I think it was a Muslim who had shot a cartoonist and the Muslim said, he drew first.
Which I thought was quite dark and brilliant.
But anyway, I feel a huge amount of kinship to the change agents in the world, to those who have defied the standards of their time and driven mightily to move the human condition and human standards forward and upward.
Improving the species is like having a thousand zombie corpse animated horror shows tied to your neck and trying to climb up an ice cliff in a windstorm.
And the people who are able to transcend the prejudices of their environment are usually those who have not benefited from those prejudices in the past.
We would normally assume that it is the underdogs who are the change agents in society.
Because they're at the bottom, they have less to lose, and also they grew up in an environment where society put them at the bottom, and of course attempted to keep them there as well.
So change agents, which is a terrible, it's like a rare genre, it's a pretty bad way of putting it, but revolutionaries of the mind, revolutionaries of moral standards.
I think in general, have no loyalty to society because society did nothing to protect them.
And that was my very deep experience as a child, was that society did nothing to protect me.
And in fact, generally exploited the wounds of others who'd harmed me in order to further control and dominate me.
And so when society, as it generally tends to do, contemporary society for everyone, tends to thump its chest and endlessly praise how moral it is for those who have suffered mightily at the hands of society, that is a gruesome and sometimes quite enraging spectacle.
And never, ever give up the chance to pat yourself on the back and say how wonderful you are, society, while you step over the broken bodies of broken children, scooping up the residue of For food.
And so, across a variety of continents and a variety of school environments and a variety of social environments, my brother and I wandered under the raining fists of our mother and struggled to survive the increasing insanity of our mother with no acknowledgement and no help.
In fact, because we were held to the same standards of people with sane parents, we were further humiliated and further ground down, not only by the lack of sympathy but by the lack of any relaxation of standards.
There was no visibility to the horrors that we were suffering as children, even though it became increasingly evident to everyone Particularly in our teens.
And then when I was 15, we basically kicked my mom out and took in roommates and worked jobs to get through high school and then continued to do that through university and so on.
It was evident to everyone that we were the lost boys, that we were a home with no parents and no extended family, no grandparents, no aunts, no uncles of any proximity or involvement.
And Nobody, no parents, no teachers, no nobody came and said, you guys are kind of on your own.
This doesn't seem right.
Is there anything we can do to help?
I would do that.
Of course.
And the degree to which people were willing and eager to avoid the basic and highly precarious nature of our situation Certainly, before my mom moved out, we were getting eviction notices and we were hungry a lot.
Malnourished to some degree, for sure.
And cold.
You know, it's brutal winters here in Canada.
For most of my childhood in Canada, I did not have gloves or a hat.
And it was...
Not wanting to go home when you don't have any money and it's minus 15 degrees outside and you have, you know, maybe a thin jacket, no hat and no gloves.
It's pretty precarious.
It's a pretty precarious and frankly quite dangerous situation.
So I'd go over to a friend's place and just hang around hoping to catch some dinner and so on because there's just no food.
And, uh, I do remember...
Oh, I remember a friend of mine's parents taking us to Ponderosa.
I don't even know if they still run, but it was like an all-you-could-eat buffet.
Oh, my God.
Did they still run?
Do you know if they still run?
I don't even know if they're still open.
They're still open, I believe.
You know, that's the first place I ever ate chickpeas, which is a food I love to this day.
I mean, basically, it turns me into a flatulent jet ski that is able to cross entire bodies of water with my toes pointed out.
Don't feed stuff a lot of carbs and then share a car with him.
Just don't do it.
I mean...
You can.
You'll just lose the will to live.
And you will literally pray for oncoming traffic.
You'll be like Christopher Walken in that Woody Allen movie.
You ever think about just turning the wheel into oncoming traffic?
Nope, but I do now!
It's even better in winter, wouldn't you say, Mike, when you get the choice between frostbite and asphyxiation?
Oh, even better when you're on the highway.
Oh, yeah.
Absolutely.
Do you want an icicle hanging from your glasses?
Or do you want to slowly asphyxiate with the stink?
Right.
You can't bring up Ponderosa and not mention the chicken wings, that stuff.
I was never a huge fan of it.
They were too annoying to me because I never felt like I needed the gristle.
I'd like to get just the food.
And chickpeas, man, do they make you feel full.
I mean, you may as well be eating polyfilla or concrete mix because just feeling full, I mean, as a kid, I was just hungry a lot.
I mean, when I was in boarding school, there was a food shortage, a meat shortage, and I mean...
We would get these crappy little veggie burgers and some slices of bread.
We were active the whole time and all that.
I remember feeling hungry a lot as a kid.
On the couple of times a year where I'd really be able to eat to satisfaction, I remember I think I was like 14 or so.
I went to a friend's birthday party at McDonald's.
Everybody was eating and eating and eating.
After a couple of hours of hanging out and playing at the McDonald's, His parents were like, is there anyone who wants anything else to eat?
And I was like, oh no, I couldn't eat another bite.
Put a french fry up my nose and I'll explode.
And I'm like, I'll take a filet of fish.
I'm still hungry.
Still hungry.
And that was...
And of course, because I was cross-country running and water polo team and the swim team and I played a lot of tennis and I started skiing in my mid-teens and all that.
So I was doing a lot of exercise and...
Yeah, it was a challenge to keep the old calories up.
I looked at pictures of myself back then.
I'm like, oh my god.
Somebody should have just drawn like an Oxfam box with a parachute under my balcony or something like that.
Because, yeah, we were, you know, things were dire at times.
And I remember hunting in the woods for a spring to drink some water from because I was really thirsty.
And it just needed, yeah, it was just this constant roaming around, just being outside a lot, just not wanting to go home.
So, knowing that I moved through a society that claimed to care so much about children, and I moved through all of these people, through all of these schools, and through all these relatives, and extended family, and priests, and nobody said or did anything.
It was the same for me.
I think, yeah, tragically, we're not alone in this.
The number of people who've ever called into the show who said, oh, yeah, my parents were abusive, but this and then this and then this happened, and boy, were they called to account.
You ever heard of that?
No.
No.
I mean, it's amazing when you think about it.
These people can do stuff which is, frankly, illegal.
You know, like the...
My mother hitting...
Hitting me in the face and beating my head against the wall and throwing something, that's illegal.
Like, that's jail time illegal.
It's hard for me to get sentimental about my mother when, if the police had acted in honest ways, she would have been dragged off to jail.
So, of course, when she did call the cops on me once, they just lectured me about needing to obey my mother and that there was a generation gap that I needed to find a way to bridge.
Oh, yeah, thanks.
So helpful.
So, I mean, it is – it remains the crime that dares not speak its name and the crime which is never, almost never acknowledged and almost never dealt with or on very rare occasions, so rare that you probably read about them in the newspaper.
But, you know, when people talk about institutionalized violence or, you know, the institutionalized racism or rape culture and so on, like, you know, there's just this aggression that floats around that nobody acknowledges and nobody sees and nobody knows.
It's like, yeah, and it's parents for the most part.
Everybody just misses and creates these massive conspiracy theories unsupported by the facts.
When what you and I and countless other people around the world have experienced is that there is parental aggression and violence on a significant scale in society that everyone knows about and nobody talks about and very few people do anything about it.
And then when you're an adult, I mean, tell me what it's like for you when you bring this stuff up or if you have with people who are around when you were a kid.
What's the response?
Anytime I've ever brought up abuse...
In any situation, in any social situation, people shut down.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, you've got the President of the United States talking about rape culture.
Yeah.
But you can't get close friends to listen to you for 10 minutes about child abuse.
I wonder if it's because a lot of them have been abused and it's just emotionally, you know, they just rather not think about it as well.
Well, I don't know.
I mean, that's one possibility.
Of course, another possibility is that they've known people like you and haven't done anything about it.
Yeah.
So they don't want to hear about it because it makes them feel really, really, really guilty.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, reach out to a hand.
Reach out a hand and try and help the victims of child abuse, even if they grow up as adults.
Yeah, you'll.
You'll find out what the world is made of.
People who aren't cynical are only the people who've never really tried to help other people.
I mean, once you actually reach out to – of course, once you reach out to really help the victims of child abuse – It becomes more understandable why people don't because there's backlash, right?
I've noticed that as I've gotten little advances, a tool here to help with this problem or I've transcended some of the abuse and I've learned a better way to act.
A lot of times if I try to share that with someone, I'll immediately get resistance from them.
Right.
Right.
So that's just the end.
And I don't know what the answer as to why people are so resistant.
I think a lot of people have suffered as children and are actively avoiding all of that.
And I think those who haven't suffered as children have known children who have suffered and haven't done anything about it, which I think is very tough.
I mean, it's tough to help.
The victims of child abuse, but it sure is preferable to the alternative, right?
Which is to not help the adult victims of child abuse or at least listen and offer them sympathy and remind them of their choices in this life.
So I think that I like to think that the world is a better place to whatever degree I'm capable of making it.
The world is a better place partly because I was abused and partly because of what I've chosen to do with that history of abuse and the good that I've tried to put it to and the sympathy I've tried to extend to people who suffered like I suffered as a child.
I think the world is a better place because of that.
I know that the world is a better place because of that.
My life is better.
Well, I'm glad for that.
I'm certainly glad for that.
I can't tell you how many shows I've listened to where I pulled something out of what you were talking about and it related directly to me.
Like, most recently, it was something about children who suffer abuse are trained to seek approval.
You know, it hit right home and a whole bunch of, like, revelations came out of that.
Oh, yeah.
We head for approval, like, Someone heads for a tree when being chased by a bear.
The alternative is unthinkable.
So I think that the world is a better place because of what I've done with my abuse and how I've...
And again, lots of people who've done this.
I'm just sort of putting myself in amongst that number.
The world is a better place because I was abused.
That doesn't mean that it was better to be abused.
Because of course, if I had not been abused or...
If the abuse that I'd suffered had been recognized and ameliorated by society.
And the horrifying thing about all of that is that, of course, it would have been difficult, perhaps, for some people to help me out if they'd really wanted to get involved.
But, you know, anonymous phone calls to the police while I was being beaten up or something like that in apartment buildings with paper-thin walls and so on, right?
All of that would have been anonymous and safe.
For people to do.
And of course, as an adult, when I would talk about the abuse that I'd suffered, people would also get very uncomfortable, wish they were a million miles away, which of course further isolates and alienates you, and would signal with every non-verbal cue at their disposal their desire to jump out of their own skin and run like a bleeding skeleton into the hills of ignorance rather than stay in the conversation.
Because, of course, when I was an adult talking about it, there was no risk for people at that point, right?
I mean, they could have just listened.
And people are incredibly uncomfortable often hearing about child abuse at a one-on-one level, like they can read about it in books or whatever and so on, but at a one-on-one eyeball level.
Because everybody knows.
Everybody knows the basic fact that this child abuse only continues because society lets it continue and society avoids it and doesn't do the necessary things to help protect the children.
That's why it continues.
So everybody who was not abused, who's not acknowledged and extended sympathy and support to abuse victims, is part of the cycle.
Like, nobody's out of the cycle.
And so I think...
I think the world's a better place because I was abused, but of course, if I had not been abused, then I may have been, and I assume I would have been, extremely and extraordinarily tempted to avoid all indications of child abuse.
When you understand the extent and prevalence of child abuse, which is one thing legally and it's certainly extended enough legally, but as an atheist and an anarchist and someone who understands the incredible destructiveness of superstition and government schools and nationalism and all of that, then the extent of child abuse is much further and wider even than the legal definition, which is damn wide enough.
Like in, I don't know what the stats are for Canada, but as I mentioned before in the show, in England...
80% of moms hit their babies before they're a year old.
That's a criminal action in Canada.
You can hit from the ages of 2 to 12 and not on the face or the head, which would make, at least from the Canadian law, I don't know what the law is in England, but in the Canadian law, that would make 80% of British mothers criminals.
I'm sorry, you were going to say?
That was my experience.
My mother was hitting me before I could speak.
I know this because she shared a little story with me about how naughty I was.
She said that when I was just learning to talk and I was being bad and she was going to spank me, I said, you thank me, I thank you back.
And this was supposed to be a humorous story.
She was recounting to me about how bad a child I was.
Oh, I'm so sorry.
Yeah.
It's horrible.
And that was probably your last act of self-defense, right?
Once you realized that the size was going to overwhelm you.
Well, she was able...
I guess she was unable to hit me much after that because, you know, I... I was getting bigger and I wasn't going to take it.
That was good, but then she went ahead and married a drunk who was hitting me before she married him and hitting me in front of her.
How old were you at that point?
I was 10.
I was 10 at that point.
Yeah, so she may have brought in a heavy hitter because you were going to enter puberty.
Yeah.
Actually, I think maybe she was just being selfish and didn't even care about me.
He apparently had some money, so I think it was a financial thing.
Oh, right.
It's hard to say.
Yeah, I generally can't usually figure out too many motives for people who...
We don't have any kind of inner sense of stability or ethics.
I mean, they just seem to be advantage seekers, but the advantage never seems to work out and they never seem to learn their lessons.
What you spoke about genetics in the last caller made me think about...
I, of course, went to school and would get into fights because I learned that bigger people hit little people.
So eventually they said I had attention deficit disorder and put me on Ritalin to try to control me.
Well, I found out later in life, as I started getting to the bottom of this, that I actually had the warrior gene that everyone's talking about.
And another gene which can, you know, basically, if you don't have the right stuff, the right food, it'll basically make you ADHD-like symptoms.
So, I sort of got to the bottom of this stuff a little bit.
When you talk about genetics and abuse, I'm wondering, because of the abuse, did I develop the gene?
Or is it because of the abusive line of my family history genetics that I had the gene?
Uh, you know, it blows my mind that so much of my mother's disappointment in me and, and all that, and how, how she scolded and all that, and how, how she scolded me and criticized me constantly was because I was following her example.
She hit me so I went out and I would hit other kids.
And then...
After the stepfather came in, I wasn't very violent anymore.
I think they broke my will a little.
After that point, I got bullied in school.
It just blows my mind that everything that she criticized me for was things that she taught me to do.
Yeah, I think that's pretty natural, though.
It's just that It reflects badly on her if you're bullying other children, right?
She might get in trouble.
So it has a negative impact on her if you're bullying other children, so she'll criticize you for that.
The idea of rational consistency just doesn't fit the...
Because the school complains.
Sure, yeah.
Or other parents might come over, or your kid is doing this, or she might get in trouble, or you might hurt some kid, and then she could get whatever right, sued.
So it's...
It's just negative consequences to her.
So you must be punished for any negative consequences to her, whether they're emotional or made up.
And the idea of consistency is crazy, right?
Yeah.
I mean, it's not going to...
And you try and explain that to me.
It just wouldn't make any sense.
Just, you know, what can I get away with?
How do I feel in the moment?
People without...
People without principles, I just find completely baffling.
People without principles is like being injected into Lewis Carroll's brain.
Like one of the most terrifying stories to me of all time.
We're going to talk about it another time.
But, you know, Alice in Wonderland.
I mean, first of all, Lewis Carroll, I think, was a pedophile.
Yeah.
And this unbelievably horrifying story of...
What's inside an evil madman's brain is something I've never found charming.
I've never found pleasant.
I've always found it—that and Pinocchio, just horrifying, horrifying stories.
I've never actually been able to sit through more than a few minutes of—I've never seen the new one, but the old animated Alice in Wonderland.
It was entirely too disturbing for me.
Even as a kid, I just recoiled from it, and literally that way, madness lies.
This is how dysfunctional a brain – how a dysfunctional brain can operate and the idea that it's whimsical or charming.
I just – the scene around the table with everyone babbling and crazy and I'm late, I'm late and everybody with their manias and the insubstantiality of reality and so on.
I mean it's like being trapped inside the brain of a schizophrenic and a malevolent schizophrenic.
It's just an absolute – I mean one day before I'm dead I'll try and get through – Yeah, we were talking about sexual abuse in hockey and Theo Fleury earlier.
Theo Fleury wasn't the only person that was affected by this coach.
Sheldon Kennedy and an unnamed player came forward with complaints about sexual assault they had suffered between 1984 and 1985.
And Theo Fleury alleges that it first happened to him by the hands of the same coach in 1982 when he was at the age of 14.
So 1982 to 1995.
And three people have come forward saying that they were abused.
And much later.
None at the time.
Yeah, much later.
And, I mean, A, you've got to think they're not the only three.
Oh, yeah.
Look, I mean, such an extensive period of time that this was happening.
You know, I mean, you know that somebody knew something and didn't say anything because, hey, this guy was a coach, which means he's probably well-respected in the community or in the locale or not want to overtip the apple cart.
I mean, what's the joke paternal stuff?
Hang on, isn't it a bit more than well-respected in the community?
Wouldn't this guy be the gateway to bigger and better things for your kids?
That too.
That too.
I mean, if he gives them ice time, they'll get practiced and noticed and scouts.
I mean, he's got a lot of power for people who really want to go the distance, right?
Yeah.
And Fleury actually wrote an autobiography, and he talks quite a bit about the abuse.
He blamed the abuse for turning him into a raging alcoholic lunatic.
And a drug user.
It was drugs and alcohol that drove him out of the NHL, right?
He said he spent most of his income on alcohol, drugs, gambling, and women, and at one point placed a loaded gun in his mouth and contemplated suicide in 2004.
Yeah, he was forced out, I think, of the NHL for drug addiction and abuse in 2009.
I think he tried to get a...
No, he was, I think, a couple of years earlier than he tried to I think some British hockey.
And then he tried to come back, which failed.
And I think he finally quit for good in 09.
That's when this book came out.
But yeah, that's the standard self-medication that comes from trauma.
I guess my question is always, the fuck are the parents?
I mean, do you not notice if your child's being molested?
Is there no personality change?
Is there like, what the hell?
Yeah.
So in a direct correlation to the conversation we were having earlier...
Theo Fleury wrote his autobiography and a bunch of sexual abuse survivors came forward and said, you know, you're an inspiration for me for talking about this.
Now I'm going to come forward.
And now he's actually volunteering with some organizations that help male sexual abuse victims.
But, you know, is he better off for having experienced that?
Oh, God, no.
No, because the benefit that you bring to the world...
Is only necessary because of the prevalence of the abuse that you suffered.
Yeah.
Right?
So it's sort of...
I have to understand it.
Yeah.
I mean, you know, it's like if you cure cancer, that's better than, you know, being brave in the face of cancer or whatever, right?
I mean, that's preferable.
So bad things can produce good outcomes.
Yes.
But if I were to believe that people are better off from abuse, then by treating my child gently, I would be harming her.
That would be too paradoxical.
This would be like, y'all hate me for this now.
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
This is for your own good, honey, or whatever, then traumatize the hell out of her so that she can be a change agent of the world.
I just don't think that's my place, right?
Right, no.
I mean...
And I think I got a lot out of...
A lot out of this, a lot out of your perspective.
I wouldn't necessarily say that it was my belief that my abuse was a good thing.
It can have good effects, though I agree with that.
Yeah, well, hold on.
I mean, for a lot of people, I mean, I did the self-medicating thing.
A lot of people that go down that road, or a lot of people that are abused do that, almost all of them, and a lot of them don't make it.
So, it can have a bad effect early on, you know, and then a bad effect later on in life, and it can, you know, can ultimately kill somebody.
And make them an abuser, right?
There's a theory, I don't remember who said it, but there's a theory that said that if you looked deeply enough into the history of even your worst enemy, you would never find it in your heart to hate them.
And I don't know if that's true or not.
I mean, it's hard to say.
But certainly a lot of the people, I would assume that the people who are abusers were themselves, of course, abused as children.
And certainly we could not say that it did them any good.
Well, all of my parents were abused, and I can't quantify it, but I think in their own way, they tried to do a little bit better, but their stories all seemed much worse than what I got, although what I got was horrific.
Yeah, I have no doubt that my mother had a worse childhood than I did.
I mean, no doubt whatsoever.
But, you know, I'm just not satisfied with incremental change, because I know it's not...
Incremental change, like, the sort of linear change, you know, our progress in technology, surveillance and control is exponential, and our progress in parenting just has to be faster.
Like, I'm sorry for everyone that it's got to go faster, but it's just got to go faster.
We have too many traumatized people with too many powerful weapons in the world right now.
We have got to up the quality of human beings to match the quality of our technology for good and ill.
We just have to go faster.
And this is what I was taught.
When I was a kid and the feminist movement was raging along, nobody said, well, this is going to be a multi-generational change and men have to learn to adapt and we can hope that That marriages will get a little bit better with every generation and so on.
It was like, nope!
None of that!
Freedom now!
Dump the bastard if he doesn't work for you.
If he's a male chauvinist pig, kick him to the curb.
Go get a sensitive Romanian pillow fighter lover who likes carving Henry Moore imitation poetry.
You know, there was no gradual stuff with that.
And with the civil rights movement, it wasn't like, well, you know, racism...
White racism is a multi-generational problem.
We just hope it gets a little better every generation.
But it's like, nope, it is now completely unacceptable.
It's done.
And we're going to put countermeasures in, you know, affirmative action, and we're going to put in wage egalitarianism for women and so on, right?
Equal pay for equal work.
Like, the revolutions that I grew up in, like I was born in 66, and the revolutions that I grew up in were all like, we want it all, and we want it now, and that's how it was.
And so this idea now, what we're talking about, improving parenting, and everyone's like, well, it's got to be slow!
It's too fast!
No!
No, no, no, no, no.
If these kinds of revolutions are supposed to be slow, then we should back the fuck up to the 60s and 70s and tell everyone they did it wrong.
But right now...
Suddenly it's all changed.
Oh, now it's like gradual.
It's got to be slow.
It's like, no, that's not what I was taught.
That's not what everybody was screaming at the top of their lungs when I was a kid.
It's like, no, the revolution is now.
It happens now.
Later is never.
Gradualism in theory is perpetuity and practice.
And that's the way it was.
And so, yeah, I mean, unless people are willing to go back and say, oh, no, no, we hit the gas too much with anti-racism and anti-sexism and And so on.
That was a huge mistake.
And we apologized to everyone we were insensitive to and blah, blah, blah.
And nobody's going to do that.
Nobody's going to go back and circle back.
So I'm like, yep, learned my lesson.
That's how we do it.
And anybody who says otherwise and who hasn't criticized the 60s and 70s is a complete hypocrite.
I have, like, one question.
I've been listening, but my brain is just kind of always thinking, and it came up...
You said that the benefits accrue to others, but it just sort of popped into my head.
I think that there might be maybe obvious benefits accrue to others, but there might be other less obvious benefits that accrue.
For example, let's say I'm a yoga teacher and I help people, and because of all the You know, the struggles and whatnot.
I'm very good at doing that and I feel good about myself for doing that.
Now, in the other fantasy reality where I wasn't abused and I played hockey and I made it, you know, would I have had that fulfilling experience of being able to help people?
There's like a hidden benefit of the Of the value of being able to help change people's lives, you know?
Yeah, I mean, it's the question of the martyr, right?
I mean, so let's take the standard narrative with Nelson Mandela.
The guy spends 27 years in prison, and that's instrumental in ending de Klerk's apartheid regime and so on, right?
Well, and apartheid was fundamentally about interference in free trade because it barred blacks from certain occupations and certain trades and basically it was just an interference with self-ownership and property rights in its most fundamental way.
So, you know, a lot of blacks ended up being more free because Nelson Mandela led them to freedom after 27 years imprisonment, but they didn't have to spend 27 years in prison, right?
And so his incarceration benefited others more than it benefited himself, if that makes sense.
And so this is often the case with people who push debates forward, that other people gain the benefits of the blowback that they experience without having to experience the blowback, if that makes sense.
Yeah.
But that's just part of the deal.
That's the way it works.
I don't think that there's any other way for it to work.
People don't like to have The moral certainty is challenged, or at least very few people do.
I actually quite enjoy it.
That's because I know that the refinement is part of the process of excellence.
But most people have acted badly and have avoided moral questions, and then when those moral questions arise, It is to their credit that they're upset because they're concerned about their conscience coming to life and castigating them and they attack someone who's provoking guilt as if that person is responsible for the bad decisions producing the guilt when they're not.
They're just responsible for the illumination that reveals the decisions as bad.
I'm sorry, you were going to say?
Well, no, I was just going to say, I suppose it's all just a little, I mean, it's just a mental, my whole question is sort of a mental exercise.
There's obviously no other life than the one that we got.
And what are you going to do with having been abused?
You can let it plow you under.
You can make it into something that gives you excuses, which I think is about the worst thing.
That can be done.
You know, well, I was abused and that's why I drink, or I was abused and that's why I'm mean.
And you then turn your former suffering into an excuse for inflicting suffering on yourself and on others.
That's self-education.
And the abuse.
Yeah.
Self-abuse and abuse of others.
And that is obviously the worst way of doing it.
So, you know, it's like if you're infected with an illness, You can decide to fight for a cure and make sure you don't infect anyone.
Or you can just sit home and drink yourself to death because you think you're going to be sick anyway and die anyway.
Or you can say, fuck everyone.
I'm going to go out and lick everyone's sandwiches in the mall and make them sick too, right?
Right.
So given that we suffered under this Obsidian-shielded tyranny of familial violence and aggression, neglect, abuse, you name it.
What are our choices in the reality of that history?
You can't change the history.
You can't change the decisions that other people made.
And I believe that they were decisions.
They became less decisions every year, more habit, but that's the reality of what decisions do.
They change.
Habits start off as the saying goes, as cobwebs, and end up as chains.
So, given that...
I just speak for myself.
I don't speak for you.
I mean, you've got your own voice.
But given that I had that history, what was my choice?
I couldn't undo the history.
I strove mightily to influence people around me to make better decisions, even as a child.
I strove mightily for any glimmer of sympathy, concern, awareness, understanding, empathy from those around me and found their hearts as accessible as a woolly mammoth frozen three miles under a glacier.
So what was my choice?
What was my choice?
Well, I certainly wasn't going to reproduce the abuse.
That was not going to happen because I remembered it too vividly.
And if you remember being hurt You can't hurt others.
There's a study that recently has shown that one of the best ways of inoculating young men against violence is to get them involved in fatherhood because men's physiology change, testosterone level goes down, endorphins surge, bonding chemicals and hormones and agents in the body that produce nurturing thoughts and provoke closeness and so on.
All of this physiologically changes the male, the brain and the body, the whole Neurochemical system alters.
And it's really hard to be violent against or towards another human being when you realize how difficult and challenging it is to make a human being.
You know, it's easy to break a vase unless you know how difficult that vase is to make.
And then you hesitate at the very least, right?
What was my choice?
I wasn't going to reproduce it because I remembered too much what it was like.
And I did spend a fair amount of time pouring it into acting and poetry and plays and novels and so on, which was a great outlet and a very productive and positive thing, I thought to do.
I did, when I was a business owner and manager...
In the software world, in the entrepreneurial world, because I remembered being called into the headmaster's office and being caned or being called into and punished in various schools.
I remember thinking, how am I going to call people into my office when I just need to talk to them about something?
And I'd say, oh, listen, so-and-so, can I borrow you for just a sec?
Which I think is pretty innocuous.
It was the nicest and easiest way I could think of inviting somebody into my office without them shitting their pants, right?
Because, you know, you know, you remember.
You remember what it's like to be under authority.
And when you remember that, then you adjust your behavior as part of that authority.
And that really was the only choice that made any sense to me.
Now, I certainly never set out to become...
Any kind of public figure in this realm.
That was really not part of my big life plan.
I'll do software and then podcasting from my car will lead me to blah, blah, blah.
And of course, the reason why these kinds of conversations are so startling to people and the reason why I thank you and the other listeners so much for...
Having the courage and the honesty and the openness to have these conversations in a public sphere, in a public realm.
You know how much good they do.
You've heard the conversations with other people and how much value that has for you.
And it's an incredibly brave and wonderful thing to do.
And this would never, ever be occurring were it not for the internet and podcasting.
YouTube, there's no conceivable way that these kinds of conversations would end up anywhere near the mainstream.
It's absolutely no way, shape, or form possible.
So technology has shifted underfoot to the point where you and I and countless other victims have a voice.
So another thing I grew up with was gays saying, well, we want a voice, and women saying, well, we want a voice.
Great, fantastic.
I'm glad they got it.
Well, now you and I get a voice.
And I'm sorry if it's upsetting to people, but I'm not sure that's fundamentally true.
What is important is that we speak honestly about what we've experienced and get the support of knowing that we're not alone and get an interaction which breaks the endless pattern of people being victimized and isolated through being victimized.
And then when they attempt to speak their sorrow, the world further victimizes them through ostracism, alienation, and a reinfliction of the isolation itself.
That was the primary purpose of the abuse in the first place.
You can't abuse someone who is not isolated.
So I think that you can do great things and have great power from having suffered.
And that's the best you can make of a bad situation.
And it has its own benefits and proud moments and proud instances.
That other people won't get.
And through public displays of courage, like I think what we're talking about here, we can also help shame people into upping their own standards for conversation and their own standards.
You know, people who have listened to these kinds of conversations, say they grew up in a very happy home, well, next time they hear someone talking about a sad home or a broken home, a violent home, hopefully they'll listen more.
And there will be an openness and an acceptance.
Particularly us men, right?
I mean, particularly us men, to talk about having been victimized at the hands of women.
Because that's the most volatile aspect of this conversation, I think, is adult men talking about having been victimized.
You grow up, and for me, I'm sure it's common, but I saw approval from women, which women generally don't like.
I would seek out women that were damaged, like my mother, and try to fix them subconsciously.
Sometimes I would have these tendencies of trying to Get a woman to sort of mother me a little bit.
All these things are, of course, horrible decisions to make when trying to have a relationship with a woman.
That wound gets cut open again when you go out into the world because no one gives a shit.
Especially not the women.
In fact, they're repulsed by what happens to a male.
They like me.
They like the way I look and everything.
But until I dealt with a lot of the abuse and stuff and learned, when they would get past the looks and see what I was like on the inside, they would just leave.
Just leave.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, no, it is.
Mothers are, it's very, very tough for people to talk about this stuff.
I'll give you an example.
I don't know if you know who, a woman named Silken Laumann.
Do you know who?
No, but I'll look her up.
She is at all.
No, so Silken Laumann, Mike, it's a trivial question for sports.
Nuts.
I don't know.
Silken Laumann is one of Canada's most decorated rowers.
A multiple medalist whose leg was ripped apart in a devastating boat collision in 1992.
She famously came back in just 10 weeks and multiple operations later to win a bronze medal for Canada at the Barcelona Olympics.
Now, obviously, most people only know the Barcelona lyrics because of Freddie Mercury's song, and rightly so.
Apparently, there were some sports as well.
So she's a writer, a motivational speaker, and so on, and she did some great stuff.
Okay, so let me just...
Her uplifting message of overcoming obstacles with positive thinking, mental strength, and courage hid a darker truth.
Her middle-class childhood, Mississauga, Ontario, was ravaged by a poisonous and abusive relationship with a beautiful, mercurial mother.
Now, that way of phrasing it is really interesting, and I won't read the whole thing, because it really just...
Continues on.
But just how that's framed.
Her middle class childhood was ravaged by a poisonous and abusive relationship.
You see, the relationship is like a third party.
It's the relationship that's poisonous and abusive, not the mother.
And the mother was beautiful and mercurial.
Which means moody and high-tempered and passionate.
Mercurial is not a negative word.
And this is all the way through the article.
And that is how things are put.
She wasn't the victim of an abusive and violent mother.
It was a poisonous and abusive relationship that ravaged her, and her mother was beautiful and mercurial.
Relationship sort of implies it was partly her fault as well.
Yeah, yeah, like it's equal, right?
Yeah.
When it's not, you know?
It's not equal.
No, she was the victim.
I mean, I couldn't imagine a wife with an abusive husband having things described this way.
No, that would be a monstrous, you know...
She was the victim of a monstrously abusive man who controlled her and beat her and blah blah blah, right?
Yeah, and something about the patriarchy.
Oh, without a doubt.
Yeah.
And, of course, her mother's dysfunction is explained away.
Not explained away, but is given a cause, which almost never happens with men, right?
You can get into it.
I'm sorry, I was just looking.
I don't want to, because I read this a while back.
But yeah, people can look at this.
Silken, S-I-L-K-E-N, Lauman, L-A-U-M-A-N-N. It's in McLean's.
It's worth reading, just I think to get a sense of...
How hard it is for people to just look at this straight.
And it's a view that men can bring.
I think that it's harder because women are so often, particularly abusive women, are so often protected by this obliqueness and this avoidance and so on.
And because men see how men are portrayed and then see how women are portrayed, I think we have a lot to So, you and I talking about being victims of moms is really quite a challenge.
I talked earlier about Alan Cummings and that's C-U-M-M-I-N-G-S and his book which is worth reading because his relationship with his father and his relationship with his mother It's entirely different, like they're just two completely separate people, different people.
Mike, you wanted to add something about the Theo Fleury stuff?
Yeah, this is a bit of a separate subject, but I'm just thinking of the Theo Fleury stuff, especially since hockey was a huge part of my childhood, and it's kind of hit me a bit strongly.
He wasn't one of those, he wasn't like a name where it's like, oh, I have this guy's jersey, he's my favorite player.
But he was certainly among that, like, list of people that I knew about.
And, you know, I'd have friends, we'd play, like, hand hockey with soft little balls.
We'd pretend with a puck on our knees in my basement.
And, you know, we'd have our drafts.
And, you know, he was always in the top few that were drafted.
So he's a pretty notable name from my childhood.
He was amazing.
Yeah, great, great player.
And it's interesting to me, like, you know, he won a Stanley Cup, he won a gold medal for Canada playing hockey, and, you know, someone at the caliber of an athlete as he was, you knew at the time, certainly my impression as a kid, thinking, man, this guy's got to be making a lot of money doing this whole thing.
And you think someone like that, I mean, from the perspective of a kid, it's like, wow, this guy's got it all.
You know, he's great at what he's doing.
He's successful.
He's making a lot of money.
Man, things gotta be great.
And then you read, you know, drug problems, contemplating suicide, just...
And the guy's life was a complete mess at the time where, you know, from the perspective on the outside, looking at him, you know, for the brief 20-minute periods where he's out there on the ice, it's like, God, this guy's got it all.
And then you look...
Peel back, layer after layer, and you see, God, his life was a complete mess, and he probably would have traded it for anything at that point, you know, to be in a different skin.
And I was just really struck by that contrast between, you know, my perspective looking up at someone like him when I was young versus a reality.
And I certainly, you know, read autobiographies of people that had an impact on you, and you see that, you know, the life that you might have glamorized or You know, thought, oh man, Perks, they don't have a worry in the world.
You know, they got money, they got success, you know, they got everything they could possibly want.
And then you look and it's just, it's a horror show.
And that disparity, it's just really striking to me.
And I've certainly had examples of that that have come up in the past.
But, I mean, hockey was like my life for my early childhood.
And, you know, he's a pretty big name.
So it's certainly another strong example for me that struck me pretty strongly.
I get exactly what you're saying, too.
Yeah, he was, you know, someone I always thought was, you know, this incredible superstar, you know, top, I believe he was a center or a wing, I'm not sure, but, you know, at the time he was one of the top all-stars in the game.
And I felt the same way.
I thought he was, you know, God, his life must be perfect.
It's almost like a...
I mean, I can understand it as a young kid because I was playing hockey since, you know, I could pretty much walk.
I was on skates.
But it's certainly something that I've kind of broken my habit of as an adult.
But I don't think everyone...
Certainly not everyone on the planet has broken their habit of kind of romanticizing celebrity and celebrities.
And it's certainly, you know, these are real people.
And more often than not, they do have real problems.
And looking at the grass, greener on the other side of the bridge kind of thing, maybe you don't want their life.
Maybe you wouldn't want Theo Fleury's hockey career, if that's what it entailed, or the schedule that it entailed.
And it's important to humanize the people, even the people that you look up to.
It's important to humanize them.
My life was almost the same as his, except that I went and I played junior AAA for a couple years, and I didn't quite make it because I just couldn't keep my head together.
It was just too much.
And so I ended up turning to drugs after that.
So hockey played an even bigger part of your life than it did mine, it sounds like.
I mean, this was going to be a career.
Yeah, it was my dream.
Well, the one thing I had access to that could get me away from the mental abuse, which was almost constant, and the physical abuse, which was bad.
You know, really bad as well was hockey.
Like if I turned to computers or anything else, there was kind of this like, you're wasting too much time on that.
It's like very critical, like, you know, what am I doing?
But for some reason, I could, you know, go outside and play, you know, hockey in the driveway or I could do that and the sun went down and there really wouldn't be any complaints.
So I just threw myself into it and I think that's probably what Theo Flory did and what a lot of other people do is that they find one thing that gives them a sense of freedom and they just end up fixating on it.
I'm curious for you, Eric.
I mean, I've certainly had this with certain things in my life, where it's like, oh, if I get that, then finally everything will be great.
Like, there's one singular goal or accomplishment or, you know, something that once I get to that point, it's like, all the problems will just wash away.
Or, like, if I lose five pounds, then I'll be happy.
Oh, certainly stuff like that, too.
Well, I mean, what I've come to in the study of, I don't know, I don't want to call it philosophy here on a philosophy show with, you know, someone who's kind of my hero in philosophy, but I've studied a lot of things in yoga philosophy, you know...
Namaste.
Yeah, and like...
I've had some spiritual teachers, which it's not the same thing, I don't believe.
But they would say things like, be happy right now.
What's stopping you?
Really look into that.
Why is it that it's got to be, oh, when I lose five pounds, I'll be happy?
Because I'll tell you from my personal experience, I got sick after...
Well, I mean, it's too complicated.
I'll just say, at one point in my life, I got exposed to lead, and I became very sick from the heavy metal poisoning, and my weight went up.
And I've got that under control, and my weight's been coming down.
And, you know, being an athlete and everything, and then being overweight, it was kind of like being in a prison, and it was horrible.
And...
And then, you know, I would think to myself, you know, oh, if I could just get back in shape, I'll be happy.
I could just get...
I recently lost, you know, the majority of the weight that was still the last tier that was hard to lose.
So I've lost, like, about 30 pounds.
Went right past my goal weight that I wanted, and I'm, like, still going, and that's all great.
But it didn't give me that happiness that I thought I would get.
And then, you know, then it just kind of hit me.
It's like, why aren't I happy?
It really is like a happiness is for tomorrow type attitude.
And I was thinking with like Theo Fleury and stuff.
And, you know, certainly you, I mean, you're playing hockey at a pretty high level.
It's like, I wonder if, you know, that carrot dangling, like when I make the NHL, you know, then, you know, things are going to be, it's going to be the storybook.
It's going to be exactly what I want.
Not going to have any problems, not going to have that.
And then I imagine, you know, I haven't read his autobiographies.
This is just rank speculation, but I wonder if you get to that stage, like, okay, I'm in the NHL. Now if I make the playoffs, or I'm on a cup team that wins the Stanley Cup, then finally, or I'm a leading scorer, the can keeps getting kicked down the road when it comes to happiness.
Like, oh, I need that, that other external, tangible thing in order to feel it, you know?
It's the same thing that drives consumerism in a way.
It's like, if I get this car, then that girl will like me.
Or if I get this car, then I'll feel good about myself.
I guess if you break the person down with abuse when they're little, then they think they're bad, so they think they don't deserve to be happy, and then they have to do all this incredible work to become happy in the future at some point.
Happiness is like tangible accomplishments or physical things.
It's not being a good person and having great people in your life and, you know, being virtuous and trying to make the world a better place.
I mean, that's, no, it's, you know, do I have the...
The nicest car.
Well, it really is the things you just said it wasn't.
Right.
But that's the mentality.
Realizing that was huge for me and that allowed me to work on happiness as a skill or trying to be more happy with just where I'm at and not believing this bullshit story in my head that You know, it's just, you know, well, if it wasn't this 30 pounds, it must be the last, you know, 5% of body fat that I really, like, if I lose that, then I'll be happy.
The goalposts keep moving.
Yeah, it's just, you know, it's this ego-based, they call it the wheel of suffering, samsara, in Hindu yogic traditions.
And it's just this ego-based, you know, chatter that just drives most people.
And, you know, I think it's just like...
It's part of never relaxing, almost.
Like, everything's so stimulating and so...
It's a distraction.
Yeah, everything's so distracting.
And it's uncomfortable to look at something.
Such a simple question as, are you happy right now, just as you are, is uncomfortable for people.
They would rather watch the sports game than look deeply inside and I don't even know if it's a society thing.
I think it's just that inquiry is uncomfortable for people.
And I think Stefan talked about that in the other show when he had talked about the dream and he realized that the dream was...
This waterfall, this tidal wave was how other people felt when he talked philosophy to them because they just feel like they're being destroyed.
If someone is really, really unhappy and you try to get them to figure out why, when they've been just distracting it, distracting it, distracting it, it's going to be a tidal wave.
So, there's that.
Oh, if you base your entire life around, you know, on a foundation of illusions, and then someone comes and says, hey, that's illusion, all of a sudden, oh boy.
You know, it's like a tidal wave of getting smacked with reality, which is certainly uncomfortable, to put it mildly.
It can't, yeah.
I mean, it can make...
People will get violent if you press them too much.
I mean, if they're not ready.
And so...
As I'm working on this stuff, I see these sorts of things in other people.
I just try to give them their freedom to be as they are.
In order for me to stay happy, if I start judging...
Trying to pressure them into things that maybe they're not ready for, then I'm not going to be happy.
That's not a very happy place to be.
So I just, like, I want to stay happy.
I'm just going to, you know, accept them where they're at, love them as much as I can.
You know, try to, try to, if, you know, there's a time, like, this is, to me, like, you know, how I teach.
Stefan has a show, and, you know, it's amazing, and I love it.
But, like, what...
What I try to do is just, you know, well, I'm still working on myself, but I just try to do that as well with other people to just, like, maybe see, like, oh, I was that way.
I can forgive them for being that way because I remember it.
You know, it's really interesting that you bring that up, Eric, because it's, you know, empathy for someone in a similar situation to you were.
I was thinking earlier, you know, talking about the hero, so I was thinking about empathy for heroes.
Yeah.
A bit, too, because, I mean, I certainly wasn't like, gee, I wonder what it's like to be Theo Fleury.
You know, it's just like, oh, man, no, he's just a shining god on a hill somewhere that has the perfect life and everything's great.
And, you know, that kind of mentality of, like, just dehumanization, this guy's just perfect, you know, no problems whatsoever, just strikes me.
Like, no empathy for heroes.
An interesting idea, you know?
He was a hero of mine, in a way.
Like, I mean, if I had grown up on the West Coast, I would have...
I mean, I was, like, Pat LaFontaine was, like, one of my heroes.
Oh, I'm in Buffalo, so Pat LaFontaine...
Yeah, you know, I loved...
The team that the Sabres had with Howard Chuck and Andrew Chuck and Turgeon and Phil Housley and Lafon.
That team was amazing.
They had Hasek.
They were so good.
Oh, the hockey nerds are going to love this call.
I love that team.
The story that you brought up about Theo Fleury, look, it gives me a break.
I can be like, hey, I wanted to be that.
I didn't make it.
I always beat myself up about not making it.
Well, look, he made it and he still had the same problems.
It's like I can give myself a break.
If you keep kicking the can down the road when it comes to happiness, it's not saying you can will yourself to be happy in the moment.
I'm sure the 42-year-old Muslim policeman that had a rifle pointed at his head today couldn't have willed himself to be happy in the moment.
Happiness often requires making some changes with the things that aren't working for you in your life.
But, I mean, it's placing happiness and the ability to achieve happiness on some far-reaching exterior goal that then the ground keeps moving or the goalposts keep moving, and it's just like, well, you know, I got it, but no, this other thing that's going to take me years to get to, that's really hard to achieve.
I mean, it's just...
And sometimes happiness can be a lot more practical than people make it out to be.
And a lot more in front of you and not far-reaching, you know, or shiny in the sense of, I'll be happy when I, you know, get the brand new Cadillac, as opposed to, you know, hey, when I sit down and have a great meal with someone I care about, you know?
Earlier, Stefan said some things.
I'd like to take notes because I... I get so much out of what he says.
He said, if you remember being hurt, you won't want to hurt others.
If you remember what it's like to be under authority, when you have authority over others, you're going to use that in a kinder way.
And it's so true.
When I see people that...
Or maybe doing something that I used to do or whatever.
Not only do I just forgive them, And for that, because, you know, I can empathize with it.
But then I also get this other opportunity to forgive myself for all the, you know, the pressure that I put myself on under when I was going through that.
And that's how the Theo Fleury thing really has been, like, great.
I didn't expect to get this great, you know, an experience out of this call.
As I got, because I really, that thing, like, you know, he was, you know, a Stanley Cup champion, a world, you know, champion, Olympic champion, and still felt like killing himself, which I, you know, I only made it to where I made it to, which was, like, really good, but I had, you know, drug problems.
I felt like killing myself, like, you know, It's really liberating that he shared his story, and it's actually even liberating to say this stuff on your show.
Well, in the case of Flurry, too.
Yeah.
Similar to you talking about your experience here.
So many people gained so many positive things from him talking about his tragic story and what happened to him.
I mean, sexual abuse survivors said, oh, now I can talk about it.
Charity work resulted.
The real strength is in vulnerability.
In so many cases, now I'm aware that there's predators out there and being vulnerable around certain dangerous people is not a good idea.
This is all challenging, tricky, black belt level stuff in some ways.
But, you know, that vulnerability, when it matters, talking about important subjects can have such a substantial impact.
And I talked earlier about, you know, empathy for heroes.
I'm just thinking about it.
It's like, there's no empathy for anybody.
I didn't have any empathy or even think for a second of Theo Fleury and what it was like to be him and live his life and what was going on for him.
I didn't get that when I was a kid and I was sitting alone at a lunchroom table or something of the case.
No one came up to me and saw how I was doing.
No one asked Theo Fleury how he was doing.
You know, so many people go through life and no one gives a shit.
It's just like, oh, we are these automatons moving forward and no one cares, and I'm going to bounce around and do this thing or this task or knock this thing off my list that I needed to get done today.
And then you wake up and you're six years old and you're like, what the fuck happened?
So, three cheers for not waking up at 60 years old, going, what the fuck happened, and going, hey, let's put the brakes on this in the moment, and really connect and figure out how I can be happy without the far-reaching goals, and how I can have empathy for people that deserve it, and display some vulnerability when necessary to those that will benefit from it.
Well, this show has been, like, really great for me, and I just want to thank you guys for everything that you do.
Oh, thank you, Eric.
Thank you.
Thank you for sharing.
I knew there was a reason I wanted to go on more with the Silken Lament story.
I'm sorry for the pause earlier.
So this is a little bit of what, remember this beautiful mercurial mother?
My younger brother, she writes, my younger brother Jörg, was a cute, mischievous kid who could do no wrong in my parents' eyes.
At least when he was little, my mom used to take him in her arms, stroke his hair, and call him her little Liebchen.
But I came to believe his upbringing might have been the most confusing of all, caught as he was between my mom's mercurial moods and my dad's great expectations.
When Jörg was eight, he started sleeping with a knife under his pillow.
He never needed to use it, but it lay close as he slept.
Years later, when I asked him why, he said, I didn't trust mom.
I believe my mom loved us in her own way, but in her darkest hours, she would say things like, I could kill you and then kill myself.
Oh God!
What seemed to transform her words into a frightening possibility was the fact that a distraught mother in a nearby neighborhood had shot her kids then herself.
Another mother had gassed her family while they were sleeping.
My mom would get worked into a frenzy screaming and sobbing and throwing dishes.
She would howl that she was going to gas us all.
Her threat was that she would kill herself and take us with her.
She never did anything to show that she'd go through with it, but I slept.
With my window open.
My mom later insisted her threats hadn't been serious, yet I felt that we lived in an unsafe house.
Really?
It's hard to convey just how volatile the situation felt.
I remember one day when my father was out trimming the hedges.
There was a woman sun tanning in a bikini in the yard next door.
My mother was consumed by jealousy.
She felt my dad was staring.
To punish him, she went into the basement and pulled out the plug from his power cord so that my dad would have to head down to the basement and plug it in again.
This was repeated a few times before my father raced to catch my mother on her way into the basement and lock her in there.
Up to this point, it was almost silly a plotline for an episode of I Love Lucy, but my mom's rage bubbled over.
She grabbed an axe from the basement and hacked her way out through the door.
For me, every day felt like it could take that kind of unpredictably scary turn.
Perhaps Danielle and Jörg felt the same way.
It's a sister and brother.
As we schemed together about an escape for which we created a kit with bandages and a flashlight.
Anyway, we can put a link to this excerpt.
I'll give it over to you, Mike.
This was the mom who is beautiful and mercurial and who she says, I really believe that she loved her.
She loved us in her own way.
And later she became a cutter, she cut herself, felt suicidal, became anorexic.
And this is how little truth can still be spoken about rank female evil.
That is a death threat against a child, a repeated death threat against a child.
And she is beautiful and mercurial and it's a troubling relationship.
We cannot get this connection to female evil, which is absolutely necessary, and that the kindest and most necessary thing we can do to treat women as equals and to help women in a non-paternalistic way is simply to speak the truth and reverse the genders.
See how it would seem, right?
Love her in her own way.
God.
Yeah, she said, I believe my mom loved us in her own way, but in her darkest hours she would say things like, I could kill you and then kill myself.
Different definition of love.
The one that I have.
I believe that my mom loved me.
Like, I have a memory.
Like, I had lots of...
I know why I had lots of infections, but I guess that's not important.
But I had lots of...
I remember her bringing me outside in the cold air so I could breathe and her holding me all wrapped up and saying nice things to me and looking up at the sky and how beautiful it was.
Memories like that make me believe that she loved me.
But, you know, it's hard.
It's hard, you know?
Did she just bring me out there because that was the best way to get me to stop coughing so she could sleep?
No, but love is not a mood.
Yeah.
Right?
Love is not a mood.
Love is not, well, that person is happy in the moment, is having a contented moment.
And is affectionate in the moment, and therefore, that is love.
No, no, no, no.
No.
That's like saying, I'm dieting every time I'm not eating a candy bar.
Right?
I gotta sleep.
It's tough to eat those candy bars in the shower.
It always feels weird to take a shit while eating a Mr.
Big, because it feels like you're putting in exactly what's coming out.
Might as well be just one long tube.
So love is not a mood.
I mean, yeah, I remember times when my mom was reading the newspaper and I'd be reading a comic when I was a kid and there were these moments of peace.
Yeah, but what the hell does that have to do with anything?
I think you...
I'm not going to say what you do, but I think I romanticized it to think it was love, and I think that that's maybe what the rower is doing, saying...
But that's what it's for.
Yeah.
That's why...
Like, abuse is a dance.
Right?
Abuse is a seduction.
Because the abuser...
Wishes to maintain the abuse.
This is all my opinion.
I'm not trying to tell you about your mom.
I'm just telling you my thoughts are about abuse, just so you know, right?
But the abuser wishes to stay in your life.
An unrelenting abuser is a bad abuser.
A good abuser sprinkles in some sugar.
Because then there's enough for you to cling to, enough for you to hang on to.
A good abuser will also find external causes of their dysfunction.
In other words, they will say, well, I acted badly, but your dad wasn't helping out, we were broke, I was unwell, the doctors injected me with this illness, space aliens told me, I mean, whatever, right?
But they will create some external, and that way, they appeal to your sentimentalization of them, and, of course, they then appeal to the greatest weakness among men, which is pity.
So the fact that there are positive memories is not a description of love interrupted.
You know, well, she loved us in her own way, and then she threatened to kill us.
I mean, you understand that's crazy, right?
And there are some times when she had some positive memories of her mother, of course.
People have their ups and downs, everything's going well, they had a good night's sleep, they enjoyed their meal, whatever, right?
And then everything's fine.
Although I think it was Christopher Hitchens who wrote about Saddam Hussein, that like Hitler, he was never more dangerous than when he was in a good mood.
But the fact that you have some positive memories, listen, abusers particularly are addicted to family members because they're not very good at making friends because they're not very nice people, right?
Right.
So they have to keep the family members around.
Which means there's a whole parade and array of tricks and strategisms and machinations and manipulations that abusers do.
An abuser is no longer an abuser when he or she fully accepts responsibility without excuses, without prevarication, without avoidance, without projection,
without denial, without fogging Without not remembering, without blame, they fully accept what they did and that they were fully responsible for it and you were fully a victim when you were a child.
That is the only kindness that an abuser can do because it relieves you of the self-attack the abuser planted in you because the abuser always says, I harmed you Because you were bad.
Which creates the self-attack that gets the abuser off the hook.
And tragically keeps you addicted to the positive response of the abuser.
You're going to keep going back for more.
And when the abuser goes to therapy, and when the abuser offers to pay for your therapy, and when the abuser offers whatever is necessary to make restitution, even if that means leaving you alone for a while, if the abuser...
That's how the cycle is broken.
But I'm telling you, as a great dad, my daughter doesn't have to...
I remember one time four years ago we had that great moment.
Yeah, and if I have kids, it'll never...
It'll be the same story.
I'm going to do what you did.
I will never repeat what my mother did or what my father did by allowing her.
He was passive most of the time, especially when the stepfather came in the picture.
He knew about the abuse, but he was still passive.
I would never be passive while someone else abuses my child.
I will never abuse my child.
That is if I decide to have one.
Well, that's what I wanted to say.
I certainly do appreciate the call in and certainly hugely and massively, you know, as present and future denizen of the planet, hugely and massively appreciate your commitment to peaceful parenting in the future and to the wonderful work that you're doing, spreading philosophy and self-knowledge to the people that you meet.
I think that's fantastic.
And that, of course, is the greatest gift that this show can receive, is that people bring philosophy into their lives and to the lives of those around them, wherever that's possible.
So a huge thanks for that.
That makes all of it and more worthwhile.
Stefan, thank you so much for all the help.
I'm going to, you know, continue to donate when I can, and I will always be listening.
Just tonight was really great for me.
It was better than I ever expected.
So thank you.
Fantastic.
Thank you, thank you, thank you so much for those of you.
I believe there's at least three or four of you who have yet to donate to support the show.
Put your money where your morals are or your time.
If you don't have any money, you can share videos and you can go to fdrpodcasts.com to share videos and – or to share podcasts and to share videos.
So please, you know what you need to do.
I don't even need to tell you.
FDR podcast.
I'm sorry, freedomainradio.com slash donate is where you need to go.
Obviously, do not spend a single dime that you cannot afford.
But if you can, it is most gratefully appreciated.
And we are going to continue to improve the quality of the show and reach more and more and more people, I believe.
It's now or never for the thrust of philosophy into the gizzards of irrationality in the world.
And I think we're in a pretty good position to build momentum and keep growing.
And I think it's one of the greatest gifts you can give to the future is to help spread philosophy around the world.
