June 26, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
03:22:08
3009 Anti-Human Propaganda - Call In Show - June 24th, 2015
Question 1: Since nature is connected in a huge ecosystem, how can you be the one to decide what to do with your property if what happens on it will affect everyone?Question 2: We haven’t done one of these in a while - Stefan analyzes a caller’s dream to see if the unconscious metaphor generator makes any sense when compared to his real world predicament and challenges. An incredibly interesting example of the power of the unconscious mind!Question 3: There is a disconnect between my inner and outer life. I am very empathetic and I feel deeply about a great many things, but I avoid stress in any form to the point of disassociation and I am very fearful of negative reactions and consequences. I want to stop being dishonest and evasive but I don't want to make any harmful mistakes. I have come to understand that I am somewhat emotionally inept. What are some steps that I can take in order to grow an emotional backbone?
Martin wrote in and said, because all nature is connected in a huge ecosystem, how can you be the one to decide what to do with your property if what happens on it will affect everyone?
All right.
What would be the alternative for you deciding what to do with your property?
What would be the alternative?
Hi, can you hear me?
I don't really know the answer to this question.
I think some of nature is owned collectively and you have a responsibility.
Of things, like the things that are on your property, like the trees and the things that won't move, they belong to you.
But things that move in and out, like, I don't know, the air or some animals, you have to be, you can't, you don't have the saying as to what to do with them.
Okay, no, I understand all of that.
That was sort of in your question.
My question, though, is what is the solution?
Right?
So if you're saying, I think you're saying there's a problem that when things are owned collectively, that people tend to be irresponsible, right?
So clearly, if people were perfectly responsible, then we wouldn't need...
And we wouldn't have any concerns about this.
But what you're saying is that when people can offload their costs onto other people, like if there's some factory owner who doesn't have to pay for scrubbers for his chimney pipes or his soot makers or whatever, if he doesn't have to buy cleaners, For his smokestacks.
That's the phrase I was thinking of, smokestacks.
If he doesn't have to buy scrubbers, then he won't want to because he wants to maximize his profits and so on.
So when you can offload costs onto other people and get more profit yourself, are you saying that is a challenge that philosophy needs to address?
Yeah, kind of, because I feel like right now the government says a little bit about what you can and can't do when it comes to polluting the air.
And then in a free market, when rules are just enforced socially, then how do you...
Just what responsibilities does a person have, like moral responsibilities does a person have for his property?
Yeah, I mean, before we get to all of that, because of course if people perfectly accepted their moral responsibilities, we wouldn't need ethics to begin with, right?
I mean, the fact is that people have choices and people often make the wrong choices.
And so we need a system of ethics to try and have people do the right thing in the same way that we need a system of nutrition in order for people to choose healthy diets for their particular circumstances or whatever, right?
Yeah.
So, we have a problem, which is people tend to prefer taking care of their own property, and people tend not to worry as much about taking care of collective or other people's property, right?
Yeah.
Okay.
So, I have to come back to you and say, what is your solution?
Now, your solution cannot involve a government.
Because I'm mean.
The solution cannot involve a government because if people despoil or prey upon or overexploit unowned or collectively owned resources, the government, by definition, is an unowned or collectively owned resource.
So if you're worried about people polluting the air because they personally profit and they offload the cost of the pollution to other people, Then saying the government should solve this problem makes no sense, because people will be temporarily in control of the government's finances,
the government's money printing ability, the government's legal power of enforcement, and what they're going to do, by the same logic of your concern, is they're going to despoil the government, they're going to over-exploit governmental resources at the harm Of others who are not in a position of power to profit from those situations, right?
Yeah.
But how...
The reason why I called in, because I don't really have an answer yet.
You do have an answer.
I bet you have an answer called government.
Let's pass a law.
Yeah.
So you do have an answer.
That's an easy go-to answer.
But I don't want to accept that answer.
And that's why I called in.
To hopefully, maybe we can work together and find a better answer for this.
Okay, yeah.
And I don't mean to be adversarial.
It's not you in particular.
Just in general, there's this...
Annoying thing that happens where people use government the way that religious people use religion.
In other words, there's a problem, right?
Well, what's going to solve that problem?
Government!
I say, well, where did we come from?
God made it!
Where did the universe come from?
God made it!
What is virtue?
What God says!
It's just this knee-jerk, not you, but this knee-jerk, there's a problem, and then there's this magic, magic solution.
And it doesn't take a moment's thought to figure out, as you have, I'm sure, that the government Is proportionately as bad a solution to the despoilation of collective property as anything else that can conceivably be imagined.
Exactly the same impulses and drives that will cause someone to pollute An unowned piece of property are exactly the same drives and impulses that will cause people to abuse government power.
I mean, the fact that not you, but again, the fact that people say, well, we need the government to protect us from environmental predation, from the over-exploitation of collective resources, we need the government to save us from that, it's like, have they never heard of the national debt?
The national debt is intergenerational financial pollution.
Of the wickedest, wickedest kind.
Because it robs the future of the ability to pay for environmental protection.
Think when fiat currency comes crashing down and people are under a bench kissing their collective fiscal asses goodbye that anyone's going to give a shit about CO2 PPM? I don't think so.
You need wealth to have environmental protection, and the government, by systematically destroying the future wealth of society, is stripping the future of its capacity for environmental protection.
It is the worst form of fiscal pollution that can be imagined.
So, for those who aren't aware of that, there's a general thing in society where people say, here's a problem.
Government!
Government!
It's market failure!
Yeah, yeah.
Because market failure, compared to the endless intergalactic clusterfrag of government programs, market failure is everyone's big problem.
So, let's discard that and discard the idea of government and turn to true knowledge and wisdom in the same way that when we discard the idea of Genesis, we can actually start to talk physics and learn something other than propaganda.
Again, I'm not putting you in that camp.
So, give me an example of a pollution that you consider to be the most difficult or the worst.
Well, I had three examples named up.
It's not only pollution that I was thinking about.
I do think that even though CO2 is plant food, the CO2 that turns into trees will turn back into CO2. Once the trees burn up or once we eat the food and things like that.
So I don't think fossil fuels is a good way to go.
And then I was also thinking about, for example, if you have a river running...
I'm sorry, hang on, hang on.
I don't know what you mean when you say, I don't think that fossil fuels are a good way to go.
I don't know what that means.
Well, because you're putting more CO2 into the system that was there before.
And then you don't have to deal with it.
It sinks into the oceans and it sinks into the atmosphere.
So...
No, no, I'm sorry, but compared to what, right?
I mean, compared to what?
Like magical self-generating energy sources that suck power from another dimension?
I mean, compared to what?
If you don't have fossil fuels, it's not like people then go without heat or cooking.
What do they do?
Let's say you banned all fossil fuels tomorrow.
Yeah.
No oil, no coal.
What would people do to get heat and to cook?
Yeah.
That's a really good question.
I don't really know the answer.
I know there's ways to be more efficient and use fossil fuels more seriously.
No, no, no.
Forget I'll be more efficient.
I know the answer because you see it.
What happens is people say, oh, okay, so there's no fossil fuels anymore.
And I live in Bangladesh or I live in Morocco or some outskirts of somewhere, wherever, right?
So what they do is they find every living tree they can find and they cut it down and they use the wood to warm their huts and to cook their food.
And so what happens is because they're cutting down trees, you end up with more carbon dioxide in the air because there are fewer trees to recycle it than you would.
The great thing about fossil fuels is that you are burning trees who are no longer consuming carbon dioxide and producing oxygen.
They've been dead for millions of years.
And so fossil fuels are great in that, yeah, they produce pollution when they burn and let's keep looking for better ways of doing things and so on.
But I think that it is arguably the cheapest and best solution to the problem that Mother Nature, that bitch goddess gave us, which is that human beings generally prefer cooked food because it kills microorganisms and tastes better.
And also, human beings prefer not freezing to death at nighttime.
It's not our fault that Mother Nature make the planet this variable in temperature, but there's a strong argument to be made that fossil fuels are the best solution at the moment because they keep trees alive.
But I think it's okay to use fossil fuels.
But because the air around us is collective and no one really cares about it, it's like all the emissions that you let out, they leave you.
If you had to take care of all the emissions you let out from fossil fuels, then you would probably still use fossil fuels.
If you had to take care of everything that you let out, then you would think about it differently.
I'm sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by take care.
Like if, for example, if you had to, like all the carbon dioxide that was coming out of your car, if you had to store that in some, you know, bag and then carry it with you and find some way to, you know, sell it or recycle it or, you know, put it into a tree again or something like that, you would use it more wisely.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, sure.
I mean, if everybody had to collect their own shit in a bag like Borat, then, you know, people would think twice about eating Indian food.
I get it.
I understand that.
But so what?
I mean, that's never going to happen.
That's not how the planet or the economy works.
So I'm still trying to understand what your issue is and what you're trying to solve.
Yeah, I don't...
I don't really...
I don't really know how...
I know the issue is that, like, people do pollute...
Like the air and river waters and they hunt species to extinction and things like that.
But I don't know any way to solve it.
Okay.
Well, first of all, we don't even know if it's a problem.
Like, for instance, a species called polio and smallpox were pretty much hunted to extinction.
A species of microorganism that causes polio and smallpox were hunted to extinction.
I'm okay with that.
I'm okay with that.
I'm pretty okay with going to a mall and not having a giant fucking grizzly bear open up and spill out my Manchu wok orange chicken lunch, right?
So there's some things I'm okay with.
I assume that you're okay when you go swimming in the ocean that...
To a large degree, there aren't giant man-eating sharks.
I assume that you like when you go for a hike that you're not being set upon by packs of wolves, Liam Neeson style.
And so it's okay, right, that we've civilized at least some areas of the planet and you don't have to worry about getting eaten.
I'm also assumed that you're fine with soap, right?
Soap, of course, kills animals.
job infesting up your insides and all that.
So there's some things I assume that you're very happy that we've eradicated and wiped out.
But there are other things, you know, it'd be great to wipe out malaria, wouldn't you say?
That'd be a nice microorganism to get rid of and all that.
So, some stuff you like and some stuff you don't, right?
Coincidentally, two days ago, I was out, or this weekend, I was out camping with my friends and we ran out of water and we ended up like filtering some river water in, you know, like some campfire charcoal over, like in a sock.
And then we all got terribly sick from that.
And you know, last night I was like throwing up a lot.
But, yeah.
So a lot of things, I do agree.
Like, for me, it would be nice if they disappeared.
But who are humans to decide, like, oh, this thing is an inconvenience to us.
Like, we own the planet.
We can, like, take away whatever is inconvenient to us.
I'm sorry, I don't understand what you mean.
Hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.
You can't keep racing paths when you drop logic bombs like that, right?
I don't know what you mean.
Who are we to what?
The humans are right now in such a place where they can...
If they don't like a species, they can pretty much...
Wait, who's they?
Are you not a human being?
Who's they?
Are you excluding yourself from carbon-based bipeds with large neofrontal cortices?
That's true.
It's a we, my brother.
Yeah, it is a we.
We are humans, not they, unless you're currently holding up your...
Your Skype voice box with 14 tentacles, I assume we're going to be in the same camp here, right?
You know, speaking from the animal kingdom...
Yeah.
If the humans want, we as humans...
Who is the lion to eat the zebra?
Yeah.
It's a hungry lion!
That's who it is?
No, but could...
But if some other...
If we say, let's kill all the zebras, then...
Then all the lions will be like, what the fuck, man?
No, you're destroying our food.
Are your lions from California?
I want to pause on this stuff because it's very common.
Everyone takes their environmentalism from the Matrix.
Humans are a cancer on the planet.
I mean, it's nonsense.
Look, there's no fucking point to nature without human beings.
I'll tell you that straight up.
Straight up!
Nature is a dumb, blind, savage bitch who sets animals on each other, left, right, and center.
Not a lot of trading going on between lions and zebras.
I mean, they just maul each other.
Things shit on each other.
They eat shit.
They gore each other.
They masticate on each other's kidneys.
You know, foxes come up and chomp down on baby goslings and rip their heads off in front of their appalled parents.
Rabbits get grabbed by eagles and their innards get ripped out in midair.
I mean, nature is...
Nature is a horror show.
Nature is a sociopathic mass murderer from top to bottom and back to front.
Yeah, but if you look at evolution and how it works, it's very beautiful too.
The fact that the weak zebras get eaten and then the zebra genes get stronger and stronger and they get healthier, better, faster and better at reproducing.
That's pretty cool stuff.
Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on.
So are you saying...
That we should let predators loose on children.
And if the child is sickly or has a cold, then we should let the wolves eat the child, the human child.
And that's a beautiful thing because it means that human beings get stronger.
Well, I guess it takes a little bit of perspective, but yeah.
You know what you have is you have a fuck you zebra perspective.
What if there are human beings there?
Like, oof.
You know, if you bring humans into it and you bring philosophy, I guess that doesn't really...
Well, hang on.
Hang on.
To the zebra, it's another human being when another zebra gets eaten, right?
Yeah.
But...
Fuck you, zebras.
I'm in love with the beauty of evolution.
Yeah.
Now, I don't want to get a cold, and I'm going to wash my hands to make sure that no microorganisms give me a tiny owie, but boy, that pack of lions ripping their head off a zebra, that's fucking beautiful.
I don't think I've ever met a more anti-zebra human being in my entire life.
What the fuck did the alphabet ever do to you?
You're like a guy in the Roman gladiator arena, you know?
Thumbs up, thumbs down.
It's evolution, baby!
It can't always be...
Okay, sure.
Wait, now I'm a little confused.
I'm trying to...
You're confused about this stuff, and I get it, because you've just imbibed a lot of Anti-human propaganda.
You're a humanist, which is like being a racist.
You're just a humanist.
You're against the human race.
You're a human racist.
You're anti-human.
And I get that.
There's a lot of this shit floating around.
It's fucked up.
It's fucked up, evil, ugly shit.
Not you, not you, but just this general air of human beings are bad for the planet.
Human beings don't know how to coexist with nature.
If we just sink and drink water from a fucking swamp and live under a tree branch, you know, we'd just be perfectly natural and so on, right?
I always get this shit from guys on TV in ties.
Are you fucking kidding me?
Shoot it to me from fucking tom-toms deep in the Amazon with no bug spray on.
Maybe I'll start listening.
But this is anti-human stuff.
It's fundamentally anti-human stuff.
Look, you want less people on the planet?
No problem.
Cut the size of government.
Boom!
Less people on the government.
You want more sustainable economy?
Fantastic.
Then stop having fiat currency.
Fiat currency allows for the massive overconsumption.
In the here and now, At the expense of the future.
I mean, how environmentally friendly are all these giant fucking empty cities in China?
They're wretched!
Massive rape of the environment.
Look at the housing crisis in the United States.
10% of the U.S. housing stock suddenly vacant.
I mean, is that great for the environment?
No!
Think of the amount of environmental destruction that occurred in order to build 10% useless extra houses in America.
There is only one way to, in a sustainable manner, ensure the safety and security of the planet, and that is to ditch the ancient evil institution of the state, number one.
Number two, well, a significant, I think it's 40% of Americans, believe that the world is going to end in a couple of decades.
Do you think they give a shit?
About global warming in the year 2100?
Their global warming is, Satan's going to turn it into a hellscape of eternally burning children.
And there's no amount of cutting my SUV emissions that's going to change that divine fate of evil dominance of the human species by the devil.
Right?
So if we could stop Christians and other...
Ragnarok eschatologists from focusing on the end of the world, end time stuff, imminent, oh, decades, if not years, if not months.
How many people, when they got involved in this Mayan bullshit, the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world, right?
I mean, do you think they give a shit about sustaining the planet?
No.
People who believe that they're years or decades away from the end of the universe aren't very big on making sure that there's going to be enough power to In a hundred years.
So, get rid of religion, get rid of government, and we have a capacity for a rationally sustainable population on the planet.
Right now, yeah, there's too many people.
Oh, I'm going to say it.
There's too many people.
I'm not saying I'm volunteering to get off the ark, but there are too many people.
And how are there too many people?
Because there's no limitation on how many people can breed, particularly dumb people.
The birth rate among the less intelligent is far higher than the birth rate among the intelligent.
And how is that possible?
That should in no way, shape, or form be possible.
Because intelligent people generally earn more.
And when you earn more, you should be able to have more children.
That's nature's way of saying, fuck you, dumb people.
Some smart people should breed more.
I've got nothing against dumb people.
I need people to put gas in my car as well.
I've got nothing against them.
I think they're wonderful and fine human beings.
They should be perfectly equal under the law.
And they should have all the trinkets that can be pumped out by smart people.
And I think that they should enjoy Candy Crush from here to eternity.
Got no problem with poor people at all.
However, and it's not an insignificant however, I don't think that we should be taking money from rich people and giving it to lots of poor people so the rich people can have 1.2 children per household and the poor people can have 2 or 3 children per household.
I know it's a democracy.
I know it's easier to rule dumb people.
I get that.
I get that.
But this is the complete opposite of what should be happening.
And again, it's not like we should restrict anyone from having babies or whatsoever.
No, no, no.
Nothing like that.
You shouldn't need a license to become a parent.
You shouldn't restrict anyone about anything in any way, shape, or form whatsoever.
However, the current policy of dysgenics, wherein we take money from incredibly rich and successful people by the billions of dollars, by the hundreds of billions of dollars, by the trillions of dollars, we hoover out money from rich and successful people, and then we hoover money into Poor, dumb, and unsuccessful people.
If you want a sustainable environment, then surely environmental sustainability Takes a little bit more intelligence than environmental predation, right?
I mean, you have to see over the hill to tomorrow.
And so, what I find astounding is that people, I'm not saying you, but people who are into environmental protection, do you know what they say?
We need a welfare state.
I'm like, well, which is it?
Do you want environmental protection?
Or do you want a welfare state?
You can't have both!
Have you ever been to poor sections of town?
Do you see how they treat their spaces?
Go to a rich section of town, look at the lawns, look at the streets, look at the garbage, look at the trash.
It's virtually non-existent.
When I was a student, I went to Glendon College for two years of English literature, part of York University, and I would bike through A poor section of town, and then I would bike through a rich section of town.
And the poor section of town looked like shit.
And the rich section of town looked really nice.
So if you want environmental protection, you're going to need some smarter people in the world.
Go to your average person with an IQ of 85 living in a trailer park and start to talk to them about the need for sustainability.
I mean, they can't even handle environmental protection to the point of not putting massive amounts of drugs, nicotine and chemicals and alcohol into their own goddamn bodies.
I mean, forget the planet.
Do you want to live in your body 10 years from now?
You twinkie-eating, joint-smoking mother...
Right?
I mean, these are not smart people with very long windows of deferral of gratification, and these are not people who are going to be able to take care of the planet 50 or 100 years from now.
When you can't even pay them 50 bucks to do a sit-up.
So, I mean, people on the left, I mean, this is just how insane the left is.
Which is, they say, we really want environmental sustainability.
We want people to rise above their petty concerns.
We want people to defer gratification.
We want them to vote for wise and sustainable policies for human management and development of the economy.
And we want to pay the dumbest people in the world to breed the most.
Well...
There's door number A and there's door number B, but they're not even close to the same wall.
In fact, they're in completely opposite directions, right?
Which do you want?
You can't have both!
And yet, any possible way, when anyone ever says that we should stop having these ridiculously insane policies that pay the dumbest people in the world to breed, oh, it's eugenics!
It's eugenics.
No, it's not eugenics.
It's not eugenics because nobody's saying sterilize anyone.
No, at least I'm not.
Good heavens no, absolutely.
Poor people have as many children as you want, but pay for them yourselves.
And that way, rational resource limits will stop you from having massive tidal waves of uninformed idiots.
Swamping over the whole society saying, give me that now.
I want it now.
Fuck tomorrow.
Fuck the future.
I want stuff now.
I like stuff now.
And get a tattoo on my eyeball while you're at it.
I can see too clearly.
Holy crap.
So it's very easy to create a sustainable environment.
Privatize the living shit out of everything.
Get rid of fiat currency.
Get rid of governments.
Oppose religion.
And for God's sake, stop paying idiots to breed like rabbits.
Idiots by definition prefer short-term consumption over long-term sustainability.
It's called the marshmallow experiment.
You hand one marshmallow to a kid and you say, you can eat this now or in 15 minutes I'll come back and give you two.
That's a basic environmental question.
Can you defer eating one marshmallow for 15 minutes because it'll give you more benefits later on?
Can you defer screwing up the goddamn environment For 15 minutes and then you'll get a cleaner environment with more goodies later on.
Well, they've done this experiment countless times and they have followed it up decades later and guess what?
The people who defer gratification are smarter, are more successful, are more productive, are wiser, are doing better on average in general in their lives.
And they're not coming a lot from the trailer parks.
Yeah, you can get geniuses coming out of trailer parks and you can get idiots coming out of bright families.
There's regression to the mean, which means that the children of tall people are likely to be tall, but they're not going to be as tall as their parents.
And children of short people are likely to be short, but they're not going to be as short as their parents.
And children of smart people are probably not going to be as smart as their parents, but they're still going to be smarter than average.
And children of really dumb people are not likely to be super smart, but they're going to be smarter than their parents.
This is a regression to the mean.
Otherwise we'd end up with like wildly divergent species everywhere all the time.
So I get all of that.
But the reality remains that if you want a sustainable environment, privatize everything because people take care of their own property.
That's not hard to figure out.
Walk down a city street, look at the unowned lot.
What's in it?
Garbage bags, hypodermic needles, trash, gum, crap like that, right?
Go to different neighborhoods.
Which neighborhoods take better care of their environment?
Rich neighborhoods generally associated with intelligence or poor neighborhoods generally associated with not intelligence?
Not that hard.
This is not brain surgery.
This is like research by walking the fuck around.
And so if you want a sustainable environment, stop paying poor people to breed and stop charging rich people for being rich.
You want rich people to breed proportional to their wealth and you want poor people to breed proportional to their wealth.
And that's not anything that's imposed from the outside, that's just reality.
Poor people have fewer resources and then statistically would end up with fewer children.
Which means you have to harden your heart to the poor people who pump out kids and then say, we need help.
We had lots of kids.
Sorry, can't help you.
I've got 2100 years after Christ to think of.
Sorry, can't help you.
We'd like a sustainable environment.
Thank you very much.
Can't help you.
I'm sorry for that, but I'm afraid you are going to have to stand as an example to other people who have children beyond their means.
But we're making it so hard For smart people to breed.
And so easy.
For dumb people to breed.
And then you know what people say?
I don't think that many people care about the environment other than in words only.
Well, duh!
Anyway.
Does that help at all?
Yeah, it helps a lot.
It's...
The original question was more like, if we did privatize everything, what would we do with the things that are not very easy to privatize?
Like, for example, the sky or the ocean and things like that.
Why can't you privatize the ocean?
Good question, actually.
I don't know, because I haven't seen it being done before.
Of course you have.
It's privatized under the umbrella of government, but governments own oceans, then they own, what, out to a couple of mile limit offshore and all that, right?
So we already have ownership, it's just not ownership where anyone benefits from the preservation of the resource.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Look, I mean, you've probably not heard of this because the environmental lobby is just...
I don't know.
Green is the new red.
They're just a bunch of Marxists who dress up their concern for...
Well, they dress up their lust for the end of capitalism and they just want to protect the environment.
Yeah, because Marxism was so great at protecting the environment.
There were no giant toxic waste sludges outside Soviet factories or anything like that.
Governments are so great at protecting the environment.
Yeah.
Biggest goddamn polluters on the planet, even if you don't even count war, they're the biggest polluters on the planet.
So, for literally tens of thousands of years, there have been lakes with communities around them, right?
And those communities do a lot of fishing, right?
Now, let's say there's a lake with 100 people.
I just went through this with my daughter today, so...
In preparation for this call, so there's a lake with 100 people, and if everyone takes 10 fish a month, it's a sustainable resource.
Fish breed and get new fish, all that kind of good stuff, right?
Yeah.
But everyone wants to take more than 10 fish a month so that they can get rich, right?
Let's just say that's a possibility, right?
Yeah.
Or they really love salmon and mercury.
So how do you solve the problem?
Well, of course, everyone says, oh, we're going to...
I have a government.
And that's because we've become ridiculously conflict-avoidant.
We've become such delicate little feminine flowers.
We don't want to have any confrontations in society.
Oh, no.
I don't want to have to enforce any rules socially.
I don't want to confront anyone.
I'm just going to...
Get the government to do it, because I'm delicate.
And I'm like a butterfly.
If you touch the wings of my social resolve, I will die.
I'm Blanche Dubois on cocaine.
I'm just about to fragment.
I'm just...
I'm falling apart.
I'm like a watermelon in the Dave Letterman show.
Right?
I mean, we've just become such weenies when it comes to social enforcement.
But here's the way it used to work.
If you took 11 fish rather than 10 fish from the lake, what do you think would happen?
You get cut off or kicked out of the community, forbidden to go to the lake.
Well, I mean, there's six million different ways that you can deal with this.
And nature, fortunately, has provided human beings a wonderful button for social compliance, which is called guilt and shame, which activates, as I've mentioned on the show about 10 billion times, activates the same pain centers in human beings as physical torture.
So a frown is the same as bamboo shoots up the nails, right?
A frown and a scowl is the same as getting a rusty nail hammered through your testicle sack as you sit on a wooden chair, right?
And so we have this wonderful button for social conformity called guilt and shame.
Works very well.
And why was it developed?
Because it really worked well in human history.
And so you're part of this community.
Your kids all play with each other.
You've got to send your kids to the local educator to get some learning done.
You need people's help sometimes.
You get sick, someone's got to watch your kids.
You break your legs, someone's got to bring you some bundt cake.
You're in deep with this community.
And if the community decides to turn against you, you're fucked.
You are completely fucked.
Your kid's got no one to play with.
You've got no one to share meals with.
You've got no one to share risks with.
You've got no one to push your boat into the ocean or into the lake so that you can go fish.
You've got no one who's going to take care of you if you're sick.
You've got no one who's going to take care of you if you get injured.
You've got nothing and no one and no support.
And maybe you decide to leave that community.
And you decide to head over the mountain and find some other community you can join.
Well, you know what they're going to say?
Oh, I know why you're here.
You're here because you're a giant dickhead.
I mean, they might as well just put a giant phallic symbol on your forehead.
You are here because nobody wants to have anything to do with you in your own tribe.
So, sorry, giant dickhead.
You've just got to keep moving.
No place for you here.
Giant dickheads, not allowed.
And so, you don't.
So, there's your cost-benefit.
Do you get a little bit of extra fish?
Or...
Do you get the continued support of your community into your old age and your infirmity, right?
It's not that tough an equation to work out.
It's just cost-benefits.
It's not worth it to take 11 fish rather than 10 fish a month.
It's simply not worth it.
Someone's going to find out, and then you're going to have no place to live, no place to...
You know, you can't just live on fish.
You've got to trade with other people.
You've got to get some veggies.
You might want to take a shit that doesn't involve a fishbone once in a while.
And so you need other people to help you.
Hey, feel like some milk?
It's really tough finding nipples on a salmon.
So you've got to be friends with the farmer who's got cows, right?
Feel like a piece of meat that's not healthy?
Well, that would be red.
And so you need the vegetable farmers.
You need the people to trade with you.
Big hole in your roof?
Yeah, maybe it might be helpful to somebody who knew how to fix that in a way that didn't involve putting Mexico's flour in the white garbage bag and pastes over the hole in the ceiling.
That's what you need.
You need support.
Hey, do you have a weird red spot on your arm?
Would it be helpful for you to go and see a doctor?
It probably would be.
But if you've taken 11 fish...
You don't get milk, you don't get vegetables, you don't get roof repairs, you don't get doctors, you don't get education.
Everybody shuns you until you say, I'm really fucking sorry, and you cough up that fish, reassemble it, animate it with giant electricity rods a la Frankenstein, and put it back in the ocean.
Right?
That's how it works.
Now, when I was a kid, we had this wonderful form of social enforcement.
It was called being sent to Coventry.
I don't know why.
I'm sure someone will tell me.
I don't know why it's called being sent to Coventry.
And do you have any idea what that is?
Does that ring a bell with you at all?
No.
No?
No.
Well, being sent to Coventry is simply refusing to talk to someone.
Being sent to Coventry is we're not going to play with you.
We're not going to talk to you.
We're not going to acknowledge your existence.
No one's going to sit by you at lunch until...
You stop doing stupid shit, right?
We just...
No.
We're not going to have anything to do with you.
Now, that's, I guess, mildly confrontational.
It's a little bit uncomfortable, but it's necessary.
And so, you know, I didn't come up with ostracism.
Mother Nature did, right?
It's a very low-cost way of enforcing social compliance is ostracism.
And so, I was never sent to Coventry, but I remember another kid was...
I mean, everybody kind of knew he'd stolen something, but he refused to admit it, and so no one talked to him.
I mean, you don't go to the teacher or you don't go to the headmaster because kids get caned and, you know, they're not going to find out the truth.
So what you do is you send the kid to Coventry until he confesses.
Now, I get that the system can be abused.
I mean, nothing's perfect.
But at least when this system gets abused, people just go through some social awkwardness that's uncomfortable, but, you know, they don't end up in the rape room of government jails for five years by accident, right?
And he did.
Everybody knew he'd stolen something.
It was a gold pen.
People had seen him writing with it, and they were like, give the pen back, man, come on.
And he's like, I didn't take the pen.
But people, I mean, everybody knew he had it.
And eventually the pen mysteriously reappeared, And he was taken out of Coventry.
And that's how you deal with things.
Run to authority and unloose blue dogs with guns on people.
Just ostracize them and it works beautifully.
And that's how you deal with these kinds of things.
If people care enough about the environment to A. Stop dumb people breeding and stop penalizing smart people for breeding since you need smart people to even give a shit about the environment.
not a lot of monkeys with long-term plans on how to not shit in their own nests, then you simply, if enough people care about it, they'll do social ostracism.
They'll say, oh, this guy's polluting the living shit out of the air upwind from a school, so stop buying his products.
And people are like, okay, I trust these guys.
I'm going to stop buying the products until the guy changes his behavior.
You buy insurance, as I talked about in one of my very early, well, my first article.
The Stateless Society, an examination of alternatives, talks about how to control pollution in a free society.
But first and foremost, get government out of the business of allocating resources, because that's unbelievably pillaging on the environment.
Get religious people to stop imagining the world is just about to end.
I mean, can you imagine what diet you would...
Eat if you knew for sure an asteroid was going to destroy the Earth tomorrow?
Would you be like, oh, you know, I better not have a second helping a cheesecake kiss.
Yeah, just all fiber, you know.
Well, I don't know.
I mean...
Most guys would just want to eat Katy Perry.
I don't know.
But you wouldn't give a shit about long-term sustainability because, like, asteroids are going to end tomorrow, so I'm going to dance with Willem Dafoe in a bad movie.
So that is how things work.
If you don't believe in long-term survivability of the planet, you're not going to care much about the environment, so you've got to stop this end-times crap with religious people.
And you've got to get more smart people out there, and you've got to get government out of provoking and promoting the mass consumption of resources through debt and fiat currency.
Yeah.
That is a good answer to my question.
All right.
Yeah.
Thank you for letting me be on.
You're very welcome.
I've listened to a bunch of your books, and I have to say that Real Time Relationships is my favorite one.
Oh, I appreciate that.
Thank you.
As long as you keep posting new stuff, I still haven't listened to all of your 1,800 clips.
But as long as there's still stuff to listen to, I'm happy.
Keep on doing what you're doing.
Thank you.
Are you a donator?
Yeah, I am.
Thank you very much.
It's hard not to donate because the more you listen to your show, the more You get influenced by it, of course.
Otherwise, there wouldn't be any point of listening to it.
And then you realize that, oh yeah, this is actually true.
I would rather have a society where everything is done by volunteerism and free market ideals and peaceful parenting and things like that.
I appreciate that.
And you say that it's hard not to donate, but I guess we have a lot of masochists who are somehow able to resist the temptation among our listenership.
We still only had a couple of points of donors relative to...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, the thing is that you say, oh, if you think someone else is better, give money to them.
And then you're like, well, I guess I can't find anyone, so take the money.
I like that challenge.
I like that challenge.
I'm happy.
Go listen to a bunch of other people's shows.
There's no better show than this in the long run and for changing people's lives.
There's other YouTubers that I enjoy and I find interesting and so on, but obviously I think there's no better show than this.
Otherwise, Honor would require me to go and work for that other show and stop polluting the airwaves with my nonsense.
This is the best show.
There's a moment...
You know, when people get what integrity really is.
And that's when they donate.
And it's just one of the things that they do.
When they really accept and understand true responsibility in their lives, when they really accept and understand the giving of value for value, when they really understand that love is the recognition of virtue by the virtuous, donation is a form of affection, and they get what virtue requires in this world, which is to support the virtuous, which is others, and I do my support for the virtuous, and so on.
When people get that click moment where philosophy is what you do, it's not what you think.
Like, nutrition is what you think, diet is what you do.
And philosophy is the diet.
Everyone thinks philosophy is the nutrition.
It's not.
It's what you do in order to change your behavior.
You study or you learn about nutrition in order to change your diet.
Otherwise, you're kind of insulting nutrition.
Because the whole point of nutrition is to change.
I mean, can you imagine being a doctor, studying to be a doctor for 10 years, and everyone who comes in, you say, yeah, just keep doing what you're doing.
Don't change a thing.
Oh, I have like a really good example.
It's like one of my friend's mom, she's...
My friends consider her like, oh yeah, she's the social grandmaster.
She can get anyone to do anything for her.
She's really good socially and she knows how to get people to do stuff for her.
But then, she's a terrible person.
She hits all of her kids and she lies all the time and she doesn't value honesty at all.
She just sits around on her ass and hasn't worked for the past 20 years.
Right.
Yeah, and so my focus is to get people to act on their values.
And once I finally convince people to act on their values, not my values, rational values, once I finally convince people to stop listening and start doing, to stop theorizing and start acting, then they donate.
But it takes a long time because people...
And I get this.
I get this.
I understand this.
They love to say...
With a bit more knowledge...
Virtue will become easy.
One more argument.
One more book.
One more podcast.
One more speech.
One more piece of data.
And virtue will become easy.
If I read one more diet book...
Then dieting will become easy.
If I watch one more Elliot Hultz video, then working out will be a joy.
Well, guess what, people?
That's called avoidance.
That's called procrastination.
And that's called a giant fuck you to virtue philosophy and the future.
And Much though I dislike criticizing any elements of the audience, it needs to be done from time to time, just as I benefit from criticism myself.
But there's a certain segment of this audience who do it or don't.
And if you're not going to do it, please stop talking about it, like virtue philosophy.
I mean, if a fat guy comes up and tells you he follows the Molyneux diet, what are you going to think?
Oh, gosh.
Well, you're a walking advertisement for what not to do then, which would be follow the Molyneux diet, right?
I don't want people to talk about listening to me unless they're doing something of tangible applicability in the realm of virtue in their lives.
I don't want them to.
Making my job harder.
It's that old thing.
Please stop helping.
The people who comment on my work and they say, well, I agree with Steph about this.
I disagree with Steph about that.
I follow him as far as this goes, but this I don't.
It's like, please stop talking about me.
Because if you're talking in terms of agreeing or disagreeing with me, Then you don't understand philosophy.
And I think if you've been listening for a while, you must be purposefully not understanding philosophy.
I did a video on global warming.
Just an interesting challenge to the consensus.
Neither a proof nor a disproof.
People are like, I'm not going to believe Steph.
I'm going to believe the scientists.
It's like, it's not me.
I'm putting forward an argument with data.
You can disagree with the data.
You can disagree with the arguments.
But the moment that people personalize what they agree or disagree with, they're just saying that they don't understand philosophy and they don't even basically know how to think.
All they have is a thought repulsion magnet around their heads.
Because agreeing with or disagreeing with me has nothing to do with philosophy.
Does anyone say in the realm of physics, oh yeah, I agree with Albert Einstein.
I agree with him.
I mean, I agree with this part.
I disagree with the other part.
Yeah, this part I agree with.
This part I follow him this way.
I don't follow him on that.
If anyone tried to say that in the realm of science...
I mean, they'd just be laughed out of existence.
They're like, you don't understand science.
It's not a matter of agreement.
Is it valid?
Is it a valid argument?
And so the people who are like, well, I follow this, I agree with this, I don't agree with that, who personalize my arguments to me are creating this bizarre world.
Where, somehow, allegiance to me as a person.
There's a bunch of pixels on my screen and in my ears.
It's like, do you agree or not with Steph?
I like spam!
Do you agree or not with Steph?
Right?
Two and two make four.
Well, how about you try and figure out whether two and two make four and forget about agreeing or disagreeing with the person who says that two and two make four?
Think for yourselves!
The world does not need one more follower.
Oh, it really, really, really doesn't.
One more follower will push the world over the brink, head the other way.
I mean, don't follow me, of course.
Follow reason, follow evidence, if I put forward a good argument.
Then try and find flaws in it.
If you find flaws in it, please do me the courtesy of calling me up and telling me that you found flaws in my argument and saved me from my error.
But no, what most people do is they say, Okay, you're wrong.
Tag your it.
Bye!
Off they go.
I'm going to tag you with the imaginary it game called insecurity.
Now I'm going to run away.
I'm telling you that you're wrong.
Steph, I normally agree with your videos, but this, you know, it's just...
Run away!
It's like, you, sir, or madam, do not understand philosophy, and the fact that you just want to tag me with this handprint of error and then run away, as if that's going to make a goddamn thing, that's sad.
Please stop helping.
Stop helping.
Anyway, I hope that makes some sense.
I appreciate your call.
You're welcome back anytime, but we've got to move on to the next caller.
Absolutely.
Have a good one.
Thanks, man.
You too.
All right.
Thanks, Martin.
And I'll just say, too, for people that are interested in the pollution subject and how to deal with it without government, search for pollution in common law, and you'll get a lot of stuff which helps clarify how things were dealt with in the absence of overburdening.
All right.
Well, up next is James, and James has a dream, a dream that actually involves stuff, believe it or not.
Last night I had the strangest dream.
All right.
James, what's it?
You know what, Steph?
Before we actually get to the dream, we should probably, since we just started talking about philosophy, you should probably do a brief intro to dream interpretation since we haven't discussed it on the show in a very long time.
Yeah, dream interpretations are when I get to say whatever the fuck I want and no one can disprove me about anything.
It is self-referential Jungian Mandela shit that can't possibly disprove.
Dream interpretation is the religion of freedom.
I'm just kidding.
So dream interpretation, and this is not just my theory.
This goes all the way back to, gosh, I mean, the ancient world drew significant inspiration from dreams.
Jung, of course, talked a lot about them, as did Freud, of course, on the interpretation of dreams.
This is a very powerful book to read, just in terms of how much detail and value there can be in dreams.
And I've got a whole podcast on why I think dreams are important, and that's why I sort of tried to demonstrate in the show that I talked about at the beginning of this show, my dream about Dylann Roof and how to end mass shootings.
But dreams are...
I think the mind working on informing you of information that goes against social programming, and it has to put it forward allegorically, because it needs to know if you're interested in working out the meaning, if you're interested in meeting the unconscious halfway.
Because if the unconscious just told you to screw social conditioning and social programming, well, you'd get killed, right?
I believe the priest is just a man in a funny hat.
Oh!
Oh dear, I appear to have been strangled by the priest's henchmen.
And so the unconscious floats.
It's called a trial balloon.
It floats stuff up and says, ooh, is it safe to question social convention?
I'm going to give you a disturbing dream.
Let's see if it's safe to challenge social convention.
Now, if the guy says, oh, that must have been a dream that was given to me by a devil, and it would be a sin to attempt to try and figure it out, then it's like, okay, I guess we'll just go back down and see the discontent and keep any individuation for a future age, epigenetically storing it up in the DNA for the future.
So dreams, I think, will give you stuff that is a challenge to social convention or a challenge to your self-image, right, which is what happened for me with the Dylan Roof dream.
It was a challenge to social convention, but definitely it was a challenge to my self-image and my capacity for sometimes honesty.
I avoided doing the show the whole day because I was like, I don't know.
It's going to be too scary.
I don't know if I can be that vulnerable.
I don't know if I can get things across.
I don't know if it's going to work.
I don't know if it's going to be authentic.
I don't know if I'm going to be tempted to fake something or whatever.
It was a scary show to do and therefore was the one probably most worth doing recently.
So I think that dreams do have great value, but they have great value like a scavenger hunt, right?
Insofar as you have to work to get them, and that's why they're obscure, right?
They don't give you easy syllogisms of philosophy, because that would prompt too many people into self-destructive action against social hierarchies.
So yeah, they'll tease you with meaning, but you have to work to excavate them, because that's how the dreams or the authentic self tests whether you are in an environment or That can handle any kind of questioning or criticism of the dominant social paradigms.
So anyway, let's find out if this dream fits anything to do with that.
Hello, Dreamer.
Take me to the Dreamer's Ball.
All right.
I'm wandering through a suburban neighborhood with tools in my hands, sounding like a shovel in my left hand and a power tool in my right.
The power tool is not a real brand that I know of.
It has CAD written on it, C-A-D in capital letters.
I stop at a corner and And see a team of laborers preparing to do some work, yard work.
Then I see Stefan come out of the house and walk to the corner of the lot in my direction.
He is priming a weed whacker.
Glancing at my tools, he says, Good morning!
Going to do some yard work?
I realize I don't actually know what I'm doing with the tools.
Just looking for some work to do, I reply.
It looks like you've got quite the project started.
Need an extra hand?
He gestures for me to join him.
He leads me to a line of potted plants on a plot of bare dry soil.
I start to ask him what he wants planted in which place.
He interrupts me with a wave of his hand and says, I don't care, just put them all on the ground.
I trust you to know just as well as I could tell you.
I begin to work alongside another person, though I never turn to see their face, nor do we exchange any conversation.
I'm only vaguely aware of their existence as I focus on the task at hand.
A few times throughout the dream, I ask Stefan whether the plants are placed correctly, to which he again waves his hand and tells me with a hint of a smile, to do is get it done, it looks fine.
Once all the plants are submerged in the dry soil, I realized I had forgotten to put water in the holes prior to planting.
I knew that if the plants didn't get watered quickly, the hot, chalky soil would choke the life out of the roots.
As I began to ask Stefan if he has a hose to water them, I feel a stabbing, burning sensation all over my back.
I look down and see a stream of red ants coming from the place I had disturbed the soil and on at my legs.
Slapping at my back but unable to reach the hole of it, I asked Stefan, And the stranger next to me to get them off me.
Then I wake up.
Right.
Great dream.
Yeah, I enjoy it.
I especially like the fact that I have a big house.
That works for me.
All right.
So you're wandering through a suburban neighborhood.
Is this a neighborhood that you know at all?
Or is this something unfamiliar to you?
Like in real life?
It seemed like a composite of all the suburban neighborhoods in which I've grown up.
And did you only grow up in suburban neighborhoods?
For a few years, I lived in a rural area, but for the most part, yes.
So you are a privileged, cisgendered white scum, right?
Obviously.
Did you grow up in Canada?
No, just CAD is short for Canadian dollar.
I was just wondering about that.
So you say, shovel in the left hand, power tool of some kind on my right.
It's not a real brand.
It has CAD written on it.
Does that mean anything to you?
CAD? For some reason, that was one part that stuck in my head the most.
And I put a lot of thought to it.
And actually, the first thing that came to mind was something that I circled back around to, which is the insults.
I was being a cad, you know, like a scouting or a rogue.
And I kind of looked into different definitions and so-called synonyms, and this is just my initial interpretation, but it seemed like some part of me was not being true to self.
I was being a cad in some way, but I used that as a As a tool in my life, somehow.
If that makes any sense.
Well, no, I think...
Have you been listening at all to the shows that I've done recently talking about R versus K reproductive strategies?
Yeah, I have.
You have, okay.
Because, I don't know if you heard this before you had this dream, but I did talk about CAD versus DAD, which is something that's in...
I don't know if you heard that at all in a show, but I did a whole bit on CADs versus DADs, The R reproductive strategy is where you basically have promiscuous sex with a lot of people and don't stick around to father them, to parent them, so to speak.
You father them, but you don't parent them.
And that's the cat.
And the dad is more of the K reproductive strategy, the more complex predator organisms who need to stick around and teach their kids how to hunt because it's harder to catch a rabbit than it is for a rabbit to eat a blade of grass.
And I don't know if you heard any of that.
I did, yeah.
I did.
Okay, so, because it sort of struck me that CAD is a hyper-sexualized response to a situation of risk, of danger.
It's not exactly the same as a response to scarcity, right?
Which is kind of, people get confused about that, which is they say, ah, you know, the R-reproductive strategy, which is when you have a lot of resources, like rabbits never run out of Right.
And so it's not a situation of relative scarcity and relative plenty.
Right.
So there are wealthier countries that are more unstable, which produce more R-type human beings.
And there are poorer countries, sort of notably Eastern Europe, like former Soviet-era Eastern European countries, which are poor but relatively stable, and they produce more K-selected species species.
So, what I thought was interesting, and again, I'm not trying to shoehorn this, but since we were both listening to the same...
I was talking about this stuff and you were listening to it.
One of the ways in which stress affects a growing child is it produces...
It causes the production of increased amounts of sex hormones.
In other words, if you grow up in a stressful environment, your body is priming you for early...
For quantity of offspring over quality of offspring, which is the fundamental of our reproductive strategy.
And so your body is saying, oh man, we're in a stressful environment.
It's dangerous.
So we better eat, we better breed early and often.
And so what happens is, if you grow up in a stressful environment, you have extra...
Testosterone if you're a male, extra estrogen if you're a woman, and this causes hypersexuality.
I guess it's not hypersexuality like bad or anything, it's just relative to the K strategy, it's early onset and heightened sexuality.
And so it struck me that you have two tools.
One is the shovel, and I would make an argument that that's the K reproductive strategy, and the other is It's a power tool, which is like penis plus extra testosterone from the R reproductive stress-based strategy, biologically speaking.
And just in case you didn't get that that's the R versus K reproductive strategy, I'm going to put the word CAD on it as well.
Does that make any sense?
No, it really does.
I have taken some notes about what those two things might have been, like the shovel and CAD, but I did not directly relate them to the R and K. That makes a lot of sense.
Yeah.
Okay, so you stop at a corner, and we will get to your family.
Actually, no.
Do you want to do the family stuff first, to see the degree to which you may have been influenced by R versus K factors in your environment?
Sure.
Yeah, that's a good direction to go.
I will tell you that there likely was a lot of stress in my childhood, especially since my mom is hypertense, and it's just prone to stress in a way.
She deals with it really well, but it just runs high.
High cortisol and everything.
And she had seven kids in the family.
So she just was...
And she had them over the course of nine years, if you can imagine that.
Wow.
So you can imagine that there was stress.
It wasn't...
I mean, she's like a geyser, like an upside-down geyser squirting babies out of her maker.
Holy crap.
Yeah.
Now, did you grow up with a father?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
It was a Mormon household.
So mom and dad both around.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
So, you grew up with stressors and one of the ways that Where hypersexuality is provoked is through a lack of maternal attachment.
Well, it actually occurs in two ways.
One is that if you have a lack of maternal attachment, and this doesn't mean necessarily that your mother was cold-hearted or mean or anything like that, but with seven kids, you know, there's only so many hours in the day and only so many calories in a human being's body to provide resources, so you are going to end up with a stressed-out mom Who's overburdened, overstretched, and therefore you're not going to get a lot of maternal involvement.
And that signals to your body that you are in an R-type environment.
If you don't get enough maternal attention, it means that there's lots of kids around which signals to your body you're in an R-type environment and puts you into a more sexualized mode, right?
And so that's one.
But the other thing, and this I don't think may have been relevant to you or not.
I'll just touch on it briefly for completeness.
But the other way in which your body is signaled to take an R-type approach to maturation is if your mother is like a helicopter mother.
In other words, if she's anxious about the outside world, that provokes an R-type situation.
If she's, oh my, stranger danger, and there's sexual abuse everywhere, and you're going to get kidnapped, and if there's a fear, and I know that in religious circles that comes because of the temptations of the devil creates this kind of But if your mother is also a helicopter mom or highly anxious about the outside world or thinks her kids are in constant danger and so on, that is a sign to your body to pursue more of an R-based strategy.
Yeah, absolutely.
It makes sense.
It doesn't 100% apply to my show, but I can see the elements that do.
Right, okay.
And if this is...
A valid interpretation, which it may or may not be.
It's just what popped into my mind because we're both doing the same sort of look at this biological stuff.
For me, I grew up in a highly stressed out and uncertain and dangerous environment.
I remember being in boarding school at six or seven years old and I'm thinking, my God, am I a sex maniac?
I'm thinking about sex all the time and I'm seven.
It didn't make sense to me at the time.
But it certainly made sense to me later when I learned more about this stuff.
It's like, oh, okay, so yeah, I mean, there's a hypersexuality in the environment because I grew up with my epigenetics pointing me towards early and casual reproduction.
And so it sort of made sense.
Now, for you growing up, was there any of that?
Did you feel more focused on sexuality than others around you?
Yes, I did.
But maybe this was a Yeah, I felt hypersexual compared to the Mormon environment in which I grew up, but as I got older I realized that everybody was about as sexual as me.
It was just that they make you feel especially dirty as an individual if you have any thoughts, you know?
Right.
That whole bag.
Yeah, it's tough to feel more sexual than the woman who's got seven kids in nine years.
Right.
That's a high price for sexuality, but okay.
But there is a lot of repression, obviously, in Mormonism, as you know.
And I think that that has a lot to do with a lot of people that I've known, cousins, friends, a lot of them kind of go through like a sexual rebellion, but they're ill-suited for the world, as it were.
It's kind of like when they let the Amish people on the run, or whatever they call it, they just go out completely and not knowing how to deal with STDs or pregnancy or Or charmers, whatever you call it.
So there is a lot of, I feel like, sexual rebellion in members of the church.
I think that I felt like a part of that because I felt less apt to repress my sexuality than my siblings and friends.
Yeah, I mean, with religion, it's an interesting mix of R and K because with religion, you are in a situation of intense danger because the devil can tempt you into evil and, you know, narrow and thorny is the path of righteousness and slippery and wide is the stairway down to devilry and so on, right?
So they create the situation of significant environment which breeds, well, which causes an R-type overbreeding or excessive or significant breeding, let's say, overbreeding or not.
But at the same time, they need to indoctrinate the kids in the religion.
So you can't have a pure R-type strategy without much parental involvement.
So they need to provoke danger in order to get the R-reproductive strategy, but then they need a huge amount of social restrictions in order to make sure the indoctrination passes down to the kids.
Yeah, yeah, of course.
You know, it might be interesting to consider that I'm very much a...
I'm kind of a conservative guy in the sense of relationships and marriage.
I've always found the arguments for monogamy very compelling, not only compelling, but correct, and kind of the best for society and all that.
And so I've always had that perspective, so I never thought of myself as R or K, which I'm sorry, as one of the stress would be R, is that correct?
Yeah, the early sexual maturation and low investment in parenting and high degrees of sexuality and so on.
That would be more on the R side.
Okay, so let's...
I'm sorry, go ahead.
No, I was just saying, I don't know.
I felt like that didn't apply to me because I couldn't attach it intellectually or if it just doesn't apply to me for some other reason.
Because it could be the case that it's obscured for me, but I don't know.
But is there something else I want to go on to?
Alright, so you stop at a corner and you see a team of laborers preparing to do some yard work.
Did you ever have that as a job?
Did you ever take that on as an occupation?
Oh, my youngest work, you know, like work for allowance.
My parents and I just do chores for allowance.
I did yard work and then I did some landscaping with some companies back in the day.
As a teenager, me and my cousin started a lawn mowing business that had just that kind of stuff.
Right, okay, okay.
Now, when you did your lawn mowing business, I assume, I mean, you're not Amish, right?
So I assume you had a power mower rather than a push mower, right?
Yeah, we did.
Okay, okay.
So you see me coming out of the house and walking to the corner of the lot in your direction.
I'm priming a weed whacker.
Now, that's the thing which spins the rope, the little yellow ropes.
Is that right?
Yeah, that's the thing, yeah.
Okay.
And it's designed, of course, it doesn't pull the roots up from the weeds, but it trims down the top, and it's used for trimming the edge of houses and stuff, right?
Yeah, and when I think, you know, it's like the word trim seems significant to me, like it was a kind of a precise, delicate tool.
Right, right.
Just to trim a little off the top of everything after all the big work is done, just trimming.
I don't know if that was significant, that just came to mind.
Well, I think it is used for trimming, but I think what's probably more significant is, would you agree that it's the tool that you use in yard work or landscaping that is closest to the home?
Oh, yeah.
I'm priming the tool that is closest to the home.
So that's probably important.
Now, priming means...
What does that mean?
Does it mean I'm, like, putting gas...
Is it a gas power...
Yeah, yeah, just like the other little button that you push the little bubble that pushes oil into the engine before you pull the lever.
Wait, you mean gas?
Gas in the engine?
Oh, gas in the engine.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
Yeah, it's gas in the engine.
All right.
Okay, so glancing at my tools, I say, good morning!
Going to do some yard work?
Jeez, I'm a polite guy in your dream.
How nice.
I realize I don't actually know what I'm doing with the tools.
Just looking for some work to do, I reply.
Now...
Is that an honest response to me?
Because it sounds not quite.
It sounds like you're covering that you don't...
Because I think an honest response would be like, I don't know what I'm doing with these tools, actually.
Yeah, I thought a lot about that, too.
And I've come to determine that I was probably...
Just because this is the most obvious thing, and I've come to...
I've kind of come to think that the most obvious thing is usually what it is.
But I think that I'm going to work, like what's been my previous job, my current job.
I think I was headed to work, but I didn't really want to go there.
I wanted to do something else.
And so, yeah, I'd rather help with the artwork than go to where I was going to go.
Right, okay.
So just looking for some work to do, but I'm still trying to understand, is that your honest thought in that moment?
Or are you sort of like, when I say, got to do some yard work?
And you're like, because wouldn't the most honest thing be to say, actually, I don't even know why I'm here with these tools.
Yeah, that would be the most honest thing.
But I feel like I should know.
Right, okay.
So you're giving me a falsified response.
Yeah, yeah.
It's not bad or anything, but you're...
You know, what are you doing?
Oh, nothing!
Just browsing some German websites, mommy?
Right, okay.
So why?
Why do you give me a falsified response in the dream?
Which is not...
That never sounds non-accusatory.
I don't mean it that way, but...
No, I understand it.
That's interesting.
I really have no idea.
Alright, so if you go back into the dream, when I ask you this stuff, why do you, what was the emotion that made you want to falsify?
I feel excited, like the nervous kind of excited.
Like I want to, like if I'm some guy wandering in the neighborhood that doesn't know what he's doing, then I call the cops because I have my law.
So I don't want to, I'm like, oh, you know, I don't know.
I wanted to say something casual, but I also wanted to help with the work that was going on.
Like suddenly when I saw it happening, Now, it's my house that these team of laborers are doing the artwork in, right?
Yeah.
Kind of aristocratic of me, isn't it?
Oh, I have a team of laborers to do my artwork.
What, what?
Right, okay.
Okay, got it.
Good to know.
I love living in Burma in 1930.
Anyway, okay, so just looking for some work to do.
So you say, it looks like you've got quite the project started.
Need an extra hand.
And I gesture for you.
This has got to be kind of weird talking to the guy in your dream.
Anyway, so I gesture for you to join me, right?
Not the laborers, right?
Which means that you're in a bit of a privileged position because I don't say, well, if you want to help, go join the riffraff over there doing whatever they do with their knuckled hands, right?
Yeah, I guess not.
sure so that's kind of like it's the backstage pause right I'm saying come join me rather than go join the laborers right oh yeah But I do end up joining the laborers.
I know, but that's just because you lied to me, you bastard.
We'll get to that in a sec, but I just want to point out that everything in the dream is important, right?
So the fact that you falsified something, and then I also don't call you on falsifying it, right?
I mean, I'm pretty good at knowing when people are not telling me something.
And that's even on Skype, right?
If someone's right in front of me, I can almost always tell when they're feeding me a story, right?
Yeah.
But I don't say, wait a minute, that doesn't seem like you're not ringing true to me or something.
I'm just like, okay, well.
So you falsify something to me and I don't notice it, right?
Yeah.
And that's important, right?
So I lead you to a line of potted plants on a pot of bare, dry soil.
I start to ask him what he wants planted, in which place.
He interrupts me with a wave of his hand and says, I don't care, just put them all in the ground.
I trust you to know just as well as I could tell you.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
I don't know what the hell I'm doing as far as this stuff goes.
So you're working on my property and you are trying to defer to me and I'm saying, no, you can make your own judgment, right?
Essentially, yeah.
I trust you to know just as well as I could tell you.
Now, when I said, because let me tell you this, I mean, as you may or may not have experienced as a kid, sometimes when people say, think for yourself, what they're saying is, I'm not going to give you instructions so that I can later criticize you for getting it wrong.
It's a trap!
Right?
Right, yeah, of course.
And so if I say, no, no, no, I'm not going to tell you where these plants go, you, you can, I trust you, you can figure it out.
What did you feel?
Did you feel like, oh, wow, that's, you know, great, you know, or did you feel like, oh, the trap, right?
No, I felt good about it.
It felt like you invested trust in me for whatever reason.
Because you liked the tools that I had.
Right.
For whatever reason.
Good.
Now, what do I do when you start working on this stuff?
You're off the frame.
You're out of the frame.
Like while I'm planting the plants here.
Doing some of the weed-whacking, I suppose.
Now, I don't mean to make this the Probe Donors show, but supporting me in my project would be sharing or sharing these shows or donating to the show, right?
Yeah, sure, yeah.
And have you done either of those things recently?
Did that happen in any proximity to the Dream?
Yeah, I'm doing it pretty much constantly, so...
Okay.
And when did you start doing it?
I started listening to the show about two years ago.
I probably started sharing things maybe a year and a half ago.
And then I've been a donator for maybe eight months or so.
Okay.
Well, obviously I hugely appreciate that.
I appreciate that.
Okay.
And when did this dream happen?
This dream was, let's see, like three weeks ago, maybe?
And did anything happen proximate to the dream, like the day before, that was out of the ordinary with regards to this show and philosophy and you and life?
Not that I can directly recall, but I will say that I've been working at a school, and so the year has kind of been coming to a close, and so that's the work that I've been doing as far as what I would relate to philosophy in the past, like working with Children with logic.
I teach just basic reading and math, spelling, things like that.
I kind of relate to the work that I would have been doing in the dream or would have been heading towards in the dream.
Oh, so your students are the pot of plants, right?
Maybe.
Just future generations in general.
I'm not sure if it's directly relatable that way.
I lead you to a line of pot of plants and a pot of bare dry soil.
So when it comes to teaching these kids logic, I assume you don't, like, read podcasts from me to them, but you teach them to think for themselves, right?
Yes, yeah, that's the idea.
Right, right, okay.
So, and that's when, you know, when you say, where do you want them planted, in which place?
And I'm saying, well, no, you, right...
Do it yourself.
Okay, so you begin to work alongside another person, never turn to see their face, not to exchange any conversation, and only vaguely aware of their existence as they focus on the task at hand.
And do you have any idea who this might have been?
Or might be?
No, actually.
Like, yeah, they were just kind of a, you know, like a onesie, like a big construction outfit, and I never saw that face or skin or anything.
I think it was a male.
Do you know the gender?
Yeah, a male.
Yeah, it was a male.
Sorry, okay.
Got it.
Alright, a few times throughout the dream, I asked F whether plants are placed correctly, to which he again waves his hand and tells me with a hint of a smile just to get it done.
It looks fine.
But that's interesting.
That's interesting because it's a curious combination of both of our property.
Because you're planting these plants on my property, but I'm really telling you to treat it as if it were your property.
It's an interesting commingling, right?
Like, I ordered these plants.
I have them set up next to my house.
I want them put into the ground, which means since I ordered, you know, let's say I ordered 10 plants as opposed to 20, I must have some idea of where I want them to go and the spacing, right?
I didn't just pick a number randomly.
So, it's interesting insofar as...
It's a curious commingling of property that I think happens in the best teacher-student relationships.
Because a teacher and a student are both commingling in the student's mind.
In other words, the teacher is laying claim to a portion of the property called the student's mind, but the purpose of it is for the student to know his own mind and to be able to think for himself.
So my podcasts live in people's minds, but the purpose of the podcasts is to have them live in their own minds.
So there's a commingling of property.
I don't know if I'm explaining this well at all, but I must have ordered these things because I want my property to look a certain way, but I'm saying treat this as your property.
And I'm not going to express a preference, even though I've set up some kind of structure which would indicate that I have a preference.
I'm telling you, don't think about my preferences.
Treat this as your property.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes sense.
It's hard for me to grasp the significance of that, the implications.
But it makes sense what you're saying.
Well, I guess the significance would be that When a strong personality like mine comes along, there is a gravity well that is set up from an interpersonal standpoint.
So, I mean, I have, you know, a fair amount of humor, a fair amount of charisma, some pretty staggeringly great language skills and, you know, reasonably original and decent arguments and so on, right?
And that's quite compelling.
I create an imprint on people's minds.
And, you know, some people like that and some people hate it and some people react to it like I'm an authority figure and some people react to it like I'm a parent or a priest or like all kinds of nonsense goes on that has nothing to do with me but all to do with the inner images.
And so I take up residence in people's minds, right?
Yeah, no, I got it about halfway through.
I just didn't want to interrupt you.
That makes perfect sense, yes.
Absolutely, yeah.
Because it has to happen within the mind of the student and all that.
Yeah, that makes total sense now.
Right, but I take residence in people's minds in order to be evicted.
Yeah.
Right?
So, like, a builder will build your house, and he's the first person in the house, but the whole point is to turn it over to you, right?
Yeah.
And that's interesting to me that there's all this yard work and I've ordered these things and it's almost like you think it's my house but I'm saying treat it like your house.
Which is I think a good teacher-student relationship.
Yeah, I would agree.
And so you say to your students, I wish to influence you so that human beings cannot influence you.
I wish to engage with you so that you will no longer make decisions from who you want to engage with.
I wish to teach you reason so that you will no longer need someone else to learn from.
So you inhabit and you vanish.
You haunt and you're exercised.
You move in and then you move out.
That's sort of the point.
You bungee.
And I think that's interesting in the way that I say it's my house, it's my yard work, But I'm really saying treat it like it's your house.
Because I think we're talking about critical capacity, some part of your mind.
How do you mean critical capacity?
Well, I want to stimulate people's critical capacity, but I don't want that critical capacity to revolve around me.
The last thing I want in the long run, it's fine for a while, everybody gets this impression, but the last thing I want is for people to think, what would Steph think?
Maybe it's a helpful way to get people to start thinking for themselves or whatever, but I wish to influence people to rid themselves of human influence.
So, I want to be the last person to move in and out of people's minds.
Whereas politicians, they just want to be the next person to move into your mind.
And they don't want to leave.
They squatters.
They check in, but they don't check out.
Whereas a good teacher teaches methodology and principles and encourages critical thinking, which also includes the teacher.
And the teacher, of course, the purpose of the teacher is to Yeah, in Kung Fu movies, there's always the point where they say, I've taught you everything that I know.
And that's when they've reached the ultimate level.
They don't need them anymore.
Right.
So you say, when you can snatch this grasshopper from my hand or whatever, right?
Because the whole point of teaching is to have somebody become a master and then pass the teaching down to the next generation and so on, right?
And the purpose of teaching is to not rely on the teacher in the future.
Right.
Eternal education is an insult to the instructor, right?
It means that...
It means that you're trying to make people dependent on you and you're trying to turn them...
You're not a doctor who wants to give people medicine to get them off medicine, right?
You give someone antibiotics so that they can get off antibiotics.
But instead, you're like a pusher.
You're trying to make people dependent upon you.
You're trying to make them addicted to you.
You're trying to breed dependence rather than independence.
But that requires a deep understanding of the commingling of property called the human mind.
That you invite people into your mental landscape in order to have them discover themselves.
And so I invite you onto my property and then say, treat it like it's your property, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that makes sense.
All right.
I'm not sure it makes sense to you or not.
I'm trying to sort of gauge the emotional content of what we're...
I don't want you, obviously, to agree with me.
It would be truly tragic if you agreed with me without agreeing with me.
No, it does make sense as a...
That's kind of a premise.
I guess I'm just getting curious ahead of myself about the other parts of the dream.
I'm going to listen back to this and make better decisions about what I think of it.
I am feeling some vague resistance to it, and that's what I'm curious to explore.
Okay, let's do that, because I don't want to keep moving.
First of all, if it doesn't make sense, and again, none of these things are like final answers about the dream or anything.
It's just things that...
Tickle my brain about it.
But you do want your students to learn how to think for themselves, right?
Obviously, right?
Yeah, you know, I guess what I'm wondering is, how does that tie in?
Like what I said, I was looking ahead, is how does that tie into the soil being dry that I'm charged to plant these plants on?
It's a dry soil.
I just don't imagine, like, well, I don't know, because if it's your property...
I don't imagine that being dry, if that makes sense.
I'm just having trouble relating that fully with the rest of the dream.
It could very well be true.
Wait, wait, hang on a second.
You don't think that philosophy as seeds land on a lot of dry soil?
Oh, no.
Philosophy is very hard to spread, right?
Well, so that's number one.
So, yeah, I mean, as you know, the vast majority of people don't listen to this show, and even the significant majority of people who listen never donate or share, or at least to my knowledge.
So even people who are fans of the show, it's hard for them to translate things into genuine support and spreading of philosophy and so on.
But I guess to make it more personal, if this is your classroom, like I invite you into my classroom so that you can teach in your classroom so that nobody needs a classroom.
So how do you feel about the students that you're teaching?
Whoa, is that water?
Oh yeah, sorry, that is water.
Hang on a sec, did you just get a drink?
I'm not criticizing, I'm just curious.
Yes, I did.
Okay, so we keep talking about dry soil and what do you want?
Water.
Yeah, I just think that, now I'm thirsty too.
How do you feel about your students?
Are you able to lead them to reason?
Is it a significant challenge to get them to think critically and independently and use reason and evidence and all that?
They're elementary age.
It is occasionally difficult, especially knowing they're lower-income kids.
There's a lot of lower-income kids at the school, a lot of immigrants.
It's a charter school.
So with the lower income comes the matriarchal society and of course the welfare society.
And the kids have a lot of terrible home lives.
So I feel good in a way, but it is stressful to be around.
It's stressful to be a part of and to kind of feel weighted every day with how I respond to them, like imprinting upon such a delicate framework, if that makes sense.
It's kind of high stress that way, but I feel good about them in the sense that they don't get a lot of exposure to people who think rationally and consistently.
And I think that to have somebody to look at who you know will always respond honestly and without the taboo element of conversation in public schools.
I feel good about it, but it's complicated, I guess, is a shorter way to put all that.
And is it a lot of single moms?
Yeah, a lot of single moms.
Or at least families with several different husbands and ex-husbands and such.
So this may tie back into the R versus K stuff, right?
Because single mom is pure R stuff, right?
Yeah, it could be.
I didn't think about my work being a Being an influence on that, but I guess it does make sense.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, like rabbits are almost all single moms.
I mean, the rabbits are almost pure R, as far as I understand it.
Okay.
Yeah, I guess just as a side note, that makes extra sense because a doctor actually told me that my testosterone would decrease working around children.
So it makes sense that it would have those kind of drivers.
But anyway, continue.
No, that's true.
And my testosterone has gone down probably 40-50% since becoming a dad, right?
Because you want to be aggressive to go out and get resources to start a family, but then you don't want to eat your children.
It's not very biological.
Right, exactly.
Now, have you listened to much of the stuff about female responsibility on this show?
Yeah, I think I've listened to just about all of it.
If not twice, then at least once.
Okay, and how is that for you when you look at these...
I'm going to focus on the boys here, because everyone in the dream, as far as I know, is a man, right?
Yeah, that's true.
So I think that you're talking about the male world here.
And how do you feel with these boys being raised by these single moms, often without dads or without much male parenting?
And you're like their male authority figure.
And what does...
I mean, this show, I think, you know, I'm sensitive and all that, but I think it's got a pretty good masculine vibe, a pretty good masculine energy, which is why, of course, it's a challenge to some people, because there's not a lot of masculine energy, unapologetic masculine energy out there in the world, right?
Because, you know, patriarchy and cisgendered white male scum and all that, right?
I mean, there's a lot of neutering.
Right?
And so I put out a lot of masculine energy, which the world is not comfortable with these days because it's been so viciously feminized.
And maybe that's something that you look at these boys.
I mean, how are they doing?
How is it for them being raised by single moms without dads?
How are they doing?
You know, you asked me how I feel about it and what's happening.
Honestly, it's one of the hardest things.
And I hate saying honestly.
I'm going to stop saying it at the beginning of sentences because the whole thing is honest, I promise.
But it's one of the hardest things that I've had to deal with over the last few years working for this company as an instructor.
It's just every day, day in, day out, you see kids that replicate their home life, and you just know it's horrible, and you know how little you start to learn.
At first, of course, like all teachers are, you're optimistic about that you can be impactful, and you can be, definitely, but the percentage of the time you'll actually spend being impactful It's so small compared to what you witness on a day-to-day basis and what you can't avoid.
Can you give me some non-specific examples?
Yeah, like there's a lot of drugs, like parents who do drugs.
There was one dad who threatened a bunch of people at the school and one of the academic directors ended up locking the kids in a closet so he couldn't get to them.
Oh, the dad came in like it might be a shooter or something, right?
Yeah, it was after a big event.
I had just left the building.
I ended up going back because somebody called me and told me what was going on.
But by the time I got there, the cops were there.
He was detained, but they let him go because the school didn't want to press charges and they didn't have any, I don't know, evidence or whatever.
Oh, it was like a he said, she said kind of thing?
Well, it wasn't.
If the school had pressed charges, the school just wants to be magnanimous in the community and And it was a big family, a big low-income family that was coming.
And so it was kind of like if that was all implicated, then it might end up punishing the kids.
It was kind of the mentality at the time.
But what resulted was the dad just not being held accountable in any way.
And he and his girlfriend, I don't even know if they're married anymore, but they've got a bunch of kids together.
But that's just one example of an obviously violent, volatile, drug-filled...
And he has a criminal record.
It's not like he's not going away for anything.
It's a miracle they haven't lost the kids yet, but somehow, like they're in the grandmother's custody right now, but the parents have total access.
And just seeing things go on like that every day and seeing it go unpunished, and whenever I ask my superiors about it, if there's hitting it, because I'm, of course, I have to report anything that I see, like physical or anything that I hear with physical violence.
Yeah, no, I mean, I'm certainly happy to hear more, but I think I get sort of the The picture as a whole, that's really rough stuff.
So what sort of effect do you think you're having?
That sounds really scary.
What kind of effect do you think?
I mean, genuinely.
I've not been in your situation, so what effect do you see occurring?
The effect that I see is that the kids...
I have an experience where they're not afraid of an adult male.
That's a really low standard, of course, but that's fairly prevalent in their lives.
To have kind male teachers for a lot of these kids, that's the only positive male influence they know in their life, which is kind of scary.
At first, when I started teaching, I can't speak for everybody, but when I started teaching, you start off and it feels like You're going to be a great influence to these kids and that you're going to be an incredible role model and be able to...
I've seen Dangerous Minds!
Right, exactly.
Or that Robin Williams movie.
So you have grand ideals, of course, but it's impossible to live up to when you're such a...
It kind of becomes sad after a while because it actually could work against the overall life of that kid.
It's almost like It would almost be better if everybody in his life was crappy.
Because when he has a teacher that's really good, like a really good male role model, then it's almost more tragic because then they look around and they see like, okay, and so the only person, the only decent male in my life is a teacher who makes 25 grand a year at a charter school.
It's like, oh, that's great.
So...
What a life ahead of me.
So that's what virtue gets you, right?
Right, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, and it also makes, if he can just view dysfunction as the human condition, then he doesn't have to hold people in his life accountable.
But if dysfunction is not the human condition, if there are counterexamples, that makes it all very different, right?
It's more painful, right?
Yeah, exactly.
That's how it kind of wears, or has worn on me, definitely.
Yeah, like if I live to be 90, I'm pretty happy, but then if I find out that I'm in the Old Testament and everyone lives to be 900, I'm like, damn, I'm dying young.
Right.
Okay.
All right.
Okay.
So, as far as the bare and dry soil, the potted plants, now, you said that drug use was considerable among the families, right?
Actually, just one sibling.
Well, I say just one sibling, but also my parents had pharmaceutical sleep aids for a long time.
My dad is insomniac.
No, no, no, not your family.
I mean, in the students' families.
Oh, in the students' family, yes, yes.
Sorry, yeah.
So it's not surprising to me that the phrase potted shows up, if this is a metaphor for your students.
Potted plants, of course, pot being marijuana as well, right?
Yeah, that definitely could be.
I'm not saying that these are marijuana plants, but just the unconscious tends to use double meanings, right?
Quite a bit.
Of course.
And when you say pot, that is the first thing that comes to mind.
Yeah, yeah.
A plot of bare dry soil.
Okay, so you don't know the other person.
Well, I'm not sure if we can solve that one.
Just get it done.
It looks fine.
Once all the plants are submerged in the dry soil, I realize I've forgotten to put water in the holes prior to planting.
I knew that if the plants didn't get watered quickly, the hot chalky soil would choke the life out of the roots.
Is this all true?
I don't know much about plants.
Yeah, for most things that you plant, especially in dry soil, you want to put some water in before.
Okay, okay.
I begin to ask Stefan if he has a hose to water them.
I feel a stabbing, burning sensation all over my back.
Red ants coming from the place I had disturbed the soil.
Now, let me just understand the physics of this, right?
So you dug the holes to put the pot of plants in, right?
Yeah.
So you dig holes in the ground to put the potted plants in.
You put the potted plants in without putting water in.
And then the ants come out from around the potted plants.
Is that right?
That you put in the ground?
Yes, that's right.
Right.
And up on my legs.
Now, why don't you jump away?
I think I do jump away.
I'm not sure.
I guess I don't recall precisely.
Oh, so it's only...
So you didn't notice them...
Until they're all the way on my back.
Until they're all over you, right?
Correct, yeah.
I look down and see a stream of red ends coming up from the place I had disturbed the soil, and on up my legs, slapping at my back, but unable to reach the hold of it.
I asked a fan of the stranger next to me to get them off me.
I mean, I'd think of ripping my shirt off, just because I like to, but also it would be helpful, right?
Yeah, definitely.
But you don't do that, right?
No, don't do that.
What is it costing you to try and save these kids?
Sometimes.
What is it doing to your heart, to your mind, to your soul, to your optimism, to your happiness?
It's not great.
As a matter of fact, this was the last...
I put in my notice for next year that I'm not going to be going back.
Right.
And that's what I think your unconscious is telling you.
I'm quite positive that it is.
And...
I think that the dream is saying that.
Now, do you feel that there's more you could have done?
Or something different you could have done?
Or do you think there's a magic?
Because in the dream, you say, well, if I just put water in, they'd be better, right?
Yeah.
So what is the water?
There are things that I could have done better, definitely, yeah.
No, no, no, not definitely.
Because your dream is telling you no.
Your dream is saying that the moment you start thinking of really changing these kids, you are going to get attacked.
So what that means, I'm guessing, or what I theorize that means, is...
That there's something that you didn't talk about with these kids that would have really helped them, but if you tried to talk about it and really helped them, you would have been attacked.
Yeah.
I would say that's definitely a dilemma.
Right.
And what is that?
The day-to-day dilemma?
Oh, like, it was what to report, what to confront parents on, which was usually never, from my position, I would always have an administrator for liability reasons and all that, but You know what I mean?
Because, like I said, I've reported several instances of children displaying self-abuse or sibling abuse or children that come in with marks.
And these things, as many people are aware, and you're probably aware, they're not very thoroughly investigated, especially in low-income areas.
People just kind of assume that they're going to happen, and it's too chaotic.
To stir up the family and then you get sued by people and all that.
No, that's not what I'm talking about, though.
Okay, I'm sorry.
I went off.
I don't think that's what your dream is talking about.
No, and I get.
So you could have reported child abuse or whatever, right?
But that's not anywhere in your dream.
So I don't think that's what your dream is talking about.
Okay, so I guess my question is then what are the ants?
Well, forget the ants for the moment because we have to deal with the water, right?
Okay.
What I could have done?
No, you have to think of the holes, and this is going to sound weird, but give me a sec, right?
Just, you know, hang onto your balls and we'll see if this works.
So, think of this.
Think of the holes in the ground as inverse breasts, right?
Like, imagine if a woman with giant metal breasts fell forward into the ground and then got up, right?
She would leave kind of depressions in the ground Where you'd put plants in, right?
All right, giant metal breasts.
I'm with you so far.
Yeah, we're all there, right?
Okay.
This is R versus K versus Meccano, right?
So you've got these inverse breasts, and the reason that I'm talking about this is because you're talking about the liquid that sustains the plants.
That's mother's milk.
There's no mother's milk.
There's no liquid to sustain these child plants.
Because potted plants, they're children.
In the plant world, they're children.
And you're trying to plant them, but there's no maternal love.
There's no water to sustain their roots.
There's no maternal love.
The mother's hearts are made of chalk.
Now, again, I'm not saying this is perfectly established, but if we go on this tightrope walk of trying to solve this one, there's no mother's milk, and you realize that what's missing from these young boys' lives is maternal affection.
And you're like, I'm going to point this out.
I am going to make them understand this.
And then what happens?
Nothing good.
Nothing good.
How has my show been received when I point out that a lack of maternal love is a significant problem in the world?
Ugh.
You know, somewhat tangentially, I have shared the science of spanking or the facts about spanking videos with parents at the school in some instances where I felt like it was borderline, like nothing that you could press charges for, but things that students have said or behavior that they've exhibited.
And I've just wrote down the facts about spanking video, the URL, and just sent it home with them.
But I don't know if that could have very well been...
What I realized over time is that might not help.
I don't know, but I'll tell you this, that talking about female responsibility, talking about spanking as a violation of the non-aggression principle, talking about voluntarism within the family has resulted in some attacks, right?
Oh yeah, yes, of course.
And so when you start talking about, I've got these potted plants...
And I planted them, oh, I forgot, deep down in their roots, right?
Roots of a plant are metaphors for early childhood, right?
Roots, in fact, guessing at some of the ethnicity of what you're dealing with, Roots is actually a famous novel and miniseries by Alex Haley about the origins of black slavery.
Roots, right?
Right.
And yes, I have realized that what they're missing is maternal love, and I think that connects really well.
That makes sense.
But if you say to these children, okay, let's pretend that you could speak without fear of consequence.
Okay.
In other words, let's pretend we're pure philosophers with no sense of self-preservation.
If you could speak...
To these children, the most important truth that they could hear that would have no negative consequences to you, what would you say to them?
What's the most important thing they need to understand?
I think that I would argue for the voluntary nature of family and the critical thinking The consistency of religion.
Who is responsible for them having no fathers?
Their mothers, yeah, of course.
Yeah, right.
And if you were to really tell them the truth about female responsibility and voluntarism and virtue and all that kind of good stuff...
What would happen?
They go home and they say, my teacher says, you're the reason I don't have a daddy.
Yeah, I get flamed.
Well, your life has certain challenges introduced to it.
I actually have had an experience that resulted in a kind of a...
The school diffused it by changing my position.
But there was a student who implicated me in wrongdoings.
And even though they have video cameras all over the school, and every instance that she claimed occurred was video camera, and it's been proven that there was no wrongdoing and all that.
But even so, the school changed my position because they said that if-- that they could-- that even if I was implicated, it could be huge trouble for me.
Even if it never resulted in any real charges or anything, that I could just be decimated.
Oh, no, no, absolutely.
I mean, a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to get its shoes tied.
There's no question.
I mean, yeah, I mean, it's such an unbalanced legal environment for particularly female charges of abuse.
Yeah, of course.
I mean, so they're talking about, like, should revenge porn be a crime, right?
Oh, yeah.
And, I mean, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it much, but I will say this, that when you look at Mattress Girl and you look at this girl who ran to Rolling Stone with the UVA rape accusations, and if you look at Crystal Magnum who accused the Duke Lacrosse boys of rape, and if you look at these, like, who's to say that a woman is not going to secretly film a guy having sex with her, and then if he breaks up with her, she uploads it and says...
He uploaded it as revenge porn, and then he goes to jail.
I mean, there's just no way to know any of these things.
And men have a very tough time understanding the degree of get-out-of-jail-free cards that women have in society.
I think there was a woman in England after her third or fourth false accusation of rape.
She finally served some jail time.
But...
I mean...
The woman with the mattress girl, she says that some guy raped her.
He seems to have evidence to the contrary.
She got credit for hauling a mattress around because he hadn't been expelled.
And she was told, don't bring your mattress to the graduation ceremony.
What did she do?
She brought her mattress to the graduation ceremony.
What happened?
Nothing!
Men cannot dream of living in such a consequence-free world.
In some great big sea song.
We can't imagine it.
We can't imagine what it would be like to live in a world where everyone takes your side.
We can't imagine what it would be like to live in a world where there's no consequences for the most egregious acts that can occur.
Many years ago, I knew a man who had a wife divorced him, and she accused him of sexually molesting the children.
And it took years before he was cleared.
Anything happen to her?
No.
I can't imagine living in a world where I don't show up for an exam and I get an A. I can't imagine living in a world where no one treats me like an authentic, independent adult.
And so it's really almost inconceivable to figuring this stuff out.
I can't imagine.
What it's like to live in that kind of world.
But men better figure this shit out.
I can't imagine living in a world where I screw up so badly that I end up having a bunch of kids with a bunch of different men and people give me money for it.
I'm a brave single father.
I can't imagine it.
It is stunning.
The instance that I spoke of was kind of a turning point for me that way.
Because I kind of brushed it off at the time.
But looking back on it, it kind of gives me chills seeing how close I brushed against the scales of this giant dragon of legal matriarchy.
Because this girl was basically...
It was really petty stuff.
He pushed me in the hallway or he said I was stupid.
But that can be frumped up to abuse.
And of course, none of it was true.
But it was hilarious to me to look back on this and see that if the mother had just gotten a lawyer, then I could be basically ruined, like really difficult to find work for the next decade.
So I kind of turned a corner there.
Oh yeah, I kind of turned a corner there.
Who's to say they would stop there with the charges?
I might find myself bargaining down for 10 years.
A lot of men are being driven out of the profession of teaching because of just these kinds of horror stories and potential disasters.
And there was that professor that I'm sure you heard about who decided to record all of his lectures now so that he has them documented because they called him some kind of sexist patriarch.
No, it's just Alan Dershowitz.
And what happened was he was explaining rape law and people called him a rape apologist and feminist got all up in arms and now people, they don't even want to teach rape law.
Because they have to teach burden of proof.
They have to teach innocent until proven guilty.
They have to teach about the crime of false reporting.
And then everyone says, oh, you're a rape apologist.
And then their life is horrendous.
But that is a challenge.
A lot of men don't want to go into a teaching profession.
They don't have the same protections that women have for these kinds of accusations, whether it's sexual impropriety or anything like that.
The women are wonderful effect, which is well known in psychological circles, the halo that follows all estrogen-based life forms, is not extended to men.
And the fact that women complain about sexism when men have to deal with unbelievable slander from really disturbed people.
It just shows you again how women seem to, in general, have a complete inability to ask men about men's experiences, but instead are too busy.
Like, there was a guy...
Mike, can you look up this name, if you don't mind?
I think his name was Tim Hunt, but he won the Nobel Prize for biology in 1972, I think it was.
And, you know, a very accomplished scientist and academic.
And he was doing a talk in Korea.
Obviously, I assume South Korea recently.
And he made a joke and he said, oh, you know, women in labs, it's tough.
They fall in love with you.
You fall in love with them.
And when you criticize them, they cry.
Right?
That was his joke.
Tim Hunt.
Tim Hunt.
His name is.
He's 72 years old, right?
And so...
And so what he's saying, of course, is that women react over-emotionally or hysterically to any kind of criticism, right?
Now, if you were a woman and you wanted to disprove his thesis, you would provide rational facts and evidence as to why this perspective was mistaken, right?
If you wanted to prove his thesis, you would react with vengeful and hysterical over-emotionalism To his comments, which do you think women who were interested in these issues did in general?
Did they disprove his thesis that women are over-emotional when criticized by bringing up calm reason and evidence as to why he was mistaken, or did they actually confirm his criticism by calling him a sexist pig and demanding his resignation and demanding his firing?
Yeah.
Well...
I will leave you to puzzle that out or search the internet.
But it is, I mean, and the fact that no one has said, well, doesn't that just confirm his thesis that women react hysterically when criticized?
He's a sexist pig.
He's got to be fired.
And, you know, we're going to put together to get him fired.
It's like, what?
I mean, let's say he's wrong.
Then correct him, right?
Give him the facts and evidence.
But all you're doing is proving his thesis while saying that his thesis is wrong.
The fact that women can get away with this Is astonishing and just shows how far we are still from dealing with women as responsible and respectful equals, which bloody well needs to be done.
So if you bring female responsibility to your kids, and if you bring them...
The basic female responsibility, it's as simple as this.
It's as simple as this.
If this was a man and a stranger, how would you feel?
Or what would you think?
Right?
That was really the beginning of female responsibility for me.
It was this basic question.
And it was actually about my own mother.
And the question was this.
If my mother was a man and a stranger, how would I feel about her?
And my answer was...
Run!
And that's a very...
And this is something I learned from women.
I can't believe it took me this long to sink into me.
But women say, oh, well, if this was a man, what would you do?
Like, I did this thing on Dylann Roof, and people are like, oh, if he was a black guy, would you try and empathize with him?
Yeah, I did the truth about Freddie Gray, so yes, fuck you.
But this is the question to ask about female responsibility.
If this woman in your life was a man...
And a stranger, how would you think and what would you feel?
And the reason we switch to man is because men's critical faculties tend to diminish around women, even non-fertile women, even old women.
And so you have to switch it to a man, and also then you can't go with the biological bond of motherhood because that clouds judgment, right?
And people, women say, oh, well, no, there's a bond called marriage, which women are supposed to not take all too seriously.
I mean, there's very few criticisms of women.
60-plus percent or 70% of the divorce-initiated Are initiated by women and the number one cause is, I'm discontented.
I'm dissatisfied.
Right?
But, you know, if you're dissatisfied with something, fix it.
You don't fucking blow it up.
But anyway.
So it takes away the bond, like the maternal bond, and it takes away the halo effect of women.
So you think, if you were to say to your students, I want you to think of your mom...
As a middle-aged guy, you don't even know.
Like, you just meet this middle-aged guy at a party who's just like your mom.
What would you think, right?
That's the basic question.
And what that does is it substitutes virtue for biology, both in terms of motherhood and in terms of being a female, right?
What would you think of this woman if she was a man and a stranger?
I mean, if my wife was a man and a stranger, I'd really want that person to be my friend because she's a great person.
And what do you think your students would say if you said to them something like that?
You said, like, I invite you to think of your mother not as your mother and not as a woman and not as a matriarch and not as the woman who gave you life like it was their gift to give, right?
Because, yeah, having sex is a lot of work.
If she was a stranger and a male...
Years and years ago, I watched this show, WKRP in Cincinnati, and one of the guys is looking to live with one of the other guys because this place is getting fumigated or something.
And the other guy says, oh, I can't.
I already have a roommate.
He's like, a roommate?
What do you mean?
Like, who is he?
He says, oh, you know, an elderly Asian gentleman, what can I say, right?
Which means he's joking, of course, right?
Of course, he's a young, hot thing or whatever that he's sleeping with.
But elderly Asian gentleman, it always stuck with me.
And I used to think about that.
I'd be physically attracted to a woman and I'd say, okay, forget the tits and ass.
If she was an elderly Asian gentleman that I met at a coffee shop, what would I think?
And that...
Elderly Asian gentleman, I don't care what your fetish is, that's almost like 99 times out of 100.
That's a boner killer, right?
There's no question for that, right?
And nothing to do with Asians.
It's just kind of funny, right?
But it's a good way to judge people outside of sexual attraction, which sexual attraction, particularly in the R versus K thing that we talked about earlier, seems to have a lot to do with...
Having you not judge the human being, but rather judge the eggs.
And we can't really keep going on as a species if we only judge egg quality, not personality quality, because it's just not going to work out for us very well, as I talked about earlier.
So what do you think would happen if...
You were to say to these kids, female responsibility.
Your mother chose to have sex with these guys.
Either she chose really low-quality guys, in which case, how can you accept her judgment on anything?
Or B, she chose high-quality guys who she then drove away, and so you don't have a dad.
What do you think would happen to you?
Well, I guess I can tell you firsthand what would happen, because that kind of alludes to the incident that I was speaking of in the first place.
But to give you an idea, like I said, if I do that, the worst case scenario is that I could go to prison.
And how I mean is that I actually, with this specific girl, I told her one time, and this is what was especially interesting to me, is because we had a really good rapport.
She liked me for a long time.
We had good engagement.
She was in my reading class.
And I got a lot of work out of her in the sense that I was able to motivate her.
She was happy and everything.
And a few times she came to class really distressed.
And so I would kind of pull her aside before class started in the hallway and just say, hey, is everything all right?
Do we need to go to the office or need to take five minutes to get a drink of water or whatever?
And she talked about how she was crying because she didn't do her homework and it was because she had to take care of her baby sister and her baby sister was fighting her or whatever.
And so she goes on this long spiel about...
Basically, what had happened at her house last night that was...
Of course, she could have gone on for minutes, but I had to cut her off eventually to say, okay, well, we need to talk to your mom then because we kind of have a deal at the school where we have to make sure that all our students are getting enough homework time or else we have to change the requirements for them.
We have to give them some kind of exception if it really is overwhelming for their family to do homework.
And so...
Initially, she was really grateful that I would talk to her about it and that I was willing to talk to her mom.
But after just a few days, her attitude towards me totally flipped.
And she was out to get me from that point on.
And I think that it was because I threatened this innate mechanism whereby I don't know if she mentioned something to her mother or if...
I have no idea what happened.
All I know is that that's when the complaint started from her saying that I had So I think that's what happens.
If you even introduce this paradigm to any member of the family, it has almost physiological reactions in people, I think.
And it can end up really, really bad.
So the issue was that she was going to have to do her homework, right?
The issue was that because she had talked about how she couldn't do her homework repeatedly, that I would have to get the administrators together with her parents and talk about why she wasn't doing her homework.
But the parents, I feel like that was evaded by just making false accusations against me and having her move to a different class.
Or actually, they had me move to a different class, but same thing.
Oh, okay, so you said basically we have to find out a way for you to do your homework, and she obviously brought this home, or maybe she did, maybe she didn't, right?
Maybe she just didn't want to do her homework, and she was just making this up as an excuse, and so maybe what happened was she had been lying to you about why she hadn't done her homework, and then if you were to sit down with her mom and you were to say...
This is what she told me.
Yeah, she says she hasn't been doing her homework because she has to take care of her baby sister.
And the mom says, well, wait a minute, she didn't have a baby sister or whatever, right?
Right, yeah.
Then that's a problem.
So it may have come from her, it may have come from the mom, but the solution, of course, was simply to eliminate you from the equation with false accusations.
Yeah, yeah, I'll never know exactly what happened, but either way, that was the end of it, yeah.
But I guess what I mean is that maybe that wasn't...
Hang on, but hang on a sec, sorry.
Sorry, just to understand, because there's a charter school, right?
Yeah, it is.
So if the girl makes false accusations, and as you say, there's video, right?
If the girl makes false accusations, wouldn't the girl get expelled, or would that provoke more problems?
That would probably provoke more problems.
Because we had a few interactions with the parents, or at least with the mother.
And any time that she got uncomfortable, she would just burst into a fountain of tears.
And then you couldn't talk to her anymore.
She would just leave after that.
It was like you drove up to a point...
Wait, sorry.
Was it the mom or the daughter?
The mother.
Well, both, actually.
The mother displayed the same candid ability.
But...
Wait, if you criticize them, they cry?
No, because Tim Hunt obviously was completely incorrect about that.
Right.
Well, and even when...
All it was is...
Because they couldn't get the...
Everybody...
Like, the policy of the school is whenever there's an allegation or a conflict, then the teacher, the parent, and one administrator, along with the person who's implicated, all have to join together.
And that's what she really didn't...
Whenever they started...
Whenever they tried to get her to do that, she...
She would just burst into tears and say that she doesn't know if her daughter can handle the stress of basically being in a room with me.
So, yeah, that was interesting.
But yeah, there would be no recourse for me.
That doesn't happen.
So that's the dream.
That's the dream.
Yeah, the dream is that the teaching is going to be a disaster.
If you really want to try and effect positive change, then you would be putting yourself at an unacceptable level of risk.
Yeah, I guess.
I didn't really put it directly to the point of my employment, but I guess I'm just glad that I quit.
Because that makes a lot of sense.
I took it as...
Well, you'd be neutered, right?
Because you're so afraid of negative consequences that you're neutered, right?
I mean, you can't talk about the real roots of why these young plants...
Aren't really growing.
Right, yeah.
It's especially discouraging to see a lot of the teaching community basically pass off authoritative memes, if that's the correct way to use that phrase.
I don't know.
But basically, believing in the general authority of things.
It's a school in the States, so it's very patriotic.
It's...
And they do the pledge every morning, which I refuse to participate in.
And they always do the national anthem and sing the national anthem.
And I've kind of been...
I was kind of banned.
Not banned, but they told me not to come to the Veterans Day and Memorial Day assemblies anymore because it's a big spectacle and it looks bad to see somebody sitting down in the middle of the pledge and not saying it.
So they asked that I step out of those.
But I don't know.
I'm kind of going off on a rant here, but I guess...
No, it makes sense.
Yeah, there's nothing I can do.
There's not a huge...
The change that I could affect is daunted by the negative effects that I could experience.
And that's tough to come to because it feels like giving up on the idea of teaching.
No, look, I mean, where you are is...
A very powerful place, which is, I think that you've accepted a truth, which is that to tell the truth to children about what's wrong in their families these days is something that cannot be done if you are in a professional teaching position, right?
Yeah, definitely not.
Of course.
The system wouldn't set it up any other way.
You can't have a corrupt and dysfunctional hierarchical system if people have access to kids who can tell the truth.
Keeping the truth away from kids is essential to having a corrupt oligarchical system, right?
Yeah, absolutely.
They don't invite a lot of atheists to give speeches in churches, right?
Especially to teach Sunday school, right?
Yes, yeah, of course.
And the paradox is this.
You cannot reach children because children are encased within the family.
And by the time the children become adults, they're so screwed up that they are immune to reason, and in fact, recoil against reason, right?
So there's lots of studies that show That if you try to reason with someone who's irrational, the irrationality gets stronger.
If you provide someone with an irrational belief, evidence against their belief, their belief actually gets stronger, like their irrational belief gets stronger.
And so this is the problem, that you cannot teach children, because that provokes the caregivers, and by the time the children grow up, You can't teach them, because trying to teach them makes them more irrational.
Seems hopeless, right?
Yeah, yes it does.
It's not, but it seems that way.
And we should have relief in this, I think, because if it was easy to make the world sane, it would have happened already.
It should be a ridiculously difficult paradox, right?
Otherwise, it wouldn't make any sense why the world was still so irrational.
So it should give us some relief.
Yeah, that reminds me of some genetic stability things that I think you were talking about in your last Colin show.
You can kind of take comfort in a degree of stability within the human race.
So the only thing that I know of to do, as I've talked about many times, is to promote family volunteerism.
There's nothing that you can do To promote quality in relationships other than promote volunteerism in relationships.
Now, you can't promote volunteerism for kids because kids aren't in a voluntary relationship.
But you can promote volunteerism for adults.
And that way, like you can't go and nag every post office worker to be efficient and to be competent and to be friendly and to be good at his or her job.
I mean, there's no point.
I mean, you can't go around nagging because the whole structure is set up against that because it's not a voluntary relationship between the customer and the supplier, right?
Yeah.
You know, to take an extreme example, there's no point telling the rapist to bring flowers.
It actually just adds insult to injury, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so the only way that you improve the quality of service in the post office is Is to privatize it.
Is to turn it from an involuntary relationship to a voluntary relationship.
And there's nothing else to do with the family.
That's the only thing that you can do.
And I think your dream is saying that you are going to get stabbed in the back.
You begin to ask Steph if he has a hose to water them.
Right?
Steph, do you have enough love to fix these children?
Steph, do you have enough resources to fix these children?
Just put some water in these inverted maternal breasts of the ground where the children's roots grow.
And you are attacked by tiny, unbearable things, right?
Yes.
Which is slander, which is, you know, all of the crap that can get written about people or all the crap that you could get dragged through professionally and all of that, right?
Yeah, yeah.
It's not a kill shot, it's just annoying, right?
And in this case, obviously unbearable, right?
Right, yeah.
And so, when did you decide not to go back next year?
About six months ago, I decided.
I'd been weighing the decision for about a year.
Right.
And I think the dream is saying, don't be neutered.
Don't be in a situation where you can be neutered.
Don't do it.
Because then you will be a constant lifelong example to children of how good people lose to bad people.
Because they'd know.
They'd know that you had a lot of truth in you.
They'd know that you knew exactly what was going on.
And they'd know that you were too afraid.
They'd know you were too afraid to speak up.
I'm not saying irrationally or wrongly.
That's the way it is, right?
And so your presence in the classroom would be a constant reminder to these children that, oh, you see, good people, they lose.
They shut up.
They get censored.
They get silenced.
Right?
Precisely, yeah.
Bad people win.
If you stay in a situation where you're neutered, you're a constant advertisement as to how bad people win and good people shut the fuck up and get in line.
Yeah, I think that kind of cinches it for me in a way, in the sense that I like, not cinching the call, but I'm saying that it really answers a lot of the question as far as where it's been going in my mind, because the job started off, like I said, as I think every teacher is, a little naive, thinking what kind of influence that you can have and how much you can accomplish with a child.
And then it kind of goes through this neutral phase, or it did for me, where you're It's not really cynical, but you realize that you're not making any big changes in the minds of the next generation.
This did the final flip to where not only is it neutral, it's actually bad for me to be in that position because then the child learns that free people, kind people, considerate people, people with empathy, they end up here as cowards.
Yes.
And that's powerful.
Yes, if you cannot be an example...
When you take on moral tasks, you are either an example of heroism or of cowardice.
There is nothing in the middle.
Right.
And so if you take on a moral task, you must, must put yourself in a position where heroism is possible.
And I would argue that in your environment...
In the environment that you're teaching in, heroism is impossible.
Because if you are heroic and you tell the truth, you will get so ground down and broken up that people will grow up saying, well, the last thing you ever want to do is know the truth or speak the truth.
I remember what happened to that guy.
The only thing you could...
Do is say, hey, you want to drive this car?
When you turn the key, it blows your fucking balls off.
And people would say, I really don't think I want that car.
Right?
The nutless sedan is not for me.
Right?
Oh, and by the way, it will take you three years to have your balls bitten off.
I think I'm good.
I'll be alright.
So no, I mean, I think that this is saying you can't.
You can't do it.
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
It works with what I've already surmised about the dream, but I didn't think that it would stretch that far.
That was amazing.
I'm glad that you brought those things up.
Because it feels weird.
It feels like abandoning the kids is abandoning virtue.
But I would say that in removing yourself from a situation where virtue becomes self-destructive, you are avoiding becoming a poster boy for badness, right?
Right.
I don't know.
Like, what came to mind when you were speaking just now is, thank God Socrates didn't drink the poison too soon.
You know, he at least waited after he got some good philosophy out of him to drink the poison.
Well, no, but Socrates drank the poison because he did not want to live in a world where philosophers get poison.
Socrates, I mean, Socrates at the very end, at least according to, we don't know the whole story, but according to the story, he said to a friend, uh, I'm going to drink this poison.
Be sure to sacrifice a cock to this particular deity.
Which is what you do when you've been given a gift, right?
So a death was a gift for Socrates.
I've got this, the whole, the trial and death of Socrates, like a six-part series I did five years ago.
But people should check it out.
It's a very good series, but...
No, Socrates, he did not want to live in a world where he is put on trial for what?
It's the same goddamn thing every time, right?
With philosophers.
What do you do?
Oh, you don't believe in the gods of the city.
And you're corrupting the youth.
Can you imagine a philosopher getting accused of corrupting the youth?
Unthinkable, right?
And...
I think he's just like, I actually do not want to live in this world where it's a gift.
This is a present.
If this is the world that is, I'm sorry I left my kids in it, but it is a gift.
I will take that poison willingly.
He was in a situation where heroism was impossible.
He gave them the last giant curse, which is obey the government.
That has killed me.
Obey the government.
The fact that, at least to my knowledge, I was the first one to point out this irony just because anarchy plus the trial and death of Socrates seems pretty obvious.
He says that the majority of men are fools, but you should obey the government who is voted for by the majority who are fools.
You should obey the fool's representative who is the government.
That a philosopher would...
Would tell you that, to obey the government.
It's so ridiculous.
The government that just put the philosopher to death.
It's such an obvious, ultimate fuck you prank from Socrates.
I'm now going to curse you with obedience to the state as my final fuck you.
You kill me, I will give you allegiance to an institution that will kill hundreds of millions of you.
You dumb fucks.
You dumb, evil, stupid fucks that I have spent my entire life trying to educate you now.
Vote for my death?
Fine.
Fuck you.
Obey the state.
You don't want to listen to reason?
Obey the government.
See how that gets you, you stupid bastards.
And everyone's like, oh yeah, you know, you've got to obey the state because Socrates said, you know, it's a social contract and they gave you life and you took the protection of the law and you said...
Oh, the vengeance of a philosopher is a terrible thing.
Socrates was the greatest mass murderer in history, if you look at the effects of what he said.
And I don't think he knew himself.
Because, you see, it's one thing, you know, his first commandment was know thyself.
He didn't know how angry he was.
He did not know how angry he was, and he chose this Buddhist route of going out gracefully and so on.
But he was so angry.
You see, it's one thing to curse your world, the world that voted you to die.
That's one thing.
It's quite another thing to have that curse pass thousands of years into the future, causing the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of people.
But those words that came out of the mouth of Socrates are some of the most terrifying words that have ever been spoken by a human being.
Because they have been used so often to shut everyone up who doubts the state.
The wisest man in history, Socrates himself, said obey the state.
Yeah, that's the government that voted to kill him.
Do you not find that a little fucked up?
No.
Socrates says, for every man of reason you kill, the curse of the dying man of reason will be hundreds of millions of you shall die like dogs.
You shall die from disease, you shall die from war, you shall die from prisons, you shall die from hunger.
You shall die from subjugation.
You shall die from randomness.
You shall die from the swords of the people I told you to worship the same people who wanted me dead.
For every one man of reason you kill, I will kill hundreds of millions of you.
Because you stupid bastards are this ungrateful to a man who gave up wealth and power To speak reason to you in the marketplace?
To attempt to bring you to a better place in life?
And you vote for me?
You put Meletus across from me?
And you vote for me to die listening to this young, idiot, fool, evil, sophist?
You put my wisdom at the age of 70 next to young Meletus and you say, I should be put to death because he says all of these things that are not true?
Fine.
For every one philosopher you kill, hundreds of millions of people shall die in the balance.
And that curse has continued along the lines of philosophers.
The philosophers in history, I could go through them one by one, but I won't bore with everyone now.
You look at the philosophers in history, and of course they were acting under compulsion.
But in general, they could have told the truth on their deathbeds.
But in general, they hate the masses who scorn the philosophers to such a degree that they curse the masses with nationalism and religiosity, knowing that to unleash these bioweapons, the bad ideas are the ultimate bioweapons.
They are the weapons of mass distraction.
These bad ideas are the ultimate bioweapons.
And until Society learns to venerate the philosopher.
Philosophers outside of me and very few others will continue to curse society with the obedience that slaughters people by the hundreds of millions.
You can't win against a philosopher.
A philosopher will turn your hatred of the philosopher into a love of the state who will then kill you.
So I hope that helps, and I really do appreciate you bringing that dream to our attention.
It was great.
Yeah, I was thrilled to hear what you had to say about it.
It made a lot of sense.
And by the way, the presentation you have on the trial and death of Socrates, that is great.
I would absolutely recommend it to the listeners if you haven't heard it.
Yeah, we'll link it below, but thanks very much.
All right, Matt, who's up next?
All right, up next is Amber.
Amber wrote in and said, The bottom line is that I want to stop being dishonest and evasive, but I don't want to jump in headfirst without first having an idea of how to start, as I don't want to make any harmful mistakes.
I have come to understand that I am somewhat emotionally inept.
What are some steps that I can take in order to grow an emotional backbone?
That's from Amber.
Yeah, is there anything you wanted to add to what you said?
Uh, no, not well...
I was afraid that my question wasn't very concise as far as what I was trying to communicate.
No, no, if there's anything you want to add, that's fine.
No, there's nothing I'd like to add.
Maybe there'd be something I'd come up with during the conversation.
Well, why do you want this backbone?
What do you think it will do for you?
I think it will improve my relationship.
I think it'll improve the quality of my relationships and just the integrity of my interactions in general.
First thing you said was your relationship and then you switched to plural.
Was there one relationship in particular that you're focusing on?
No, well I'm more or less focusing on specifically on relationships with my immediate family members.
Right, right.
And let's say that you could snap your fingers tomorrow And have, you know, all the assertiveness and honesty and directness that you wanted or you want.
Let's say you could snap your fingers and have all of that tomorrow.
What do you think would happen?
I think I would improve the community.
Understand each other better and be able to help, you know.
Improve each other's lives and then help each other achieve our goals and just better quality of life in general.
So your theory is that you have problematic relationships with your immediate family and it's your fault 100% because you are not assertive enough.
Is that right?
No, I just think it's definitely not 100% my fault.
There's a lot of shared responsibility, but if I were more honest about my perspectives, I think at least that they would know how I feel.
And in that case, sometimes the ball does exchange hands.
Why do you think they don't ask you what you feel now?
I mean, you know, if I want to know how someone feels, I can say, hey, how do you feel, right?
And make that an inviting space for them to let me know, right?
Which I assume they're not doing, right?
Yes, communication is terrible in my family.
So why do you think they're not doing that?
Well, the first thing that came to my mind is they don't want to know my opinion.
I think that's a fair thing, right?
I mean, if...
If I know where your winning lottery ticket is and you want to go and cash it in, you're going to ask me, where's the winning lottery ticket, right?
Right.
Because you want to know that, right?
But if I've known you for years and years and I still have not asked you how you feel, it's because I don't want to know how you feel, right?
Right.
Okay.
So...
What don't they want to know about what you feel, right?
So if you're honest with them and tell them how you feel, what are they going to hear that they don't want to hear?
Well, I guess that's part of my aversion to negative reactions is that in the past I have been honest and not, you know, not brutally honest, but frank.
And the reaction has been negative.
And even though it was coming from a place, you know, Where I was trying to communicate it from a place of love and caring, still the reaction was negative and it did cause a lot of conflict.
Alright, hang on, hang on.
Would you like me to model a kind of assertiveness that might be helpful?
Sure.
It came from a place of love, you said.
Yes, like I was concerned and it wasn't unsolicited either.
No, I get it.
I get it.
Okay.
So what about your family do you love?
I love our shared experiences and the different personalities and just being with them.
Nope.
No, no, no.
No.
Listen, two guys in a cell have shared experiences, right?
Right.
That doesn't mean love.
Right.
Well, it could possibly be love.
It doesn't mean love, it doesn't mean no love, but it doesn't mean love, right?
Right.
Shared experiences are not the same as love, because shared experiences are morally neutral, right?
I mean, if two bank robbers, Bonnie and Clyde, have been robbing banks for 20 years, actually, no, not banks, robbing mom-and-pop stores, because, you know, banks generally rob us, that's the way it works, but they've been robbing little mom-and-pop stores for 20 years, they have a shared experience of being thieves, right?
Right.
Yes.
But we would not say that their actions are noble and heroic and virtuous and worthy of love, right?
Okay.
I get what you're saying.
So not shared experiences.
You said different personalities?
Mm-hmm.
I don't know what that means.
I mean, there are lots of different personalities in an asylum.
That doesn't mean that we would love everyone in the asylum.
And again, I'm not saying your family's in asylum or that they're robbers.
I'm just saying that I don't see how these things would be loved necessarily.
Okay.
Well, I guess when I've said different personalities, I'm thinking about the aspects of, you know, my siblings' personalities or my parents that I love that are, you know, they're compassionate and they have a good sense of humor.
Okay, let's go back.
Sorry, let's go back.
So you're just trying to piece this puzzle together, right?
So you said that your parents or your siblings are compassionate?
My siblings.
Your siblings are compassionate.
If I were to think of my mother, she is more compassionate now, but I'd still say that she didn't really demonstrate true compassion because she tends to be really self-centered, so she's not concerning herself with others most of the time.
Okay, I'm trying to puzzle this out because you said that the few times that you have tried to talk about, like they invite you to share your thoughts and feelings and then you get attacked?
Is that a fair way to put it?
Right, so there's a strange split, but I guess I was describing that there is sort of this invisible wall that we run into when it comes to Really getting honest about personal matters.
Like, you know, we've all made bad decisions, but confronting those issues in any serious way, that's when things get a little bit difficult to navigate.
What do you mean a little bit difficult to navigate?
I thought you said it was a very negative response.
Right.
So, well, I guess for me, I get tentative in that situation because of, you know, What do you call it?
Gun-shy.
I'm not sure.
Are you trying to understand why I say that?
Because they are compassionate in most scenarios, but then when it becomes personal matters, it gets defensive.
Really, really defensive.
Well, I mean, you said that they don't ask you how you feel, right?
Except, you know, a couple of times they've asked you how you feel, and you tell them how you feel, and you get attacked, right?
So if people don't ask you how you feel, what on earth are they being compassionate about, right?
Like, if I run a restaurant, and you come in, and I'm your waiter...
And I say, I'm going to tell you what you're having for dinner tonight.
And you say, well, shouldn't I tell you?
Nope.
Can I see a menu?
No.
I'm telling you what you're having for dinner tonight.
And then I bring you some food, which you don't like.
Can it really be said that I'm a compassionate waiter who's really concerned about the quality of your eating experience?
Well, would you say it's possible to be compassionate in some scenarios and then have sort of a block when it comes to certain topics?
Well, I mean, apparently Hitler was kind to dogs.
And I've known some people who are very nasty pieces of work but have certain sentimental streaks about certain things.
Like, for instance, Jung said that, I don't know if it's true or not, but it's an interesting idea where he says that And sentimentality is like the flip side.
He called it the superstructure, but the flip side of brutality.
In other words, people who are quite brutal can often be quite sentimental as well.
And I've found that to be quite true in many instances.
So I think that's certainly true, but...
I think that compassion towards a person requires that you ask what that person thinks and feels.
Otherwise, you are not having compassion towards that person.
Now, I mean, my mother, for instance, was relatively good when I was not well as a kid, right?
I mean, she'd set me up in the living room with comic books or whatever, and she was pretty nice, right?
Because she was taking care of my body, right?
But when it came to me as a person and ideas or thoughts or preferences I would have that would be different or sometimes even opposed to her, well, she was very hostile.
Does that mean that she was like half compassionate and half not?
No.
It means that she was compassionate towards what was most generic about me, which was my body, and she was least compassionate towards that which was the most me, which is my mind, my thoughts and feelings.
Yes.
I can relate to that quite significantly.
So, still trying to understand the love thing, right?
Because you're saying that you said you...
And the reason we're bringing this up is you said, I approach them with love.
Well, instead of...
And I'm trying to understand...
I'm sorry?
Well, you know, there's various approaches you can take and you can be accusatory and you can be aggressive.
No, I understand that.
But if you're not sure what you love about people, it's hard to say that you approach them with love.
Okay, so we're using the word love.
Well, maybe compassion is a better word.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about how I feel about my family.
Right.
I mean, you have an adverse childhood experience score of six, right?
Right.
So that's verbal abuse and threats, no family love or support, parents divorced, physical abuse towards female adults, lived with alcohol or drug use or household member, depressed, mentally ill or suicide attempt.
And you were spanked one to two times per week.
Because like you say that you want to, you don't want to be dishonest and evasive, right?
Right.
I guess I'm putting more of the onus on myself for whatever role I have in the relationships.
Why?
To improve myself as much as possible, regardless of their level of functioning.
No, but their level of functioning is important, right?
Because it's a relationship.
You can't have a great tennis game if only one person knows how to play tennis, right?
Yeah.
The quality of a relationship, Amber, is a function...
Of the honesty of both parties.
And with regards to you and your parents, they have defined the relationship because you were subject to their power and control and physical hitting for many, many years.
Your parents have defined the relationship and you cannot have a higher quality relationship than the other person allows you to.
You cannot have a higher quality tennis game than the skill and dedication of the other person allow you to, right?
Okay, yeah, I get that.
Does that make sense?
Yes, it does.
Like if you're singing a duet with someone, if one of you sounds like Gloria Estefan and the other one sounds like a frog, it's not going to be a pretty duet, right?
Together it's going to be like bad or jokey or whatever, right?
So if you take the entire onus of the relationship on yourself, I think that that's not accurate.
And I think what's going to happen then is that...
And it also means you're giving up on the other person.
I'm not sure whether you should or shouldn't, but I think that's what it means, right?
Because you're saying, well, I'm responsible for the quality in this relationship, but that doesn't give the other person the onus or the need to have quality or to bring quality to the relationship.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
So, and the reason I'm saying all of this is, you know, it would be great if you could have a high-quality relationship with your family.
I mean, that's good stuff, right?
But I don't think you'll get there if you're not honest about your own feelings and thoughts towards your family, and also if you take the major or the entire burden upon yourself for the quality of that relationship.
Okay.
Because if you have an adverse childhood experience score of 6, which means that you're going to have some residual difficulties with your family, right?
Yeah.
I mean, people with an adverse childhood experience score of 0 probably have, once they achieve a particular level of philosophy, some challenges with regards to their family, right?
Yeah.
I mean, there's nothing in the adverse childhood experience score here called was told about hell, or was encouraged to join the military, or was sent to a terrible government school, or, or, or, right?
You just go on and on and on, right?
Right.
But you have an adverse childhood experience score of 6, which means that you're going to have some complicated feelings towards your family, right?
There's going to be some attachment.
There's going to be some disappointment.
There's going to be some anger.
There's going to be some pain.
There's going to be some frustration.
There's going to be some significant desire for connection, right?
It's going to be a big, complicated thing.
Is that fair to say?
Yes, very much so.
Okay, so then when you say, well, I just approached them with love.
I don't believe you.
I'm not saying there's no love in there, but what I'm saying is that you say, well, I just approached them with love.
It's much more complicated than that, right?
Oh, yes.
I'm not sure I can quantify the whole mix.
Right, right.
And so because it's a big...
I'm not saying you should or could, right?
But you could at least say...
It's a challenge.
It's something you shouldn't have to do.
The child should not need to instruct the parent on basic honesty, curiosity, and empathy.
That's not a fun job for a kid.
It's not a job that any kid of any age should have to take on.
It is very difficult to coach One's parents.
Because they're the authority figures, right?
And I don't assume that your parents have given up this authority figure thing, right?
Well, I'm not sure they ever fully assumed it.
They definitely used it to their advantage when it suited.
Right, but what I mean is they haven't said, listen, we're now equals, forget about all that parenting stuff, we're going to listen to you as much as you had to listen to us, and we're redefining the relationship and all that, right?
Right, there's no discussion really on that level.
Right.
And have they accepted any faults in their parenting?
My mother has.
Oh, that's good.
To a degree.
I mean, she has a lot of trouble.
I think she has a lot of trouble confronting all of it, but she's taken at least steps towards confronting bits and pieces and continues to do so.
And what has she accepted as negative that she did?
All the physical violence.
And she was a substance abuser and she talked about that and how she, you know, the impact it had on us as children and her regrets and her...
She's apologized for that.
And...
And is that still part of an ongoing dialogue?
Because obviously it takes more than one or ten or fifty conversations to begin to close that gap, right?
Yes, it is ongoing basically every time we do speak that It comes up in, you know, one form or another.
Okay.
Okay, good.
And is she asking you about, you know, what effects her substance abuse has had on you?
Yeah, and maybe that speaks to part of, you know, addressing part of my question is that she has asked me those questions and I've You know, I have answered her, but I haven't been as frank as, I don't know, I guess I've been afraid of, you know, setting her off emotionally, so I have answered, but not to the degree of honesty that I would have liked to.
Right.
I'm just, you know, she's in recovery again.
Well, I guess recovery.
Oh, she's in, so this is not a distant problem.
No.
Well, it's been recurring throughout her life.
And what does she abuse?
Alcohol, mainly.
And how long was she an addict before she was, now she's currently in recovery?
Right.
Well, when she went into recovery when I was around five, She had been a pretty bad alcoholic prior to that and through her teenage years, I believe, as well.
And then she was doing well for a little while and then relapsed.
And then back when I was...
It's hard for me to remember precisely, but when I was in grade two or three, she was sober again.
And she actually stayed sober until I was 23.
23.
For how old until you were 23?
Like 8 or 10 till 23.
She had a really good long stretch there.
And so when it did happen again, it kind of snuck up on everybody because we didn't recognize what was happening.
Right.
And we were all, you know, all my siblings and myself were all grown and doing our own thing at that point.
So it was sort of, she was able to hide it a lot more easily.
Right.
But yeah, so she got out of rehab maybe six months ago.
Oh, okay, okay.
And how long was she on the booze again?
Four, you said?
I mean, it was nearly six years.
Wow.
And it was just sort of one of those continuous downward slopes.
It wasn't severe, but it was, you know, we had been Saying to her, oh, you need to go back to meetings or whatever worked for her, back to her counseling.
Because she had done the thing that a lot of alcoholics do, which is, well, I've been sober for a long time, so I can have one drink.
Yeah.
Which is a critical mistake.
Right.
But then she got really bad in the year previous to the last six months.
Yeah, just by the by, I can never figure out how people can afford alcohol.
It's really expensive.
No, I mean, I'm sorry.
It's just like, man, I mean, I don't drink that much at all.
I mean, that may be a beer or two a week or if that.
But it's like, holy crap, this shit's expensive.
And I mean, being an alcoholic, I mean, you just want to set fire to your money as well as your relationships.
But anyway, I just...
I wanted to sort of point that out.
Maybe it's cheaper.
Canada's all government controlled and all that, but man, it's bad stuff for price.
Yeah, no idea.
Right, so my major thought, Amber, is that it's not your fault.
You say like, oh, I need to sort of grow this emotional backbone and And I have, you say, I have these deficiencies.
I'm very fearful of negative reactions and consequences, you say.
I avoid stress.
And the one that really struck me was I'm somewhat emotionally inept, right?
Yeah, I just, I feel that I don't, I don't know, I tend to shut down a bit, so I don't really...
No, no, I get that.
In fact, I know that's happening in this very conversation.
Would you agree?
Oh, yeah, I think so.
Yeah, because I'm challenging some of the consistency of what you're saying, and I think I'm doing it in a pretty friendly way, but it's kind of stressful for you, right?
Yes.
Right.
Yeah, going back.
I'm sorry?
Even just trying, you know, thinking back.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
But it's a lot of self-blame, frankly.
These, I mean, you know I'm no therapist, but I can spot logical inconsistencies when I see them, right?
Right.
Like, if I've never been exposed to Japanese, am I inept at Japanese?
No.
If someone taught me all the wrong words for Japanese, would I say, well, I guess I'm just incompetent at Japanese?
What would I say?
You'd say you never learned Japanese.
I was badly taught.
Yeah.
Not my fault.
I was badly taught.
And my concern is that you, like, when children grow up with substance abusers, what they do is they attempt to control as much as humanly possible.
Yep.
Because so much Of what occurs in substance abuse or violent or dysfunctional households, so much of what occurs is outside the child's control, right?
And so you try to assert control as much as possible, but you cannot effect or exert much control at all over your environment, right?
Because things are chaotic with the parents and there's violence, there's problems that you can't control.
And it's pretty random for kids, right?
You don't know what kind of mood people are going to be in.
You don't know if they're going to be up or down.
You don't know how they're going to take particular things or not take particular things or whatever, right?
I mean, I couldn't figure this crap out for the life of me sometimes.
What would bother my mother?
What wouldn't bother my mother?
It would make no sense to me.
It would make no sense to me.
And yeah, like you couldn't pay me a million dollars to try and figure out whether she's coming home tonight happy or sad.
Or even the same thing, like a week apart, exactly the same occurrence would provoke wildly different and sometimes opposing reactions.
And part of it, I didn't understand the difference between the public and the private face.
Like when there were other people over, If I would spill my milk and there were people over, she'd laugh and, oh, kids, you know, whatever, right?
And she'd sail off in a happy little blur of glee to get the cloth to clean it up.
And, like, she would be still chatting.
Like, she'd be perfectly fine because there were people over, right?
But, you know, I've mentioned this on the show before, but I remember when I was, I think, eight years old or so, seven or eight years old, my brother and I were making a 124th model Spitfire.
And we had silver paint out, and we had this white shag carpet, and we spilled some silver paint on the white shag carpet.
Oh, Amber, I can't tell you how terrifying that was.
It was terrifying.
Terrifying.
My mother was out.
My mother's stepmother was there.
She was visiting from Germany, bringing the hellspawn pseudo-treat known as marzipan, but that's a rant for another time.
And we were...
She was scared, too.
Maybe because we were so...
But we were terrified that we were just going to get beaten literally within an inch of our lives when she saw that there were spots of silver paint on this white shag carpet.
Wow.
Terrified.
And...
Literally, it's like, okay, well, we're just being slowly lowered into the shark cage, and the shark hasn't eaten in a month, and here goes my leg, right?
I mean, this is what it was like, like the last hop of the movie Deep Water or something.
But she actually did help us.
We lifted an armchair.
We cut a little slice of carpet out, and we cut a little slice out where We spilled the paint and we switched the two around.
She helped us.
She helped us cover up the silver paint in this deep shag carpet.
And he combed it all over, right?
Like a Donald Trump comb over or something like that.
Wow.
Because, you see, that was family so she could go insane on us.
But when there were other people, I can remember there were, she invited some Jehovah's Witnesses in once to talk to us about, I guess, Jehovah and how they'd witnessed him or whatever the hell they talk about.
And, you know, I remember I spilled some water and she was like, oh, no problem, right, and blah, blah, blah.
And so I didn't understand that it was like the public face and the private face.
You know, like she wouldn't be beating up her kids up in front of people, but she'll do it when there's no one else around or when it's just family or whatever, right?
Yeah.
but There's so little control in that kind of environment, so little predictability.
And so what we do is we try to exercise as much control as humanly possible.
But since there's no capacity to control the environment, we end up giving ourselves a lot more responsibility than is rationally possible.
Which is why in your entire question, Amber, there's nothing about any negatives outside of yours.
Your deficiencies, you're afraid of this, you are inept at that, you are deficient.
Right.
That's not realistic.
You're the child.
If things went wrong, it's your parents' fault.
Sorry, I mean, I have to just put it that bluntly.
If things went wrong in your family, it's your parents' fault.
I definitely agree with that on an intellectual level.
Look, all I can do is go by the letter you sent, right?
Yep.
And you want me to read it back to you?
Because you'll hear it very clearly, right?
I avoid stress.
Like, it's just your choice.
You avoid stress, you see.
No, because stress was disastrous when you grew up in a dysfunctional household, right?
And it was so, like, it was just a consistent state of being.
Yeah.
I think I got intrigued of it, in a way.
Yeah.
Well, I think your adrenals can burn out.
Like, you can physically get overstressed and exhausted from it.
You say, I am very fearful of negative reactions and consequences.
No.
You were very harmed by negative reactions and consequences.
But just saying, I'm fearful of them, means that it's your problem without any reference to how it was caused.
My arm just broke of its own accord.
No.
Something happened.
Yeah.
Well, I guess what I was sort of hoping to...
Astertain is knowing this and taking responsibility, or not taking responsibility or whatever.
It does still affect my functioning and in other relationships.
I get it.
I get it.
And that's why I'm trying to give you what I think is a more realistic view.
That you were harmed and scarred by the environment you grew up in.
And there are negative consequences to that Which you have to deal with.
I'm not saying they don't exist.
But what I'm saying is that you're blaming yourself for what was done to you.
Right?
You've probably heard this mantra, don't blame the victim, right?
Yep.
You're the victim.
You're the victim.
It goes against the...
The drive to control, right?
To accept a victim.
Yes, absolutely.
Because you've got to have control over something.
And so I'm just going to take responsibility for everything.
Right.
Right.
And I'm sorry to bring all these stories back about my child.
I know that the people haven't listened to all the shows.
But my brother and I, right?
My mother would be coming home and my brother would be like, oh, let's tidy up the place.
Let's tidy up our little apartment.
Because then mommy will be happy, right?
Right.
Right.
And I was like, I don't care.
I mean, she's going to be happy or she's not going to be happy.
If she's not happy, then she'll say she's not happy because the apartment is messy.
If she is happy, she won't care.
But it's not.
The apartment being messy or not is not making her happy or not.
So my brother was in this defensive mode, right?
And he's like, I'm going to be proactive to make sure Mama is in a good mood.
And I didn't feel that way.
To me, it felt like begging.
You know, we've tidied up.
Please don't be angry.
I hated that.
I hated that.
It felt so humiliating.
You know, like, okay, so basically we're giving you permission to beat us up if the place is not tidy.
I just hated that.
It just...
It just seemed so mad, crazy.
Like, it's not fair to beat us up even if the place is messy.
It's not fair to scream at us and terrorize us even if the place is messy.
And it's magical thinking.
Mom will be fine if the place is tidy.
No, she won't.
Now, she may hook onto that as an excuse, but that's not the cause.
She's going to come home in a bad mood for God knows what reason, and then she's going to say, I'm mad at you because the place is messy.
And I remember when she was in a bad mood, she'd stalk around the apartment like a tiger looking for something, and then she'd ask questions, and she'd say, where's that book that you borrowed a month ago?
You borrowed $2 from me last week.
I need it back.
And she'd ask these questions so that she could find something to get angry about.
And it didn't matter, I knew, deep down, it didn't matter if everything was perfect.
She'd then get angry at us for being too compliant.
You see?
Doesn't matter what you do.
Cray cray, gonna cray cray, it doesn't matter what you do, right?
Yep.
And accepting that helplessness in the face of significant and severe dysfunction, to put it as nicely as possible, accepting one's helplessness in the face of that is very important.
I was not hit because the place was messy.
My daughter leaves a trail sometimes, she's messy sometimes.
I don't get to hit her.
Right?
That's what abuse victims say to themselves.
Well, if I'd have been a better wife, he wouldn't have beat me up.
It's my fault.
And what do we say to that woman?
Well, it's not her fault.
It's not your fault.
It's your fault you married a guy who beats you up.
But even that probably comes from an unexamined childhood.
It didn't matter what you did, and it doesn't matter how much responsibility you take now.
It's your parents' job to fix things.
And you running around managing stuff and trying to improve everything and taking all the burden on yourself, Amber, is a mere continuation of what happened in your childhood.
You taking responsibility to fix the unfixable, to manage the unmanageable.
To repair constantly what everyone breaks every day.
To give yourself the illusion of control, right?
Yep, I totally agree with that.
I get it.
The true mark of self-confidence, I think, I think, I'm not telling you I know this is some absolute final truth, but Amber, I would say that the true mark of self-confidence is to take One step towards someone else and see what they do.
Okay.
And to vow that if there is to be a meeting, it must be a meeting in the middle.
Now, with parents, it should be 90% then and 10% you, in my opinion.
It's more than an opinion because parents define the relationship.
But let's just say we'll go with 50-50, right?
So it means that You don't meet anywhere but in the middle.
You don't go over and do other people's work for them.
You don't go over and make them want to call you or make them want to do the right thing.
You don't tell them what they need to do.
You simply say, this is what I want, and you see what they do.
And if there is to be a meeting of equals, it must be a meeting in the middle.
Okay.
A meeting in the middle means...
I am not taking the ownership of this relationship because to take an ownership of this relationship, Amber, is to erase the other person.
It means you are going to work.
It's like I'm going to have a game of tennis with you and then I'm going to hit the ball nice and high and gentle.
I'm going to run around and I'm going to move your racket and hit it back and then I'm going to run around back to me and I'm going to hit the racket and run back and forth.
You can't do it, right?
It's exhausting.
Right.
Right?
What would it be like for you to not work both sides of the net?
For you to simply say, this is what I think, this is what I feel, this is what I'd like, and then just relax and let the other person do what they're going to do.
It might relieve some significant levels of anxiety.
After a while, it'll probably provoke them quite a bit to begin with.
Yeah, especially my father.
Give the other people room to make a wiser decision.
Give them, you know, it's okay to change.
I mean, I think it's important to change what you're doing in a relationship where it's not working.
But there are two people and you can't meet with anyone, I think, in the long run, except in the middle.
That doesn't make perfect sense.
And have empathy for the effects of, right, self-empathy, self-compassion for what you endure.
There are certain aspects of your childhood you probably wouldn't want to wish on your worst enemy, right?
And you've been managing the effects of that.
It was not your fault.
You didn't choose the family you were born into.
You didn't have the choice to leave.
You didn't have a choice as to the personalities and dysfunctions and addictions and aggressions and violence of the people around you.
You were just dropped into there biologically, and you had to try and survive.
And we can survive, but it comes at a cost.
And acknowledging that cost is hard.
But it means relaxing out of, trying to be in control of everything and everyone.
And whenever anything goes wrong, I assume you think it's your fault, right?
Oh, I should have done it differently.
Oh, I should have done it better.
Oh, they got defensive because of how I approached it, right?
My mom got angry because the place wasn't tidy.
If I tidied the place, my mom wouldn't have gotten angry.
No.
That's a necessary fiction when you're a child.
And...
An entrapping fantasy when you're an adult.
You are not in charge of your relationship with your parents.
You're not in charge of your relationship with your siblings.
You're not in charge of any relationship because if you're in charge, it's not a relationship.
It has to be two equals.
State your needs.
Let other people do what they want with that.
Well, that's a significant challenge too.
It's easy to do, it's hard to live with.
It's easy to say, this is what I think and feel, physically.
It's not like I'm saying go be a prima ballerina at the Bolshoi Ballet.
It's easy to say, this is what I think and feel, and do that.
It's physically possible, it doesn't take 12 days to do.
It's easy to do, but it's hard to bear.
Yeah, and also a certain level of vulnerability.
Very much so.
Yeah.
But when you try and take all the ownership for yourself, you're just trying to avoid that vulnerability.
Because then if something doesn't work, you get to say to yourself, well, I just have to change my approach.
It's my fault it didn't work, rather than be hurt that you didn't get what you want, that you were rejected, right?
Mm-hmm.
You're like someone trying to pick a lock.
You've got 500 keys and you're like, well, this key doesn't work.
Well, this key doesn't work.
Well, this key doesn't work.
I'll try another.
Right?
Right.
But they're not locks.
They're people.
And if you say, this is what I think and feel and want, and they reject you or they attack you, that's painful.
But then to avoid that pain, you probably say, well, you know, I approached it this way.
I should have approached it this way.
I triggered their defenses.
I could have tried.
Right?
No.
No, that's not fair.
That's not fair to you.
They're responsible.
And your parents are more responsible than you for your relationship.
But it is very tempting to take on ownership in order to avoid rejection.
To take on excessive responsibility in order to avoid the pain of rejection.
Yeah.
But you understand, if this was a dating relationship, that'd just be stalking.
Right?
No, like I'd say, Amber, hey, Amber, hey, Amber, hey, Amber, want to go to the movies?
And you'd be like, no, thank you.
And I'd go home and I'm like, oh, well, Amber, I bet she does want to go to the movies with me.
I guess I'd just have to ask her another way.
Right?
And I'm like, hey, Amber, you want to go to the movies?
And you're like, no, Scottish Steph, or whatever the hell that is.
I... I don't want to go to the movie with you, right?
Either.
Amber, do you want to go to the movies?
Like, I don't even know who that is.
Amber, do you want to go?
Right?
Klingon doesn't matter, right?
And I'm like, oh, I tell you what, I'm going to ask you in a chicken suit because I know you want to go to the movies with me, right?
And then I'm going to sky write, Amber, you want to go to the movies with me, right?
And then I'm going to show up at your work and I'm going to say, Amber, do you want to go to the movies with me?
I'm going to text you and say, Amber, do you want to go to the movies with me?
Look, it's all caps.
Look, it's wingdings, right?
Right.
And why would I keep asking?
Amber, I say, what?
Would you like to go to the motion pictures with me?
I hear the pictures are in motion.
We can also witness some Jehovah's, I hear.
Right?
But, like, you get that I would keep asking you because I was avoiding the pain of rejection.
Amber does not want to go to the movies with me.
Right.
I'll just adjust the way I ask.
That's That's not good, right?
I mean, that would be like, can I get a restraining order on whichever weird ethnicity is going to ask me to the movies next?
Right.
No, that's called stalking someone, right?
I'll ask them from the bushes.
I'll ask them from the ceiling.
I'll ask them from the window.
I'll ask them from the phone.
stop it okay Bye.
Tell them what you think and feel and want.
See what they do.
Give them room to respond and be themselves and process what happens.
Now, I would be remiss, of course, in not doing my usual plug, which is, you know, I think a therapist would be great at unraveling this kind of stuff.
I mean, it certainly was for me.
I know what it's like to think I'm on a tandem bike, but I'm the only one doing all the pedaling.
That occurred in my relationship significantly.
Me Overdoing to avoid the anxiety of rejection.
And fortunately, that never happens in this show.
But I think a therapist would be great.
I mean, I can point out some logical inconsistencies, but I'm not a therapist.
So I would say that if you can talk to a therapist, there's going to be some emotional stuff to process that overburdening yourself with responsibility is Probably designed to avoid.
Yeah.
I mean, it also must be like, but I want to stress out my mom, because what if she starts drinking again, right?
Well, yeah, and that's a significant fear for me.
Sure.
Yeah.
And it is, right?
I mean, it's not just a significant fear, but it's not an improbable fear either, right?
Yeah, the risk is real.
Mm-hmm.
It's probable.
Right.
Right.
Yeah, you don't play cabritas with the guy with the brittle spine, right?
Yeah.
I have seen two therapists, I just didn't seem to mesh well.
I'm not currently in therapy.
It's a thought.
I mean, I've got a podcast, I think it's 1927.
My thoughts on how to find a great therapist might be helpful, might be useful.
How long have you been listening to this show?
Oh, it's been a few months.
I can't remember precisely.
Maybe February?
Okay.
I did listen to the How to Find a Great Therapist.
Was that after your last therapist?
It was after, yeah.
Okay, good.
Well, at least then it would lead you to a bad therapist.
Or at least a therapist who didn't work out as well.
And...
I mean, that's sort of most of what I wanted to say.
How was the conversation for you?
It was good.
You brought up sort of the thing that's been, I think, blocking my way, which is just acknowledging that I had control of all of it.
Yeah, no control.
You know, kids, we're like leaves in a thunderstorm saying, okay, I guess I think I'll go this way.
It's like, well, okay, anyway the wind blows.
And that is a tough thing to accept.
Because the whole point of parenting is you keep trying to give your kids more and more autonomy, more and more control, and more and more responsibility not to have such a chaotic environment.
Kids feel trapped and Have to overcompensate by taking on imaginary responsibilities because they can't get any real ones.
And how do you feel at the end of the chat?
I know you felt a little stressed earlier on.
I actually feel better because I was just really worried that I wasn't going to communicate what I was trying to get across and be just sort of a mishmash of miscommunication.
But I think I got what I needed out of it.
But most importantly, Amber, would you like me to do some more bad accents for you?
Of course.
Just kidding.
I think this is good.
So, will you keep us posted about how it goes?
Sure.
Yeah, I mean, it's a limited pool up here, so as far as Therapist, though, and with the communication, I'll keep you posted.
Yeah, I mean, you can.
I don't know if any studies have been done.
I've heard some fairly good stuff has come out of, you know, you can even do therapy remotely and so on, so that's a possibility.
Yeah, that's...
Yeah, keep us posted if you can, and...
Yeah.
Somebody just wrote, how is Steph going to tease us with offering more bad accents and not deliver?
I think my one remaining Southern listener would not appreciate it if I did yet another Southern accent.
After apparently people misconstrued me saying that calling it the War of Northern Aggression meant you are a white supremacist, which I don't believe at all.
I'm sorry if I misspoke about that.
It certainly was not my intention.
But yeah, Brian, sorry, you'll have to tune in next week where I promise to do the entire show as an elven orcish Klingon warrior.
So I'll be working on that all week.
So thanks very much, Amber.
I appreciate the call in.
And again, you know, deep, deep sympathies for the history.
That's not where people should be starting off with at all.
And I'm really, really sorry about all of that.
And I, you know, commend your mom on the steps that she's taking to have these conversations.
I think that's admirable and difficult.
So thanks a lot for sharing about that.
And I hope, I'm glad the conversation was helpful and hope you'll keep us posted.
Thanks everyone so much for listening.
I guess we're tuning off for another Wednesday night interview.
Almost finished that word that never quite failed to materialize.
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