Nov. 10, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:57
3123 What Pisses Me Off About White Guilt
Stefan Molyneux is pissed off - and he communicates a very important message about rejecting feelings of guilt and shame from those without empathy. Guilt is often a big red button that bad people push to extract resources from good people. Don't be exploited, don't be guilted or shamed into exploitation. Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.fdrurl.com/donateGet more from Stefan Molyneux and Freedomain Radio including books, podcasts and other info at: http://www.freedomainradio.com
It feels like everywhere I look in the world, I see this giant Nazgul beating wing pterodactyl of guilt floating and circling like some deathly kite over the scarred remnants of human history.
Guilt is a feeling of self-attack which occurs when You have a standard of value and you have failed to meet it or you've gone in the opposite direction and someone points out the gap between what it is that you say your values are and what it is that you're doing.
And this can be a very positive thing.
We all drift from the straight and narrow.
We all act against our values at times.
And to have this pointed out to us is a very positive and helpful thing.
Except when it's not.
And I'd like to talk about the not part of guilt and how toxic and destructive the emotion of guilt has become.
Now A relative of guilt is shame.
And shame is when you sort of finger wag at someone else.
And if that, you know, you're bad, you did something wrong, you're a hypocrite, you're whatever, a bad person, that's the finger wagging.
Now, if that infection of shaming someone internalizes, then it becomes guilt, right?
So if somebody says to you, oh, you're part of an institutionally racist group of whoever, whoever, right?
Well, there's this finger wagging, right?
But...
If it passes into your mind and becomes a standard that you have internalized, then it goes from shaming to guilt.
It goes from the imposition of a standard of immorality, or at least not meeting the right standard of morality, to internalizing that.
And once you've internalized it, then you beat yourself up.
I really believe that it has metastasized into a form of cash-reaching mental torture, of verbal abuse.
Shaming can have very positive effects in society.
It is a way of peacefully, colloquially, and horizontally enforcing community standards.
Way back in the day, if you were a woman who got pregnant outside of wedlock, you would be shamed.
Or if you were a man or a woman who had an affair, you would be shamed.
Or if you were a man who got a woman pregnant out of wedlock, you would be shamed and people would generally withdraw supporting you or having anything to do with you until you did the right thing.
You married the girl or you gave the kid up for adoption or whatever it was.
Now, This aspect of shaming people to maintain positive and beneficial and helpful social standards is great, because the more that you can get a community to police itself horizontally without actually having the overhead of the police, the cheaper and more efficient social enforcement gets to because the more that you can get a community to police
And this capacity to judge, to shame, and if shaming doesn't work, to ostracize, is how societies function when you don't have this giant all-encompassing state power and the NSA and endless prison industrial complexes to keep the population in line.
It's something that people used to do at a communal level.
And so, you know, shaming and ostracizing and so on all have very positive and powerful value to society, because it allows you to enforce social standards without the overhead of...
Of a giant police, military, industrial, prison industrial complex, massive national debts, and so on.
It is uncomfortable to do it, which is why people, the moment the government says, hey, we'll take over policing, we'll make sure that the single moms get money so you don't have to shame and ostracize them until they do the right thing, people like that.
It's like, whew, don't have to enforce, government will take care of it for me.
And that's a relief to people, but it does generally spell, from the Roman Empire onwards, the death of civilization.
So...
I just want to put that out there.
It may be a short relief, but it's the kind of relief that a drug addict has when he gets a hold of that drug.
Don't have to quit today.
Well, you might quit tomorrow if you're dead.
So, shaming?
No problem with shaming.
Guilt has a very valuable aspect in the human psyche and in human society.
Because guilt, being shamed, being ostracized and feeling guilty are unpleasant emotions.
And of course, because we're a tribal species, we require each other to hunt, we require each other to farm, to gather food, we require each other to take care of and raise babies, and so we're a very communal species.
And ostracism is gene death within a tribal species.
Like if you're a young man who acts outside the moral norms of your tribe and they ostracize you, it means no woman's going to sleep with you, no one's going to protect you while you sleep, no one's going to share food with you.
If you survive into old age, it doesn't really matter because your genes are going to die because you're not going to reproduce with anyone.
No one's going to...
Let you make the peace with two bats with them and therefore your genes are going to die off.
So it's very uncomfortable.
Studies have shown that ostracism and shaming provokes the same physiological responses in normal healthy human beings that physical torture does.
So it's a very negative state to be in.
And therein lies its strength, guilt, and therein lies its exquisite civilization-crushing vulnerability.
Because people will pay for you To relieve them of a negative experience, right?
I mean, if you've ever had a toothache, right, you go to the doctor and the doctor, they go to the dentist, the dentist will give you an injection and figure out what's wrong and make it better.
And so you're paying to have a negative state taken away from you.
And guilt...
It's something that is healthy when it's spontaneously culturally developed and used for the protection of the tribe and its future.
It becomes very dangerous when it becomes an institutional profit center.
Because then what happens is people will infect you with something called guilt through constant shaming.
And then they will ask you to give them money.
To take away that negative experience of guilt.
Because the classic example is something like original sin, that you are bad because Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the apple of the tree of knowledge of good and evil and therefore...
Eve was cursed with childbirth and Adam was cursed with work and they were both cast out of the Garden of Eden and flaming swords were put barring their way back.
And because of all of that historical disobedience, you now are guilty of original sin and therefore you must pay the priest for the rest of your life to remove this imaginary curse called original sin from your soul so that you can gain entrance to heaven and not face the endless torture death threat of hell.
That's not particularly great, to put it as mildly as possible.
And so paying people to stop cursing you with an imaginary illness is understandable, but it is a way of exploiting or mining our capacity for self-reproach, which comes out of our desire to be good.
Being good obviously is a complex thing.
We'll just take it as being consistent with the standards of the tribe for the moment.
But once people figure it out, That healthy people's capacity for self-attack, called guilt, puts a big giant red button on their foreheads, which if you hammer and hammer and hammer and hammer, they will cough up gold into your lap.
And that is one of the great weaknesses.
And this original sin manifests itself in a wide variety of ways now, of course.
So we have...
Well, the environmental movement, you're sinful for consuming.
We have white privilege.
You're sinful for being a white male, and therefore you must make atonement by giving money and resources to those less advantaged than you.
You may be privileged for being a male at all, and therefore you have to give advantages to women.
This sort of goes on all over.
There'll be a privilege for being rich, and therefore you have to cough up money to give to other people.
And without...
Empathy, there can't be guilt, right?
Because guilt is fundamentally not...
Would a man on a desert island feel guilt?
It's really hard to imagine.
So he could not do any harm to his fellow man.
And so empathy for others is why we feel guilt.
If you had no empathy for others, if you didn't care what anyone else thought or said or judged you, if you didn't care at all, then they would be unable to shame you because you wouldn't care what their opinions were.
And, um, so you need empathy in order for shaming to work.
And then for shaming to work, it's a prerequisite for you to have guilt, right?
So empathy experiences, you experience empathy, you care what other people think, they're negative judgments, you internalize, which then becomes guilt.
It's kind of like a boomerang.
Without empathy...
There isn't any value to shame or to guilt.
And empathy is one of these, you know, where you feel what other people feel.
And it's a very complex brain development process.
It requires about 12 or 13 coordinated areas of the brain to develop simultaneously.
It's usually not something that can ever be implanted later in life.
You either get it when you're a baby through, you know, mirroring and empathetic interactions with a primary caregiver or you don't.
And to me, empathy and shaming and guilt work very well when you are among like-minded people.
When you are among people who also have empathy for you, who also will shame you only when appropriate and in values that you all agree with, and who also have the same internalized guilt mechanisms that you have.
If you have a ban on, say, sleeping around, right?
Infidelity, right?
If all the tribe is that way, then it's a universal thing.
It can't be used as a weapon against only one person, right?
Because then you get the bounce back of hypocrisy.
So if we all, 50 of us in the tribe, say that infidelity is a really bad thing, and both you and I commit infidelity, I can't wave my finger at you without...
The shame bomb going off in my own heart.
So where you share your values, shame and empathy and guilt work very well because...
Anybody who breaks the rule from a one-sided standpoint and tries to shame another steps on the landmine of hypocrisy, and therefore you can't use it in a hierarchical way.
It is only dependent upon the actions, individual actions of a person.
In other words, it can never be institutional.
Institutionalized crime, institutionalized guilt, institutionalized privilege, you just use the word institutional, In the same way that the Catholics use the word original sin.
It just means it applies to everyone and it never needs to be proved.
There's no specific action you can take or not take to prove institutionalized sexism or racism or privilege or whatever.
Because institutional just means it's there, you can check your privilege, right?
You can't ever find it or prove it or disprove it.
You're convicted absent, you have a court in some Kafkaesque manner.
So if everybody kind of has the same values, then...
Empathy and shame and guilt work relatively well.
Are they perfect?
Well, no, of course not.
But nothing is.
But it's about as perfect as you can get and about as cheap as you can get as far as the enforcement mechanisms.
But, but, but, but, but, when you end up with wildly disparate groups within society, then you have significant problems.
You have significant problems in society.
Because then what happens is those who don't have empathy...
But know how powerful empathy is, right?
The sociopath, the cold-hearted or whatever in society.
They provoke through verbal attacks.
They shame people, provoking sensations of guilt, and then offer to withdraw their shaming in return for money.
And it really does come to this casino of empathy that people generally play and very successfully play within society.
So white people with slavery is a perfect example, right?
So apparently modern white people are somehow responsible for slavery.
And I guess by that logic, the extinction of the dinosaurs and therefore have to pay, right?
So if it wasn't slavery bad, didn't white people enslave?
Okay, then give me money, give me resources, give me privileges.
And that is not a healthy environment to say the least.
And this creates a huge amount of toxicity within society, because what happens is, when you are a guilt slut, When you are a shame whore.
In other words, you feel guilty in the presence of other people who don't feel guilty.
Well, that's a very toxic situation.
I mean, if you date some woman who's a complete sociopath, she's going to play you and manipulate you and cry and storm and offer sex and then withdraw sex and manipulate the living hell out of you because you care about her.
Right?
And so the fact that you care about her and she doesn't fundamentally care about you creates a huge imbalance.
And, you know, when there's an imbalance, all the resources roll down towards the lowest common denominator.
When I say a guilt whore, what I'm talking about is people who, and this is the majority of people in the West at least, people who extend empathy to those who have not extended empathy back.
It is a non-reciprocal relationship.
Now, the reciprocity of these relationships is so Oh, essential!
I can't tell you.
If there is a spine to be grown in the world, it is the spine of demanding reciprocity for empathy.
That is the only thing that literally is going to save civilization.
Some group says, pity us, give us resources, and so on.
Well, is there reciprocal empathy in that situation?
Is there reciprocal empathy?
If you have...
Significantly more empathy than the person you're dealing with you will lose.
You will always, always, always, always We're good to go.
I mean, if involuntary interactions are the essence of civilization, then a lion eating a zebra is just engaged in a kind of ballet.
That's not the case.
It is the voluntary interactions.
And shame and guilt and empathy, these are all voluntary interactions.
And so...
When you have more of social mechanisms run on ostracism, shame, and guilt, you have less coercion in society, and that is the very definition of civilization.
And so, when you have an unequal relationship in any relationship, you have an unequal relationship Platform.
More empathy on one hand, less empathy on the part of the other, then the person with less empathy will continue hitting the guilt button, not feeling any guilt themselves for doing so because they don't have empathy, therefore they can't be shamed, therefore they don't have any capacity for guilt.
They'll keep hitting that empathy button until the resources just get rolled down.
But when somebody comes at me and And says, well, Steph, you need to have empathy for X, Y, or Z, person or group or whatever.
Well, my question is, okay, well, what empathy have they shown me?
Or what empathy have they shown my culture or my civilization?
Well, that is a very clarifying question.
It's a very enraging question for the parasites who like to hit the big giant red guilt button in order to get people to cough up resources to make them stop doing it.
They really don't like that when you stand up for yourself and say, wait a minute, if empathy is such a goddamn value, why aren't you showing any to me?
Well, that brings back the question of hypocrisy.
That brings back the question of hypocrisy.
That is the only defense, is to demand that empathy must be shared.
It must never be commanded.
Commandments in morality are the exact opposite of morality.
Morality is a relationship.
So, if I've got some shop on eBay and I say, I'll sell you an iPad for 200 bucks, And I send you, you say, I want it.
And I say, I'll send it to you, then you send me the 200 bucks.
And I send you an empty box, nothing in it.
The platonic iPad.
Are you obligated to send me the 200 bucks?
No.
Because that would be a non-reciprocal relationship.
I have not fulfilled my pledge to send you the iPad, therefore you are not obligated to send me the 200 dollars.
The reciprocal nature of virtue is something that is almost completely forgotten in the modern world.
So when women say, well, you have to have empathy, you've got to really be sensitive to and understand the thoughts and feelings and experiences of women.
I think that men have every right to say to women, Well, how is that working for me?
Do women inquire as to men's experience?
Hey, how does it feel to be called a sexist, privileged, patriarch, and all this kind of stuff?
How does it feel?
Do you like that or not?
How many times does society ask men, well, how do you guys feel about stuff?
How is society working for you?
Doesn't really happen at all.
All that you get is this endless bang, bang, bang, bang microaggressions and mansplaining and man-terrupting and stuff like that.
We've all got to have the empathy for the women, but where's all the famous women's empathy towards men and curiosity towards men's experience in this world?
I will show empathy for feminists, for instance, when feminists start to show empathy for men and curiosity about men's experience.
And if feminists are not showing, it's just one example of many, if feminists are not showing any empathy towards men, then their demands for empathy from men fail the hypocrisy test.
Sorry, it's a scam, and a very obvious and silly scam that you're trying to pull.
You want me to have empathy for you, you're not showing any empathy towards me.
You want me to send you the 200 bucks, but all I got for my iPad order was an empty box.
This fundamental understanding of honesty is not a commandment.
Honesty is not some law of physics.
You just must be honest to everyone, no matter what the situation, no matter what the circumstances.
There's that old moral question or quandary where somebody says, I want to go and kill your wife.
Where is she?
And, oh, well, I've got to be honest and tell them that she's hiding in the heart.
In that situation, clearly you don't owe the person any honesty because they are violent, evil, creepy murderers.
So, the idea that this is the fundamental self-defense of good people.
If as a good person, you view things like empathy and guilt and honesty and concern and care, if you view this as just some absolute that you have to do no matter what, and it's always excused with this, well, I'm going to take the high road.
I'm going to act so much better than everyone else around me.
Bullshit!
That is a terrible thing to do.
That turns virtue from a binding strength among good people to a wide-open rape of the unempathetic.
That means that your virtue is something to be exploited by people who don't have your virtues.
Honesty is a relationship.
It is not a commandment.
Empathy is a relationship.
It is not a commandment.
I feel no more guilty about my actions, if criticized by people, than those people feel guilty about their actions.
I feel no more the capacity to be shamed than other people feel the capacity to be shamed.
I feel no more compunction for honesty than those around me have a compunction for honesty.
It's a sliding scale.
It goes up and down.
And you test in relationships.
You test.
A little honesty, a little honesty.
You don't start lying.
But you don't have higher standards than those around you.
Well, I'm going to send the $200 even though he didn't send the iPad because I committed to do that.
Yes, you committed to do that, but conditionally.
Not as an absolute.
I will send you $200 no matter what.
Well, that's a great guarantee to just get an empty box instead of an iPad.
This idea that morality and ethics and integrity and high standards and honesty, that these must somehow be divorced from a relationship and be like physics that compel you no matter what, is disastrous.
It solves so many problems.
In society to say, I will not have higher standards than the person I'm dealing with.
And what that means is don't have low standards, but only deal with people who have high standards.
And if people come running at you and say, you should be ashamed, it's a shame, you should feel guilty, you're terrible.
Well, first of all, where's their empathy for you?
If they know how bad that might make you feel, where's their empathy for you?
No.
They're just trying the oldest con in the book.
The oldest con in the book is find a good person, make him feel guilty until he coughs up resources that you can steal.
And you then must make it perpetual.
In other words, you must make it institutional so that no amount of resource transfer will ever solve the problem.
No amount of resource transfer will ever solve the problem.
You can never pay a Catholic priest enough money that you never have to worry about original sin and your kids never have to worry about original sin again.
It's perpetual because it can't be proven or disproven.
It just becomes an axiom.
And as far as privilege goes, and as far as being white goes, and male goes, and whatever it is, I mean, it can't be changed.
I don't do anything racist.
It doesn't matter.
It's still racist because institutional white and racist doesn't matter.
I don't do anything sexist.
It doesn't matter.
You're sexist because heterosexual, white, male.
Nothing needs proving.
It doesn't matter what you do on an individual basis.
They want a giant red button of guilt, which they try to install through shaming, on you so that you give them resources which otherwise they would have to earn in a positive and voluntary manner.
Let your ethics be A boomerang, not an arrow.
Let your virtue be a relationship, not a commandment.
Defy the shaming inflicted by the cold-hearted.
Reject, reject guilt from those who cannot feel guilt.
