Dec. 28, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
53:17
3544 RIP Carrie Fisher | Star Wars Princess Leia
Carrie Fisher died at the age of 60 on December 27th, 2016, four days after going into cardiac arrest near the end of a transatlantic flight. Stefan Molyneux looks at the challenging early life of the Star Wars starlet, Fisher's struggle with drug addiction, the former Princess Leia's mental health advocacy, relationships with Harrison Ford and much much more!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.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Wallen from Feed the Main Radio.
So, yeah, Gary Fisher has died.
Not a huge shock a couple of days ago.
She was on a plane, had a huge cardiac arrest, a heart attack, and it took upwards of 30 minutes to restore a pulse to her.
And after five minutes of no oxygen to your organs, of course, including your brain, You're in a huge deep well of potential non-recovery, so the fact that she died.
Not a massive shock, but there's a lot to be gleaned from this woman's life.
Of course, most people know her as the buns of Navarone-haired portrayer of the steely resolved Princess Leia in the Star Wars movies, and she was in a bunch of other movies, of course, when Harry met Sally, and one of Kevin Smith's movies, and just a bunch of other stuff that she did.
Also a writer, she wrote some pretty...
Well-received and popular books.
And she had quite a life.
So, for those who don't know the backstory, and I'm going to go very, very deep on this one, so get into your bath escape helmets.
We're going down, baby.
She was, I got some notes here, she was born into Hollywood royalty, October 21st, 1956.
She was the daughter of Debbie Reynolds and a singer, Eddie Fisher.
Now, Debbie Reynolds shot to fame in the movie Singing in the Rain when Debbie Reynolds was 19 in a sort of odd pattern.
Carrie Fisher was also 19 when she was in the Star Wars movies.
Eddie Fisher, well, Eddie Fisher was kind of nuts, according to a lot of people.
When Carrie Fisher, the daughter, when she was between one and two, reports differ, Eddie Eddie Fisher left the family, or as it was phrased, left the scene of the accident, and he wanted to start a relationship with Elizabeth Taylor, who was considered to be the most beautiful woman in the world.
So, you know, for my younger audience, Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, they were kind of like the Brad and Jen of their day.
For listeners even younger than that, I don't have a reference for you.
So Carrie Fisher said, quote, I'm a product of Hollywood inbreeding.
When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.
And Eddie Fisher was crazy, according to a lot of people.
And he was an alcoholic and, of course, was barely around for her childhood.
She said, Carrie Fisher said, that she saw her father on TV more than she saw him ever.
In the house.
And Carrie Fisher, this is the most important part, which we'll really, really dwell on.
She refused to blame family background or her celebrity status for her problems.
And her problems were huge as we get to in a sec.
So Carrie Fisher said, it's always been my responsibility.
If it was Hollywood that was to blame, then we'd all be dope addicts.
So we'll get to her problems in a second, but so she won't hold her parents responsible for the dysfunctions in her childhood.
What does this mean to her life?
What does this mean?
Because people know if I'm doing this show, people call into the show and they try to hold their parents, absolve their parents of all responsibility for negative childhood experiences and I push back hard against that because I believe in moral responsibility.
And I think that if we have sort of this elder cult worship of our parents no matter what, then we end up very much distorting reality, in particular moral reality.
And we end up doing a grave violation of basic philosophical principles.
And since I'm into philosophical principles, that is a big deal for me.
So her first memoir was called Wishful Drinking.
And she talked about the moment she was born.
The doctors were cooing over Debbie Reynolds, looking so pretty and peaceful under anesthetic.
The nurses had to rush to the aid of Eddie Fisher, her father, who had fainted as his daughter's head emerged.
So she wrote, So when I arrived, I was virtually unattended, and I have been trying to make up for that fact ever since.
There are pseudo-insights into the causes of one's own dysfunctions that seem like they solve something, seem like they answer something, but they don't, which I'll get to in a sec.
So, her mother became a star at 19 with Singing in the Rain and was working a lot, right?
So, Carrie Fisher has stories about how she would be desperate to spend time with her mother, but her mother was home sleeping all the time because when she was on set or out, she was working so hard.
And it sort of reminds me of Angela Lansbury.
Uh, whose, uh, kids got involved, uh, in the proximity of the Manson cult and Angela Lansbury had to finally quit working and take them off to Ireland to sort of save their, their souls.
And so, um, Carrie Fisher and her brother used to sleep in the room that their mother slept in.
When they'd wake up, they kind of creep out just to be close, just to be proximate because the maddening aspect of family where you have proximity without intimacy, is a way of sealing you off from yourself and sealing you off from others.
If you're around people that you're not connected to, that you're not intimate with, that you can't be honest with, that you can't be fully yourself with, then you don't have the identity and depth of being alone, of being with your own thoughts, of being solid within your own self, of putting down your roots within your own authenticity.
When you're around people who are not present, who are not with you, who are dissociated, who are absent, who are distracted, who are unavailable, or who are hostile, to the essence of who you are because of their own dysfunctions then what happens is you're not with people and you're not with yourself and you end up well a long time ago in a galaxy far far away you end up not being anything you're not with yourself you're not with other people they basically are blocking any kind of intimacy you can have
with your own thoughts and with your own experience with your own being So, an interviewer said once, at 13, your mother suggested that you try marijuana together so you wouldn't do it outside the home and get into trouble.
Yeah, this was the kind of cool, hip stuff that was going on, like in the 60s, you know, I'm not going to be your parent, I'm going to be your friend, and all this kind of stuff, and so yeah, the fact that...
Carrie Fisher's mom reportedly introduced her to marijuana at home.
Not particularly great.
And this caused a huge spiral into marijuana addiction and drug addiction throughout her teenage years.
And, you know, there's a huge vulnerability in the shattering of the family.
Through a variety of influences generally on the left.
The shattering of the family leaves children exquisitely vulnerable and unprotected.
Child abuse in single mother households is enormous and the predation on children within single mother households is many, many, many times what it would be in two-parent households.
So if you want to exploit children, if you want to harm children, separating them from their fathers is a great way to do it.
And of course, if you want to destroy society, separating fathers from their children is a great way to do it, because then fathers don't have that much to fight for and can pursue a life of hedonism, rather than protecting the civilization that their children are really going to have to grow up in to suffer.
So all of the sort of family court stuff, easy divorce, no-fault divorce, all of that kind of stuff that shatters family really does absolutely undo the very fabric that holds civilization together.
We can see that sort of playing out now.
Once when Carrie Fisher checked herself into a mental hospital, she signed her name as shame.
Shame.
Well, and of course, this is...
You ever play a game, hot potato?
You've got to keep the potato moving.
So moral responsibility for family dysfunction rests with the parents.
Rests with the parents.
I mean, know this.
I mean, parents will often get angry at six-year-old children for moral transgressions, right?
For being bad, for not listening, for yelling or hitting or whatever it is, right?
And so the moment you inflict a moral standard, you yourself are subjected to that moral standard, particularly if you're an adult and you inflict that moral standard on a child.
So if you punish a child for moral transgressions, you as a parent are responsible for your moral transgressions with the additional almost infinite weight of the fact that you're the parent and they're the child.
So you're kind of responsible in some ways for how they turn out and you are the adult.
You chose to have children, right?
If you're a parent, you chose to have children.
Or even if you didn't choose to get pregnant, you chose to keep the child.
Children don't choose to be born, and they certainly don't choose their parents.
It's the least voluntary relationship in their own universe, which is why I've always argued it has to have the very highest moral standards.
Like, I want to be a parent so that my child, if she had the choice of all fathers in the universe, would choose me.
Now, she doesn't have that choice.
She's kind of stuck with me, but I have to act as if she has that choice in order to My wife can choose to be with me or to leave.
My friends can choose to be with me or to leave.
You as listeners, of course, can choose to listen to me or to leave.
My daughter has very little choice, but I must act as if she does.
And that's the only way that I can maintain the quality of the services I provide as a father.
So, when Carrie Fisher writes the word shame as her name when she checks herself into a mental hospital, Well, that's because she had a terrible childhood.
There's a huge amount of dysfunction going on.
And if it's not her parents' fault, well, it must be her fault.
Right?
The blame, the responsibility has to go somewhere.
And if it's not her parents' fault.
Now, logically, this makes no sense, of course.
I mean, of course, right?
I mean, you're the child.
You're just born into a family, and you try and do the very best you can into the circumstances you're born into.
Hopefully, they're good, but all too often, they're wretched, and in this case, particularly terrible.
And you can, of course, say that it's your responsibility as the child.
And when you grow up, you can say, well, it's entirely my responsibility.
But, of course, your parents were children once, and I assume with Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, and there's some indications they had pretty wretched childhoods themselves, well, then it must be all their fault.
Because it wasn't their parents' fault, therefore it must be the parents' fault.
It wasn't the grandparents' fault, therefore it must be the parents' fault.
And so if you take on all the toxicity of your family and say, well, something went wrong with me, I did something wrong, something's bad, I'm shameful, I did wrong...
Well, you're creating an isolated universe where you're the only person who has moral responsibility as the child.
A solipsistic, narcissistic moral universe where all the sins heap upon you.
Like the Jesus myth.
Take all the sins of mankind upon you.
You are the only cause of the dysfunction in your life.
Even if you live in a world where your father buggered off when you were one or two years old, barely spent any time with you, and your mother introduced you to drugs when you were 13 and was never around, according to these reports, it's still all your fault.
But if it's your fault because you were the child, why isn't it your parents' fault?
Because they were children once and grew up.
It makes no sense.
But it's what we do when we have to protect the relationship.
If you have a strong relationship with someone, it can handle criticism.
It can handle negative feedback.
In fact, that's essential.
It's essential to get negative feedback from the people you love.
That's how you continue to guide love into new places and to expand it, right?
But if you have a tenuous, uncertain, fragile bond with your parents, you can't criticize them because you fear that they're going to reject you and then they're going to abandon you, which is death for children, so you have to join this elder worship unreality.
And the lack of a bond is the cause of the lack of criticism.
The cause of the lack of criticism is the festering of self-hatred for dysfunction because you can't assign responsibility where it is due, which is to the parents.
So, her mother introduced her to marijuana when she was 13.
In this semi-autobiographical novel, Postcards from the Edge, which was made into a movie, I think, with Meryl Streep.
I've never seen it.
Carrie Fisher discussed using drugs such as cocaine, LSD, and painkillers.
She said, I couldn't stop or stay stopped.
It was never my fantasy to have a drug problem, she said.
I'd say, oh fuck it.
I haven't done anything for a couple of months.
Why not?
Let's celebrate not doing drugs by doing them.
I got into trouble each time.
I hated myself.
I just beat myself up.
It was very painful.
Right.
Right.
So she attacks herself.
She punishes herself.
Because she's dysfunctional and can't put the blame where the blame should properly be, which is her parents, she has to attack herself.
It's hot potato.
Either the people who justly cause the dysfunction carry the burden of moral responsibility and moral blame, or the child absorbs it all themselves.
Right?
I mean, if there's a poison, and the child knows there's a poison, and someone in the family has to eat it, in general, the child will eat the poison themselves.
Because if the parents are poisoned and died, the child's going to die for sure.
But if the child survives, then at least survives to reproductive age, right?
It's just sort of DNA stuff.
Now...
As if she hadn't had enough of dysfunctional Jewish singers, Fisher was briefly married to singer Paul Simon, half of Simon and Garfunkel, the talented half.
In the early 1980s, they had like a 13-year, one of these tortuous on-and-again, off-again relationships, and then she had a very brief marriage to him.
And he ended up...
He's married for like over 20 years to Edie Brackel.
Philosophy is something on a cereal box.
Edie Brackel in The New Bohemian, she had like one hit in the 80s, and then she's married to Paul Simon.
She's done some recording with him.
And she and Paul Simon, I think in 2014, were arrested for a domestic dispute or domestic altercation and so on.
I'm not sure what happened with that, but...
So, Carrie Fisher's father was an inconstant, unavailable Jewish singer, and then, again, if you don't have self-knowledge, right, you tend to repeat all of these things, right?
I mean, the reason we pursue self-knowledge and the facts about our own history is so we can break the cycle.
Whatever we reject, we repeat.
And I talk about this more in my free book, Real-Time Relationships, available at freedominradio.com slash free, but this is essential stuff.
Now, They marry very briefly, and then Carrie Fisher had a relationship with a talent agent named Brian Lord.
So she had a daughter, which we'll talk to more about that in 1992 with this guy, and then her husband left her for another man.
And isn't it woefully and gruesomely predictable?
And what happens, of course, is when you deny the knowledge of the true moral responsibility of the dysfunctions of your childhood, What happens is you tend to repeat these errors, and then what you do is you somehow shift this from your inability or unwillingness to assign moral responsibility to your parents.
You shift it to the human condition, because all of these disasters seem to keep happening, which you either say is completely my fault, in which case, why bother living?
And she said she wasn't directly suicidal, but there are times when she would have preferred not to be alive.
Or you sort of try and find bitter humor in it, which is, of course, where a lot of comedy comes from.
Or you ascribe it to the human condition and say that we are doomed to be ham, right?
It's like, no, you're doomed to be ham because you won't be honest.
So, she was heavily involved with drugs when she was first introduced to Paul Simon while filming the Star Wars.
And she said, I think this is in reference to her relationship with Paul Simon, she said, drugs was one of the hands, one of the baby hands, that pulled us down into the mess.
We went through a lot to be together.
We didn't make it.
Now, speaking to psychology today in 2001, Carrie Fisher said, drugs made me feel normal.
They contained me.
Made me feel normal.
See, there's a misconception, and I've talked about this before, and the person to read about this is Dr.
Gabor Mate, M-A-T-E, and the book is In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.
He's been on the show a couple of times, fantastic, and very eloquent and passionate deep thinker about the nature of addiction.
And I'm going to just very briefly summarize it here, go to the book for more.
But...
People are not addicted to highs.
They're addicted to non-lows, right?
So if you grew up in a troubled, dysfunctional, alienated, messed up, abused, or neglected environment as a child, then like a normal person's happiness and person who grows up with good enough parents, like 100, right?
Happiness is kind of 100.
Ups and downs and all that.
But if you grew up in a dysfunctional household, your happiness is like 20.
But you don't really know it.
You don't really know how miserable you are until...
You're not.
And what happens is, if you're exposed to drugs, the drugs give you the sort of natural high.
And the high doesn't take you to like 500 or 200.
It takes you to like 100, maybe 110.
This is just made up numbers, but you just want to get you the idea of addiction.
And then you feel normal.
Like if you're in chronic pain and then suddenly your pain goes away, you're going to feel euphoric, more so than if you just never had that pain to begin with.
And it's not because you're like going to a high, you just feel not in pain, possibly for the first time in your life.
Now, Normal people, when they take drugs, people of 100, if they take drugs, they go to 120, 130, and then they crash down to 90, and then they go back to 100, right?
So your brain adjusts.
People grew up really unhappy.
If they've grown up really unhappy, they start off like happiness at 20, they go to 100, and then they crash down to 10, and it's unbearable.
They now know how unhappy they've been their whole lives.
And so they're not chasing a high from a happy place.
They're chasing the avoidance of the catastrophic nihilism associated with existential unhappiness.
And it's existential unhappiness that you can't escape because you're not putting the moral responsibility on the parents.
And so when people are chasing addictions, they're chasing a feeling of normality.
Or as Gabor Maté says about one of his heroin patients, talking about heroin, said it felt like a warm hug.
I felt like a warm hub, a physical contact.
So it's called self-medication, in my view.
I'm just an amateur out here on the internet, but it's a form of existential pain mitigation.
And the existential pain comes from the childhood and from a refusal to criticize the parents, which means that you can't escape it.
It's the human condition.
And so you have to drug yourself.
Like if you're in chronic pain, you're going to drug yourself.
And that, I think, is...
And so when Carrie Fisher says, why did I take the drugs?
Drugs made me feel normal.
Drugs made me feel normal.
That's just the important thing.
They're not chasing a high.
They're chasing what you and I experience, if you're a relatively happy person, what you and I experience every day.
They need massive amounts of psychostimulants to achieve.
And then when they crash, they go down even lower than they were before.
And it's an unbearable state.
And this is important to understand, and Dr.
Cabramatte goes into all of the details about this in a really essential reading, because you may not know anyone who's an addict to a, you know, cocaine or anything like that, but we are all managed and controlled and to some degree enslaved by power junkies, right?
The people who get the same endorphin rush or get the same high from the achievement of political power.
And they've seen this, of course, in bonobo monkeys, right?
Monkeys, when they climb up the hierarchy of power in their tribe, then they get this endorphins.
We are rewarded for the achievement of political power.
So even if you don't know a direct physical addict, we're all controlled and managed by all of these people who are addicts to power.
So...
In 1985, during an interview, Carrie Fisher wore a t-shirt.
It's very interesting.
It says, it's never too late to have a happy childhood.
Yes, it is.
I've heard this.
I think I came across this in Bloom County years ago.
You're never too old to have a happy childhood.
You are.
Like, I'm sorry.
I mean, believing you can have a happy childhood later in life is believing that a loved one's going to come back to life before you die and comfort you.
No, your childhood is over.
Your childhood is done.
The damage was done.
You've got to accept that.
You've got to grieve it, and you've got to deal with it.
You've got to assign the moral responsibility, which is not to you as a child, but to your parents as adults, or whoever harmed you if they were adults.
Yeah, it is in fact too late to have a happy childhood.
You can't go back.
What is done cannot be undone.
It can't be mitigated.
And you may end up a wiser, stronger person through that mitigation, but no.
You can't have a happy childhood after your childhood is done.
That fantasy, again, keeps you from grieving, and then when you're unhappy, it's because you're failing to have a happy childhood as an adult, which you can't have, and therefore you're to blame, and you're responsible, and self-hatred pours out a...
Crazy.
Another interviewer said, regarding Carrie's book, one of her books, he said, because at one point in the book, Carrie's daughter says she doesn't want to be a neurologist with a specialty in schizophrenia, but a comic.
And you say, Carrie Fisher says, well, baby, if you want to be a comic, you have to be a writer.
But don't worry, you have tons of material.
Your mother is a manic-depressive drug addict, your father is gay, your grandmother tap dances, and your grandfather shot Speed.
It makes it kind of cool.
It's material.
No.
No.
It's a gruesome Eugene O'Neill-style long journey into night human tragedy.
It's not funny.
And the goal of making it funny is kind of how the virus of misery and dysfunction gets reproduced.
That is a great tragedy.
And it all stems out of a refusal to criticize the parents.
Now...
Reading her interviews, it's kind of exhausting.
I had a mom who had logaria, just endless torrents of crazy, crazy words.
And that sort of reminds me of this, just this flow of language.
Of course, I guess that's the manic side of the manic depression that she talks about.
Bipolar, bipolar she talks about.
And it seems like there are insights in some of the stuff she says, but then it also feels like a rabbit maze with no bottom, right?
So in Wishful Drinking she wrote, George Lucas was the man who actually made me into a little doll.
A little doll my first husband could stick pins into when he was annoyed with me.
Also, I was a shampoo where you could twist off my head and pour liquid out of my neck.
She also said, once I was on a talk show hosted by this child psychologist who kept asking me questions like, when did you realize your father was a horrible human being?
And finally I said to him, you want to hear about the wire hangers, don't you?
Questions about my marriage are wire hanger questions, and no matter how I answer them, they're wired to blow, no pun intended.
Now, that's a reference, I believe, to Joan Crawford as another famous actress from the mid-century, last century.
Apparently not a great mom.
There's a book written by her daughter called Mommy Dearest talks about when the daughter had hung up some expensive clothes on wire coat hangers rather than padded coat hangers, right?
And the wire coat hangers, I guess, make creases.
Um, that Joan Crawford reportedly beat her daughter with these wire hangers, right?
So, the child psychologist keeps asking, well, when did you realize your father was a horrible human being?
And, uh, why is the child psychologist doing that?
Is he a sadist?
Does he want her to suffer?
I don't know why he was doing it, of course, right?
But my guess would be, um, that that's trying to get the person to assign the moral responsibility to the only adult in the room when she was a child, or the only adults which were her parents.
And, um, She won't go there because it is going to be incredibly disruptive to something in her soul.
No matter how I answer them, they're wired to blow.
It is explosive to talk about the moral nature of her husband.
Now, the dysfunctions in Carrie Fisher's life just kind of went on and on.
She said once, I came home one night when I was sixteen, and there was blood all over the bedroom.
My brother Todd had accidentally shot himself with a blank.
The next day, the Daily News headline was, Picasso Dies, and under it was a picture of my brother.
And my mother in a mink hat.
We were still up at 8 in the morning after this whole night at the police station.
My brother was in the hospital.
Picasso was dead, and all these photographers were at our door because the big story, in all the confusion, was that my mother had shot my brother, and she and I were discussing why she'd done it.
Well, you know, he wouldn't clean his room, or he never fed his turtle or brushed his teeth, so I finally had to penalize him in a way he'd understand.
See, what the fuck is wrong with these people?
The brother just shot himself, and they're making jokes about it being a form of parental punishment.
Someone came up to her, Carrie Fish goes on, someone came up to her in the hospital and said he thought it was a publicity stunt for her play, Irene.
And she said, yes, I shot him, and I only have one other child to shoot for publicity for the next play, so obviously there's just one play left.
Your son is in the hospital, he shot himself.
With a blank.
And...
jokes?
I mean, there's gallows humor, and then there's just, to me at least, completely weird dissociated.
Like, how is this even remotely funny?
And I get people who call into my show all the time talking about the most tragic stuff and trying to laugh it off.
It's very dissociated.
And it's how this dissociation...
You're invited to laugh at these tragedies and thus expel significant portions of humanity and empathy.
Come, laugh with me at my son shooting himself.
If you accept that invitation...
You know, parts of you break off.
Parts of you break off and disintegrate when you're invited into that world where this shit is funny.
It is an invitation to crack your soul.
Crack your empathy.
Isn't it funny?
No, it's not.
Carrie Fisher also said, my father was bipolar.
I recognized that something was wrong with him when I was 14, and he said, come see what I got in Asia.
And he had gotten 180 silk suits in every different color.
My father was a drug addict, so I knew that I was like him.
So whatever that was that was weird was like him.
My mom would say, that's the Jewish thing, dear.
So, and she was asked in 2013, what treatment are you on now?
And she said, I take electroconvulsive therapy and lots of Medication.
And yeah, so drug addiction in the late 1970s, mental illness.
She smoked pot, age 13, LSD by 21, was diagnosed as bipolar at 24, but she says it wasn't until her late 20s that she accepted that diagnosis.
Her life had been defined by addiction.
Her life had been defined by addiction.
Well, I think her life had been defined by a terrible childhood and a refusal to place moral responsibility, whether it is due, which is the parents.
Her life had been defined by addiction stints in psychiatric hospitals and rehab clinics, as well as being rushed to hospital at least once following an overdose.
She said, we did cocaine on the set of The Empire Strikes Back in the Ice Planet.
Hoth, I think it was.
I don't know why I know that.
I'm just telling you.
I'm not happy I know it.
I didn't even like coke that much.
It was just a case of getting on whatever train I needed to take to get high.
Now, John Belushi, a famous comic, died of a drug overdose in 1982, actually told her she had a problem.
Now, when John Belushi says you have an addiction problem, you probably have an addiction problem.
And she said, slowly I realized I was doing a bit more drugs than other people and losing my choice in the matter.
If I'd been addicted to booze, I'd be dead now because you just go out and get it.
So, yeah, she got ECT, this electroconvulsive shock therapy, jolt the brain with electricity, and medication for treatment.
Now, here's, I mean, this was a hole with no bottom.
I was doing the research for this.
And so I had to sort of get the greatest hits where I think the most important stuff is going on, where the greatest wisdom can be extracted out of a pretty tragic life in many ways.
So, an interviewer says, I ask whether Fisher still holds a grudge against Elizabeth Taylor, right?
The man who...
Sorry, the woman who her father left, right?
Carrie Fisher's father left the family when she was one or two for Liz Taylor.
She cackles.
She said, I was at a party once and someone came up and said, Elizabeth is very hurt that you haven't come and said hello to her.
I mean, Christ, only in Hollywood.
She steals my father and I have to make the first move?
So I went up and she said to me, and she reenacts the conversation, Taylor, I heard your book is really good.
That's the first book, Postcards from the Edge.
Fisher says, well, it's about alcoholism, and you were in Betty Ford, weren't you?
And so was my father.
Betty Ford is a treatment clinic for Gerald Ford's wife, for alcoholism and other addictions, I think.
Taylor says, how is your father, Fisher?
I wouldn't know.
I didn't really see him growing up.
Elizabeth Taylor said, maybe you didn't miss that much.
Jeez, I say.
I know, she says, isn't it great?
This conversation, isn't it great?
It's not great.
It's not great.
And Carrie Fisher goes on to say about Elizabeth Taylor, and then I saw her another time and told her I'd heard she'd been bad-mouthing my mother.
And people don't talk to Liz Taylor like that, so she says to me, I'm going to push you in my pool.
I said, okay.
She said, you'll pull me in with you.
I said, no, I won't.
I said, push me in the pool!
It's all caps.
And she did.
It turned out to be cathartic for both of them.
In some stupid way, I was telling her that she couldn't hurt me anymore.
We've been great friends ever since.
Ah, Jackie Chan face.
In what universe?
Woman steals your father.
Okay, yeah, he had a choice, but, you know, she could have said no.
Woman steals your father.
And says, well, you didn't miss that much.
So not only does she steal your father, she absolutely, completely and totally insults your father as well.
And how do you solve all of these problems?
Well, she pushes you in a pool, and everything's fine.
Oh, man.
And, like George Michael, and like Prince, and I mean, where's the love?
Where is the love?
Yes, one of the few rap songs I actually really like.
Where is the love?
She was asked, where's your one true love?
She said, ugh!
She fell silent for a record two seconds.
Where's your one true love?
Who did you truly love?
She said, it's going to have to be in some freaked out planet of darkness, Paul Simon.
Can you imagine?
Someone asks you, who is the love of your life?
Who did you really love?
And she says, well, in some freaked out planet of darkness, it would be this guy.
And she goes on to say, and a little bit of Brian, the guy who fathered her child and left her for a man.
The people I spend time with.
But there really hasn't been one, not really.
No love.
No love.
You see, this is the price of avoidance of reality.
You can avoid reality, particularly moral responsibility reality.
You can avoid all these realities, and what you end up avoiding is love.
And the neediness that comes from inconstant relationships with the parents.
People who can't judge their parents are people who have, in my view, they don't have a strong bond with their parents.
I mean, my daughter's going to grow up, she's going to judge me.
I've got lots of stuff out here on the internet.
People say good things and bad things about me, so my daughter's going to judge me.
Of course.
Of course.
You judge me every time I put out a video or a podcast, right?
I understand that.
It's valid.
It's fair.
I'll survive and be better for it, and you'll survive and be better for it.
But if you don't have a strong relationship with your parents, if you feel that your parents' rejection is always imminent, then criticizing them becomes beyond the pale, and that means that you have to take the burden for their moral failings and moral horrors.
It's just how it works.
If you're around someone who doesn't seem to have a conscience, self-attack is your only solution to dysfunction.
So, from her book, The Neediness, The Neediness, right?
So she wrote, let's get some of the backstory that you already have.
No.
Over and done with.
My mother was Debbie Reynolds and my father was Eddie Fisher.
If you know that already from my previous books, please don't hate me.
See, the only reason I'm writing all this is because I want you to love me.
You'd be messed up with parents like that.
If you end up hating me, then it will be a bit of a bummer for me.
Only kidding.
I'll live.
Once I've had a few sessions with my therapist, with my shrink, sorry.
So, when you introduce yourself saying, well, these are my parents, what you're doing is you're framing the discussion so that you have importance and relevance because of your lineage, rather than because of who you are as an individual.
And this sort of confusion, right?
Please don't hate me.
The only reason I'm writing this is because I want you to love me.
If you're not hating me, you're a bit of a bummer for me.
Only kidding.
I'll live.
Once I've had a few sessions with my shrink, it's like trying to play chess with somebody who's thrown their chess pieces in one of those parachute simulators just floating all over the place.
You can't do it.
Ugh!
Not only was the last US election a pretty gruesome example of just seeing how many celebrities I'm no longer going to consume the products of because they're horrible human beings when they talk about politics, she writes about this.
Then came George Lucas's birthday party.
I don't drink, because drink and me just don't mix, but this time I did drink.
And then Harrison Ford made me smoke some dope that was a lot stronger than what I was used to.
And they slept together.
I think she's like 19.
He's 33.
He's married.
He's got two kids, right?
So you see, Elizabeth Taylor, who was a movie star, takes Carrie Fisher's father away from her.
I think there are two kids, her and her brother.
Maybe there's two kids, right?
So, you see these patterns, right?
Without self-knowledge, life is just this constantly degrading photocopy of past traumas, right?
So, Elizabeth Taylor takes away Carrie Fisher's Father.
Carrie Fisher then has an affair with Harrison Ford, who's married, and his marriage ends.
You see?
Two children involved.
Fallen woman, or dysfunctional woman, takes away the father.
And this happens again.
But this time she played Elizabeth Taylor and Harrison Ford played her father.
See the patterns, the patterns, the patterns.
I... I find it morally repulsive, frankly, that Harrison Ford may have...
Given very strong drugs to this young, mentally ill addict, and then slept with her.
This is what is reported.
I think it's pretty gross.
You know, he's a married father with two children, to some degree, I think, preying on this drug-addicted, mentally ill teenager.
And...
One interviewer says when talking to Carrie Fisher, over the course of an hour, she does indeed take on her lousy ex-husband, her sister-in-law's lousy ex-husband, her crazy mother, her, quote, schmuck of a father, who she reveals is sleeping with a yoga teacher 20 years his junior, and all the, quote, creepy, end quote, people who populate.
Hollywood.
I think that's some real truth in that, the creepy people in Hollywood.
And there's been a lot of stuff written about that lately.
And I think that's important.
What happened to her as a teenager?
You know, a very attractive teenager, very prominent teenager, a drug-addicted teenager.
What happened to her?
I don't know.
I don't know.
But I got to think it was not good.
She also happened to be very vocally anti-Trump.
Now, of course, if you're pro-Trump and have a history of drug addiction and mental illness, you would be discredited according to that.
If you are anti-Trump, the mainstream media will either sympathize with or cover up all of this history.
So...
A couple of points, just to sort of conclude, and I really, really appreciate you sitting through this, and people say, well, why do I keep talking about this?
There's so many lessons to be gotten from these people's lives, so many really, really important things.
We can look at, there's an old poster that I saw many, many years ago, and it was a ship going almost 90 degrees down into the water, and it said, it could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
So she played a hero, a strong, resolute hero.
But she herself was deeply damaged and deeply damaging, right?
I mean, because by making all this kind of hip and cool and funny and all that, she helped spread the virus.
So, I mean, I have sympathy for what happened to her as a child, just as I have sympathy for what happened to her parents when they were children.
But too much sympathy is a problem because then it starts excusing the dysfunction that is being played out in others, in the world as a whole.
So you've got, you know, Harrison Ford plays these, you know, upstanding, noble, there's a president, there's a hero and so on, but he's kind of marijuana dosing this drunk, mentally ill, addicted teenager and then sleeping with her when he's a married man with two children.
That is...
Yeah, I think there's a reason why he showed up and had the end that he had in a recent George Lucas movie.
You know, it's funny.
I have experience with acting.
So, after high school, I went and worked for quite a while.
Up north, it's Gold Paner and Prospectors.
I needed money for college.
Then I did two years of English literature, undergraduate, and then I auditioned for the National Theatre School of Canada, and I went there for just under two years.
I didn't finish the program.
Acting and playwriting.
And they only take like 1% of the people who apply, so it was quite a big thing to get in.
But I I found with acting, and this is sort of why I want to talk about this, because actors are big in our lives.
We think that we have a connection with them and so on.
This is not true of all actors, but I've known a lot of actors.
I've directed plays, I've been in plays and so on.
And this is sort of what I think.
When I was in theater school, we did this mask.
We had to do these masks, right?
Become these mask characters.
And the guy who taught us masks actually taught Tom Cruise as well, right?
So...
And one of the actors in my class...
It was talking about being in the mask, right?
And it's a little tough to breathe.
It's kind of foggy in there.
And he said, you know, he said, I'm trying to get into this character.
But all I can sort of think is like, man, it's hot and smuggy in here.
I feel like I've got an alien on my face.
Being able to act, being able to be that emotionally revelatory...
As if there's no one else in the room.
Acting is like there's no one else.
There's no big crew around you.
There's not an audience out there.
You're not under these weird lights.
You're not in makeup.
It's not something you just did last night as well.
You have to be in the moment and you have to pretend to yourself that That no one's watching in order to act well.
Because if you're self-conscious about people watching you, you will act from the outside in rather than...
And it's particularly true in film.
Film, you got extreme close-ups, right?
Carrie Fisher said she hated ECUs or extreme close-ups even when she was a child.
But if you are acting well, you have to genuinely convince yourself that there's nobody else in the room.
Now, who is it?
What type of personality?
Can most reliably extinguish the existence of others?
I would assume self-involved, narcissistic personality types.
You know, have you ever been on the toilet, you take a dump and there's an ant crawling across the floor?
Do you like, oh, I've got to cover myself, right?
No, you don't feel self-conscious because the ant is not a person.
You can continue your business, right?
So, who is it who can, like, you've got a camera, you've got hot lights, and you can pretend that nobody's there.
Well, people whose personality structures don't really fundamentally recognize the existence of other people.
And this is why I think that these kinds of personality structures are so rife throughout the acting profession, and actors are pro-left.
In the left, politically in the left, you are units of production, right?
You're taxed livestock.
You're not individuals who should have rights to be controlled and managed and central planning.
You've got to be told what's fake news and what's real news.
You've got to be told.
You can't think for yourself.
You've got to be propagandized.
You can't be taught to think for yourself because you're a thing to the left.
So, this aspect of things I think is really, really important.
I was okay as an actor.
I did some things well, but when I have a camera on me, I want to be fully myself.
Plus, it turned out that I have many more important words within me than I should spend my whole life with some writer sticking his hand up my ass and making my mouth move.
I have more valuable words inside me that I can self-generate than I could possibly get.
Inserted into me from some external source, and I wanted to be authentic and fully myself when I am talking to you, when I'm talking to the world.
I don't want to pretend like you're not there.
I know that you're there.
I know that you're on the other side of this camera.
I know.
I see the comments.
I get the feedback.
I know.
I want to know.
I want this to be connection.
You know, when you're watching an actor...
You are an invisible voyeur.
You understand?
You don't exist in the actor's world.
You can't exist in the actor's world.
Because if he's conscious, if you're watching him, he can't act that well.
He's got to be straight in.
And invisible voyeur is not where I wanted my talents to create.
I didn't want them to create that.
I wanted to create connection and a conversation.
Which is why I do so many call-in shows, have conversations with people.
I want to be present.
I want them to be present when I'm doing what I'm doing.
I don't want them to have to self-erase, to turn themselves into mere observational ghosts who cannot affect what's going on.
An overconsumption of acting is, I think, a return to the invisibility of helpless childhood, but that perhaps is a topic for another time.
I want to be myself on camera because you're all deeply human to me, and I know that you're there, and I want you to know that I know that you're there.
I don't want you to be invisible, which is what you'd have to be if I was acting.
Now, why do I talk about childhood?
Why do I talk about that?
Aren't you into abstract philosophy?
Yes.
Yes, of course.
And we need to figure out what mind or what attitude or what perspective does the most damage to empirical philosophy, to moral responsibility.
The whole point of philosophy is ethics.
The whole point of medicine is cure or prevention, right?
So here's an example of why, right?
In an interview, I asked Carrie Fisher, you do a lot of work in the comedy genre.
Talk about how you find humor in everything.
Carrie Fisher said, if it's not funny, then it's just true.
And that's unacceptable.
So, it better be funny.
Just mull over that.
Think on that deeply after you've turned off this video or podcast.
Kara Fisher said, if it's not funny, then it's just true, and that's unacceptable.
So it better be funny.
Unacceptable to who?
If you had a traumatic childhood, if you were abused as a child, and you accept the truth of that, and the moral responsibility of the parents or the people who abused you, who is that unacceptable to?
Of course it's unacceptable to your abusers.
And so you have to turn the pain that your abusers caused you into a comedy show so that they're entertained, and so you're not hurt, and so you can maintain a pretend relationship with the people who abused you but won't even look at the pain they caused and give you the freedom of accepting moral responsibility.
The parents who hurt children who don't accept moral responsibility are condemning their children to this kind of horrible, gruesome, pseudo-comedy mime.
Oh, look, Mommy, Daddy, look, I'm turning all the horror into...
I'm making people laugh.
It's great jokes, see?
Look, it's great.
Aren't I good?
Don't you love me?
Won't you love me?
Won't you care for me?
Won't you hold me?
Won't you stay?
And also, it pretends that the dysfunction and the horrors that were inflicted upon you as a child have some value because they could be transmuted into comedy.
But unfortunately, it's only funny to other people who are also avoiding the moral truths of their own childhoods and assigning moral responsibility to their abusers.
They love, love that you're turning all of this trauma into comedy because then they can laugh at it and then not do the unacceptable thing to their own parents, which is to be in pain and hold your parents morally responsible for the hurt they did.
That's unacceptable.
That's going to threaten the pretend bond that you have by being a performing joke monkey dancing on the hot coals of horrifying histories.
Yeah, see, mommy and daddy didn't hurt you, didn't harm you.
You know what we did?
We made you funny.
Isn't that great?
And that's why she says to her daughter, you can be a writer now.
You can be a comedic writer.
You've got tons of material.
We've given you all these wonderful traumas, all these wonderful horrors that you can use to advance your professional career.
Carrie Fisher says her daughters don't think that Carrie Fisher's cool, but they do think that Carrie Fisher stays in a mental hospital or way cool.
Madness.
Madness.
And all of this celebrity worship, like, it has been a frustration, not just of me, but of philosophers throughout history, that the idols that the people hold up are often very damaged and broken people.
Now, they're pretty, and they're talented, and they're rich and famous, of course, but these are held up to be cool.
I've seen the outpouring of I mean, every time the celebrity dies, all this outpouring.
Wonderful, noble, heroic, blah, blah, blah.
I don't know.
How do you know?
Couldn't even tell the truth about her own family.
Resolutely avoided assigning moral responsibility, turned her horrors into comedy to distract and dissociate other people.
This is how the virus spreads throughout the world.
Heroic.
The only thing that a philosopher or a virtuous person recognizes as heroic is telling the truth.
And she openly said, I'm not going to go to the truth.
I'm going to pretend it's funny.
The truth is unacceptable.
The truth is unacceptable.
And I'm not going to tell the truth about my father's moral character.
It's a Jewish thing.
So no.
People who resolutely avoid telling the truth and who distract other people with comedy and misdirections and...
It's not heroic.
The avoidance of the truth is not heroic.
It's cowardly.
I sympathize.
I mean, it sounds like I'm being harsh on the woman.
I sympathize.
She's also...
But she did have a child psychologist saying, listen, when did you realize your father was a horrible human being?
What's he trying to do?
He's trying to do something important.
So she had exposure to better knowledge.
But...
This elder worship cult is very tough to break.
It's very good to get through to the truth.
It's a saying that says...
Paul Joseph Watson just retweeted this today.
It's a saying that says...
There's only two ways to tell the complete truth.
Number one, posthumously.
After you're dead.
Number two, anonymously.
I don't think that's true anymore.
It may have been true in the past.
I don't think it's true anymore.
And...
She wasn't loved.
She had horrible relationships, I think.
And...
She started life, I mean, Debbie Reynolds, like, they didn't have epidurals back then, so she just, they just anesthetized her, so Carrie Fisher came out unconscious, drugged, and did not feel close to her mother, but desperately wanted to be close to her mother.
Slept in the same room when her mother, I just want to be around my mother's exhalations.
And now where did she end up her life?
Well, she lived in a house next door to her mother.
And they share a driveway.
And the last thing I wanted to say is, we need to start reorienting our perceptions of who is heroic and who is valuable Not because she looked good in a gold bikini.
She looked better than I would in a gold bikini.
A gold bikini sold for over $90,000 at auction.
We need to start venerating moral heroes.
We need to start venerating people who tell the truth against significant social pressure.
We need to start venerating philosophers.
We need to start venerating truth-tellers.
Maybe we're not as pretty, maybe we're not as entertaining.
But if the masses, as a whole, just want to be entertained, then they'll elevate these people to the status of sentimentality.
Princess Diana?
Princess Diana?
God sakes!
What a post-modern fairy tale!
She marries a prince and lives happily ever after?
No, it dies like a dog in flames in a Paris tunnel, fleeing photographers.
Our heroes as a culture, that's our future.
If our heroes are like shallow self-absorbed people who don't tell the truth but entertain us, then we're saying, well, we want to be entertained more than we want the truth.
We want to be amused more than we want facts.
We want jokes more than we want honesty.
We want misdirection and dissociation more than we want contact and intimacy.
And that is pretty tragic.
Of course the masses don't care about, they don't fundamentally care about Carrie Fisher.
She died and she'll be forgotten in a week by most people.
There'll be stories when they CGI her back to life in some new Star Wars caper.
But...
The masses, if all you want to be is entertained, then you can praise and get sentimental about these people who openly avow their avoidance of truth while claiming to be for mental health.
Mental health is being in alignment with reality.
And if you're openly going to avoid truth and say the truth is unacceptable, I bet you're for mental health.
I'm against lung cancer, but here, have some cigarettes.
It makes no sense.
But it takes a truth teller to see that.
So, the cult of celebrity is very dangerous and it arises out of the elder cult of parent worship.
And we need to break free of this orbit.
We need to stop following the pretty people who entertain us, who merely make us laugh in uncomfortable ways if you have any kind of sense of true empathy and true self-regard.
Empathy for the child that was harmed at the hands of the parents who were responsible.
If we keep chasing these dead stars, these empty vessels of sheer entertainment, mere entertainment, Well, we're hollowing out our culture, and people with deeper values, not truer values, but deeper values, are going to take it over.
We are following these shiny, empty helium balloons off a cliff.
It is very dangerous, and I don't know that we have a lot of time to turn around, but dammit, we better start trying.
