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Aug. 11, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:46
3786 THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT YOU | The Daily Argument
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing well. I would like to bring today's daily argument to you and with it may come just a little bit of pain because we're going to talk about the glories of exclusion And the fact, the basic reality that as an adult, strangers just don't care about you.
They will pretend to care about you in order to enslave you, but they don't really.
And I really want to run through this because it's so essential.
If you grew up as a baby, as an infant, as a toddler, And you got hugs and love and kisses and affirmations and you were told all the things that a child needs to hear.
You know, I love you. You're good enough.
I believe in you.
You can do anything you want.
Communism has failed every single time it's ever been tried.
If you heard all of those wonderful words of affirmation and support and love, then You are, in a sense, full for life.
We're all born an empty vessel with a great need to bond.
And if you receive all of these wonderful, loving things, realistic things, like not the mindless, cheerleading, pumping, you're special, you can do anything, but based upon achievement.
Initially, of course, just for breathing and then based upon achievement.
If you received all of those things, then you are full and you then don't have A sort of significant or fundamental discontent with society.
Which, you know, if your society is perfect, sounds good to me.
But if it's not perfect, or if it's going in the wrong direction, chafing irritability and pushback is probably a pretty healthy response.
So, if you didn't get That kind of love.
If you had a distant mom or an absent dad or, you know, you were dumped in government daycare and dumped in government schools and a latchkey kid, like I was a latchkey kid, you came home, nobody was there for hours and so on.
Then you end up with a need for love and approval.
And the need for love and approval comes, of course, from the deficiency of love and approval.
And, of course, your need for food results from a deficiency of food.
You haven't had enough to eat, so you're hungry.
Your thirst comes from a lack of water, you understand.
The problem is that this pain, this existence pain, existential pain, if this was your experience of sort of solitude or isolation or being dropped into the sort of feral, horizontal, psychopathy, Lord of the Flies reality of being raised by your peers rather than by authority figures, which is a brutal, brutal experience, highly instructive, somewhat dangerous.
And opportunistic for some of our lowest impulses.
But if you've had this experience, then you grew up with a lot of pain.
You grow up with a lot of loss and so much of your pain and your loss is absorbed in self-medication, in trying to find ways to distract yourself from this pain, ways that could be like cigarettes or drugs or sex or video games, pornography, you name it.
There's a way to sort of fill the hole inside that was left by an absence of Think about what your body does when you have little contact as a child.
If you have little contact as a child, your body primes you for combat.
I mean, this is why cortisol levels are higher in children who are suffering from abandonment and neglect and abuse and so on.
Because if your parents aren't there, what are they doing?
Well, there's been a disease, there's been a war, there's dangerous predators.
Your body primes you for An environment of scarcity and combat.
And what that means is that you'll either be bullied or bullying.
You'll either be a bully or you're going to be bullied.
Because, of course, if you're in a situation of scarcity, it means that human beings are in conflict with each other and there's win-lose negotiations.
If you grew up in a situation or a system of love and approval and respect and parental attention, then your body is primed to the reality that the world is at peace, that you should learn to negotiate, that it's win-win negotiations that are making things work, And so the deferral of gratification and all of that is how you're going to profit.
Are you at peace or are you at war?
Well, your body starts scanning for these signals, I believe, before we're even born, based on stress levels within the mom and so on.
Grow up either being abused or neglected, and neglect is sometimes even worse than abuse, at least with abuse you get attention, and we know this because kids will sometimes provoke parents who aren't paying attention to them even to pay attention to them in a negative or sometimes dangerous way.
So if you grew up with this, then you have a pain within you that you often will feel is wrong, makes you deficient, makes you bad, so you'll try to avoid it.
But in avoiding it, it leads you to be very, very susceptible to people who offer you a replacement for the love you lacked as a baby, as a toddler.
Those people are everywhere.
And they are highly dangerous because they are finding the hole in your heart, the size of your heart, and they're saying, I will fill it in for you.
I will fill it in for you. I will make everything better.
I will give you the love bomb.
I will give you the acceptance and the love and the approval and all of that.
And it's really, really tempting.
It's really tempting.
The first thing I want to say is in my particular opinion, it's all opinion, but in my opinion you can't fix it.
You can't fix it. You can't go back and get the development stages that you wanted when you wanted them.
It doesn't mean that you have to have a bad life.
You can have actually a wonderful and glorious life.
But I think it's important. Like if you didn't get enough food to eat when you were a kid and you grew up like as an adult, as like a 20-year-old or 25-year-old, you're like three inches shorter than you would have been otherwise in malnutrition and so on.
Then eating more food is not going to make you taller.
It's just going to make you fatter, right?
So a desire to sort of go back and say, well, I was starving as a kid.
I'm going to eat more food now.
It doesn't make you healthier. It makes you less healthy because that development phase is past and things are kind of set in stone as far as that goes.
Again, it doesn't mean you can't change.
There's neuroplasticity, but it does mean, I think, That you have to be very wary, very wary indeed, to people who are going to come along and say, we're going to make you part of our group and we're going to fill you with a love bomb and we're going to just make everything better for you.
Because they do that in general only if you conform to their ideological wishes and only if you...
Surrender to them.
The state sometimes does it.
Religions sometimes do it.
Cults do it a lot.
I mean, it is a real risk.
It is a real danger that you really need to be aware of.
There is no solving early trauma through excesses later in life, again, in my opinion.
What you can do is recognize and go through the pain of saying, listen, I didn't get what I needed when I was a baby, when I was a toddler, when I was an infant.
I didn't get what I needed. I maybe got the opposite of what I needed.
And that was painful. And accept and deal with and manage that pain.
Don't run from it. Don't run. I mean, our instinct is to sort of run away from emotional pain.
That's understandable, of course, because in the past, we didn't live very long, right?
So it made sense to sort of avoid emotional pain rather than Run towards it.
You die of tooth decay when you're 25.
Not much point getting a lot of self-actualization.
But now we live a hell of a long time.
And so now it's worth dealing with things rather than avoiding them.
But dealing with them means, okay, I'm going to accept.
I'm going to eat my pain. I'm going to eat my pain.
I'm going to swallow and deal with the pain that I have inside.
The loss. There is an old saying, all emotional problems are caused by the avoidance of legitimate suffering.
Not self-inflicted suffering, not masochistic suffering, legitimate suffering.
Not the suffering you experience when you choose a bad person to be in your life, as I've done in the past, but legitimate suffering, the suffering that actually occurred when you were a child.
Because once you get that people, as an adult, they're not going to care about you the way that your mom Should have cared about you when you were a baby.
They're just not going to care about you.
They have their own lives to live.
They have their own agendas that they're running.
They have their own ambitions, their own preferences, you name it.
But they're not going to care about you in the way that you should have been cared for as a baby, as a toddler, as a child.
They're not going to do it.
And it would be kind of weird if they did.
They're not your mom. You're not a baby anymore.
When you're a child, we can play with avoidance.
And we just have to manage stuff, that pain as a child, if we're in those situations.
But as an adult, as adults, we must accept that that loss occurred, that neglect occurred, that abuse occurred.
Deal with that pain, that it's never going to be solved.
You can never go and find another mother.
You can never go, bounce back into the crib and have everything.
There's no do-overs, there's no mulligans for this early childhood loss or abuse.
But there are solutions.
The solution is to accept avoidance.
That you didn't get what you wanted.
To embrace that pain.
I'm a big fan of talk therapy, but there are other things that you can do.
Jordan Peterson's program is very good.
Selfauthoring.com. That's the American spelling.
You can use the code Molyneux to get a discount.
But once you recognize that you can't go back and get it solved you can't go back and do it over then you recognize you know if you're if you're lost in the woods and if you get for some reason no one's coming no one's coming to save you no one's coming to helicopter you out then you're going to just have to start walking once we accept that no one is coming to save us that there's no way to undo early pain it must be dealt with and and embraced accepted understood And we have to learn the lessons of that early pain.
If we were neglected or abused, what was it in our parents that led them to do that?
And is there any way, as I think there is, to recognize the patterns of those in adulthood who may want to do the same thing to us?
And can we avoid those people?
Because pain recurs until we're safe.
Pain recurs until we're safe.
And the only way to be safe is to accept the pain, to understand and learn the lessons behind it, and to learn to avoid such personalities in the future.
If you ate a fruit that made you sick, you should stop eating that fruit, at least until you figure out what is going on.
So I hope that that will make some sense.
I strongly invite you to self-knowledge is key.
If you know and understand yourself, if you know and understand your history, You won't need willpower in the same way that you do now.
You won't need willpower to resist temptation because the temptation is to avoid the self.
The temptation is to avoid the pain.
The temptation is to avoid a difficult history.
Once you accept and embrace and deal with your pain, you won't need willpower in the same way.
You won't even be tempted by things that you were formerly tempted by and you can start to work to correct all of the things in society that led To you losing out in the way that you did.
So I hope that this helps. Thank you so much for listening and watching.
Please don't forget to donate at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful day.
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