lies lies lies lies lieslies lies lies lies lieslies lies lies lies lieslies lies lies lies liesFALSEHOOD.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom in Radio. | |
| Hope you're doing well. Welcome to your daily argument. | |
| Now here I'd like to talk a little bit about the development of the false self and kind of how it's manifesting itself in society as a whole. | |
| It's a very very dangerous phenomenon that has led to untold suffering in the past and of course we attempt the diagnosis in order to avoid the progress of the disease. | |
| So the false self It's a term that's used a lot in self-knowledge. | |
| To me, sort of the definition that I use is anyone who can get you to substitute something other than virtue for the seat of your self-respect, for your pride, for your belief that you're valuable, that you are worthy of love and respect and so on. | |
| Now, there are so many different ways in which people can get you to substitute something other than virtue for your self-respect. | |
| They can get you to focus on beauty, on your abs, on your muscles, on your hair, on whatever, the whiteness of your teeth, or there's some bizarre thing where you've got to try and get these Brooke Shields eyebrows by doing stuff that can be considered highly dangerous. | |
| And if they can get you to substitute beauty For virtue, then what happens of course is you end up having to transfer a lot of money to people in order to get the self-respect that you think you can achieve through the pursuit of beauty. | |
| It can be through the pursuit of money. | |
| It can be through the pursuit of status. | |
| It can be through the pursuit of dominance, of control. | |
| It can be through stimulating envy or need In other people, so that you have value, not because you are a virtuous person, but you have value because other people envy you. | |
| It's not that you have value, it's that you have created a sort of vacuum, a thirst of envy in other people, and therefore because they think you have value, you have value. | |
| Conformity is also another very, very big way in which people can get you to transfer resources to them in order to gain the false self value of being a good girl or a good boy, a good citizen. | |
| Conformity and obedience is very, very important. | |
| Disobedience is wild, it's rough, it's disrespectful, it's inappropriate, whatever. | |
| Now, this is all very important stuff, and it fundamentally has to do with resource transfers. | |
| As I've mentioned a million times, we are mammalian-based evolutionary organisms trying to gain resources, and we can either gain resources through the hard work of self-development, of virtue, of honesty, of integrity, of courage, of truth, of all of those good things, Or what we can do is we can try and harvest resources by selling other people a false identity. | |
| Now the false identity, the false self, pushes aside and eventually destroys the true self and then you're really trapped because you don't have sort of in case of emergency break glass and release the true self the true self the honest self the self that connects with reality and reason and honesty and all of that the the true self after a while expires in the shadow of the false self I wrote about someone that this happened to in a poem many years ago. | |
| He has become a hide of bright armor. | |
| A hide being an external shell, and there's nothing inside. | |
| Now, the false self originally is designed to protect the true self, because the true self gets attacked in a dysfunctional society. | |
| This is really, really important. | |
| And if you're not being attacked, you're not being honest. | |
| If you're not being attacked, you're not being truthful. | |
| You don't have integrity. | |
| It's not directly causal, right? | |
| It's not like everyone who's attacked is... | |
| It's not being honest. But certainly if you are being honest, you're going to be attacked for sure. | |
| And so what happens is you try honesty as a kid. | |
| You know, I don't want to kiss grandma. | |
| And then people say, well, you have to go and kiss grandma. | |
| I don't want to share my toys. Well, you have to share your toys. | |
| I don't want to share my candy. You have to share your candy. | |
| And so you are ordered to falsify your experience, to falsify your thoughts and feelings. | |
| And you are punished for having basic integrity and honesty. | |
| I don't want to go to school. | |
| I don't like school. I don't want to be hit. | |
| I don't want to be yelled at. I don't want to be humiliated. | |
| I don't want to study this because it's boring and so on, right? | |
| Now, these things can all be negotiated, but if you're fundamentally squelched, if your honesty is punished, qua honesty, because it's honest, then what happens is you develop a false self. | |
| The false self mimics compliance. | |
| You can't really have compliance. | |
| I mean, I guess right at the end of Winston Smith's shattering 1984-style journey, perhaps, but you can't really have compliance. | |
| You can only fake compliance. | |
| And so, when you're punished for being honest, you develop a compliant self that is designed to avoid punishment, and it's designed to protect your capacity for honesty in the future. | |
| But what happens is, of course, the longer the false self, which has a sort of, in a sense, an organic meme-like existence of its own, it wants to dominate and spread, which is why honesty is attacked. | |
| It's a way of the false self jumping from body to body like some sort of demon possessing new people. | |
| So what happens is you develop this false self. | |
| Now as long as you recognize it's a false self, well I have to do this in class because otherwise I'll get punished. | |
| I have to do this at home otherwise I'll get punished or yelled at or ignored or whatever it is. | |
| Now as long as you recognize that it's a strategy that you don't like, then you are holding your true self in reserve. | |
| If it goes on for long enough, and if you stock home syndrome with those who are triggering your dishonesty, so to speak, or forcing your dishonesty, it doesn't mean that you're bad. | |
| I mean, if you have a gun to your head, whatever you do is not moral because it's not chosen. | |
| So if you're simply trying to survive in a dysfunctional environment, your survival strategies are not immoral. | |
| In fact, they're very helpful. So the defense is designed to protect Your true self can become so strong that your true self can no longer find an exit. | |
| It's sort of like this. It's sort of like you put a cast on your arm and it's supposed to protect your arm as the broken bone heals. | |
| But if you keep that cast on for like five years, your arm just withers away, the bone withers away. | |
| So you have to make sure that as you gain capacity to tell the truth in your young life, that you begin to work that and you begin to Have a sort of exit strategy, a tunnel to dig out of from under the false self so that you can emerge as an adult with all of your attendant freedoms with the capacity to be honest and to be direct and that is a very very powerful thing and again it will recreate some of the attacks that you experienced when you're younger but the alternative is a, | |
| well, a spiritual death, soul murder, the end of the possibility for you to have honesty at all. | |
| And then you become, not just dishonest, but a sort of transferor, an infector of dishonesty, because then you will now punish other people who manifest the true self. | |
| Because once you've killed your true self, You think it's because it's inevitable or it's a wise strategy or it's a good thing or it's impossible to live any other way. | |
| It's impossible to live with the true self. | |
| So then when you see someone who is honest and direct and courageous, has integrity, you want to attack them because they remind you that what you did in allowing the triumph of the false self was a choice. | |
| It was not an inevitability and it is not a wise thing to do. | |
| You've just told yourself that so that you can live with what you did with the backing down. | |
| It's a productive strategy when you are a child. | |
| It is a cowardly strategy when you are an adult and have any capacity for independence and honesty. | |
| When you can get people, we're going to flip roles here, right? | |
| So when you can get people to accept a false self, or you can get them to surrender or submerge their true self to your dominance of bullying, they need some way to have value because they've been humiliated. | |
| So they need some way to have value in the absence of honesty and virtue and courage and truth and all of that. | |
| So you have to offer them something else. | |
| It could be patriotism, it could be conformity to particular ideologies, it could be self-righteousness, virtue signaling, beauty, I mean, status, wealth, whatever it is. | |
| Once you've got them to give up the true self, then you sell them, literally for money, in most cases you sell them. | |
| A false self-reward palette, like the dopamine palette of, oh, I lost five pounds. | |
| Now I have value. | |
| Oh, I got a facelift. | |
| Now I have value. I got a nose job. | |
| Oh, I got, I widened my teeth. | |
| I strengthened my, now I have value. | |
| And it's not like the pursuit of, you know, physical attractiveness is all very well and good. | |
| That's fine, but it should not be the basis of your self-worth. | |
| The basis of your self-worth must, to be rational, be something that you can gain more of over time. | |
| Physical beauty is a passing thing, right? | |
| I mean, it peaks in your 20s and after that you're just, you know, propping everything up with rapidly rusting Meccano's heads. | |
| So, you really do have to transfer a lot of money to get this false self-validation and it's very profitable, which is why philosophy is the enemy of this kind of materialism. | |
| Once philosophy comes along and gives you something you can grow over time, you can grow your virtue, your integrity, your honesty, all of these things can grow, your courage can grow over time, They do not decline like physical looks. | |
| They grow with wisdom. | |
| So stop transferring resources to the false self. | |
| Be honest, tell the truth, and shame the devil himself. |