4089 When The Indoctrinated Turn On You - Call In Show - May 9th, 2018
Question 1: [1:24] – “I’m a 26-year-old male who has recently had his life turned entirely upside down. As a musician who’s lived in nothing but artistic communities since my early teens, on top of being raised, taught, and employed by feminist women, I’ve been deeply indoctrinated in the radical left ideology. I was always taught and was under the implication that compassion was the deciding factor for being left leaning. I was hook line and sinker. Rallies, fundraisers, ANTIFA meetings. That mindset changed viscerally this past summer, when a kangaroo court of individuals whom chose to remain anonymous to me, started to smear my name in the vane of ‘toxic masculinity’ after a disagreement amongst political views. A number of life altering false rumors, and fake utterances were written up, passed onto my roommates, and musical peers. Leading to an intervention style meeting, where they laid out my so called ‘problematic behaviors’. Without being able to properly defend myself, not even being given the dignity of knowing my accusers, this led to my short-term homelessness, the loss of my source of income, social ostracism, and deep emotional turmoil. I’d like to believe that I’m not the only well-meaning man who’s been largely cast out from his former peers, just in result of voicing right of center opinions who’ve had their lives completely uprooted. My question is, how does one begin to start over after your life has been burned to the ground by the far left? Is it worth censoring yourself in the pursuit of new friends?”Question 2: [44:14] – “Does Stefan have a proposal as to why some callers are emotionally invested in their belief system and such callers are often beyond the reach of logic? I am a qualified Hypnotherapist (among other things) and believe that some people have mental processes that produce ‘anti-logic’. They hold to untenable positions and invent increasingly bizarre constructs to maintain their position, (regardless of the facts) - resorting in the last to conspiracy theory. I recently listened to the show with the Flat Earther. Despite the absurdity of his position he could not be moved from his position by Stefan's appeal to reason. As Stefan regularly points out, actions have consequences and people respond to incentives. A ‘Flat Earther’ invites the dis-benefit of ridicule, so there must be a compensating benefit to make him cling so tenaciously to his untenable belief system.”Question 3: [1:16:15] – “I have developed the basics of a potential theory of ethics that states that what is ethical for a community is what is in the community's common interests, and the community's common interests are based upon the commonly shared interest of all the individual members of said community to reliably maximize their own interests. I would like to explain my theory to Stefan and see if he agrees with it and/or if it accords with his theory, UPB.”Question 4: [1:34:15] – “I am happily married mother with 2 children. My husband and I are deeply dedicated to providing the best upbringing possible for our kids. My husband works full time & I stay at home. We are doing what we can to raise our children to be happy, healthy and productive humans. Of course, there is a pin in our bubble. Some of our important members are mentally ill or are not participating in our lives. The mentally ill ones cause A LOT of unneeded drama for our family of 4. When the ones NOT participating in our lives DO show up they think that we need to drop everything to be with them, and they are resentful when we do not direct our full attention to their presence. The stable ones have pulled away from family life all together or live too far away for us to meet often. So mostly we are stuck at the dinner table with the crazies.”“My question is: As a role model for children where do we place our boundary with family? Is it in children's best interest to have a connection with family even if they are mentally ill & destructive? What about opening doors to allow people into our lives when it is convenient or them but promptly having the door shut on us when they decide they are done visiting? Would it be healthier to live in exile without the headache & drama that relatives can bring, and still hope that the kids still learn the value of family? Or should we for the sake of the children endure so that they can develop relationships with cousins, aunts, and grandparents?”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
A musician who was unpersoned by a leftist community that turned on him extraordinarily ferociously simply for making a relatively minor comment about diversity called in and wanted to know how do you build your life again anew after you've had it burned to the ground by the radical left?
Is it worth censoring yourself in pursuit of new friends?
Now, the second caller wanted to know why people cling to incorrect ideas.
You know, there are some of us who, when we get new data, we get better ideas, we improve our thinking, and there are those who, well, they don't.
In fact, quite the opposite, so we talked about that.
The third caller wanted to know what's wrong with the benefit of the community, the good of the collective as the basis for moral theories.
And the fourth caller, a brave woman who wanted to know, if your family is dysfunctional, is it worth having them around just so your children have that kind of connection with their family, or at least their origin family?
And it's a great question.
There's a balance that we all have to make when it comes to purity versus relationships.
And it was a great, great conversation about all of that.
So I hope you will enjoy the show.
I hope you will come and help us out at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
And please don't forget to pick up your copy of The Art of the Argument, my new book, at theartoftheargument.com.
Alright, well up first today we have Paul.
Paul wrote in and said, I'm a 26 year old male who has recently had his life turned entirely upside down.
As a musician who's lived in nothing but artistic community since my early teens, on top of being raised, taught, and employed by feminist women, I've been deeply indoctrinated in the radical left ideology.
I was always taught and was under the implication that compassion was the deciding factor for being left-leaning.
I was hook, line, and sinker.
Rallies, fundraisers, Antifa meetings.
That mindset changed viscerally this past summer when a kangaroo court of individuals who chose to remain anonymous to me started to smear my name in the vein of toxic masculinity after a disagreement amongst political views.
A number of life-altering false rumors and fake utterances were written up past my roommates' musical peers, leading to an investigation-style meeting where they laid out my so-called problematic behaviors.
Without being able to properly defend myself, not even being given the dignity of knowing my accusers, this led to my short-term homelessness, a loss of my source of income, social ostracism, and deep emotional turmoil.
I'd like to believe that I'm not the only well-meaning man who's been largely cast out from his former peers, Paul!
Gosh, what a story.
What a story. Do you want to say what the instigating action or statement was?
Do you even know? Oh, boy.
Well, you know, the thing was, is that they laid out a few fake utterances.
And I believe that it came after actually like a show.
It might have been like a house show or something.
I remember it kind of feeling a little amped after the show and a little combative and there happened to be this conversation going on about the wage gap which is a pretty popular topic among a lot of leftists and I guess like feminists in the community that I was performing in a lot of the time.
I had mentioned something about She had mentioned something about saying that everybody should be equal, you know, and I just brought it up.
I was like, you know, what do you mean by equal, necessarily?
And she replied something along the lines of, well, everyone's the same.
So, being combative and kind of a dick, honestly, I said, well, then why is diversity so important?
You know, just kind of poking.
Why is that being a dick?
That's a reasonable question, isn't it?
Yeah, I mean, like, it was, but I kind of just, like, laughed, you know, and nobody thought that was very funny.
It's a room full of people who kind of just scoffed and shot daggers at me from across the room.
But failed to provide any actual answers to your question, right?
Yeah, yeah.
I was just kind of shining light on the whole thing of being like, oh, well, this doesn't make much sense.
Right. Right.
Among that, I'd say that I'm a fairly decent looking guy.
I performed and lived in a very small artistic community.
Everyone knows everyone's business.
That gets around like wildfire.
I'd say that I did my fair share of sleeping around a little bit.
I think a few of them were pretty upset about that.
I felt like I was fairly upfront with who I am and my intentions and everything.
I never meant to hurt anybody, but obviously if somebody has an axe to grind, especially if they know that somebody will listen to them and believe every word that they say, then they're going to throw whoever they want under the bus.
It's your theory, and I'm not disagreeing with you.
I just want to make sure I understand it.
Paul, is your theory that this may have been blowback for being a manwhore?
I think so.
I think that's probably a part of it.
Right. Which, you know, I'm not necessarily defending myself on those grounds, you know.
You had sex with crazy women, right?
And next thing you know, your life got enormously complicated.
Funny how that works. Yeah.
Now, what were the Antifa meetings like?
Oh boy. Well, it was advertised as progressive, like a progressive meeting.
It was actually directly after the election of Donald Trump.
And there were a few meetings that were kind of similar beforehand.
But they were, you know, kind of just, like, palling around, like, not really talking about much, like, much political or, like, community involvement kind of stuff.
It was more or less just getting to know each other.
Well, because they thought Hillary had it in the back, right?
Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah.
And, you know, there were some disagreements in the room about Hillary Clinton and, you know, Bernie Sanders and...
But, I mean, like, absolutely... Bernie Sanders?
Does he actually comb his hair with a balloon?
Because it kind of seems that way.
Yeah, I actually...
I actually did a lot of fundraising and campaigning for Bernie Sanders.
I honestly did treat it a bit like a social event.
It was more or less, oh yeah, well, my friends are doing this, so I should jump on this train and just, you know, for the greater good, you know, that's sort of the idea that a lot of us had about it.
Because like I mentioned before, you know, compassion Was the deciding factor for being left-leaning.
So you're like, oh yeah, everyone deserves $15 an hour minimum wage.
Everyone deserves a shot at life and I don't know.
I don't really know what I was thinking necessarily.
I'm sure if you had asked me any questions at that point in my life, I probably would have...
Shrugged it off as, oh, I mean, I can't believe that you want Donald Trump to be president because I'm, you know.
Ah, the things that men will say to get blowjobs.
Wait, this is what the women like?
Sure, I'll make those mouth noises so they'll make their mouth noises.
Yeah, I'm not making a very good case for myself.
No, no, no. Listen, you're being admirably frank.
Okay, that's good to know at least.
I don't know. I guess that there was a bit of guilt too.
I kind of guilted myself into voting for Hillary in the end thinking that only a monster would betray his mother and every woman I've ever known.
But didn't these women have any trouble whatsoever with the fact that Hillary Clinton was enormously corrupt?
That she destroyed Libya and helped destroy Syria?
That she was married to a serial sexual predator who'd been credibly accused of rape?
I mean, did they have any issues with that?
Did it even come up?
Did it matter at all to them?
It never did.
You know, actually, one of my exes, she had several books by Hillary Clinton, and she lived by it, you know.
She lived by every word the woman said, which was interesting, you know.
Even my liberal now-past grandmother hated Hillary Clinton, you know, in the 90s and 80s.
And was there any political theories that were going around here?
Or was it just, you know, we want to help people, we want to be nice to people and people deserve this free healthcare and 15 bucks an hour?
Was it just nicey, click your heels three times and wish for things?
Or was there any actual analysis of economics or politics or the nature of the state or the nature of democracy?
Or was it just this big tsunami of bullshit feelings?
I mean yeah There wasn't a whole lot of real theory going on or like any conversation of economics or anything of that matter.
You know, it was more or less just revolution.
So people should get 15 bucks an hour and that's the entire start and end of the analysis.
And if you don't want that, you must be an evil capitalist.
Yeah. Ah, the 19th, the 19th, the 19th.
Anyway, go on. So funny.
Yeah. Yeah.
I don't know. Like, I guess there were a lot of coalitions that started popping up called, you know, like Socialists for Peace and Progressive Midwest.
And there's actually this forum that popped up in my community.
It was called the Sexual Assault Forum, which I thought was interesting because there wasn't even the word prevention in the name, which seems a little insensitive to say this, but it seemed a little fetishy.
It just seemed like they got together weekly to talk about just sexual assault in general.
And I honestly was for it, like initially, because I thought it had something to do with- Wait, I think you want to clarify when you say you were for it, what you were for.
Because the last thing you talked about was sexual assault.
I just want to make sure you put into that one right up.
Sorry, yeah. No, I was thinking, you know, sexual assault prevention in the community.
Got it. I knew that.
I just wanted to make sure. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, so I did think it has something to do with community building and- You'd get there and, you know, it would be a bunch of Antifa members at these small meetings.
You know, people wearing like J-shirts talking about how they need to shut down City Hall.
Wait, J-shirts? What is a J-shirt?
Like, Che Guevara.
Oh, Che shirt. Okay, sorry, sorry.
I got it. Yeah, yeah, sorry.
There's a guy I recall, he said something along the lines of, Use violence to cipher violence, you know, at like conservative rallies, just, it was like a couple of rallies after Donald Trump had been elected and he was kind of making his rounds.
And, uh, I don't know, like they would, they would talk about alt-right plants in the meetings and stuff.
And they were always scared that the police were like coming onto them and Shortly after that, I definitely stopped attending those.
I was a bit freaked out by the intensity of it all, and I kind of wanted to find some opposing viewpoint somewhere, because I knew that I belonged in the middle somewhere, because I just don't agree with having no theory at all behind what you're trying to say.
Clearly, you just lack compassion, Paul.
Yeah. You need to find your squishy caramel heart of socialist infinite resources and just unwrap it and feed all the poor.
You need to find your giant boobs of infinite socialist mother's milk and spread it all over the land like a pair of twin milk lasers.
I mean, where's your heart, man?
I mean, forget your head. Where's your heart?
Don't you care? Care, care, care.
Because Lord knows caring solves all the problems in the known universe.
Got a difficult problem?
Do you know how to solve this quadratic equation?
Do you know how to build this suspension bridge?
Just stare and care.
That's all you need to do. Care enormously.
Care emotionally. Care deeply.
Cry, feel, yell, scream, have a tantrum.
And economics will obey.
Absolutely. That's what it seemed.
How did you find what I do?
What's that? How did you find what it is that I do, like this show?
I actually found you and Jordan Peterson through some feminist publications, actually.
It was completely on accident.
Thank you, quote, ladies.
Yeah, right, yeah. It was just pretty funny.
It was actually on accident.
I actually ran across an article calling Jordan Peterson the dumb guy's smart person.
Holy Dunning-Kruger effect.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And is it funny?
I mean, was it the article like, here are the giant penis enemies?
Well, I mean, some of that's true, of course.
But go on. Yeah. And it didn't challenge any of his points.
Like, you know, it only a straw man and kind of poked fun at him and kind of roundabout accusing him of being a Nazi sympathizer.
And I just had this daunting realization that if any of my lefty peers hated somebody, there was a good chance they were probably being challenged by them and that they're probably right about a lot of things, which I'm actually really thankful for because it's how I actually found out about Marie Rothbard and comedians like Dave Smith and Owen Benjamin, which I highly respect.
I think that they're doing some really great stuff right now, especially in the wake of what's happening in our country.
But, you know, I did learn that, you know, when you challenge an indefensible agenda and they don't have an argument, they just kind of start hurling rocks at you.
Look, look, dumb people want to have their say in public too.
You know, dumb propagandize stupid people being led around by their feelings like a redneck truck pulling behind somebody who said something nice to someone.
I mean, dumb people want to be able to get up and have their say.
People who can't sing want to get up and do karaoke, but they want to do it at the opera or at the Met or at Carnegie Hall.
And so dumb people want to have their say too.
The problem is dumb people don't have much to say.
When you don't have a lot to say, but you care a lot about something, then you just uncork the feels.
And your Dunning-Kruger effect means that everything must just be easy to solve.
Just raise the damn minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour and throw in some free healthcare.
I mean, what's the matter with you people?
This is all you need to do.
What's the problem? What's the holdup?
Well, the holdup is a little thing called reality, mathematics, economics, motivation, debt, and general government incompetence.
So for every stupid person, there is a very simple solution to a very complex problem.
Now, I'm a smart person.
My solution to very complex problems is freedom.
And freedom is the fundamental realization that there is no centrally plannable solution for complex problems.
I mean, there's no centrally planned solutions for just about anything.
But the more complex the problem, the more you need to step back and let people negotiate for themselves.
But for every stupid person, there's no simple law you can't scrape out on a piece of toilet paper in crayon that's going to solve the problem magically.
And look, they want to have their say too.
Idiots want to stand up and bray their stupidity at the very skies and have people nod and say, hmm.
That's very interesting what you said.
It's something I read many, many years ago about someone was writing and said, you know, I was in a diner last night and this guy was in the diner, you know, with this bottomless cup of coffee and he was talking and he was talking and he was talking to people about how to solve the problems and how to do this and it's so simple and just do that and so on.
And one guy was sitting there and at some point he said, like, if you're so smart, why are you in a diner?
And he got up and he walked out.
And it's like, you know, for every idiot, there is a very simple solution to a very complex problem.
And they're always wrong.
But because they're idiots, they don't know that they're wrong.
And they won't learn anything from the fact that like socialism, like communism, every time it's implemented, it's a complete disaster.
They'll learn nothing. Why?
Because they're dumb. Yeah, it's just...
Yeah, sorry.
I kind of cut out there for a little bit.
I don't know if my connection got cut off, but I kind of missed half of what you said.
Yeah, you can listen to it in the replay.
All right, so was there a moment where it sort of became too much and you began to question the propaganda?
Or was it a slow process?
Or was it one of these like, whoa, wait a minute, what about this kind of thing?
I think it was the moment around...
Where these Antifa members were resorting to violence in order to get whatever kind of point they wanted to get across.
I just needed to step back and realize that I was dealing with something that wasn't very lighthearted anymore, to say the least.
Right. There was a darkness to it where they're literally saying, let's go and use violence to disrupt these conservative rallies, right?
Right. I come from a very red state and I have a lot of conservative family members and even friends.
All of them were completely ostracized as well in this whole process.
I don't know if any of these people have made amends with them or just decided that they were going to cut them completely out of their lives because of their political views, but I just thought that that was completely counterproductive.
Did anyone ever bring up any doubts?
Does it seem right that we're talking about using violence to people who are peacefully assembling to talk about their ideas?
Why don't we just write articles to prove them wrong if they're so wrong and we're so right?
Did anyone ever say, I don't think that beating someone's head in with a metal pipe is the way to solve these problems?
Nobody spoke against it, which was very disturbing.
Even these so-called peaceful protesters that were in the room with us, They would kind of, you know, make light of it and kind of make a joke of saying like, oh, I can't say that here.
Right, but there was no ethical barrier between the proposal of violence and the execution of violence.
There was no ethical barrier whatsoever in the proposals.
No, not that I could see.
Yeah, and this is why the solution to all this stuff is never going to be peaceful.
Sadly, that bridge has been crossed long ago.
It's definitely really scary.
Since these things have happened to me, I've been honestly pretty scared for my well-being.
The first few months afterwards, I was homeless there for a while.
I was kind of sleeping on friends' couches.
Wait, didn't you have the conservative families?
Wouldn't they take you in as a refugee from feral leftism?
Yeah, that's one thing, too.
I kind of have a lot of pride.
I kind of went all out with my music and my art, and that was sort of a thing that I didn't want to admit that was kind of failing me.
Wait, the music and art was failing?
Yeah. So, like, my artistic community were the people that were basically ostracizing me.
And that led to my exit from all of my projects and my job and my living situation.
So, I was kind of on my ass, for lack of a better term.
What about your parents?
I mentioned I kind of had too much pride to admit to them that things were falling apart.
Wait, so you faced homelessness rather than to say to your parents that your new friends didn't turn out to be that great?
Yeah. Do you think they would have humiliated you for that eventuality?
I don't think so, but I think I had it in my head that I was letting them down or something, if I admitted.
If I had admitted that things, you know, just didn't work.
I'm 26 years old and I actually dropped out of high school when I was 16 years old to tour the country and I was actually making money at some point.
I was in and out of bands for the better part of 10 years and I was making a living and doing alright for myself and then it all just fell apart.
It was sort of a I told you so moment.
Paul, wasn't it a dead end life?
I mean, where were you going to be at 36 if you hadn't been kicked out of this?
I mean, you were making enough to get by.
Were you making enough to have savings, to build up resources, to support a family?
I mean, it seems to me, tell me, of course, if I'm astray, it seems to me like it was a pretty dead-end gig.
Oh, no, yeah. Yeah, and see, I guess, and this isn't probably the case for a lot of musicians, but where I'm at in the country, it's sort of like a...
Keep pounding type of situation, you know?
Oh, no. Musicians, it's like write songs or just go home.
Yeah. Like, no, seriously, this is my advice to all creative people.
And particularly because musicians have the steady drip Novocaine of being a cover band.
Yeah. Right? And if you're a cover band, you'll make enough to get by.
You just won't make enough to really live.
Right. And that's the way – it's like a spider web over the abyss.
And what happens is you climb out halfway and then you hit your mid-30s and it all falls apart and you got nothing.
Right? So, for musicians, write your damn songs, get better at writing your damn songs, spend your 10,000 hours to become good at writing songs.
Or go home. But this, we're going to be a cover band shit, that's just, I mean, it's fine to practice in your garage and stuff like that.
Yeah, do your money money and all that.
But for God's sake, thinking that you're a musician, if you're a bar band, it's like thinking you're an artist because you've got a photocopier.
Yeah, I mean...
There is a house in New Orleans, they call the rising sun.
How many times can you play that?
I remember seeing a bar band when I was like 16 or 17 and I was in a bar.
I was very excited to be there because I was underage.
It was all very exciting. And they're like, we're going to take requests.
I said, we're going to take requests? But by God, we're not doing House of the Rising Sun.
That is the one song everybody wants.
And we're not gonna do it.
We can't do it one more time.
And I was just like, wow, now that's what I call art.
It's a prison. Well, it is.
It is a prison. And yeah, I mean, this is the old thing, like Freddie Mercury, when he wanted to join Queen, he's like, like, you guys could just write songs, you got to write songs.
Like, if you're not writing songs, you're not a musician.
Absolutely. It's like if you're typing out someone's novel for them, like they wrote it out in longhand and you're typing it up, you're not a writer, you're a typist.
And if you're a cover band, you're not a musician, you're a radio that's live.
I think, you know, I think for a lot of musicians, you know, they kind of need that groundswell or that trajectory to carry them over into a career, you know.
You build so many connections over time and you make your professional contacts and you tour the country and you make other contacts in that aspect.
No, but contacts don't matter if you're not writing songs.
Yeah. Oh, I'm going to make contacts.
It's like, yeah. And what do you have to offer?
I'm a cover band.
Well, okay. I guess I could be a studio musician if somebody wants to record House of the Rising Sun for the 12 millionth time.
but other than that, I got nothing.
I don't know.
That's All right. That's enough of that segue.
Thank you for letting me get that off my chest.
But I've known some musicians who are like, I'm playing a gig.
It's like, that's really sad.
I mean, I've even known a musician who claimed to be a musician because he was in the backup band for a live karaoke night.
I'm like, dude. Oh, no.
Dude. And he was a drummer.
My antipathy towards drummers goes back too far and too deep for me even to speak of.
All right. Sorry. Let's get back to your issues.
I'll stop indulging myself for my musical noodlings.
So, didn't they save you, Paul?
Didn't they kick you out of a road to nowhere?
You know, I did have that thought.
And there is a silver lining to this all, you know?
And that is basically being able to start from the ground up again.
Wait, what's not a silver lining to this?
You discovered that the friends that you thought, the people that you thought in your life were decent, good, compassionate human beings, that they were TFN, right?
Totally fracking nuts. That they were vicious, cold, hostile, destructive, mean, bigoted hate mob that turned against anyone who made a slight joke or asked a simple question.
You know, like that old joke, how many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
That's not funny! Right?
So, these are monstrous in human form.
I mean, they're perfectly fine with violence.
They have these kangaroo courts.
They destroy people's lives for asking a simple logical question in a good-natured way.
I mean, I got kicked out of the cult is not a tragedy.
You understand? This is not a sad story.
I got kicked out of the asylum for not being insane.
How is this not a massive liberation?
I suppose I'd like to rejoin An artistic community elsewhere.
I'm just worried about the whole- Why don't you just write music?
Yeah, I suppose you're right.
Community? Let me ask you something, Paul.
Sorry, I don't mean to laugh.
I know this is your life, but I'll just tell you why I find this so humorous and then you can tell me how cold-tarded I am.
But anyway. Paul, how do you think my show would be doing if I felt it absolutely essential to join a philosophical community?
Well, good point. Seriously.
What do you think would be going on right now?
It's a very good point.
Tell me that. Explicate.
Let's follow that train of thought.
I wake up tomorrow. I'm like, man, I've really got to join a philosophical community that's going to accept what I say and get behind me and be my companions in this journey.
First of all, I'd have to talk Mike off the roof of his building because that would involve interacting with other carbon-based life forms on a regular basis.
No, I'm just kidding. But no, seriously, what would that look like if I wanted to do that?
How would that play out?
Well, I mean, you probably have somebody on your shoulder being like, hey, man, you probably shouldn't say that.
Hello, friendly philosopher companions.
I wish to discuss race and IQ. Oh, no.
Can you imagine? That's a bit of a contentious subject.
Let's talk about single moms and their effect on society.
Let's talk about peaceful parenting.
Let's talk about the non-aggression principle that's applied to children.
Right? Let's talk about a voluntary society, a stateless society.
Let's talk about the universal application of the non-aggression principle.
Right? Can you imagine?
It'd be quiet the conversation.
Whereas I'm writing songs, brother.
So this show, which I assume has had some significant positive impact on you because you're calling in, is the exact opposite of what you say you want to do.
In other words, I'm providing value because I'm doing the opposite of what you say you want to do.
So why don't you learn that lesson?
Write your own songs.
Forget about making contacts.
Forget about networking.
Forget about being part of a community.
Sit down and write the fucking songs.
I guess I'm like...
I'm more scared of this mob following me into the future.
I've known a lot of my actual friends to be doxxed just because they said something that they believed was out of line or transphobic.
I'm sort of afraid of stumbling back onto these small hive minds in the country.
What do you mean stumbling? If you're sitting at home writing songs, how are you stumbling across hive minds in the country?
Now, if you're out there trying to find a community, yeah, I get it.
That's going to happen, but I don't understand how what I'm proposing puts you in that place.
I guess more along the lines of like touring, touring, you know, being a touring musician, traveling musician, and meeting people outside of You know, where I am right now.
No, sorry, still not understanding.
So let's say that you write some songs and you become fairly big, right?
Or big. And then you're touring.
Well, you're touring with security.
And you're up there on the stage.
And you're playing your music.
And you're doing your thing.
And people are cheering. And then you go and throw television out the window of your hotel room.
That's my understanding of a typical life in a musician.
And then if you are like a lot of musicians in the 1970s, you adopt a child as a sex slave.
Tragically, that did happen.
You can look it up. It's horrifying.
But... Yeah, so I don't know how that's going to put you in any kind of community or danger.
You're going to have security. You're up on the stage.
Nobody can rush the stage and you go back to the hotel after the gig.
I can see that.
I guess I'm more worried about this whole online mob culture thing going on.
But you found me through a mob.
You found me through the trolls, you found me through the haters.
Please understand, the haters are how we guide ourselves too.
Didn't you say, I'm not trying to catch you out, Paul, I'm really not, but didn't you say, well, whoever the feral mob you were trapped with, whoever they hated probably had a good point.
Yeah. See, you can get a long way on a sailboat, something called tacking.
You can sail against the wind and you can make pretty good progress.
The trolls are just part of the markers of how we find each other.
They are an essential service to humanity.
Right, so the New York Times wrote an article on the intellectual dark web.
And, you know, they had people in there with some, I guess, nice photos and all of that.
And they had the nice intellectual dark web and then they had the others.
I'm going to leave you to guess which pile I ended up in.
But it was fine. It was fine.
But what's going to happen is, see, this article, I don't know if it's supposed to be negative or it's hard to tell.
I mean, I barely read these things anymore.
But what I got from this article was, A, there's really, really edgy people out there who are asking challenging questions and not accepting propaganda.
Sophistry is the answer, right?
It's the intellectual dark web and it's composed of people we like and people who are too edgy and dangerous even for us.
I was put in that category and it's like, you really can't buy that kind of publicity.
You know, it's the old thing, I don't care what you say about me, just make sure you spell my name right.
It's like, wow, thank you.
So I'm the edgelord's edgelord.
Like, yeah, you couldn't ask for anything that's going to get people more interested in what you do than that.
And what can you say?
You know, the trolls, the haters, they're laying out breadcrumbs.
They're directly to the door of wisdom.
They are working as hard in a way for the cause of truth and harder than a lot of people who aren't trolls.
And when they send up their flares and they scream that they found a horrible person, everyone else can see.
And they say, well, the horrible people have found a horrible person.
The horrible people are screaming that this person is a horrible person.
Hmm. The cancer cells do not like this medicine.
Hmm. I have cancer.
I believe I will explore.
They are doing their part.
And this is old school thinking, and I understand it.
But the idea is that the trolls, you see, they attack you, and they get mad at you, and they attach all these negative labels to you.
And then, as you found in this interpersonal relationship situation, and then your life is destroyed, right?
You're homeless, you're couch surfing, and so on, right?
You got no friends, no family, your steady brigade of blue-dyed poon has dried up and so on.
And this is terrible, right?
But in the world of the internet, that's not how it works.
I'm not sure. I mean, it used to work that way, way back in the day, right?
It used like way back in the day, like they could, Joseph McCarthy, they could trash that guy for uncovering genuine communists in the State Department and other places.
They could trash that guy, they could destroy his reputation, they could do all of the, and it kind of stuck, right?
But that's back when the communists in general controlled the media.
Now, they still in general, or the leftists do, but there's the internet.
And what that means is that where they used to be firing bullets, now they're not even firing blanks.
Now there's a little gun with a little flag that comes out and rolls down and says bang.
Because nobody...
They've cried wolf so many times.
This is the great danger.
Heaven forbid some genuine racist comes along who's really dangerous.
Well, they're out of ammo because they fired this word racism at absolutely everyone, which means that when a genuine racist comes along, the word's going to have no power to stop him.
I mean, it's a horrible thing to do.
To call someone a racist or this alt-right, whatever bullshit label they come up with, it's a terrible thing to do because you really want to keep that ammo in reserve for when a genuine, dangerous racist comes along because otherwise the word's going to have no meaning and you won't be able to deploy it against somebody who has genuine ill intent.
At heart. But they don't care, right?
They don't care. I mean, it's not anything like they don't have the brains to sort of follow that kind of logic or anything like that.
So you just do your thing.
Write your songs. Go do your gigs.
Are people going to end up hating you online?
Yes. And that's how good people are going to find you, just as you found me, Paul.
That's absolutely true.
Mike, the guy I've worked with for well nigh half a decade, found me because of hate articles in the mainstream media.
Thank you. He's a great guy to work with.
Yeah, they say any publicity is great publicity, you know.
Well, because if good people, like if you're a good person, right?
If good people write good things about you, as yet for me, this remains in general theoretical, right?
But if good people write good things about you, then it's wonderful.
If bad people write hateful things about you, it's a double negative, right?
You know what happens when you multiply a negative by a negative?
You get a positive. So if you multiply a hater with hate, you get love.
If the hater attacks you, it draws good people to you.
You know what it's like when you have a line of troops and the enemy attacks in a wedge formation in one place, which they consider to be the weakest link ever.
What happens? Well, you take all of your troops, or you take a good number of your troops, and you pour them to close up the gap, close up the breach.
So their attack brings more good soldiers to defend.
It's just the way things work.
I mean, if it didn't, I would have been gone long ago, you understand?
I mean, the amount of negativity and hate that's poured towards me and others, it can be extraordinarily vitriolic.
And if you just stare at that, then it's a tough life.
But if you say, okay, well, they're mocking out the territory of where the good people are.
Well, like everybody that Schneiderman, the disgraced New York Attorney General, everyone that Schneiderman hated, they're looking pretty good right about now, aren't they?
No, they did you a solid, man.
They did you a complete solid.
And better now, Than five years from now or ten years from now.
Better now than when you're a husband and a father.
Better now than when you have a mortgage and debt.
Better now than later.
Because you have to learn how to be around sane, decent people, Paul.
And that's going to be a bit of a reorientation.
I know. I mean, I've had to go through that process myself.
So it is much better.
That they did it now. I mean, it would have been better if they did it three or four years ago, but nonetheless, it's better that it's now than later.
I mean, they saved your life, man.
It's definitely an angle that I haven't been able to step back and take.
And your last question, is it worth censoring yourself in the pursuit of new friends?
No. You know that, right?
Because if you're censoring yourself, you can't have new friends.
Because you won't be there, right?
Yeah. It's like saying, is it...
I'm playing a stadium.
Will I get new fans if I unplug all of my instruments?
No. You have to be there and present as who you are in order to have new friends.
And you want to be able to make a joke or a comment, like everyone's the same, and then say, well, why is diversity so important?
Well, that's a contradiction. And a smart person would say...
Huh, wait a minute. That's actually true.
I hadn't thought of it that way.
Tell me more, right? Wow.
You know, I mean, and you may get a startled reaction, Kathy Newman style, where it's like, wait, I'm just trying to puzzle that out.
And then the next day, she's back to being a victim.
And, you know, the patriarchy is trying to get her.
So you may get startled people back into rationality, or at least questioning, but very often, the false self just seals up The wound where the light gets in and everything goes back to darkness.
But no, you want to be able to make those comments so that people who are offended by those comments fuck right off.
You understand? It's a protective...
Honesty is a protective shield because it keeps dishonest, manipulative people at bay.
It's a superhero cape.
You understand, right?
Because you won't end up investing in relationships that are going to go tits up whenever you say something honest and spontaneous.
You won't get attached to people who will turn on you.
Just be honest up front. And the people who like you will like you forever.
And the people who won't like you won't waste your time.
honesty is the best policy, not just because you don't have to keep your story straight, but also because it just saves so much time.
If only I'd known that then.
Well, that's why you're calling in, right?
And I'll tell you this, man. I will tell you something very, very important, and this is my big, you can make a fortune, is that people are hungry for sane music that isn't country and Western.
People are hungry for sane music.
People are hungry for anthems that aren't from lefties.
People are hungry for songs that have meaning.
So if you want to write down some songs that are anti-leftist, man, can you imagine how powerful that would be for people?
And what a great service to the culture and to humanity that would be?
To write some songs that mocked leftists, that poked holes at leftists.
It's almost incomprehensible, but it's so essential.
And by God, I'm telling you, man, if the song is decent, if the song is good, you will make a fortune.
You will bring people into music who haven't been in music for 20 years.
That is your business opportunity.
Sit down and write 20 songs about the power of free thought and your hatred of conformity and collectivism.
And you've got the emotional scars to write some great music about this.
You've got like Pink Floyd's The Wall of leftist social and spiritual shattering deep down.
And you've got shards, like Narsal.
You've got shards in your heart that you can mine, bring into contact, and electrify a page with notes and lyrics.
Write about what happened to you.
You're not alone in this.
Voice it. Bring it to song.
Bring it to power. Bring it to life.
And you will be worshipped as a god.
And you will make a fortune to boot.
Use what they did to you against them.
Steph, you bring so much clarity to my life.
And I really, really appreciate it.
All right. I look forward to hearing the music.
Thank you so much for your call.
And let's move on to the next call. Yep.
Have a good one. Okay, up next we have John.
John wrote in and said, Does Stefan have a proposal as to why some callers are emotionally invested in their belief system and such callers are often beyond the reach of logic?
I am a qualified hypnotherapist, among other things, and believe that some people have mental processes that produce anti-logic.
They hold to untenable positions and invent increasingly bizarre constructs to maintain their position, regardless of the facts, resorting in the last to conspiracy theory.
I recently listened to the show with the Flat Earther.
Despite the absurdity of his position, he could not be moved from his position by Stefan's appeal to reason.
As Stefan regularly points out, actions have consequences and people respond to incentives.
A flat earther invites the disbenefit of ridicule, so there must be a compensating benefit to make him cling so tenaciously to his untenable belief system.
That's from John. Hey John, how you doing?
I'm good, thank you, Steph.
And good evening. Alright.
So, I thought about this all day, and I think the closest that I can come to...
This can't be answered, fundamentally, because a lot of it has to do with free will.
Like, if I could say, these are the dominoes that lead someone to reject reason and evidence, then that would be a strike against free will.
So, some of it is just inevitably going to have to do with free will.
But, I will say this, that when people believe that there is a moral reason...
For holding a particular perspective, you cannot talk them out of it.
You cannot. Right?
So the flat earth guy. Well, he was religious and he believed that God had created the earth as a flat frisbee in the center of the universe and stared at it and he wanted to get to heaven and he wanted to do good and he wanted to live forever.
And so for him, the belief in the flat earth was a virtue.
You cannot talk anyone out of that which they consider to be virtuous.
You cannot. Yes, I agree.
I agree. And that is the reason I have called in.
The question is, why and how does he originally come to hold these bizarre views?
And there's a very obvious emotional underpinning.
It's not, I might take slightly with you, that it's a total function of free will.
People come to these views from a number of reasons, if I may explain.
I've written down a number of techniques that they have when Your facts contradict their beliefs that they have of, I don't want to use a perjurative word, but let us say weasel the way out.
A number of techniques that they have for avoiding the logical construct that you give them.
Now, believe it or not, it extends to 14 techniques that they have.
I don't know if I have time to run through them all.
Yeah, just give you the most prevalent that you see.
Well, the most prevalent, let us say, extending the argument.
This is a technique beloved of politicians.
Only men are rapists. You're a man.
Ergo, you're a rapist.
Logically, inexcusable.
It doesn't work.
Ill-defined words of ambiguous meaning.
I could expand on that.
We've got circular arguments.
Reframing the proposition in different guises without addressing your rebuttal.
I hear a lot of.
They don't usually get away with it.
Challenging the facts and the fact sources of your rebuttal without addressing the substance.
I listened to a university-based caller who was preparing a course on the distribution of company profits from a Marxist viewpoint recently, and he was totally ignorant of the business process.
Then there's ad hominem attacks where they attack the man and not the substance of what he's putting forward.
And there's a degree of that happening at the moment with Trump, who appears to be doing rather well bringing North Korea to the negotiating table.
He's not going to get any credit for that at all because they're attacking the man, not what he's doing.
Then there's hair splitting, willful misinterpretation of definitions, validation by incompetent authority, and this is a specific reference to the man with the Flat Earth Society.
He said he'd recently...
Searched it for six months.
Well, he'd been doing a web search just to the sources that agreed with him.
So he's validating his argument by reference to an incompetent authority.
Now, we could have a debate as to, probably not tonight, as to what constitutes a competent authority, but certainly the ones he was quoting were not.
And then there is the misquotation of the rebuttals.
You usually shoot them down pretty quickly.
And disregard, just ignoring your rebuttals.
And the one that most irritates me is psychobabble.
A load of words that sound fine but of little or no meaning.
And the invention of undisprovable conspiracy theory, as if governments were preventing people going to the rim of the world.
Totally unprovable.
And without validation.
You could probably think half a dozen more off the top of your head, where the caller is emotionally invested, and he's not prepared to learn that their strongly held beliefs are based on a false dilemma.
And so a fallacy is used to force an outcome that was preconceived by the caller.
Now listen to this, and I honestly step on my toes curl up in my shoes.
So the issue for me, it's not that people believe in some strange things.
That's nothing new.
But why do they hold them with a tenacity that transcends rationality?
This seems strange, particularly when it involves a measure of ridicule.
That would appear to me to be a disbenefit.
So when I listened to that Flat Earth one particularly, but not exclusively, I expected to have a laugh when it started out.
But after five minutes, I definitely wasn't laughing because there was something else at issue here that I didn't fully understand.
And since I've watched it, I've been reflecting on this.
The key question for me now is how do they hold these views and what covert benefit are they getting that compensates for this apparent contradiction with reality?
And how do they resolve these conflicts in the mind?
So the results of this, I'll run them past you quickly if I may.
I think, and I'll edge your way into a bit of neurology, but I'll keep it very brief for your listeners, is that the upper cortex of the human brain is a recent product of evolution.
And this has implications for philosophy and logical thinking.
And it went to a significant upgrade about 50,000 years ago.
But below that upper part of the brain is the lower brain.
Some people call it the crocodile brain, but I don't like that.
That That runs the autonomic functions of the body, and it doesn't need rational processes.
So, if you stick your head in a bucket of water, you can't drown yourself.
The lower brain, let's call it the subconscious mind, will make you take your head out again.
And it doesn't matter how hard your conscious mind tries to keep it in.
And similarly, you can't keep your hand in a fire because of conscious resolution.
Your subconscious mind will force you to take it out.
So the subconscious mind, therefore, has the capacity to override the conscious mind in certain circumstances.
And it always tries to act in the best interests of the owner, the person.
Decisions are taken in conjunction with the upper cortex.
So it's not the logical part of the brain that is exclusively making decisions.
And this is where the irrationality starts to show up.
This dichotomy in control is seen in addiction, which I can take as an example.
A heroin addict or a cigarette smoker knows logically and rationally that another shot's bad for him or her, but the subconscious knows that the lack of that shot will be painful and be intensely unpleasant.
Therefore, the subconscious is demanding another shot, which it falsely believes to be beneficial.
And the conscious is trying to withhold it.
So, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind, and there is a voting system, if we can call it that.
The voting system is not a level playing field.
The subconscious is very powerful and usually wins.
So, this evolved in evolutionary past when it was advantageous to hold arbitrary views, like snakes are to be avoided.
But in the modern world, the fit...
Isn't as good when we're looking at political systems in the shape of the cosmos in terms of the flat earther.
Now, I've made a note for myself here on the structure of the brain, the amygdala.
I don't want to go into that. It's getting into neurological stuff, but it's involved with memory, decision-making, emotions, and the brain's reward system.
And this structure is obviously closely associated with the subconscious mind and its decision-making process.
So if information is presented and becomes encoded by the amygdala and there's a reward for holding this information, as in flat earth or militant feminism or radical socialism, it becomes hardwired into a belief system.
When and if this happens, It can contradict the information held by the upper cortex, the logical, conscious, philosophical part of the mind.
Then you have this conflict and the subconscious tries to square the circle and resolve an unresolvable conflict by the stratagems that I spoke to previously.
So, as with the addict, the subconscious mind, usually involving emotions, wins.
There's a paradox. And the paradox of some scientists who are Christians, you may have heard of them.
I certainly have heard of scientists who are Christians.
And they make a living by the rationality.
So they hold a totally irrational viewpoint on the creation of the universe with no supporting evidence whatsoever.
And they may hold this viewpoint with some passion.
So this begs the question, John, I do need you to...
I mean, I feel like you're calling in to my show to do your own show.
Because you're not asking me if I'm following or what value I'm getting from the conversation, which seems a tiny bit rude to me, but that's all right.
I mean, normally I like to have a bit of a back and forth.
So if you could just wrap up your thoughts here, then I'll tell you sort of my particular hypotheses.
But you've had quite a while and you haven't even bothered to ask me if I'm following or if it has value to me.
But okay, so if you could finish up, that'd be great.
Yeah. I'll finish there.
I was going to go on to look at how...
Yeah, I got a sense that you were going to go on.
And I think that you want to have your own show rather than call into somebody else's show and try and monopolize things.
And it's up to me, of course, to interrupt.
So I'm just going to take my earpiece out, because it's a little annoying while I'm doing a speech.
And I'll tell you what I've got, and then we'll move on to the next caller.
But I do appreciate you calling in with the question.
So... For everyone who exists in their own mind, and we all do exist within our own mind, we are the superheroes, we are the central characters, we are the protagonists, not just of our own stories, but we like to think of ourselves as protagonists within the world, as a whole. Think of movies, right?
The movie starts with the shot of one guy, he's doing something, and then something bad happens, and he fights, and it looks like there's a disaster, and the girl doesn't like him anymore, and then he does this, and he acts, and so on.
Now, there are supporting characters.
In movies, but generally there is a central focus on the main character and it's his journey, his arc, his story that people are following.
For every Razumihin, there is a Raskolnikov.
For every Raskolnikov, there is a Marmolodov.
And so, within our own minds, we like to feel that we are the protagonists in a world movie.
And the problem is, of course, that you can be the protagonist in a world movie to some degree, but then what happens, or what has to happen, is you have to find a way of Providing value to people to the point where they'll pay attention to you, right? So if you are a singer and you're a great songwriter and so on, Then you go and do a concert and people will pay to come and listen to you sing and play music and so on.
And if you're P.G. O'Rourke and you're a very witty writer, then you can come and read some of your book and people will pay, as I did once, to go and see him speak and do a Q&A and so on.
So if you work hard, if you milk your capacity sometimes to the point of turning the cow inside out, then you can provide value to the point where people will pay attention to you and will pay good money or give you Focus.
And then you are at least a supporting character in their movie, and you are important in your own movie.
Now, the problem, of course, is that to create something, a thought, an idea, an argument, a book, a poem, a story, a novel, whatever it is, a song, to create something in the hopes of getting someone's attention, in the hopes of getting people's attention, to create something, It's scary.
To create something is to act in such a manner that you can be rejected.
And you can be rejected in a way that is emotionally very, very hard.
Very hard. And to gain people's attention to become a protagonist in a world movie is difficult, challenging.
It's a lot of work. It's a lot of rejection.
It's a lot of problems. And so the question is, how can you feel special if you don't want to be vulnerable?
How can you end up feeling special if you can't handle being rejected?
And I've known, I knew a man when I was younger, who kind of, he sidelined the whole asking girls out phase that goes on.
For men, right?
So you hit puberty, you pass puberty, and men want to find out where they – boys, I guess at that point – want to find out where they stand in the sexual market pecking order.
And so they start at the top and they ask girls out in general.
This is a sensible thing to do.
You don't want to start at the bottom and work your way up because you might get stuck in the quicksand of land whales.
But – You start at the top and then you ask your way down until someone says yes.
And that's certainly what I did. I asked the queen bee of the school out.
She was not so keen.
I asked one other girl out.
She was kind of keen. And then the third tier, I was it.
And I had a great relationship with a young woman for quite some time.
And... That aspect of going to ask and then finding out where you stand and so on, that's an intensely vulnerable process.
I still very clearly remember when I asked the queen bee out.
I asked her to come swimming with me because I was a great swimmer and a great diver.
And she said, when?
And I said, Friday. And she said, with who?
Mayday! Mayday! As soon as she asked, with who?
It's like, well, with me. Like, well, I'll be busy, right?
And the funny thing is that I got a group of cool kids to go.
She may have come, and things may have gone different.
But I actually met her years later.
At a party and she was so wistful back for those days in junior high when she was the queen bee because, of course, she had graduated from being a protagonist in everyone's movie to being somebody who wasn't.
And so if you want to end up being special in someone's life, as a man, you have to ask women out and then you get a woman who will say yes and then you work on the relationship and you work on yourself and you provide value and you bond and you get married and you have kids and you're special.
You're special. You know, like I get up a little bit later than my daughter sometimes, and I came out, I brushed my teeth and put my doodron on, and I came out and my daughter was like jumping up and down.
She was excited because we've got a new game.
So anyway, like a new game that we play with pillows.
So it's called Ninja.
I attack her with pillows and she's got to dodge.
It's very exciting. And so I'm special to her because I've invested a lot in making her life a better place to be.
And I'm special to my wife, special to, you know, to you, the listeners, because I work myself sometimes a bit too hard to provide value in the world.
So if you want to be loved, you want to be special, then you have to be vulnerable.
You have to risk rejection in order to be accepted.
You have to risk Pain in order to get love and commitment and beauty.
And so this process where people end up feeling special is a painful and difficult one for most people, right?
They think of actors, like they go through hundreds and I was reading the story of some actor the other day who went through six or 700 auditions.
He went to six or 700 auditions, got nothing.
Got so angry with like punching holes in his wall, but he ended up Finding meditation.
Somebody taught him how to meditate and then things change from there or whatever, right?
So that's 600, 700. That's a lot of rejection to go on.
And If you want to be special, you want to be valued, you want people's attention, but you don't want to go through the process of creation, of proposing or loosing what you create into the world, and then it most likely being rejected.
Most things are rejected.
Most novels are forgotten relatively quickly.
Most movies are pretty forgettable, and most songs are not particularly memorable and And so on, like for every Bohemian Rhapsody, you have your Who Needs You, which actually I listen to more, but anyway.
So if you want to feel special, but you don't want to go through the pain of being vulnerable and rejected, then you just create a world wherein you're special and you don't have to work for it.
So you may create a world wherein God created the earth, God created you, and God is focused on you and you're special in the eyes of the Lord.
There's no rejection in that.
There's no vulnerability in that.
You simply have to will your protagonist status in the world movie into existence by believing in this particular universe.
And then you are special.
Because you are beloved of God, and you have a soul, and you have a friend in Jesus, or wherever, whoever it is, Vishnu.
And it's a way of being the protagonist in a world movie without going through the process of creation, release, rejection, vulnerability, pain, refinement, you name it.
Now, when... And the problem is that when you create the universe wherein you are special, and the specialness can be victimhood as well.
This is the great danger of sort of multi...
Of this identity politics that's going on at the moment, that you can be special because you're discriminated against.
You can be special because you're underpaid.
Underpaid? What does that mean?
There's no such thing as being underpaid.
That's like having less than the requisite amount of sex.
I mean, no such thing as being underpaid.
You're paid what you negotiate.
That's what you're paid. You're paid what you're able to negotiate.
And if you want to negotiate for more, as I did on a video Earlier this week, well, you have to improve your skills.
There's no such thing as being underpaid.
It's like saying, I am underdated.
Well, no, just go ask people out until they say yes, or if they don't say yes, then find a way to become more attractive and more appealing and a better conversationalist and take more risks and be more confident and whatever, right?
But people say, well, I'm underpaid.
That gives them specialness in that someone cares about them enough to exploit them.
That makes them special.
That makes them important.
I am woman. Hear my gender wage gap.
I am special because I am.
Underpaid, undervalued. The patriarchy is keeping me down.
The man is keeping me down.
I'm being oppressed. I'm a proletariat.
I'm special. I'm part of a big world historical movement of class conflict or gender conflict or race conflict.
People care about me enough to put me down.
I think there's a narrative within the black community that in general, whites wake up in the morning and just plot and plan about how to keep black people down and poor and how to break up the black family and all of that.
We're special. We're important, say some of these thinkers, because people want to oppress us.
The alternative that people are just busy living their lives and are not putting that much thought into oppressing other people means that those people aren't as important as they think they are.
That's painful. If the world is not flat and the spotlight of God is on my heart, mind, and soul, but it's just a round thing, we evolved, and I'm a biped on a blob...
That's painful, because then you don't feel special anymore.
That guy worked a shitty job in a warehouse, the flat earth guy.
Massive sympathy. And that's why I tried to tell him.
The cost of what he believed was enormous.
The cost of holding this belief meant that he got to feel special without earning it.
He got to feel special because he was alive, because he was breathing.
He was vertical rather than horizontal, therefore he has value.
But if you already have value, you don't work to get value.
You know, you set your GPS to drive home.
Once you get home, you turn off your GPS because it's got you where you want to go.
So if you're special for breathing, if you're special for being a victim, if you're special for being a woman, if you're special because you're oppressed, if you're special because you're a worker, if you're special because you're black, if you're special because, because, because, then you're not going to work as hard to bring value To the world so that people pay attention to you.
We all want to be paid attention to.
I mean, I'd love to not be a public figure, but that's just the gig.
I'd like to be a robot voice of infinite wisdom, perhaps, but no way.
That's just not the way that this kind of stuff works.
People need the eye contact. They need to know who I am.
And of course, if you hide, people just expend every ounce of energy trying to find you.
But people want attention.
And you can either get it by bringing genuine value to the real world, or you can create some fantasy universe wherein people are focused on you and obsessed with you and interested in you and value you.
And sometimes people do it through being crazy, through creating drama.
Ah, they're paying attention to me now, aren't they?
You know, I slashed his tires.
I keyed his car. Now he's paying attention to me.
And it's tragic.
It's tragic. You can either gain the attention of the world or of people around you by being honest, funny, wise, engaging, useful.
Musical. By hiring them or creating a company.
Lots of different ways that you can get attention and be the protagonist at least in your movie if not other people's movies as well.
But a lot of people they don't want to do it.
They don't want to create and face the vulnerability of rejection.
And there's a great market For giving people the fantasy that they're special without actually having to earn it in the adult marketplace of good services and ideas.
I know I'm special to a lot of people and I work very hard to provide value every single week.
Do like half a dozen or more shows every single week.
New stuff, new arguments, new ideas.
This is pretty new. I work my brain like a set of bellows to the melting point of steel to provide new value.
To even the old questions.
So I know I'm special to a lot of people and I work very hard.
Very hard. Mike works very hard.
So that we can provide value To you.
Because you don't owe me any attention at all.
You don't owe me any focus. You don't owe me a download.
You don't owe me a click. You don't owe me a share.
You don't owe me a donation at freedomainradio.com slash donate.
I know it's post-tax season.
If you could help out, that'd be great.
freedomainradio.com slash donate.
But you don't owe me anything.
I have to work to earn it.
My wife doesn't owe me anything.
I have to work to earn her love.
My daughter doesn't owe me anything.
I have to work to earn her love. Because that's called being an adult.
Work to earn, work to earn, work to earn, work to earn.
That's called being an adult.
That's the only stability that you have.
If you want job security, be invaluable.
If you want love, be treasured.
Be someone who can be treasured.
If you want stability in your relationship, be someone who is worthy of somebody else's love and devotion.
If I want your attention, I have to earn it every single time I do a show.
I have to earn it. I have to keep my standards of quality high.
I have to keep my courage up.
I have to keep my engagement up.
I have to keep my humor up without becoming annoyingly jokey.
Like, it's a real... Artful to keep people's attention with such challenging topics.
I have to tell people that they're wrong in a way that is encouraging and motivating to them.
I have to oppose social wisdom with shocking truths in a way that motivates people and doesn't repulse them.
I have to do so much to move the cause of philosophy forward using the crampons of every single eyeball and ear canal I can get a hold of.
And I have to earn it every single step of the way because you owe me nothing.
I do believe that there are a few other podcasts out there and a few other video channels that you could be perusing.
You owe me nothing. I must earn it.
Not just once, not every single time.
Every single time.
Now that way, I can maintain the attention that I need to help spread philosophy.
Because it's not about me. I don't want you to pay attention to me.
I want you to pay attention to philosophy.
I'm the vehicle. I'm just the singer and not the song.
So... If you want to be special, be valuable.
Be important. Doesn't mean necessarily to the world.
It can be to your boyfriend, your girlfriend, your...
Well, I don't think pets really can.
But provide value.
Be important. Be a net positive in people's lives, and they'll pay attention to you.
I mean, people know that when they tune into what it is that I'm talking about, That I am going to pour heart, mind, and soul into trying to get an idea across in a way that's going to be engaging.
And some people, you know, find it too repetitive, or too lengthy, or too this, or too many jokes, or too few jokes, or too serious, or fine.
I also have to navigate that as well, because I can't just be big, giant, light, whip, truth lasher.
And, you know, I have to do it in a way that people want to engage with.
And that's That is a really complicated negotiation I have with you individually.
I mean, with the world as a whole, but with you individually.
I have to bring things to you that are innovative, unique, powerful, and important enough that it's worth paying attention, but I have to do it in a way that you want to pay attention to, right?
I mean, I could just scream off vital statistics about this, that, and the other.
It wouldn't matter. And if it's too dour, people would get turned off.
But if I make it too frivolous, people won't think it's just important.
I mean, it is such a balancing act.
I can't even tell you how much planning and plotting and thought I spent the last two days on these questions.
So, if you're special, you'll get attention and you'll be important in people's lives from a personal level to a global level, if you want.
But you have to create.
You have to be courageous. And you have to survive.
Not just disappointment, but rejection and hostility and hatred sometimes as well.
And if you pass through that fire, which never ends.
Avenue of fire like poplars of fall leaves that never ends.
Then you will gain attention.
And then your great temptation will be to relax and say, well, I got the attention and then the attention will evaporate.
You know, like you pour a bottle of water on a hot Georgia asphalt and it's wet for about 30 seconds.
Up it goes. The same thing with attention.
You must continue to win it.
You can't rest on your laurels.
People will say that's exhausting.
That's reality. You owe me nothing.
You owe me nothing. So I must work every day to get your attention, to earn your attention.
It must be original enough and powerful enough that you like it, but not so original and powerful that people will think you're a complete lunatic for sharing anything.
I mean, it's going to happen for sure, but...
So I steadfastly reject and refuse to endorse systems of thought that give you being special without effort, without creation, without vulnerability.
That's why I said to the last caller, write the songs.
Go create. Being a bar band is using other people's music to gain attention, being a cover band.
People are paying attention, but not because of you, but because of the songs that they like that you didn't create.
You're a live radio. That's why I said go create something.
Go make something.
And if you do that, and you're willing to be vulnerable and willing to improve and willing to listen to your audience, you can get attention.
You can be special. And it will mean something because you earned it.
It wasn't handed to you through some fantasy-based ideology.
Well, thanks, John, for the question.
I move on to the next caller, but I certainly do appreciate you calling in.
It's a very, very important topic, and I'm glad we had a chance to chat about it.
Okay, up next we have Nathaniel.
Nathaniel wrote in and said, I have developed the basics of a potential theory of ethics that states that what is ethical for a community is what is in the community's common interests, and the community's common interests are based upon the commonly shared interests of all the individual members of said community to reliably maximize their own interests.
I would like to explain my theory to Stefan and see if he agrees with it and or if it accords with his theory, UPB. That's from Nathaniel.
Nathaniel, how are you doing, friend?
I'm doing well.
All right, all right. Common interests.
Common interests.
So, yeah, what I mean by common interests is...
So, a community's common interest is to disallow actions that would make it so that...
Everyone in the community can't trust each other to not violate their interests that don't harm other people's interests.
I'm not sure I follow.
So the common interest of a community is to disallow Bob from killing Todd, because if Bob kills Todd, then everyone in the community can't trust, since that was allowed, everyone in the community can't trust each other not to kill each other since they allowed for one thing.
So what is present that is stopping them from allowing another murder?
Oh, no, no.
Communities in the modern world, communities enormously benefit from violence.
They believe they do anyway.
So let me give you an example.
The government takes money at the point of a gun.
They call it taxation. It's just theft, morally speaking.
The government takes money at the point of a gun and hands it out to other people.
And if the taxpayer or the person who is supposed to be paying the taxes refuses and tries to use force in self-defense, not that I recommend it, then the government will shoot that person.
In other words, give us your money or we're going to escalate violence against you until you comply or die.
Now, you can certainly say that that's not in the community's common interest.
But right now, if you're like a single mom and you have three kids by three different fathers and you are reliant upon the state for welfare and for health care and for subsidized housing and you name it, dental care and so on, then the fact that some people are willing to kill other people to get their money is enormously beneficial to you.
So that's the part I'm finding a little confusing.
Yeah, well...
So first of all, what I mean by a community in this context is just a group of people who number more than one.
And the reason why I define it like that is because I think ethics is basically about I'm sorry, Nathaniel.
Maybe you're kind of new to this.
This is not me giving a speech and you giving a speech.
This is us trying to have a conversation, which means that I responded to what you said.
Now your job is to respond to what I said.
So I don't know why we're now off on communities of more than one people, because I gave a rebuttal to your theory that communities don't like violence because it's bad for the community.
And I then gave you examples of how communities really like violence because it transfers resources from wealthier people to themselves.
And they vote for it repeatedly.
And anybody who tries to repeal the welfare state is going to be considered a very bad person by a lot of people.
So you have to respond to that rebuttal, not go off on some other...
I'll respond directly to that.
When you say that a community benefits from the welfare state because I guess what you're saying is that the people benefiting from welfare are in one community and a lot of them are happy about it.
It's – so you can't – well, that's just benefiting some people in the community and it's not benefiting others.
So you can't have a cohesive community if two groups of people are – Having conflicted interests.
Sorry to interrupt you, but that's a great point.
That's a fantastic point.
But now, you are moving to universal principles, i.e.
don't steal, rather than common interests.
Because if you have a system, as we have in the modern world, as most societies have been throughout history, with a few exceptions, Iceland and Ireland and other places, occasionally, if you have a system, Where the interests of one part of the community, those on the receiving end of government money, and this is the rich and the poor, military-industrial complex and lobbyists and so on.
So if there are some people on the receiving end of coercively stolen or produced government money, and there are other people on the paying end, then there cannot be common interests between the two, right?
Now, you could say that the common interest of the welfare state is to prevent the poor from rioting and destroying the society.
In which case you could say, our common interest is, we get your money, and then we don't riot.
Because if we riot, we outnumber you, we're just going to come and kill you all, so it's kind of like a shakedown.
You know, like how the mafia says, well, we want our money and we won't burn down your store, and the guy says, well, I don't want my store burned down, so I'll give you the money.
Is there a common interest?
Well, it's kind of hard to say.
But if you say common interests, I think that that's somewhat applicable to a voluntary society, but it's not applicable to a state society, because you can't have common interests in a state society, a government-based society, because the whole point of a government-based society is to rob from Peter to pay Paul.
That's the only reason that it has any legitimacy, is that, as the old saying goes, if the government robs from Peter to pay Paul, the government can always rely on the support of Paul.
And so the government, by favoring and disfavoring particular people at the point of a gun, destroys the idea of common interests.
Now, if you have a voluntary situation, like a family deciding where to go on vacation, then you can have more common interests, but they will end up being negotiated.
But it's only because negotiations only occur because people have Not.
They don't have common interests, right?
One person wants to go to the beach, one person wants to go to the mountains, and they may compromise.
What's this old Mad Magazine comic I remember?
It's pretty funny. Three stages of a relationship.
Number one, it doesn't matter where they go as long as they're together, right?
Number two, he wants to go to the mountains, she wants to go to the beach.
He compromises. And goes to the beach because he loves her.
Number three, he wants to go to the mountains, she wants to go to the beach, so he goes to the mountain and she goes to the beach.
It's the three stages of the relationship.
So when, just look at a couple, right?
He wants to go to the mountain, she wants to go to the beach.
Their common interest is to try and vacation together and have a good time, and the negotiation occurs because they don't have common interests.
I mean, if they both want to go to the beach, that's one thing, in which case there's no need for a negotiation.
But negotiations occur when people don't have Common interests.
So basing things on common interests is kind of tricky.
I see what you're saying.
What I think a common interest is when two people have different interests, what a common interest is is what is pursuing the outcome.
It's like both of them doing Things that will work to pursue the outcome that maximizes happiness and that maximizes their interests for both of them.
So if person A and person B, one person wants to Go to the beach and one person wants to go hiking but they need to do it together or something so their interests conflict.
Then the common interest would be to make a plan like we'll go hiking in the morning and the beach in the afternoon and what would not be in the common interest would to It was just to say, okay, well, we're going to go separately and, you know, because we just don't like it.
We just don't like the fact that we disagree.
We're just going to go separately and face whatever dangers we can face by going alone, which is...
I'm sorry.
I'm having trouble following this.
Let me try giving you another example.
Maybe it's just my brain's a little slow tonight.
So, Nathaniel, have you ever been in competition with another man for a woman?
No. Okay, well, I have.
I remember when I was younger, there was a woman who I really liked, and she had a boyfriend, and the boyfriend was, in my view, a doofus.
He was, you know, a nice guy, I guess, a good-looking guy, but he was just, you know, he'd kind of come in, and I would say to him, hey, so what do you do?
And he's like, oh, I ruined my father's business.
I mean, I run my father's business, you know, and he was just kind of goofy and predictable that...
That way. And I thought, man, I'm a lot better than this guy.
Come on. You know, this guy is kind of, he's a himbo.
He's like ornamental and so on.
And I was in competition with this guy.
I was trying to woo his girlfriend away from him.
I wasn't explicit.
I was just being nice.
I was around. I didn't push anything.
I didn't do a sort of bungee kiss.
Nothing like that. I was just around and being positive.
And She didn't end up choosing me.
I think that was a mistake.
But the fact is, she ended up choosing him.
So, she was going to go with him or she was going to go with me, or let's just say it was down to those two, right?
Yeah. Now, what are our common interests between the guy and myself?
I want the girl. He wants the girl.
If he gets the girl, he's happy.
If I get the girl, I'm happy.
What are our common interests?
Oh, I see. So you're describing a situation where there's one...
Like, where there's one thing...
It's kind of...
So if you...
I'm not saying that every situation can be resolved by figuring out a common interest.
I mean, some situations, it's best to look at what...
If the guy who's dating your crush asks her out first, then you have to look at your options about what you can do about it.
And you can, you know, negotiate with a guy to break up with his girlfriend, which won't convince him because there's, you know, there's no good reason that you can give for him to do that.
Well, I would go to him and tell him to...
What I'm saying is I'm canceling out the option of negotiation.
So I'm saying it's probably a good idea not to try to negotiate.
No, but we don't have the same interest, right?
Like if there's a pile of metal and I want to use it to build a car and you want to use it to build a playground, we don't have common interests.
You want the medal for something, and I want the medal for something else, and only one of us can get it.
Like, we can order more medal, but just talking about...
Right? So, the reason why we want a free market is that nobody knows.
But there's no such thing as common interests.
There's no such thing as common interests.
A lot of stuff is win-lose in life.
Now, you could say, well, everyone benefits in the long run from their not being thieves or murderers or whatever.
And it's like, well, yeah, okay.
But the problem is that the thieves and the murderers don't believe that.
They want to act in a way that is immoral and violent and so on.
Otherwise, they wouldn't. And saying, well, it's not in the common interest of everyone for you to go and steal a car rather than get a job.
Well, he doesn't agree.
So he's just going to go and do it.
And then the guy who steals the car has his interests served, and the guy who loses the car doesn't have his interests served.
In fact, they're impacted very negatively.
So I think if you look at human situations, all human desires are infinite.
All resources are finite, which means there's always going to be win-lose.
When it comes to people, to sex, to love, to jobs, to resources, to...
I mean, just look at roads.
Everybody wants to be on the road at 5.15 because the jobs end at 5.
What's the common interest?
Everybody wants to use the road at the same time.
You say, oh, it would be better. If you staggered your jobs so that you got to work from between 4am to 9am so you could leave in a staggered way and it's like, yeah, well, but customers need stuff reliably and people have to work together so it doesn't really work out that well.
I don't think that you can found a moral system on common interests because I do not know that common interests are even a valid concept.
And there is a lot of competition.
You know, if people are listening to this show, they're not listening to other people's shows at the same time.
So I'm, quote, winning and they're, quote, losing.
If they go and listen to other people's shows, then those other people are winning and I'm losing.
Where's our common interest?
So I think trying to found things on common interests.
So the market solves all of this stuff very elegantly, right?
So I could go and declare my love for some woman who's in a...
I would never do it with somebody who was engaged or married or anything like that.
But to me, you know, boyfriend is just like, it's a test drive.
You know, it's not a real commitment, especially if it's a new relationship.
It's a four-year boyfriend, no.
And of course, back then I was so naive that I thought that somebody who would leave a boyfriend for me would be a trustworthy person and would be emotionally available, which of course they wouldn't.
So I was just young and naive and unschooled.
But the way that the free market works is wonderful.
So if there's a pile of steel and you want to build a car and I want to build...
A playground, then who gets a steal?
Well, whoever bids more for it. Whoever finds it the most important or whoever could, maybe the playground is going to cost me money, but the car you can sell and it's going to make you money so you can afford to bid more because what you provide is more valuable in terms of monetary services to other people because they'll pay for it rather than the playground, which is maybe just for my house.
My kids will like it, but it doesn't make money and so on.
When it comes to land, right?
It's the one thing they're not making more of.
Well, if there's a plot of land, who should get it?
Well, the person who bids the highest or the person who, if it's completely unowned, homesteads it and works it the soonest.
So there are no common interests that I know of.
But I do like the free market because the free market resolves these things in ways that are not coercive, right?
Who gets the medal?
Not the person who shows up earliest with a truck and steals it or takes it, but the person who can bid the most for it.
And very rarely do the people who don't get something because they don't bid or not go on a shooting spree or violent or whatever.
So resources get allocated to people who want them the most.
Whether that desire is monetary or something else, the resources go to whoever wants it the most.
If you want the land and it's not owned by anyone, you go and homestead it.
You build a fence around it.
You plow it. You build a house there.
Well, you really want that land because you've poured a huge amount of effort in it.
So guess what? The land is yours. So I wouldn't try and found things on common interests because it also tends to be kind of I could see this in the question, right?
I mean, you say, what is ethical for a community is what is in the community's common interests.
And the community's common interests are based upon the commonly shared interests of all the individual members of said community to reliably maximize their own interests.
There's no content in any of that.
You're just using the word interest like it means something.
You know, it's like, it should be what's best for the community, or what's best for the community, or what the community believes or perceives is best for the community.
It's like, there's no answer to any of that.
There's no philosophical content.
It's just a bunch of positive adjectives.
So, I would say...
Study UPB. I mean, UPB is the thing.
Universally preferable behavior.
That's the thing. That's the answer.
You can get it at freedomainradio.com.
It's free. And study UPB and really, really understand it.
I've got tons of podcasts on it all the way.
And it's actually, there's a new section, UPB 2.0 in my new book.
And study UPB. That's the answer.
And I don't think trying to reinvent the wheel based on common interests is a good idea because it's not going to work.
So... All right.
Thanks, Nathaniel. I appreciate your time.
And let's move on to the next caller.
Thanks. Okay, up next we have Anne.
Anne wrote in and said, When the ones not participating in our lives do show up,
they think that we need to drop everything to be with them, and they are resentful when we do not direct our full attention to their presence.
The stable ones have pulled away from family life altogether or live too far away for us to meet often, so we are mostly stuck at the dinner table with the crazies.
My question is, as a role model for children, where do we place our boundary with family?
Is it in the children's best interest to have a connection with family even if they are mentally ill and destructive?
What about opening doors to allow people into our lives when it is convenient, or them but promptly having the door shut on us when they decide they are done visiting?
Would it be healthier to live in exile without the headache and drama that relatives can bring and still hope that the kids still learn the value of family?
Or should we, for the sake of our children, endure so that they can develop relationships with cousins, aunts, and grandparents?
That's from Anne. Well, when the question is put that starkly in, does the answer pop into your mind?
No, because it's something that we've been trying to sort out for ourselves.
Alright, so tell me, what kind of crazy are we talking about here?
Well, whose family do you want to start with?
Mine or my husband? Sort in descending order of craziness, I don't care which gene pile it comes from.
Probably, let's start with my husband's sister.
She, I believe in my unofficial analysis, has borderline personality disorder.
She has an addiction to opioids.
She's chronically ill.
She has often battles with bulimia.
She has this complete fear of abandonment.
She has like this therapy friend that differs depending on where it is she's going, but a therapy friend that follows her around.
She has this tendency to push people away and at the same time kind of suck vampiriously on them to pull them back in.
And the family, if you can imagine like a tornado and everything, you see the tornado coming And you duck and you hide for cover and hope that the tornado doesn't notice that you're there.
That's kind of what it's like to be on her when she goes on one of her rants.
And the whole family kind of pulls together to try to, you know, sympathize with her and try to make sure she's okay at the cost of the relationships with everybody else.
So oftentimes, especially my husband and I, we get thrown under the bus.
It used to be when we first got married that we would have to stop everything that we were doing and rush to her aid, whatever it was, to make her feel better.
Wait, have to? What do you mean, have to?
Well, if we didn't, then we'd be ostracized from the family.
Oh no, the crazy people won't talk to you?
Whatever will you do?
Well, I think for my husband, it was normal.
And for me, like...
Okay, but just don't give me the have to.
You know, you made a choice.
You chose to appease for the sake of maintaining a pseudo-connection with nutjobs.
I've just got to be real clear.
Don't give me the, well, we had to do this.
The reason I'm saying this is you said we are stuck at a table with the crazy people, right?
No, you're not. I mean, unless you're physically strapped, taped, duct tape, and glued to the chair, and the chair is glued to the floor, and the floor is glued to the center of the earth, you're not stuck there.
You can get up and walk away anytime you want.
It's kind of an insult to people who are genuinely stuck in situations like a North Korean gulag.
Well, it's kind of what it, sometimes kind of what it resembles.
No, no, no, I get that.
That's how it feels.
But that's not what it is.
And this is not a show about how things feel.
This is a show about what it is.
And you're not stuck there.
You can get up and walk out anytime you want.
Well, that's where we're kind of stuck out with our...
Not stuck there either.
What happens? No, I'm not giving you that language, my dear.
I just am not. Because I want you to be as free as possible, whether you stay or whether you go.
I can't give you the language of involuntarism when you are in a perfectly voluntary situation.
Okay. What's the impact to the kids if we decide to walk away?
Oh, hang on.
Sorry, don't jump the gun yet.
I was just pointing out that particular use of language.
Because if we've done a sort-by-crazy and the only person who comes up is your husband's sister, that's one thing.
How about we get a few more?
Oh, great. Just get it all off your chest.
Oh, that feels so good.
There's my mom. And my mom was a great mom when I was little.
However, after my parents were divorced, she got into the New Age movement.
How old were you when your parents got divorced?
I was five. Okay.
Maybe six. And she started getting really into the new age movement.
And that's when things started changing.
She stopped doing her hair.
She stopped doing her makeup. She stopped buying normal food.
Let me guess here.
Is your husband's sister younger than he is?
She's older. Oh, she's older.
Okay. Sorry. Go ahead. Yes.
So she's the older sister. So back to my mom.
And then she kind of keeps trying out these new personalities.
So she goes through some very weird stages.
And she is either present.
She's always present with what it is she chooses to do.
So when she chose to be a mom, she was great.
When she chose to do the New Age movement, it was like all her energy went into that.
Then she goes off on these other tangents.
Sometimes show up in town and we just kind of have to, that was my, we have to drop everything and pay attention to her and do what she wants to do.
Otherwise, you know, she says, oh, I didn't get to see my grandkids and I didn't get to see you.
Sorry, Anne, did your mom go new age right after the divorce when you were five or six?
It was very shortly after.
She did end up going to school as well for New Age programs.
And so she pretty much...
Okay, I'll let you get away with using the word school with New Age crap.
I just, you know, that's right on the edge for me.
But yeah, okay, you could be trained in New Age.
Well, it was a lot of money and it was four years of her life.
Sure, sure. Yeah, no, there's profit in crazy.
There's profit in selling crazy to crazy.
All right. Sure.
All right, who else have we got?
My dad, I'm actually very close with him.
I've always have been.
We've had trouble in our relationship, but he's suffered on and off with chronic depression, some rage behaviors.
Sometimes he's suicidal.
So, you know, that was present.
And sometimes, you know, things still come up every once in a while.
My full sister with my mom and my dad, she is bipolar.
Wait, diagnosed or you diagnosed?
She was diagnosed by a therapist.
She doesn't accept that diagnosis, but she was diagnosed by a therapist.
Does she take meds at all?
She did take meds for a little while when she was a teenager and had my dad supervising her.
Once she became an adult, she stopped taking the meds.
Wait, having the depressed, rageful, suicidal guy was in charge of the bipolar?
Oh, he was the most stable one out of my mom.
Okay. Sure. It was easier to live with dad than it was with mom.
Right. This grenade is the most stable pineapple in the bunch.
All right. Who else have we got?
There's other people in my husband's family that, you know, we choose not to interact with as much.
But they kind of have some of the more bipolar.
Oh, there's some choice.
Borderline personality issues.
Yeah, so when it comes to your husband's family, you have some choice.
You choose not to interact with as much, right?
You're stuck with some people, but with some people you have choice, right?
Right. Okay. At least that's how it feels.
I'm sorry that is a very womanly thing to say.
But hey man, that's how it feels.
I'm afraid that doesn't work here.
Not an argument to say it feels like something.
How do I prove that?
You can't prove it.
It's a feeling. Feelings are not tools of cognition.
You know, the world looks flat.
It's not, right?
I mean, just because something feels...
I mean, it's funny because it's not just for women, but for a lot of women, that is.
This is how I feel, period.
And it's like, this is how I feel.
That's just the very beginning of the exploration.
Why do you feel that way?
How does it compare to reality?
But for a lot of people, it's like, hey, man, these are my feelings.
Deal. And it's like, kind of don't have to, really shouldn't take that as the end point, but rather the starting point.
Okay. All right. Is there anyone else you wanted to mention?
Those are the main playing characters in terms of important people that could be in my children's life.
We do have some close cousins and things that are, I don't know for lack of a better description word to encompass it all, but they're liberals, they're professors, and they really don't like me in general.
So, for various reasons, but in any case, so...
Those people in the family collude with my sister-in-law, and it kind of turns into a big shitstorm.
Right. Right.
And I don't want the specific ages of your children, but are we talking babies, toddlers, latency, teenagers?
What have we got? Between kindergarten age and sixth grade.
So elementary school age.
Hmm. A little bit of a spread.
All right. Doesn't matter.
Just noticing it to move on.
All right. Tell me about...
They're only a few years apart.
I'm sorry? They're only a few years apart, but I was just giving you the...
So tell me about how you're close to your dad.
Depression, rage, suicidality.
How do you get close to somebody who's that way?
He... In my early childhood, before the divorce, it wasn't that way at all between he and I. He was my hero.
He was my daddy.
He was A very, very important person in my life.
And then we had, unfortunately, he was accused of sexually molesting me by my elementary school, and it never happens.
But I was basically treated like a molestation victim, and he was basically, he was treated as, you know, an abusive father.
So he was...
What? Yeah, I've actually, I've heard someone who's had that threat against them from a school.
But what, how did that come about?
Oh, I guess you wouldn't know, right? You were so young.
Well, I have like a vague remembrance of what happened.
And then, of course, we have the police documents and stuff, too, that I went through later on in life as an adult.
And my dad and I, we've talked about it a lot.
So... What ended up happening was it was circle time.
And I don't know why, but the teacher said, let's go around and tell secrets.
And my secret, you know, all the other kids had something like really silly.
And my secret was that I took showers with my mommy and daddy.
This was probably before, this was before school, probably around when I was two or three.
And I said, I grabbed my daddy's penis.
And my dad tells me that that happened, but that was the last time.
He said, you know, you're too old now, and this isn't something that, you know, we're going to do anymore.
And so that was, I just was, you know, giggling because it was funny.
You know, it's a funny, I thought it was a funny thing.
And the school didn't think it was very funny.
So based off of that, they seemed to create some sort of molestation case.
And they interviewed...
My mom and my dad separately.
My mom wasn't sure about any of it.
And my dad...
Well, she wasn't sure.
What do you mean? Right.
Well... She thought that this molestation might have occurred?
Apparently, she just kept saying, I don't know.
I don't know. Oh, my gosh.
And, you know, I think that really didn't help the situation at all.
She said that she was getting a lot of pressure from the officers to answer their questions.
And she just felt very...
Well, of course, because if it was true...
Yeah. Wow.
So, he spent probably, he says, you know, since the early 80s, it was about $15,000 to $20,000 fighting his legal case.
And I would have to go to therapists and counselors and things like that.
So anyway, it just got to be a whole lot of craziness for my parents.
Was he charged? He was charged, and so he had to clear the charges.
And I'm not quite sure in all the details on that.
But he was successful in fighting his case.
He was able to prove that the prosecutors in their interview with me were leading me on in their questions.
And, you know, all the other therapists I went to said there's nothing wrong with her.
She's fine.
So.
Do you think this provoked the divorce?
Yes.
Yeah.
Kind of tough if your wife's kind of throwing you under the bus with these kinds of allegations.
Well, that was something that was very strong between them because he said, you know, how the F do you think I could have done this to our daughter?
And she just kind of said, well, I don't know.
Yeah, that's a challenge in a relationship.
Yeah, so they called it quits and said, you know, I don't think we can do this anymore.
So it felt really good at the time.
I think most kids, when their parents are divorced, they feel...
Maybe, you know, guilty for doing it or for being a cause of it.
And I didn't feel that way.
I was just glad that mommy and daddy weren't fighting anymore in the house.
Now, according to your adverse childhood experience score, though, you did experience some form of molestation or sex or rape as a child.
And obviously it wasn't this, but if you could give me a detail or two, or if you don't want to, that's fine as well.
But I was kind of curious how that fit in.
No, it's fine. It actually does pertain to this instance.
So part of what they were doing was that they had me twice.
They had me segregated in a room alone with a strange man.
And the first time they told me, you know, just lay down on the, you know, five years old, lay down on the changing table.
I'm sorry, who was doing this?
This was, they had gotten court orders.
I'm sorry, the prosecution had gotten court orders to check and see if my hymen was intact.
And so I don't really know if this is molestation, but it brought up those, again, feelings of shame and guilt.
So I had to lay on the changing table while they checked to see if I had a hymen.
I'd never met these people before.
There was one person that was kind of outside the door and another person who was checking.
And then for whatever reason, they did it twice.
And the second time, I remember fighting them because I knew what it was.
And I was fighting them on it.
And they told me that I had to do it and that I could get candy afterwards.
Are you kidding me?
Candy from strangers? No.
Oh, my God. Candy from strangers that are touching you.
Yeah. So that was really interesting.
I didn't know whether to count that one or not, but it definitely came up with those feelings of I've never had anybody touch me in that way.
Yeah. And my parents didn't know about it.
They weren't informed and they weren't contacted.
My dad only read about it later on.
Once the court cases are cleared, he could get all the documents.
And the verbal abuse slash threats that you checked?
Because of my dad's rage behavior, sometimes...
He would get not necessarily angry at me specifically, but it would come out in other ways, such as he'd get really mad at something.
And some things would fly across the room, or he would yell aggressively about something, stomp around something.
There was a period where he was hospitalized, and after he was hospitalized, once he got out of that, the rage behavior became more acute and easily triggered.
Wait, sorry. When you say hospitalized, do you mean mentally or physically?
He was mentally hospitalized.
There was another event that had happened that was just horrendous as well.
You mean from him? Yeah.
It wasn't, again, it wasn't his fault.
He had remarried and the woman that he remarried, I lived with them.
They had a great relationship as far as I could tell.
As far as he was concerned, they had a good relationship as well.
I'm not quite sure why she married him, but they ended up having essentially three kids together.
And one day she quite literally picked up all of her stuff and Led to the other side of the country and said, I'm not coming home.
And came up with some other, you know, things that, you know, accusations against him to prevent him from having access to these other three kids.
Oh, accusations of sexual misconduct?
Yeah, I think she had said at one point that he had gotten angry with her, threw his keys on the ground, And it was scary to her.
And then the biggest one was that she said that he had raped her, which I find very unlikely, knowing my dad.
And he vehemently...
Wait, he threw his keys on the ground and raped her?
Well, not at the same time.
No, no, no, I get that. But those are the two...
These things are not like the other...
Yeah. So, I mean, those were the things that she had put in the documents, was that he would get angry and do things like throw his keys on the ground in frustration.
And then she said that, you know, he had raped her.
And we kind of believe that she was being coached by her sister, who was a caseworker for children welfare.
And she just didn't want a husband.
She didn't want to live out where we were living.
And she just wanted to call it quits and didn't know how to get out of it.
And did he end up losing contact with these kids?
Yes, unfortunately.
He did regain contact once one of the children turned 18.
The other two will not talk to him because of the things that their mother has told them, such as if your father will come and kidnap you, those types of things.
So, yeah.
So that was real interesting to watch because from my perspective, I hadn't seen anything like this.
And, you know, like I said, I had always been close with my dad.
And so I had, you know, never seen anything remotely like what she was talking about in terms of his behavior.
Wow. What's with him choosing these women?
Well, he got it right on the third try.
Yeah. Wow, he rejected the MGTOW philosophy and stepped right up again.
He's always wanted a family.
I'm sorry? He's always wanted a family to create that life for his children.
And so, you know, he's a good-looking guy.
He makes a decent salary.
He really values family.
And so he found a woman that she's amazing.
So we got lucky with her.
And how long have they been together for?
Oh, gosh. 22 years, I think.
22 years? Yes.
Wow. That's quite something.
Yeah, he has a pretty extraordinary story.
And fortunately, he was Because he just lost it.
I mean, between everything that went on with me, his wife leaving him, taking the children.
I mean, this is like the second time he was being threatened with losing his children.
He just broke down.
That is a huge amount of suffering.
Yeah. And unfortunately, my mom was living on the opposite coast from us.
And so it was basically just me.
The siblings were split up?
My mom, my parents had decided that when I was 12 that I could choose where I wanted to live.
I could live with mom or I could live with dad.
And remember I said living with mom was like, oh my gosh, it was, she's, you know, I had more of a family life.
I wanted a family life. I had a mom.
I had a sister.
I had a dad that were married.
And they were providing a good life for us.
And I wanted to go be part of that.
So when I was 12, I left my mom to go and live with my dad.
And... When my stepmom left, yes, she essentially, she was pregnant with twins at the time, and she essentially picked up my sister, everything in the house, and left while I was at school, and left me a note on the door.
So that's how I came home, and that's how my dad came home.
And so from there, she just wouldn't answer questions, wouldn't pick up her phone calls.
Wait, she took your sister, like your blood sister?
No, I'm sorry. My father had had...
Oh, your stepsister. Okay.
Yeah. All right. I'm sorry.
I just wanted to check because that seemed a bit of a reach.
Okay. Yeah, a little bit.
But even still, it was still kidnapping.
It was still taking a child out of state.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, and because she had done that, she probably was...
Well, that's the argument for escalating to the rape accusation, right?
Yeah. Right.
And I think she just used that to ensure custody because the state she moved to is a very liberal state.
It's totally bent on women in the courts.
Giving women the advantage in the courts.
Yeah. Right.
So, do you like these people?
Do you enjoy their company?
Is there a positive that you get out of the relationship with your husband's sister, say, with your mom, with your full sister?
The only real positive relationship I have is with my dad, and we've worked on that growing into that.
And then... You know, his wife, of course.
And my sister-in-law, no.
No. But I am close with my husband's mom.
And, you know, of course, she doesn't want, she wants everybody to get along.
And she understands that her daughter's difficult.
And so she just kind of ignores that side of the relationship and will take part in some of the bullying of my husband and I. When necessary, in order to appease the sister-in-law God.
Or the volcano, you know, the evil volcano so it doesn't erupt.
You're right. What are the benefits?
I mean, don't give me any of these abstract categories like the value of family because there's no such thing as the value of an abstraction.
Value accrues to individuals.
You know, it's like saying, well, I have a terrible...
Group of musicians, but it's a wonderful orchestra, right?
The orchestra, the value of the orchestra is the combination of the talents of the musicians, right?
So I don't want to hear any of this like, well, this family has value in the abstract because it's a category and it's populated by individuals and only individuals can have value.
So what do you want the kids to learn from and to imprint from these personalities?
I want them to...
I didn't grow up without...
I didn't grow up with much of a family.
And so for my kids, I wanted something different.
And I chose more or less wrong.
I have what I have.
Wait, what do you mean you chose wrong?
Well, if I was specifically looking for somebody to have a...
You know, a great family.
Oh, your husband, you mean? Yeah.
Okay, so your husband's family was not what you would have chosen for your kids?
No, not at all.
And so for them, you know, I can wish all I want, but it's not, you know, it's not there.
So I just, I'm hoping that when they grow up, they can look back and say, you know, I have a great connection with With family and people.
I don't want to project my history.
Wait, your kids are going to have great connection with the borderline opioid addict who's bulimic?
No, but if we pull away from her, then everything kind of pulls back as well.
You know, how are we supposed to go to...
they're with they want great you want them to have great connections with either the borderline opioid addict who's bulimic or with all the people who support and treasure her and choose her over you right um they have a
they have a daughter together my sister-in-law and my brother-in-law and she's the same age as my daughter and they want to you know have things like sleepovers.
No, I get it. I get it.
Yeah, they want to be together.
The kids want to be together.
The kids want to be together.
So if I say, we're not going to deal with Sister-in-law anymore because she's, you know, nutso.
Then that means my daughter doesn't have a relationship with her cousin.
And how do you think the cousin is going to mature?
How do you think she's going to be as she grows up with the mother that she has?
We see it. She exhibits a lot of the same behaviors as her mother and as her aunt and uncle.
So she's going to be dangerous to your kid, isn't she?
Emotionally or maybe even physically?
Possibly. Well, no.
Emotionally, for sure, right?
Emotionally, for sure. Okay, so that's not...
You don't want your kid to bond with borderlines, right?
Or the kids are borderlines who are showing borderline tendencies, according to your phrases, right?
Yes. Okay. You don't choose blood over virtue.
You don't choose blood over virtue.
That's making family into a cult, you understand?
You choose virtue.
You choose virtue.
Well, biology has served up these convenient companions.
But if they're crazy, aren't they a toxic substance for your children to be around?
Yes. But it's kind of like...
To use the Hispanic phrase, you don't get one bean, you get the whole burrito, or you get nothing.
Well, no, that's their choice.
Their choice is to escalate in that way.
But if that's their choice, then they're choosing to bond with crazy over somebody who's got standards and is trying to establish some boundaries.
Because what your kids are going to learn is you can get away with all kinds of crazy, dysfunctional, nasty behavior under the umbrella of family.
And what do you think your kids are going to be like when they grow up with that lesson?
You can be as nutso as you want.
You can't do anything about it.
We're family. How are you going to tell them be good?
How are you going to tell them be responsible, be mature?
How are you going to tell them be respectful?
How are you going to tell them to have quality people in their lives?
How are you going to tell them not to be so susceptible to peer influence?
How are you going to have any moral credibility if these are the people you're surrounding them with?
Why would they listen to you about virtue, responsibility, maturity, anything when they get older?
And how are you going to say to them, don't behave in a crazy manner?
Because they'll say, hey, you opened your entire household.
You opened up entire childhood to people who were crazy.
You've got no problem with crazy.
You welcome crazy into the household.
Who are you to tell us not to be crazy?
You reward crazy.
You love crazy.
It's all about the teenage years, and you know this as well as I do.
Parenting is all about preparing for the teenage years when you get corrosive skepticism coming from your children.
You did it to your parents, I did it to mine.
Any child with half a brain goes through the corrosive nihilistic skepticism with regards to their parents' own values.
And they're looking for any chink in the armor by which they can dislodge any form of moral superiority or authority that you have over them.
And you've got to not have those chinks in your armor where they can cast you aside and bond with their peers.
You have to maintain your moral credibility as a parent, especially if you're raising your children, to think rationally.
So if you say, crazy people are welcome here, what are you saying?
I don't have any moral standards for my relationships.
And I was more than happy to have my children bond with crazy people and be imprinted upon by crazy people and have to deal with crazy people.
And the only reason, the only rational reason, and which I'm going to be frank with you, as I always am with listeners, You and I know the real reason for this.
It's got nothing to do with family and connections and wanting your children to have this.
You don't want the conflict of setting boundaries.
You don't want the fight that comes from setting boundaries.
You don't want the opposition.
You don't want the ostracism. You don't want the rejection.
You don't want the problems. And so you're willing to sacrifice your kids for the sake of you avoiding problems.
Tell me if I'm wrong. That's what I think.
No, you are not wrong.
That's something that I have recognized.
Oh, good. I'm glad I'm not peeing in the wind there, as it were.
Not necessarily sacrificing my children at the sake of it, but that is the result of it.
Well, no, if you're exposing your children to crazy people, to abusive people, to dysfunctional people, isn't that negative for them?
They may not recognize it at the time, so what?
Kids don't recognize that lunch...
And dinner full of chocolate and candy is bad for them.
That's what they want. It doesn't matter what they want.
It matters what's good for them, right?
Right. Anymore, it doesn't matter what you want.
It matters what's good for you.
Now, what you want is to avoid conflict.
But conflict is not avoiding you.
Drama is not avoiding you.
You can't invite the vampires into your house and then say, well, my only goal is to avoid vampires.
So how do I go about setting boundaries with people?
Well, if they're genuinely crazy, you can't set boundaries.
That's the whole point of genuinely crazy, right?
Right. You know, if you've got the opioid addict who's bulimic, if you've got the new age mom who's trying on new personalities like teenage girls experiment with haircuts, you've got bipolar sister, like how you can't set boundaries because they're crazy.
It's like trying to hold up your hands to stop a tsunami.
Kabloosh, right?
I mean, tell me if there's any, I've never found a way to set boundaries with crazy people.
I don't think anyone ever has.
You might get them to, like, with a huge amount of pressure, you might get them to box up their crazy huff a little bit for maybe a week or two.
If you're like, well, no, you can't do this and you can't do these and here are the consequences, they might grudgingly submit and chew back their crazy for a short period of time, but it's not going to last.
So do we say no to family dinners?
Do we say no to vacations?
Do we say no? Now you're asking me to tell you what to do.
I'm going to establish my boundaries with you, Anne, and model the behavior.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
Oh, man. I know.
It's a drag, isn't it? When you can't outsource your free will and moral responsibility to some guy on the internet.
Oh, that sucks. I've got my wrist bracers of, like, laser repellent.
I'm not going to tell you what to do.
Come on. This is your family.
You've got to own what to do. Great.
These are not the relatives, as you said, regarding your husband.
And these are not the relatives you would even remotely have chosen, right?
It would be a pretty long lineup for you to end up with these people, right?
No, yes. It would be a very long one.
So if you met this woman at a dinner party, she would be like entertaining conversation for the drive home, not someone you'd be like, let's introduce her to our children.
If she was a babysitter who came over and said, you don't mind if I take opioids and throw up half my dinner in your toilet, right?
You'd be like, yeah, great.
Let's have her babysit the kids.
No, quite the opposite.
And this was the question for me.
The question for me was, if I met my family at a dinner party, would they become part of my life?
Hmm. Great.
And that's values versus coincidence.
These people aren't in your life because of values, because of virtues, because of compatibility, because of shared ideals.
These people are in your life because you had the Bombay doors of vaginas open up and drop some pups in your general vicinity.
It's coincidence.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm not positive at all, then, that you're doing them any favors by enabling their behavior, by having them live consequence-free for however badly they're behaving.
Are you going to impose consequences on your five or six-year-old when you're not willing to impose consequences on a 40-year-old?
Why should children have consequences and adults not have consequences?
Your children will resent you the moment they figure that out.
And they'll figure that out quicker than you think.
Oh, we get consequences.
We're expected to have reasonable behavior.
We are encouraged to be good and we have negative consequences for being bad.
But not auntie.
Not grandma. Not my other auntie.
Not the cousin. They get away scot-free.
Why? Not only do they get away scot-free, no punishments, they're still invited over for dinner.
You still cook for them.
You still clean for them.
You still...
Right.
Take care of them.
Thank you.
So why do they get all this wonderful stuff from you and we get punishment, negative consequences, whatever, however you parent, right?
Oh! So if you're crazy, people will work like hell to appease you.
If you're crazy, you can dominate the good people with threat of acting out.
So the crazy people have the power.
And the good people appease them constantly.
And if you want to get your way and you want to get things from people, you just be crazy.
You invade. You act out.
You have tantrums. You explode.
And mom will serve up what you want on a silver platter.
Mom will serve up her kids' peace of mind.
Mom will serve up the past piece of her marriage.
Mom will serve up her own peace of mind, her own tranquility.
Because crazy people rule.
Crazy people run the world.
Crazy people will make mom do anything they want.
Crazy people say, jump.
Mom says, how high? That's the world you're teaching your children in.
You want to be in charge?
Just be nuts. And the good people will appease the living crap out of you from here to kingdom come.
That's how you get things in this world.
You threaten people. Yep, I see that time and time again.
You're right. Don't you want to teach them the virtue wins?
Don't you want to teach them the goodness and self-knowledge and integrity have power in this world?
They want you to be a superhero who keeps them safe.
Not an appeaser who exposes them to toxic personalities because she's afraid of bad people and crazy people.
And I know we say crazy.
Some of it's bad. I think that the mental illness thing is way overused.
I think sometimes people are just really mean and vicious and manipulative and nasty, controlling.
I think it also helps explain the behavior.
You know, so instead of internalizing it, It is, at least with the sister-in-law, a way that we can say, okay, here's what's going on with her.
These are some of the symptoms that she has, and this is why she's behaving this way.
But you're right. People, they swirl around her to give her exactly what she wants.
And you understand that is so bad for her.
You know, love is a complex thing.
Let's say that you have some affection for this woman.
You understand that appeasing her crazy only feeds it.
You're making her worse.
If you care for crazy people, stop appeasing them.
Because that gives their craziness power and dominance over you, but fundamentally over them.
They can't dislodge the demon of nuttiness if it constantly gets what they want.
If their strategies work, they won't change them.
Well, you know how it is you can tell somebody that.
Particular speech a hundred times over, but it's, you know, when you recognize that you're doing that exact same thing yourself.
I mean, I didn't walk into this knowing how to treat her, but I definitely know how to do it now in order to get the monkey off her back.
Yeah, the bullying works.
And then you're like, I can't believe she's still a bully.
Of course she's still a bully.
It works! And, you know, the few times you do stand up, you know, everybody comes after you.
So it's just... Well, yeah, and you can say to them, listen, you guys can enable her all you want.
I care for her too much to appease her craziness.
She needs to know that this is unacceptable behavior.
She's a mom. I care for her daughter.
I care for her husband. I care for the peace of the family.
I'm done. Appeasement is done.
That is wrong. That is bad for her.
And that is teaching our children that bullies always get their way and good people fold like a cheap tent.
To hell with that. To hell with good people appeasing.
I know we're sensitive. I know we're nice.
But where does it get us?
It gets us ground down, dominated and bullied by the least empathetic, the least mature, the least wise around us.
It lets crazy, bad people run the world.
And run your family and make your decisions as a mother.
Mm-hmm. Your job is to protect your children.
Exposing them to crazy, toxic personalities doesn't fall, at least for me, into the category of protection.
Good people appeasing bad people.
I don't want to load too much on your shoulders, Anne, but it is the death of the West.
Oh, these people are going to get really, really upset.
Yeah. They're going to get really mad.
So let's surrender everything to them.
Because that's going to be great.
I'm sure they'll become nice when their not-niceness gets them everything they want.
And it never does.
They just become more hungry and vicious.
Of course! Whatever you feed tends to grow.
You may have noticed that with your babies.
Oh, look! I'm feeding bullying with compliance and submission and resources.
You know, the part of the garden you shit in tends to grow the most.
That's one way to put it.
And I gave up on the appeasement stuff.
And people hate me for it, obviously, right?
How did you give up on the appeasement stuff?
I'm sorry? How did you end up deciding that you were going to give up on that?
Oh, you know, I'd like to say it was some heroic...
Stance of abstract virtue, Ann, but it really wasn't any of that.
I just couldn't stand myself anymore.
I, you know, my self-respect, given the values and virtues that I had, non-aggression principle, integrity, you know, Howard Rourke, my hero, and I was appeasing, appeasing, appeasing, appeasing, and that contradiction.
It was like a file on the chain that held my self-respect up.
And every appeasement.
And then, bing!
Fall. And I fell.
I couldn't stand it anymore.
I couldn't stand myself. I didn't even know what it was.
I just ceased to be able to sleep.
Right. Because I had drifted so far...
From the abstract values I claimed to hold.
In other words, I could talk everybody's ass and ear off about abstract philosophy, concept formation, economics, the free market, the Fed, you name it.
The history of the Great Depression.
Man, I could chew everyone's ear off about the need for courage and integrity in political discussions, in economics, in philosophy.
But when it came to my actual relationships in my life, no connection at all.
No connection at all.
It's taken a lot of work to get me down to even two people.
And sometimes they multiply.
But no, I just...
It wasn't, I'm like, well, you know, I've really got to stand up to these people because...
I mean, I wish it had been that way in a way, but it wasn't.
What it was, was I just, I can't stand myself anymore.
I am in great danger of the nihilism of self-contempt.
And I'm in the great danger of using philosophy, not for the cause of virtue and strength, but for the cause of vanity and self-aggrandizement.
But look, you see, I'm philosophical.
I understand all of these deep and important things.
I've read my Aristotle and my Rand and I've read my Spinoza and I've read my Heidegger and I know how concepts are formed and I know the value of logic and its relationship to empiricism and virtue and science and excellence in all forms of human endeavor.
But when the crazy people call, I come running and panting.
Philosophy was...
I was insulting philosophy by using it to be clever and right and to dominate and be victorious in discussion.
I was using philosophy as a shield against my own unconscious cowardice.
I do not call myself a coward because it hadn't even occurred to me that philosophy starts in the personal, not in the abstract.
It hadn't even occurred to me.
It wasn't a thought like, well, I have this thought.
I'm going to push it away. It never occurred to me.
Which is why it is such a shock to the world when I talk about the logic of personal and political freedom.
Personal first. Personal first.
Great. So I did not have some big abstract revelation that caused me to become courageous.
I was just in danger of eating myself in the nihilism of self-contempt for the avoidance of the inaction of necessary values that I claimed to love.
For year after year after year, I claimed to love these values.
And they manifested nowhere in my personal life except in an absent opposite way.
I value truth, virtue, and integrity.
But the people I surround myself with just about every sphere of life have very little to do with any of those things and quite often virulently opposed to all of them.
Well, truth doesn't have many friends, so...
Philosophy shouldn't just be an abstract value.
It should be something you can achieve and do in your life.
Well, not for me, you understand.
For other people. It's something I will preach, but not do.
And that was horrendous.
And I guess, you know, my unconscious was like, yeah, okay.
It's going to take a while, but, you know, he'll get there.
Well, he's not really getting there.
Okay, I guess we'll send him some bad dreams.
We'll send him some anxiety.
And, you know, we'll give him a couple of cattle prods of...
I'm sure he'll figure this out.
This isn't brain surgery. These are all the values he claims to love.
It's right there in the fountainhead.
Peter Keating's mom.
It's not complicated. Not hard.
Right there. Nothing yet.
Oh, crap. All right. I'll tell you what.
Why don't we have...
I don't know. Let's throw him some significant business challenges that are...
Directly resulting from the lack of ethics of those around him.
That's going to wake him up. Come on.
I mean, he's a smart guy.
He's going to wake him up. What, nothing?
Holy crap. All right, I'll tell you what, why don't we send him inspiration for novels and poems and plays that depict somebody completely blind to the immorality of those around him?
Oh, he'll write that stuff, and he'll see, I mean, he'll see this for sure.
What, nothing? Guy just wrote a 1,200-page novel about this entire, he's got nothing?
Right, that's it. Turn off the sleep!
That's it, turn off the sleep!
I don't care. Until he wakes up, he don't get to sleep anymore.
And a mere 14 months later, in China, a mere 14 months later, I began to have an inkling that I might not be living with the most integrity possible in the known universe.
I shouldn't laugh because, man, it was rough.
Oh, man, it was rough.
And it was like within spitting distance of self-destruction.
And that's how deeply embedded these things are.
And this is how much we all serve crazy people.
I mean, people tune into CNN.
We are all programmed to serve crazy people because our current society can't function if we don't.
But you want your kids to be different and you want your kids to have a different environment.
And I tell you, Anne, you really, really want your kids to respect you.
You need them to respect you.
That's foundational. You want your husband to respect you.
You want your children to respect you.
And your husband is probably begging you silently to save him from his sister.
He can't love her. She sounds like more than a handful, like a claw full up the ass.
Oh, gosh.
You know, it's sometimes when you go to these family parties, it's like being thrown to the wolves.
No, no. See, A, wolves on evil, and B, wolves will finish the job quite quickly, or at least you get away.
You don't sit down in the den for a long series of chewing and spitting up and then stagger out.
Wolves are humane relative to crazy people.
You either get away or they kill you.
At least they rip you apart quickly, right?
Oh, yeah. This fight or flight doesn't stretch out for 20 years.
Because it feels good for them.
It feels good to have all these.
Oh, they get to dominate virtue.
In you as they do in themselves.
They get to dominate integrity, consistency, compassion, empathy, you name it.
Evil wants power, which is why evil freaks out when anyone threatens its power.
Evil desperately needs power.
And if it can dominate evil, like if evil can dominate evil, that's good.
But nothing's as good as bullying good.
Nothing's as good for evil as dominating good.
That's the ultimate nectar.
That's the ultimate dopamine rush.
And that's why if you set boundaries and you say, get thee behind me, They freak out like you wouldn't believe.
Because you are now interfering with the only dopamine that makes evil bearable.
Or, if you want to put it another way, you are interfering with the only dopamine that makes dysfunction function.
So, of course, they're going to fight tooth and nail.
Because as long as they're dominating good, evil is worthwhile.
Evil is good. Evil is...
Profitable. But if they don't get to dominate, good.
This is why they call the airstrikes of ostracism an attack and they try to get everyone.
Oh, do you know what Anne said?
Do you know what Anne did? I can't believe it.
She's doing this. She's doing that.
She's terrible. And they whip everyone up and they get the mob going and the pitchforks come out and the torches come up and everyone comes charging at you.
Yes. Because you must get back into...
The livestock farm of being dominated by bad people.
Because that way, being bad becomes sensible.
See, if evil can't dominate good, then evil is useless, futile.
Evil is a bad decision.
If evil can dominate good, then given that evil bases itself upon Darwinian dominance rather than universal values and virtues, if evil can dominate good, then evil is the only sensible decision in the world!
But if evil cannot dominate good, evil loses.
And then you're just left with some really bad decisions.
Right. It'd be interesting to watch and see if they were the ones to change.
I mean, you can't expect them to, but it's always interesting to see how badly they want a relationship.
No, no, but they don't even think there's a problem, right?
I'm sorry, what was that? They don't even think that there's a problem, do they?
No, they just technically look at us and say we're the problem.
Right. Which is what you're talking about.
And this is the great insight that everybody needs to get.
And I bring you this insight with bloody hands.
It was not easy to get.
The big insight is that even if people honestly and openly admit that there's a problem, there's only a 5% chance of them changing.
If they don't even admit that there's a problem or if they think you're the problem and they're in fact the problem, there's no chance for them to change.
None. They will only escalate.
Now, the reason I say 5% is I think it's about even people who say, I'm fat.
I got to lose weight.
I'm going to diet. I'm going to exercise.
Only 5% of those people keep the weight off.
Most of them actually gain it back and more.
So after a certain period of time, I think it's about 5%, maybe it's even lower, maybe it's a little higher, but it's real low, single digits.
So even people who say something as simple as, I'm fat, I need to lose weight, or I'm overweight, I need to lose weight, I need to change my diet or whatever.
Only a few percentage points of people, and that's with massive amount of social support.
Not very many people say to a person who's lost weight, You're too thin.
Here, let me insert a cheesecake into your ear, right?
They don't do that, right?
They get massive amounts of social support.
People cheer them on. They feel better.
They can do better. Their energy goes up.
They can exercise. They're stronger.
They can climb stairs without panting.
They can do all these great. And everyone's saying, yay, yay, go, go, go.
And even then, only 5% of people can make it last.
With all those positive reinforcements, with saving money on food, with everyone cheering them on, with their lives getting better, only 5% of people who've admitted there's a problem, everyone's cheering them on, very few people change.
Now, if these family members don't even say there's a problem, they're not going to change.
They're only going to get worse.
Yeah. And if you accept that fact, Then you can start to navigate with open eyes rather than appeasement.
Now, if you want to appease, that's a choice.
Then say, I'm scared to stand up to these people because I'm afraid of their aggression.
See, to me, everything that's not a direct violation of the NAP, everything is permissible as long as you're honest.
Right? So, I don't agree with taxation in principle.
I pay my taxes because I don't want to go to jail.
Right? I'm honest about it.
Yeah. So, I mean, if you want to say, these people terrify me.
I'm really frightened of conflict.
I'm frightened that they're going to bring a tax against me.
I'm frightened of feeling lonely.
Right? Because there's a gap between dealing with dysfunctional people and actually having healthy and positive people in your life.
I don't want to cross that desert because I don't know what's on the other side, if anyone.
I'm willing to surrender my children up to dysfunctional people because I'm scared of setting boundaries.
Great. As long as you're honest with yourself, sure.
I'm willing for my children to end up completely disrespecting me Because I would rather expose them to toxic, crazy people than set boundaries because I'm scared.
Well, see, I think if you're honest, the reason I say all of this is not that I think, I mean, of course you shouldn't serve your children up to this kind of dysfunction, but if you're honest enough with yourself, you won't do it.
Because it'll become so clear what it costs you and what it costs your children that...
You won't even be that tempted.
So, just relentless honesty.
Now, if you say, well, I want my children to grow up with a sense of family, and I didn't have as much family, and it's family, and it's a good thing, and she likes her cousin, and my daughter, and we can have some good time.
Then you're not being honest, because then you're pretending that there's something going on that's not what's going on.
What's going on is you're afraid of being lonely, you're afraid of being ostracized, you're afraid of being bad-mouthed, you're afraid of being attacked, and so you appease.
I believe that's the truth of what's going on.
All this other stuff just seems like a bunch of frou-frou, a bunch of excuses, right?
It's pretending that there's value in really crazy dysfunctional people.
Well, that's one of the reasons why I called, too, because it's easy to look at other people and say, you know, this is what I see going on.
It's a much harder thing to look inward, and especially with how much dysfunction it has caused.
It's really hard for us to look inward and say, okay, well, you know, this is...
What's going to be... If it was just us, we know what we would do.
What would you do? We would run.
We're done. Wait a minute.
I'm so sorry to interrupt you because I just had a long speech, but I don't want to pretend my mind just wasn't blown.
If it was just you and your husband, you'd run from this family.
But because your children are involved, you don't.
Because... My question was, am I projecting onto them what my experience has been?
And saying, because my experience is really bad with your aunt, because my experience with other family members are bad, because they don't like me because of X, Y, and Z reasons, that means you can't participate in the family.
So that was where I was stuck.
No, but you said that if there were no kids involved, you and your husband would run.
Yes, but because my children...
But why wouldn't you have those same self-doubts about your behavior if it was just you and your husband?
Because it's not just us that we're thinking about.
We're thinking about our kids.
We know what it is that we talk to.
I can't stand these people.
I want to get away from them because they're so dysfunctional.
Here you go, kids. You deal with them.
What? Well, are they going to have that relationship with them?
No way! You can't stand these people.
You want to get away from them. Yes.
But you think your kids can handle them.
You can't handle them, but your kids can.
Because, you know, they're in kindergarten and grade six.
They could have a completely different experience, I guess, is what we were thinking, was that, you know, they would have a different experience with Auntie because there was less...
I don't know. Less what?
Less animosity built up, less history, less...
Oh, but don't worry, they'll accumulate that history just as you did.
Right? Yeah.
It's greatly possible.
Oh, so you would blame yourself to some degree saying, I don't know, like you're holding grudges and your kids don't have the same history, so they won't hold as many grudges.
Right. Well, if somebody, if I was, let's just say I was the kid, and my mom said, you can't go out and spend time with your aunt because she's not so.
I mean, that would perk up my curiosity.
Well, you wouldn't say it like that, right?
And you wouldn't start off like that.
You'd start off by apologizing.
Right? Apologizing to my kids.
Well, yeah, because if you say, I expose you to people that I consider so toxic, I would flee the state to get away from them.
Yeah. You'd say, I'm really sorry that I didn't stand up for you and protect you from people that I find horrendous.
Wouldn't you start off by apologizing to them?
Yes. We've had similar, we have had similar conversations.
What do you mean? Things come up and the kids notice things.
And so, you know, I'll talk to them about a little bit about what's going on and just, you know, apologize that that's kind of how it is.
What do you mean that's how it is?
If that's how it is, you can't apologize.
There's no point apologizing.
You can only apologize for decisions that you've made.
So if you say, I apologize for decisions that I've made, but it's inevitable, then you're contradicting yourself, right?
Yeah. I mean, you don't apologize to your children for getting older, do you?
Because that's inevitable.
That's a good thing. The alternative is worse.
Grow, child. Right.
You don't apologize to your children for the fact that there's gravity because that's out of your control.
But if you're apologizing, it means that you made a bad decision.
But then you can't say, but that's just the way it is because that's saying that you didn't make a decision.
Gravity is just the way it is.
Aging is just the way it is.
Mm-hmm. Would you and your husband leave the geographical vicinity if you didn't have kids and these people were around?
Yes, and we are considering it.
Before we had kids, we were considering it just based off of the fact that we wanted to get away and start our lives without influence.
That didn't end up happening.
What do you mean that didn't end up happening?
God, trying to get free will and choice into you is like trying to put a pterodactyl into a birdcage.
Trust me, I've tried.
What do you mean that didn't happen?
Things don't happen.
You make choices. Okay.
Well, we chose to stay in the careers and jobs that we had.
Thank you. Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
I do know what you mean.
And it's just the words that I'm using, but I do know what you mean.
Oh, I know it's the words that you're using.
Oh, I know, and I know why it's the words that you're using, and that's why I'm pointing it out.
Uh-huh. Hot potato, free will, hot potato, free will.
It's the game we play. I've done it, too.
I understand. Yeah.
So you wanted to get away.
You're thinking of moving away, but then when you had kids, you're like, oh, no, we should stay.
It's just, we never took the opportunity to leave.
Okay, so, I mean, if you want to not spend time with these people, you can move, right?
Yes. Hey kids, we're going on a great adventure to Sanity Town!
And it's just us.
Yeah. I mean, there's ways to do it that aren't quite as explicit, particularly for the younger kid, right?
But your oldest child is either going through or on the verge of going through puberty, right?
Yeah. Now's the time when they're going to be imprinted in adult romantic relationships.
Because, you know, in the latency period, you know, people don't even...
The kids don't even really think about that stuff too much, right?
But when they hit puberty, suddenly they're like, oh, eggs colon, sperm colon, got to figure out how to reproduce.
And the way that you figure out how to reproduce is you look at the people around you who've reproduced and you copy that.
Of course, right? You mimic that which has been reproductively successful in your environment in the past.
You imprint on the adult relationships around you.
That's puberty, man.
That's what happens during puberty.
So you say, well, you know, it doesn't really matter.
They get along well when they're younger.
And it's like, yeah, for sure, maybe.
But when the kids get older, particularly your oldest kid, they're going to start imprinting.
And they're going to say, oh, well, this crazy person has kids.
And this person crazy, crazy person has kids.
And they're in charge.
And they dominate.
So I want to be drawn to the most powerful person who has children.
And I'm going to imprint on that.
Because we all seek power.
We all seek dominance.
And we all seek to reproduce.
And if the most powerful person in the environment is the craziest person, and they have kids, they're the new parent.
Yep, I could see that.
Because you're going to be drawn to that naturally anyway.
So you may not have all the time in the world.
Those are the most entertaining and exciting people.
Yeah. And if they're the new parent, the crazy people are the new parent.
You are the annoying loser she happens to be stuck with.
Because if they bond with the crazy people, the crazy people have some contempt for you, right?
The crazy people have contempt for me, 100%.
Right. So then, she has a choice.
She can bond with you, or continue her bond with you, which means...
Being the person who bows down before and loses against the crazy people or she can bond with the crazy people who have power and authority and control.
And then she's going to internalize their contempt for you.
And you're done.
Right. Appeasement comes when we don't think of the costs.
Like cigarette smokers, right?
I mean, you smoke because each cigarette is nice.
And the only way you continue smoking is because you avoid the consequences.
If I'm trying to avoid my children falling into the same trap that we have, then I'm either going to have to step boundaries and step up to the plate and be the more dominant one in order for them not to...
In order for them not to either be the appeaser or to join in on the pitchforking.
You know what it's like with younger kids.
For me, it was dinosaurs and trains.
You're drawn to that which has power.
Dinosaurs, you know, big stompy things taller than a building.
Of course you're drawn to that because as a kid you want power.
You acutely feel your deficiency of power and so you bond yourself and model yourself and are fascinated by that which has power.
For my daughter, it's dragons.
She's mad about dragons because they're huge and powerful and glorious and beautiful and, you know, that's what she's drawn to.
So we're drawn to that which has the most power.
For little kids, you know, it can be a number of things.
Movie stars, pop stars, firemen who can carry people out of burning buildings, astronauts who can float around the world, policemen who can apprehend bad guys.
Whoever has power, we're drawn to.
This is why the left wins so much, because they own so much, they control so much.
People are just drawn to it, imprinted like gravity well.
Now, the teenage equivalent of...
The little kid's love with dinosaurs and trains and dragons and all the things that have power is who's socially dominant in the hierarchy around me.
And I will model my personhood after that person.
They sniff.
They sniff out the hierarchy.
You know, it's like taking a laser pointer and waving it Against the spiderweb in the middle of the night, you get this sense, this scheme, this twisted, half-broken crossword puzzle of stickiness.
And you map the social hierarchy around you when you're a teenager.
And you gravitate to whoever has the most power.
Right. And Anne, that ain't you.
Yet. Right.
I think, I definitely, in my oldest one, I see her What do you mean?
I see her craving to feel her own strength and power in life as well.
And who has the most power in your environment?
It ain't me!
Who is it who has the most power?
Oh, the people that probably make us run around a little bit.
It's probably grandma. Which individual, if you had to guess, let's wave your laser pointer at the spider web of power, right?
So which person do you think has the most power?
Who are you the most afraid of?
Probably my mother-in-law.
Right. Right.
Because I actually like her.
And if I ditch my sister-in-law, then I lose...
My mother-in-law as well.
She's, you know...
You gain your kids. That seems like a pretty good bargain.
Yep. Yep.
And then, you know, my husband loses his mom and his dad.
And so that's, I think, probably what we're most afraid of with leaving behind sister-in-law.
Yeah. And that's why we comply and jump through hoops, is because we don't want to lose the favor of mom and dad.
And it's not a good power, right?
I mean, it's not like she has the power to enforce boundaries and good behavior in people, right?
No. No, she...
Oh, I... She's just a...
Powerful force in our lives.
Just dominant. Just dominant and bullying, right?
Controlling. And willing to escalate, right?
This is a big problem with relationships, that if one person is willing to escalate and go nuts, and the other person isn't, you're in a situation of appeasement by definition.
Right. You get to match the energy.
Yeah, you either escalate with them to the heights of Crazy Mountain, or you fall.
Or you detach.
Funny game, the only way to win is not to play.
Yep, that's...
You know, and that's kind of where, and that's when the pitchforks come out, right?
So you say, I'm going to get, you know, just as wrapped up in this thing, because it's all imaginary.
None of it's real. Anything that, you know, is going on that sister-in-law gets upset about, it's just whatever she thinks up in her mind and gets everyone else to rally around.
So then if you escalate it to the same point, then that feeds it.
But if you don't pay any mind to any attention to it, then that also, you know, But here's the big issue, Anne. The big issue, I don't think, even has to do with your family of origins.
And I don't want to sound unsympathetic to your dilemma because it is a huge dilemma and I have massive sympathy for it.
So I don't want to be glib and say, well, the answers are easy and you should just do X. It is a horrible, horrible dilemma.
I don't have an enemy bad enough that I would wish this kind of situation on.
So I really, really want to just express my massive sympathies for even having these challenges and these problems in your life.
This is what nobody would ever wish for, nobody would ever want, and you'd give just about anything to not have this situation.
So I just wanted to really express that because I've been kind of like a tough guy, but, you know, I'm giving my own sort of history with how difficult it is.
So I just want to mention that.
You have to be tough.
I mean, like I said, nobody likes hearing the truth.
But if you don't say it, if you can't even work out the truth for yourself and you've got to call into a radio show and ask a stranger over the internet, What am I doing here?
What's actually happening and going on?
I mean, obviously...
Strange, but not a stranger.
Alright. But here's the challenge.
What's this going to do to your relationship with your husband?
Because your relationship with your husband has been forged and formed to a large degree, certainly since kids, with this mutual appeasement.
And so, is this going to be a challenge for your relationship with your husband?
Because are you guys going to maybe end up on the same page about how to deal with things moving forward?
I believe so now.
Obviously, probably like six, seven years ago, we struggled a lot through a lot of things because of his family.
And we just kind of got to the point where we said, you know what, F this, you know, we're not going to, we don't care anymore.
We're not going to jump through as many hoops.
And people got mad.
And then, you know what the strangest thing was, is that they kind of stopped Being as mad at us.
And we stopped being in the middle of the tornado in the target all the time.
And then, you know, of course we had kids and then the decision was, you know, let's try to reenter the family and, you know, allow them to have relationships with grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins.
So I think he would be on, we would obviously decide together, but he's on the same, he and I are on the same page more or less because we have gone through so much family BS together.
We know more or less where each other stands.
And so he was encouraging me as well to call on his radio show.
I mean, he's Watching the kids, he's curious to know what your answer is in our conversation as well.
What do you think your eldest child would say if you asked her about these relationships?
I'm not saying you should or shouldn't.
I'm just kind of curious what she would say.
She would probably be upset about it.
No, no, no. If you asked her about these relationships, not if you came to her with a conclusion.
So faster.
Okay.
She would say she's probably noticed things.
Gosh, I don't know what she would say.
She definitely pays attention, and she has ears, and she has eyes, and so she sees and hears things.
She'd probably want more explanation than we've given her.
No, no. See, now you're back to asking her for explanations, right?
Which is her being passive and you doing the work.
Does she have, I would assume, that she has friends who have more functional families than your extended?
Yeah. Okay, so she knows, she sees the difference, right?
It's not like everyone in her life is like this and is part of the extended family, right?
Right. She knows that, you know, she has family and they do different things than her friends' families.
Right. So, I would say that if she's old enough, she may be old enough.
I mean, you have to be the final judge.
You're the parent. But I would certainly start asking questions about what she thinks.
Good, bad, indifferent.
Map things from her perspective.
Okay. Because she's going to have some fascinating things to say.
It may take her a while to feel safe enough, to be honest.
So this may be a conversation topic you have to go back and forth with.
But I, I mean, I tell you, you know, kids are just incredible with the things that they notice and the things that they, I mean, the things that I can talk about with my daughter age appropriately are just amazing.
And she's younger than yours.
I'm sorry? Yeah. She's quite articulate.
She and I do talk a lot.
I don't doubt it. You know, if your husband's anything like you, then she's got some verbal skills.
So, yeah, I would try and map that relationship or those thoughts or those feelings because you need to have the perspectives of those around you so that you can make decisions without being unduly influenced by the unconscious thoughts of others.
To make them explicit makes them much more easy to process and deal with to make sure that you don't make a decision based upon what other people think that you're not aware of.
Right.
Right.
How do you feel about what we're talking about?
You know, sometimes it's frustrating, but it's when you need to hear something, it's almost like a relief.
Sure. Because sometimes when you get into situations like this, it's almost like you're the one that's treated like you're the problem.
And it kind of makes you feel like, oh my gosh, am I the problem?
Am I the crazy one?
Am I the one that's not understanding this picture?
You know? And so it gives you the runaround, you know, and I've always had this, before I met my husband, the way that I, you know, I often left situations.
So it's kind of like, I stood away, I went away from people that made me feel like I was hard to love.
I said, all right, well, we're good, we're done.
And I ran away from that probably a little bit too much.
And when, you know, you come into a relationship with someone else, and it's a lot of Their family and their problems, you know, you also have to be with another person who's working through that stuff as well.
So it's been an interesting journey and we're coming to this kind of crux of it where we're looking around going, well, you know, we're not so young anymore.
We're a little bit smarter.
We've gained a lot of life experience.
We're finally getting to the point where We're looking around, you know, kind of like in your mid-30s, you go, I don't need all this.
I don't need all this drama.
I don't need all this stuff. Yeah, that certainly was my time frame, early to mid-30s.
Yeah. So we were holding on to it, you know, having the discussion, what's the benefit for the kids?
Because if it was just us, you know, we would have made some different decisions.
Like, we have very good family members that have kind of gone away.
Yeah. You know, we would have more or less gone along the same lines that they did, probably just keeping in contact with a couple people.
Right, there are other people who've...
Oh, who fled the family?
Yes. Wow.
There's one daughter that won't even tell her mom where she lives.
You know, mom's never met, grandchild, that type of thing.
There's another one where an uncle, similar situation.
Well, you might want to talk to those people too.
Tell them that there'll be a Chinese wall between you and the family, and it may take a while to get that kind of trust, but you might want to hear what their stories are as well?
Well, we've done that, and we were building relationships, but then they got, because we were still associating with the family.
Oh, yeah, they're kind of quiet, right?
They don't want to, right. Yeah, so they, in a sense, they were developing, you know, trust with us, but it was very difficult, especially for the one that left because of her mom, like, yeah.
She had a really interesting situation.
So she was afraid that, you know, it would be found out that we were talking.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow.
The real refugees, right?
Like, real, like, don't dox me to mom.
That's some pretty rough stuff.
Well, there's a saying that says, God forgives, but Sicilians don't.
And, you know, we've got a couple Uncle Louys in Chicago that make cement shoes.
Right. So... But you have excellent brickwork in your basement.
A little bit.
So anyway, she has a fear inside of her that mom's going to find her and come after her.
It was so severe that she could have gone to jail because of the things that her mom had done.
So yeah, so she was super afraid.
The other one just, oh my gosh, he's just angry at the family and wants to get as far away as possible.
So he and his wife, they really don't associate with much of anybody.
And then the other, there's somebody else too that's a very similar situation.
They just are really angry at their dad and don't want to have anything to do with the family or anybody in it.
So we've Before all this happened, we really liked them and we looked forward to spending time with them when we would go to places.
We pretty much just spent our time engaging with them.
So if the people who got away are saner, then you've lost contact with the saner people by staying with the crazy people.
Yes. Yep.
That's rough too, right? That's because of mom and dad.
Well, for them too, right?
Yeah. Well, yeah, so, and I've always suggested people who were even contemplating taking a break from family that this is something, it's a huge decision, it's very difficult, particularly for the lack of social support that you'll get.
And I always strongly suggest to talk to a therapist who's had some experience with these kinds of situations because it is a very, it can be a very destabilizing thing to do.
I mean, I sympathize with it.
I'm certainly open to it as a course of action because it is universal principle.
That you don't have to spend time with abusive people or crazy people.
This is just one of these, you know, you can't support women leaving abusive marriages and then not support people leaving other abusive relationships.
That's just hypocritical. But, again, lack of social support, big problems with it, and it is usually worth, and I would strongly suggest, To talk to a therapist, even just to sort of get the lay of the land, so to speak, and figure out a strategy and put yourself under the guidance or feedback of somebody who's helped people navigate these waters before.
That would be my strong suggestion.
And how are you feeling?
We've done that. We've done that in the past.
I'm sorry? I was just saying that we have done that in the past, especially when things were very rocky and difficult and it would help.
Good, good. Okay. And how are you feeling now?
I feel pretty good, Stefan.
I really appreciate our conversation today.
I appreciate your taking some time out and especially running over a lot of water with me.
Time out? That's what I do! Well, time out, I don't know.
That's what you do. That's what I do.
Will you keep me posted on how things are going?
Yeah, sure. That'd be great.
All right. And don't forget to talk to your daughter.
Oh, son. You don't have to tell me about it.
All right. Thank you, everyone, so much.
Thank you to the callers. A wonderful, wonderful evening's conversation.
It is something that I treasure as part of my week.
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