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July 21, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:47
4149 This Is A Matter Of Life And Death
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Hi everybody, Stefan Moly-Dee from Freedom Aid Radio.
Are you ready to ramble?
I hope so, because, oh man, I don't know if it's like a 50 thing.
50 years old, by golly.
But my brain is...
Break it away from the present and it's like swimming back upstream like a salmon looking out to crap a few eggs and make a whole bunch of new salmon.
It's a weird thing. I'm falling backwards through time at the moment.
And I've been doing a bunch of reading on genetics and personality and how much of who we are is...
Some of her personality is water and some of it is the container.
And the water can slosh around in the container, but it can't change the shape of the container.
And some of the mysteries of my early life that were confusing at the time, and for which I thought I had answers, I am reopening these wounds.
Some of them are real, real wounds.
And going back to look at the origin narrative of my existence...
It's like happening against my will.
Like my mind is just tumbling backwards through time and examining days long dead and sometimes people long gone.
And one of them, I'm going to call him Bob.
And Bob was a friend of mine.
From about the age of 12 to about the age of 14.
We met in school and we both had some similar interests and we hung out.
And Bob was funny, engaging, fairly smart, a little cold-hearted, a little nutty at times.
And I definitely had the amygdala storm, like just when he would get upset, there would just be this...
This irrepressible storm.
And we went, I don't know if this is, I mean, we went through puberty together.
I mean, it's not like we were whipping out and comparing pubes or anything, but we just went through puberty together, and that's kind of like a big deal.
Like, I remember being out on tennis court when I first, I got me some whiskers.
Like, I just, I went through puberty together.
That's kind of, in a sense, a biochemical trial by fire or something like that.
And we both had the challenge.
His family had more money.
He was the only child of a single mom.
Only son of a single mom.
That is not a good combination in my experience.
That's generally pretty negative in terms of life outcomes.
And his was particularly disastrous, as we'll get to in a bit.
So we had the challenge of no money.
You get no money. Like, I had jobs, so I wasn't as available.
I got jobs from the age of 12 onwards.
And in Canada.
And he didn't, but we had the challenge.
So dirt biking became like a big thing.
So he was able to afford, like his family, his mom was able to buy him a dirt bike.
I had to kind of piece one together out of crap I found in garbage dumps and stuff like that.
And he had a cool dirt bike with shock absorbers and so on.
And he was a wild rider, like a wild rider.
If you ever watch these sort of home videos or funny videos or Fail Army or whatever, I mean, there are people who just do these nutty things, and for the life of me, I cannot figure out why.
Why? Why? Why, Jackie Chanface, why would you do these things?
You're not getting paid for them.
I mean, why are you trying to bike off this thing?
Why are you trying to do this skateboard down these railings and so on?
And I just never quite...
I mean, I like doing cool tricks on the bike and all that, but I've just never understood this.
Like, for me, when I was a kid, we had...
Skateboards, right? And skateboards were not for, like, the seeming goal with skateboards these days is to flip them around 19 times and then embed them in your groin and not really go anywhere.
But we had, when I was a kid in England, we lived on this, it's called an estate, but it really is not, it's not Downton Abbey, it's not what you're thinking of.
And there was sort of the apartments or the flats at the top, and then there were like the low-rent Jim Morrison-style cottages, bungalows down at the bottom, which is where the, you know, the guys with the shirtless, the sleeveless shirts called the wife beaters and so on.
They hung around on welfare and drinking a lot during the day and playing a lot of rock and roll music and snarling at anyone who got on the tattered remnants of their lawns.
And there was a pathway, a sort of circular curling pathway that went from the top of the estate down to the bungalows at the bottom, which was like Mordor for me.
Like, it was really, I mean, it was a pretty dark and sinister place.
You didn't spend much time down there if you could avoid it.
This was, I guess, a generation into the welfare state.
And it was just fading.
Like, it was considered to be shameful, but it was just now it became sort of like you're a sucker if you work kind of thing.
The culture had adapted to the law as it generally does.
Rarely for the better. And culture adapts positively to the diminishment of laws, almost never positively to the expansion of laws.
And we used to get on our skateboards, and again, mine was a found one.
We'd get on our skateboards, and we would get a handful of sticks, a handful of sticks, and we would go down this sort of curving hill, which was a real challenge, and there was these metal bars I remember going into when I built a go-kart with pram wheels and wood and all that.
I remember going into that go-kart with my knees up around my chest and like, You know, like the metal went into my shins.
And man, getting a barked shin is a special kind of hell.
I'd rather have an ice cream headache than a barked shin.
That's like an ice cream headache.
A friend of mine used to make jokes.
If you could like will ice cream headaches on people, you could actually just rule the world because everybody would do whatever the hell you wanted just to avoid a continuation of the ice cream headache, which I actually kind of agree with.
I had a brain freeze the other day when having a smoothie with my daughter because, you know, she has moderation But we would go down with these handful of sticks on our skateboards and we would try and drop them in front of each other.
Because if you got the right size stick and you dropped it at the right angle, then this person's skateboard would stop.
They just... Like it would just stop.
And then they'd go flying off their skateboard.
So we would go down trying to win a race and then trying to drop these sticks.
And then you'd have to dodge the sticks and so on.
It was a blast.
My God. Childhood was rough and great in many ways.
It was rough at home and great, great out.
So, yeah, Bob and I went through puberty together, and I remember walking down...
This is a very, very vivid memory for me.
This is walking along...
Don Mills Road, opposite from the mall, between Eglinton and Lawrence.
And we were walking down this hill, then across the street.
This is where I used to have a paper route.
And... I mean, we're probably like 13 or so, like real freaks and geeks territory.
And these two cute girls walked by.
And I turned around and my friend and I both turned around to check them out and saw that they had turned around to check us out.
Oh! Glory be!
I have my first scrap of sexual market value!
Praise be Lord! So that was...
I just remember that being like it's one of these...
Oh! It was my first tiny sliver of game, or at least the possibility of game.
And that's, you know, going through the puberty thing and talking about girls and questioning, you know, whether you're attractive, how attractive you are.
And trust me, you're always way more attractive looking back in time then.
I came across some old pictures.
I'll post them someday. I came across some old pictures of me as a teenager.
I'm like... It's true, you know, you look back, you have all these insecurities at the time, you're like, pretty good looking kid.
So we had the challenge of filling up time with no money.
And he was, of course, partly constrained by I had no money.
And it was a challenge.
This is back in the day.
Oh, man. For $1.90, you could go downtown and see a movie.
$1.90. I remember this very clearly, because I remember I got locked out.
I had money. I had four bucks in the house, so we could both go down, because it was 20 cents on the bus and $1.50 to get into the movie.
They used to have $2 Tuesdays, but it was $1.50 to get in.
We wanted to go see Rocky, because Rocky came out, which was, I mean...
It's a good film, but what it did do was stimulate a lot of working out among people, which, you know, had its benefits that it needed for me.
And I remember we got locked out.
And I was a lot of times getting locked out as a kid because I would lose my keys and I would be too terrified to tell my mom that I'd lost my keys.
And so I would just keep leaving the door unlocked and then hope that it stayed unlocked and all that kind of stuff, right?
Even though my name wasn't on my keys, my mom would think somehow someone had her keys, and therefore they'd be able to get in.
So we were locked out, and we wanted to go and see Rocky.
And I remember I had a car that we were trying to break into my own apartment with this guy.
Anyway, so...
For the most part, he would, you know, I didn't have any money, so he wouldn't do stuff that involved money.
And we both kind of got into video games, which was a big thing for me when I was a kid.
The bowling alley, long gone from Dom Mills, wherein I got into some trouble.
Ah, another time. We did a lot of dirt biking.
There probably still are.
I guess I was last walking these trails about 15 years ago.
But in the Don Valley, like back in behind Don Mills School and so on, there's great paths.
I mean, really great paths.
And great for dirt biking and hiking.
And I used to spend a lot of time out there walking.
Because, you know, you can walk and talk, which is a great thing I love to do, as you can imagine.
That's why I stand by and do these shows.
And sitting is the new smoking.
But we would...
We would dirt bike a lot.
And it wasn't really...
Again, I'm not really that much into tricks because...
You know, I have the capacity to see consequences and costs and benefits and the consequences were highly negative and the benefits were highly dubious and the costs, right?
So, but yeah, he was a crazy guy on the dirt bike.
And we had sort of kind of ups and downs when it came to our relationship.
His temper was pretty significant and he would get, like he'd sort of push his mom up against the wall and a lot of aggression and I just, I didn't, I wasn't really down for that.
So I'd take sort of breaks. And anyway, then, again, he's very charismatic, very funny.
And so we'd end up hanging out again.
You know, some of this frenemy stuff, this makeup, breakup stuff for relationships, male and female, like sort of same-sex friendships and so on.
You know, it can happen. But yeah, he had a cold side for sure.
So I, you know, didn't have any gloves.
And look, I wasn't so poor that we could never afford gloves, but what happened is if I lost my gloves, I wouldn't say anything.
It was constant hiding of...
Disastrous! Who last had the flashlight?
We need the flashlight.
It was you! Ha! Right?
I mean, this NKVD apparently style was not unknown in my household.
So I can't remember if we didn't have gloves.
I lost gloves. But we went dirt biking in some really crazy cold November day.
It was November, I think. We went dirt biking.
My hands, like, you know, just frozen claws.
And I remember saying to Bob, he had these, you know, big, giant oven mitt hockey gloves, and I remember saying, listen, can I just, you know, five minutes, let me have them for five minutes, warm my hands up.
He's like, why don't you bring your gloves?
You know, when you're a poor kid or you don't have access to stuff, well, you sometimes are tempted to make things up and say, well, you know, I left them here.
Like you claim incompetence rather than poverty, because incompetence is...
Somehow less shameful, right, than poverty, because poverty indicates, you know, often indicates a not very positive gene pool, or, you know, anyway, you take it personally, because that which causes the poverty in your parents is partly mixed up in you, and anyway, so, and he wouldn't let me have the gloves, and it was that kind of stuff where I'd be like, ah, forget I'm hanging out with, I've got other friends in my hand.
And then, you know, something would happen to hang out together or whatever, right?
And we built a train set together.
I remember that. I loved trains, model trains.
And I remember his mom had a boyfriend who had a cottage.
And he had a train set.
Ah, fantastic. I was very, very excited about the train set.
And honestly, no idea where I got all this stuff from.
I remember doing the papier-mâché, the chicken wire, the newspapers, and, you know, building the mountains.
And that was fantastic.
I actually slept under the train set because we had a pretty small apartment.
And the train set was above me.
I slept under the train set because otherwise I wouldn't have had any room for it because no basement would live in a flat.
And it sounds ridiculous, but this is, you know, back in the days of innocence.
We had a model train.
I had a model train on the train set.
Some of them were his. And, oh, I have big presents and so on.
Friends whose parents were a little richer would Get me stuff for my birthday.
I know that's how I accumulated some of it.
And secondhand stores as well, garage sales.
I'm going to pick up stuff from there. But we had one train that constantly fell off the track.
It would go around the corner. Again, it sounds ridiculous.
This is how naive we were.
We called it jerk-off because it kept jerking itself off the tracks every time you go, jerk-off.
And we were on the phone talking about this toy train called Jerkoff, and I remember someone's parents, I can't remember who's, got very upset, because obviously they didn't know what we were talking about in the context.
We were talking about it, and I don't know.
It was just kind of funny.
But the exploration of sexual market value, which happens when you go through puberty, is...
Pretty important. He was a funny guy, but he was cold when interests collided.
He had a pretty kind mom in many ways.
I think she was out of her depth.
He had wild energy.
He had, I think, a lot of...
Like, he was a dude. He was a dude.
And, you know, the sense of risk-taking, some of the coldness, I mean...
But his mom was kind of out of her depth in terms of trying to control him, trying to manage him, and so on.
And this was the aggression that I don't think she had much of a capacity to handle in any kind of productive way, way out of her depth.
But she did have some real kindness.
I remember for my 13th birthday, I was, you know, out doing my thing, and...
Came home and got progressively more morose over the course of the evening.
I remember my mom saying, well, what's the matter?
And I said, well, Bob's mom.
It's not his real name. Bob's mom was the only person the entire day who remembered that it was my birthday.
And that was rough, you know.
You know, this is back in the days when, you know, birthdays really meant something.
And I remember she gave me $5 for my birthday.
And you know how long I held onto that $5 for?
I mean, I could have spent it on hell that $5.
And she was nice. I remember when I was, I guess it was 1979.
To 1980. It was a decade, and I've always loved New Year's Eve.
It's fantastic. I mean, I went to a couple of great parties when I was a kid, like my mom would go and some friends.
Great parties. So I always loved New Year's Eve, and especially the decade New Year's.
That's a big deal, right?
And I remember my mom had gone out somewhere, and I was over at my friend Bob's house.
He lived in a townhouse.
And he and his mom weren't really into New Year's.
They just went to bed. And I remember sitting with a radio, a little portable radio, listening to people having fun thousands of miles away as I struggled to stay awake in the darkness and sadness of an empty New Year's.
But I had a place to go.
And I remember also there were these girls who were gymnasts at a party at Bob's house.
And I guess I was 13 or 14 and I I wanted to impress them, and so I wanted to show them how I could do a handstand against a wall.
I slipped and put my head through the wall.
Don't you just hate saying to people, I put a hole in your wall?
Terrible. Anyway, so...
What happened was things came to a head.
So as I... I was very shy when I was a kid.
More shy. I'm not shy when I was a kid.
And that... I sort of grew out of that.
And some of it was wild and some of it was just, you know, the bubbles of personality rising in adulthood.
But here's what happened. So we were biking.
And I remember cops came by.
We were playing frisbee in the mall parking lot.
Cops came by. What are you doing?
Not going home, pretty much.
So we were biking back from Edwards Gardens.
I think we were biking at Edwards Gardens.
We were biking back, and when you had a bike, you didn't need a car.
You could get anywhere if you were willing to keep biking.
So we were biking back, and I was biking ahead of Bob.
And there was a rock on the sidewalk, so I swerved to avoid it, and he nearly ran into me.
And again, I knew he had a bad temper, and often I would just kind of, okay, okay, be conciliatory and so on.
But for some reason, I don't know why.
It could just, again, just be getting older.
I just was done with that.
It kind of happened ever since.
But that one moment, I remember very clearly.
And Bob got really angry, and he said, you cut me off, man.
And I said, no, no, no.
You were tailgating.
Tough call, right? Tough call.
I mean, you know, I know in a car, if you're behind, you bump in.
So what's your fault and all? But was he tailgating or did I cut him off?
If I cut him off, it's kind of my fault.
I just randomly biked in front of him for no reason, right?
But if he was tailgating, then the fault is his.
Whose fault was? The near collision.
And it's a funny thing, because it mattered at the time.
And actually, it did matter. At the time, he said, well, you know, it's just a near collision.
What does it matter? Your friendship and blah, blah, blah.
But it kind of did matter. It kind of did matter because it came down to...
He was tailgating.
Listen, if you have to swerve to avoid something on the road, on the sidewalk, and someone almost crashes into you, sorry, it's their fault.
It's their fault. You know, if I'm on the road, sounds like I'm adjudicating something decades later, but it's important because these principles matter.
They can be life-defining moments, which way your life goes, one way or the other.
You know, if I'm driving up north and someone, like I'm so close to behind someone that they have to stop because there's a deer on the road and I go crashing, it's my fault.
You cut me off! No, you were tailgating.
You're going to stay two cars distance, right?
So we had this conflict.
Did I cut him off, or was he tailgating?
And I knew, of course, that if I appeased him, then things would be okay.
But they wouldn't, right?
You understand. I would win, or things would calm down in the moment, but I would lose something important.
Not just with him, but in my life, as a principle.
And I didn't, you know, I didn't abstract it in my, but it was happening.
Testosterone spigot was on, baby.
But no, I mean, you understand it was important.
I couldn't just say, well, you know, I'm sorry that I didn't crash into a rock on the sidewalk and, you know, you were tailgating.
You were too close to me. And I didn't back down.
And he went nuts.
You know, people say that. No, he really went nuts.
It was like a horror movie.
He started yelling and screaming, and I've always been freaked out by that, because it's like, hey, don't you know there's people around?
Well, it was really late at night, so there wasn't really anyone around.
And we went through the mall parking lot and went to the apartment building, and he was screaming at me.
And I was like, he would bike downstairs, I wouldn't, you know?
I like the capacity to reproduce.
Anyway, so he was kind of barreling after me, and I crossed the road, and there weren't many cars on the road, thankfully.
And he's screaming at me, and he's biking after me, and I'm going down the stairs, and I'm fumbling into my pocket, trying to get out my key to the door to get in, because it was one of the apartment buildings.
You get in, you close the door, it locks, right?
And somebody can wait, I guess, for someone else to come in and slip in with them.
But that was in the side door, and I'm like, he's coming down the stairs on his bike, and I'm like, I'm keying and throwing my bike in and diving in and closing my doors as he's coming up.
Right? I mean, Lourdes, Lourdes, Lourdes.
It was really intense.
And, you know, heart pounding.
But I was so glad I did it.
Like, no, you were tailgating.
Sorry, Bob. You were tailgating.
And I go up to my apartment and nobody else was there.
And... I was on like the fifth floor.
We moved a couple of times in that building, but I think that time we were at the fifth floor, fourth floor or fifth floor.
Door closed, balcony door closed.
I can hear him screaming.
And I kind of peek over the balcony and he's throwing his bike around and just like, holy God.
Nuts. Could not accept that he was tailgating.
And now, of course, after that, I mean, there was no...
I mean, no more friendship.
I mean, what can you say?
You can't... I mean, he did, you know, I think like a couple of months later, six months later, he called me up and said, hey, man, you...
You have a football of mine.
I want it back. And, you know, I can't remember what happened, but I'll get it back to you at some point.
I'll bring it to school. Whatever, right?
Now, of course, I was, you know, there were over a thousand kids in my school, so I could...
And I graduated to different friends, and I think better friends, obviously.
They got into my Dungeons& Dragons crowd, and everyone went to college, became a professional.
And, you know, it was... It was a step up, but it was...
Because it sort of indicated to me that like that, I don't know whether to call it self-indulgence or not, because he was, you know, 14 or whatever, right?
But just having the capacity to blow up to that degree and then not say, you know, mom, I need help or, you know, I just blew up a friendship of years and Or apologize or, you know, just, right?
Man, it's bad. It's bad.
You know, if you've had people in your life where if you stand up for something you think is true and they just continue to escalate and like no end in sight and it's like, yikes, it is not good.
And you can buy a temporary peace with appeasement, but you lose yourself.
You lose pretty much everything over time.
And so... I'll tell you the end of the story, and there is an end sadly to the story, but thinking about how much of me or how much of you is not under our control, authority, responsibility, or part of our virtue is pretty important.
So there's this rule.
It's general. Like 16% of kids have genes that are troublesome.
16% of kids have genes that are strong, so to speak.
And there's a bunch of kids in the middle that can go either way depending on environment.
Now maybe Bob had the genes that just was this way inclined, plus the bad environment.
It doesn't help. And maybe I just had these genes that made me kind of indestructible regardless of environment.
If I think, oh, philosophy will save you from this.
Well, philosophy can't save you from genetics.
It can help. I think it can help, but it can't save you from genetics.
Philosophy can't turn you from one organism into another.
I guess leftist pseudo-philosophy can change you from one gender to another, but you can't go from the outie to the innie based on philosophy.
And so I think, well, I got philosophy and then I was saved, but maybe I was saved to some degree by genetics and philosophy was part of that.
I don't know. But how much tragedy there is wrapped up in genetics, in that which is beyond people's control.
Don't get me wrong, I still think that philosophy is valid and, you know, there's still a huge chunk of kids in the middle, of people in the middle, of souls in the middle that can go either way if they get the right information.
Some people will die young even if they diet and exercise.
And I've known some. And some people will live to a ripe old age even if they drink and smoke.
But there's a lot of people in the middle.
You can go either way. But I've been going back in time and thinking about those I knew who may have had no chance.
Another friend of mine. It was a sweet, gentle kid.
We used to talk.
Oh, conversation.
It's rare finding kids who can have conversations and talk.
And his parents went to get him one morning and he was just dead.
He had a heart defect. Nobody knew about it.
He just died in his sleep. But he was my first peer great conversationalist.
We used to walk around in these random patterns in the recesses in school.
Just talking. He was a great kid.
He had one set of jeans and my friend Bob had another.
Maybe he could be helped.
Maybe he could be saved. Maybe he couldn't.
Ah, well, you see, it's a single mom, single son environment that's so destructive, but maybe it's because the same genetics that lead her to become a single mom are the same genetics that make him aggressive.
I don't know. But because I am so invested and wedded to the idea of choice, coming up against limitations to that choice is very hard.
It's heartbreaking. For me, I mean, maybe it's a relief for you, I don't know.
But it's humbling.
Because let me tell you what happened.
So what happened was, years after we were friends, but not many, my friend Bob was on a motorbike. my friend Bob was on a motorbike.
And The car ahead of him stopped.
And he didn't. And he went flying through the air.
Landed in a horrible way.
His helmet apparently had come off in the accident, or maybe it was loose, or maybe he wasn't wearing it.
I don't know.
But he died.
He died.
He was tailgating, you understand?
He was tailgating.
And you see the conflicts that you don't listen to can potentially be your undoing.
If he had accepted, I don't know, I don't know, this is pure theory, but if he had accepted my argument that he was tailgating and if he'd learned to keep more of a respectful distance when he was biking or motorbiking, if he listened, But our friendship died because he was tailgating, and then he died, I think, because he was tailgating.
Did he have a choice?
Could he have surmounted his fight or flight storm and come to reason?
I was able to, for which I took some pride, and for which I still take some pride.
I had a choice.
Did Bob have a choice?
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
I'm really curious.
Thank you. Thank you for listening.
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