Dec. 14, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:28:05
4266 "My Mother Wishes She Had Aborted Me!" Freedomain Call In
"I have been listening to the podcast for close to two years now. As the child of a single female parent with a high ACE score, I find many listeners' stories, and also Stefan's own experience, resonate strongly with my own. "If I had to describe my childhood in a word, I would struggle to make a choice between 'dysfunctional' and 'non-existent.' If you can envision a parent doing everything conceivably wrong short of sexual abuse or going to prison, you will come close to painting a picture of my life up to the age of 17."I feel as if I've been battling with the fallout from this experience all my life (not always effectively or intelligently) and am only now, in my third decade, finally coming close developing the psychological tools to repair the damage caused"I hope that sharing my experience via this medium will allow me to gain some valuable insight into what I can, and indeed should, be doing to, paraphrasing Nietzsche, 'better become who I am.' I also hope my doing so can provide comfort and encouragement to others who might be in a similar predicament."▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
Alright everyone, I'm here with Edward, and I think you're facing what a lot of people are facing, I think in your generation, maybe even in your gender, which is a kind of, if I understand it, a bit of purposelessness, a bit of ennui, that kind of stuff?
Yeah, I would say that's fair, yeah.
And an adverse childhood experience score of...
Seven. Oh, six. Six.
So I wonder if you could just, well, take me at least on a quick run-through through your history.
Okay, cool. I think a good way to frame it is one of my earliest memories of when I was, well, I would have been old enough to talk, so I guess, I don't know, three, four, an argument with my mother.
And this is the same argument that played out several times, but I remember this particular one sort of like It's like a foundation stone, if you like, of her screaming at me that my very existence was a huge inconvenience to her and she was very angry with herself for not having changed her mind about having an abortion.
Oh my god, three or four?
Well, any time. Yeah.
But three or four. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, that's fucking harsh.
Oh my god. Do you remember that's the gist?
Do you remember the phrase or the words?
Yeah. It was something along the lines of things would have been so much easier if I'd have had a coat hanger, which of course at the time I didn't understand.
But it wasn't like hanging you in a closet is a good thing either.
Yeah, I mean, I remember at the time being puzzled thinking, what does she mean?
But I knew in the context that she was getting at the general gist that, you know, she would have rather I wasn't here.
And of course, much later on, when I realized what that, you know, what the mechanics of using a coat hanger means, it was very, you know, it was a lot to deal with.
Do you know the circumstances under which you were conceived?
Yeah, I know I was unintended, because that's what I was told.
They were married, but I wasn't a planned conception.
How long did your parents be married when you were conceived?
I think it was just a couple of years.
Do you know why you were considered to be inconvenient?
Did your parents split up after you were born or what?
They did split up when I was 11 or 12.
I think the only reason I can see that I would have been such a huge inconvenience to my mother in particular was because she has a huge undiagnosed personality disorder.
Is there any way I can look at it? You think?
Yeah. And it's funny how they say personality disorder when I have a sort of more simple term for it which is just stone evil but maybe that may not be shared by everyone but we have all these complicated terms For female evil, which mostly have to do with mental illness and the avoidance of responsibility.
You know, it's like when some Muslim goes and trashes some place, partly as a result of ideology, they first go to explanations.
Mental illness, right? As opposed to, well, maybe there's just a certain literalness in the interpretation.
So, personality disorder and undiagnosed, was she able to function in society relatively well with these emotional habits?
I would say not, no.
No, no. Not looking at her sort of case history, if you like.
And how, what happened?
So, I mean, obviously there's a lot to unpack here, so I do tend to sort of wander off in conversation.
Just speak what's on your mind, and if I need to redirect, I'll feel free to say so, and feel free to say so for me as well, of course.
Okay, cool. She's never held down a steady job, has always blamed other people for her shortcomings for her For her personality issues or just her issues in general, has a huge problem with paranoia, with relating to people, not least people in their own immediate family.
Just an absolute walking nightmare.
How did the paranoia manifest?
Anything that happens in her life or happens in life in general is always someone else's fault.
One example that springs to mind, we've always had cats in our family.
She's always just adopted cats.
As soon as one cat dies, she goes and gets two more or what have you.
And if a cat dies, usually through old age, it's because the neighbours poisoned it.
That's a shining example of just how paranoid she is.
Well, that's interesting, too, because the murderousness with which she communicated her intentions to you at the age of three or four, it's like, well, she has murderous impulses if she's talking about coat-hanging her child.
And then, of course, because she's not able to own her own murderous impulses, she then imagines that there's all these people out there with murderous impulses.
Yeah, that would make sense.
Yeah, it's a kind of projection, isn't it?
A kind of reflection. Yeah.
Yeah, there's evil in the world.
It can't be me.
Therefore, it must be everyone else who's doing all these terrible things.
Yeah, and a huge character in her narrative in that respect is my father.
Oh, there's no demonology like the ex-husband, right?
It's really quite a black coven of soul-stirring nastiness.
Yeah, the guy that she chose to marry and spent 17 years of her life with He's the worst man who's ever lived, or the worst human being that's ever lived.
Oh, wait, can I throw a guess in here, Edward?
Mm-hmm. Okay, my guess is that, boy, you know what was really strange, Edward?
He was a complete chameleon.
In other words, he was absolutely wonderful at the beginning, and then, mysteriously, and through no way that she could predict, and through no fault of her own behavior, he just turned bad.
Yeah, yeah. And he's so powerful that actually anything that I say that's critical of her is actually him influencing me.
Her term is brainwashing.
That's something that was used quite a lot while the divorce was going on.
Right. So the only criticism that could come from your lips to her ears must be programmed by her ex-husband who's so nefarious.
Yeah. Do you have any siblings?
Yes, I have a biological brother and I have a number of step-siblings.
Because you're remarried?
No, my father remarried.
I am now no longer on speaking terms with my biological brother.
What happened there?
So that's a very recent development.
In 2016, I split up with my partner, or my ex-partner now of seven years.
Now, partner, it's not hugely relevant, but I'm not sure if you mean this.
Oh, ex-girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend, yeah, because people say partner if they mean gay.
It's not hugely relevant, it just helps me frame things.
Go ahead. Oh, no, no, I mean, I am bi, but yeah, it was a woman.
And I split up with her, and I needed a new place to live, obviously, because it was her property and I had to move out.
So I had agreed to move in with my biological brother.
I won't know many names because I know it's going to be a huge pain in the arse for you to edit all of this out.
But I moved into a property with my biological brother and then found out that he is basically a clone of her.
And I almost became homeless as a result of this.
What happened? The agreement was that I would, because I had some spare savings at the time, that I would put down the deposit and the first month's rent and any agency fees or any sort of general fees on this house that we were renting together and that he would then pay me back what he owed me plus ongoing contributions to the utilities.
And that did not happen.
And what I didn't realize was At that time communication with him immediately but also with my mother broke down and I found out that that's because the two of them were communicating about me in private to basically get me thrown out of the house.
What effectively happened was we had a number of huge arguments because he was refusing to pay me back what he owed me but he was also refusing to contribute to the monthly utilities And I couldn't get anywhere with him because he was just stonewalling me.
So I tried to make contact with her and she wouldn't speak to me.
She kept saying that she couldn't talk to me.
There was always some reason why she couldn't speak to me or why she couldn't relay the message back to her son.
I then found out that he had been telling her that I had been threatening him with violence, that I was a violent alcoholic and a drug addict and that he was afraid for his life.
And he then just moved out.
Leaving me just with all of this, you know, this money to have to find just to keep the property going.
And with a lease and a far larger property than you wanted, right?
Well, yeah, because it was a three-bedroom house between the two of us.
And the agreement in tenancy was that if that, you know, they obviously weren't planning for this to happen, but it would have meant that I would have had to have paid the sum of about £800 on my own every month.
Let me throw out another guesstimate here and say that you criticized your mother, but your brother didn't as much.
Yeah, I would say that's true.
That has always historically been the case.
And do you know how I know that?
Because he's always been the favored child.
No, because he was weaponized against you, right?
So you committed the original sin or the grave evil of criticizing your mother, and therefore your mother will use just about any mechanism, financial, biological, emotional, in order to harm you, if not destroy you, and because she weaponized your brother against you, that's in revenge for you criticizing her, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And because he doesn't criticize her as much, He doesn't have boundaries.
He doesn't have a barrier. He doesn't have any pushback against manipulation.
You've really hit the nail on the head there.
Yeah, yeah. All right. Wow, that is some terrible stuff, man.
And the really horrible thing about this is that she still makes excuses for him.
She puts the whole thing down to a, quote, misunderstanding.
Well, she wants to destroy you both, right?
I mean, so she destroys you by weaponizing him and she destroys him by making excuses for him rather than holding him accountable.
Yeah, he has never been held accountable for any of his behaviors and his behaviors in the past have quite honestly been really alarming at times.
Right. I mean, the guy is a sociopath in training.
Well, he may have graduated at this point, but now I'm going to assume that the accusations of alcoholism and drug abuse were not true.
No, of course not. Well, I don't know.
We've just met. You could be drinking and snorting as we speak.
I don't know. I didn't mean to sound defensive.
What I mean is that I... Yeah, no, they're completely unfounded.
And I really don't know where she's got these from.
And when I've challenged her on these in the past, she's told me that I made them up and that someone else set them.
That you made what up?
Oh, she told me that I... She's...
She tends to change her narrative.
Her sort of narratives mutate over time depending on how she thinks they best suit her needs at the time.
Sure. So quite often when I will say to her, well, you said this particular thing or you did this particular action and I find that very reprehensible and I, you know, resent you for it.
She will either say, she didn't do it.
Someone else did it. Someone else told me it happened and I believe them.
That my father has quite, again, brainwashed me into thinking that this happened.
It's complete gaslighting.
What does she live on?
This is a very interesting thing.
She has always struggled with holding down any kind of respectable day-to-day income.
So there was a period of time where she was actually a dominatrix.
She was actually operating a dominatrix operation out of our home while we were still living there.
While we were still children. What age?
Oh Jesus. I left home or rather I was forced out of home when I was 17.
So I would say there's a good period of three years in between our father leaving and my leaving home where this was happening.
So she would invite dominatrix clients into the home with children?
Yeah. Actually, no, I'm sorry, I misled you there.
This did continue for a while after I left home as well, but my brother was still there, and my brother was still, he's five years younger than me.
So, yeah, he would have still been a child.
Wait, so this happened, so wait, this started when he was 10 or 11?
Actually, I think it happened for a lot longer than that.
Well, he was, yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, no, I think she stopped all of that shit when I was 21, so he would have been...
Oh, 16, I've done.
16, 17. So she's basically, you know, she's hanging up your fucking coats on the coat rack right next to the beat-me-eat-me licorice whip.
Yeah, pretty much, yeah. Did she have a separate room, the rent room?
I mean, how did this work?
Yeah, this was happening in another room in the house, yeah.
I mean, there was no, you know, sexual contact or contact, but purely, completely inappropriate.
Wait, you're saying that there was no sexual contact between your mom, the dominatrix, and her clients?
Not in the...
Yeah, no, I don't understand Bill Clinton here.
What I mean is, like, not sex in the way that, you know, most people would consider sex.
However, having said that, it is part of the sex industry, and it is...
But how would you know?
Well, yeah, no, that's a good point.
I wouldn't know. Is this what she said?
This is what she said. No, no, I'm just beating them, pulling out their fingernails and dripping hot wax on their nutsack.
But Kevin's, no, I'm not having sex with them.
That would be highly inappropriate.
Yeah, no, you make a good point.
Yeah, you know, when somebody's a liar, they're lying.
You know, like top to bottom, back to front, there's no truth coming out.
Unless the truth is accidentally available and useful to further some other lie.
Yeah. All right. Yeah.
Oh my god. So this was all because she just didn't...
She's just incapable of holding down a proper job.
After father left, she...
Incapable? Yeah, I would say so, yeah.
She went through a period of working an office job after father left, so she was looking after...
Well, I say looking after us.
Okay, she wasn't looking after us, but she was like the sole parent, for want of a better word, better phrasing.
Right. And was then going to work nine to five...
And hating every minute of it and resenting us for the fact that she had to go to work to earn a living to feed us.
And I know that that was how she felt because this is what she said every day.
This is how she expressed herself.
And what would she say? She would come home from work most evenings in a completely foul mood, get really angry with us that she had to then cook a meal.
You know, like, oh, I wouldn't have to do this if you guys weren't here.
I remember one time where she kind of went on strike in the sense in that she just didn't cook anything.
We just lived on sandwiches for weeks on end.
Yeah, no, it is a sad thing that this dedication to anti-reality always comes with this entitlement.
And it's inevitable that would.
Because if you hate reality, if you hate responsibility, if you hate the fact that in order to consume, you or someone has to produce, if you hate all of that, Then of course you end up preying on other people.
Because you're entitled like an aristocrat.
Why would I have to work?
I'm far too good for work.
I'm far too good for labor.
It must be the toiling masses who keep me afloat.
Or guys in chaps that I'm beating with a piece of birch, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it's horrible.
And then when that came to a head, she basically just lived off boyfriends or lodgers.
Oh yeah, yeah. And anything other than responsibility and accountability, right?
Yeah, yeah. What the hell was your dad doing with her?
17 years?
Maybe he just wanted a free dominatrix.
No, well, I don't know.
I mean, he is an incredibly patient man.
Whoa! You're starting off with a list of his virtues?
No, no, I'm not saying that...
Okay, not exactly where I was expecting you to take me, but hey, drag me along like I'm bound and chained.
He... I wouldn't say that was a virtue.
I certainly don't think him marrying my mother was a virtue.
But he just puts up with a lot, maybe more than he should.
Oh, I guess we found the parent who got away now, didn't we?
See, there's one parent that you identify as evil, or bad, if you have a dysfunctional family, but there's also another parent that you have a soft spot for, and this would be your father.
Maybe he put up with more than he should.
The fact that he didn't drag your mother to court!
And get the children the hell out of her house when she's operating a BDSM dungeon right next door to a 10-year-old's bedroom means he's putting up with a hell of a lot more than he should.
And so you had to because he failed to fucking act!
Yeah, there were custody battles.
No, that's not a battle!
I mean, I know there's a bit of a gynocentric court system.
But bondage, whip, chains, hot wax on the nipples right next to a ten-year-old's bedroom?
That's not a complicated court case.
He didn't know that this was happening.
In which case, knowing how crazy your mother was, he was completely derelict in his duties to make sure that you were safe.
Because what you do is you drop by, and you ask your children what's going on in the household, and you find the fuck out what's happening in order to keep your children safe.
So if he says he didn't know, it's because he was actively avoiding knowing.
Right? That's very possible.
No, no, that's not possible.
If you want to have a better life, you've got to start raising your standards.
It's one of these awful, practical, real truths about life.
If you want to have a better life, you've got to raise your standards.
Now, if you raise your standards, it means no one...
Gets to escape those standards.
Not you, not your dad, not your mom, not your brother, not just half-sister, half-brother, whatever.
Doesn't matter. Everyone gets subject to these raised standards.
So, if your father is more functional than your mother, then he had a greater responsibility to ensure your safety.
If he's only as functional as your mother, then he falls under the same moral condemnation, right?
Either way, he doesn't get away.
No, yeah, I agree.
I agree, yeah. Alright.
He and I have...
We have had discussions about this, and I have mentioned this to him, and he has apologized profusely.
I know that doesn't make it right, and...
No, but you're still making excuses for him, which means there's not closure.
It means there's not clarity.
There's not moral clarity in the situation.
Because if your default position is, well, he didn't know, and there were custody battles, blah, blah, blah, right?
Then it means that there's still fog around this area.
Mm-hmm. Because it would be, oh yeah, he completely abandoned us to this crazy woman when he had a moral, perhaps even legal, duty to ensure that we were protected.
I mean, who knows what the fuck could have happened with these creeps coming through your house, right?
Maybe something did happen with your brother, maybe that's why he got so messed up.
I mean, he's not...
I haven't picked up anything like that, but...
Yeah, the thing is, this is the thing that makes it so reprehensible, is that that was always a possibility.
That could have happened.
And the fact that it could have happened, in my mind, is just as bad.
Yeah, you play Russian roulette with your kids, it's not a...
I mean, it's good that the gun doesn't go off, but it doesn't make it okay.
So how pretty was she when she was younger?
like what the hell is your dad's motive for getting involved with this kind of monster that is a very yeah that is a very good question and it's a bit of a hard question to answer I'm I mean, objectively... Well, it's impossible for you to answer because you weren't around, right?
So your dad would have to answer this.
Yeah. I mean, in a very strange way, they have always had a very strong sort of intellectual connection.
That may sound completely stupid, me saying that now in this context.
I'm willing to hear it.
I mean, it doesn't jump out to me as something obvious to understand, but I'm certainly happy to hear this intellectual connection.
When they weren't yelling at each other, I do remember them always finding it very easy to talk to each other.
They always had a very complex sense of humour, very deep discussions about things.
It's just that they...
I don't get the impression that they really loved each other.
Deep discussions about things, so what would they discuss deeply?
Current events, stuff like that.
It always seemed that they found it really easy to talk to each other.
It is a good question, but it is a hard one to answer.
No, there's a lot of crazy people who are good conversationalists.
They show up all the time on television as pundits.
Insane people, but relatively easy to have a chat with.
As long as it's not anything personal or confrontational, or anything that involves responsibility.
In other words, people who are very insecure will often find it very easy to fall into conversations where they're criticizing other people, which is why they gravitate towards current events and say how terrible the world is, right?
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. I mean, my dad did intervene at one stage.
Your dad what? My dad did intervene at one stage.
Intervene, okay, yeah. Yeah, when after my mother split up from her...
So there was like an overlap of her meeting a new partner Before the divorce was finalized, but they were separated.
And she was madly in love with this man, and then he just left.
He just fucked off. Which left her completely destroyed.
I mean, she was an absolute wreck. Wait, so she was in love with a married man, and then he left her, and you say this destroyed her?
Oh, did I mention that he was married?
Well, actually he was married, but she didn't find this out straight away.
This is another problem as well.
She has, you know, as much as she demonizes my father, she has had like a string of just complete loser boyfriends.
Of course she has. Of course she has.
Okay, so let's go back.
Because you gave me a very Hallmark card sentimental narrative about your mom being madly in love and having her heart broken, which I think is complete bullshit, though I don't think you're trying to falsify things for me.
I think you genuinely believe this nonsense.
So she was obsessed with the married man.
In other words, he had resources, right?
Or he was good looking. He was high status in some manner.
Yeah. Okay, so she wanted his resources and she was willing to have sex with him to get them.
Yeah. He represented an avoidance of responsibility, which she craves because otherwise she has to become an adult and she also then has to look in the mirror and see all the evils she's done in her life, which she would rather die than do, I'm sure.
Yeah. So she wasn't in love with him, because people who are evil don't have the capacity to love.
They only have the capacity to exploit.
So if she needed him, she needed his resources and didn't give a shit about his ethics, other than perhaps hoping to use them against himself in order to exploit those resources.
And then he wised up to her, saw how evil she was, ran away, and then she was forced to find someone else to attach to, rather than become productive for herself.
Yeah. Okay, I just, this fell in love, he broke her, he fucked off, and he broke her heart.
Yeah, yeah, sorry. That's not what I believe.
That is how the narrative is framed.
No, I get that. It's just that you didn't make that particularly clear.
I wanted to make sure I'm talking to you, Edward, not your mom.
Oh, no, yeah. No, I understand that, definitely.
Yeah, yeah. So, you've put all that better than I could, which is probably why I sort of summarized it like that, but Anyway, he fucked off and...
No, he didn't fuck off.
That's your mom talking. He wised up and got away.
He woke up to her evil or maybe he found out she was a dominatrix or some stupid shit like that.
And he was like, I gotta get out.
Like, he got away from her.
He escaped out of the prison of the vagina of the mama.
Yeah, well, he was a very smart guy for doing that.
Eh, not that smart if he got involved.
Yeah, true. So that, yeah, that relationship ended and then her response to that was to go through a period of deep depression.
The resentment towards me and my brother amped up.
And how old was she at this time, Edward?
I feel really bad that I should have written the chronology down before...
Just roughly, I don't need details.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think she would have been about 40s.
Right, so she hits the deep depression because she's hit the wall, right?
Yeah. She's lost her youthful looks and she can't use her physical attractiveness to exploit men as much anymore because men with any resources in that age group are looking for younger women and men without resources she can't exploit.
So she's kind of running out of the whole trick, right?
Yeah, yeah. Right.
And nobody wants granny bondage merchant, right?
Yeah, I can't see any sensible argument to say otherwise.
Yeah, I mean, the masochism shouldn't be watching mommy's creased jowl flaps going back and forth as she works the whip.
That's not what you want to pay for.
No. Right. Okay, so then was she able to squeeze any resources out of another guy by clamping onto him?
Yeah, there was a string of partners after then, but immediately after that she fell in with this couple, a man and woman, a married couple, and we relocated to a different part of the country.
What do you mean she fell in with a married couple?
What do you mean? Well, she met this couple, became involved with them.
Oh, she was like the menager?
Yeah. Okay.
Yeah, there was that kind of arrangement.
And she just packed us up and moved us in with them in a different part of the country.
She moved you guys away and then she moved you in with the couple that she was having sex with?
Yeah. Thus, again, exposing you to some fucking creepy people.
How old were you roughly at this time period?
I know this is before you had to leave at 17 13, 14 Yeah, you know, that's very common I just wanted to point that out for people.
I could not, for the life of me, for many, many years, figure out...
Why I was moved to Canada when I was sort of 11 and 12.
Why? Why was I moved to Canada?
Now, my mom's only explanation was, well, we just needed a fresh start.
It's like, I didn't need a fresh start.
I had my friends. I had my school.
I had my hobbies. I had, you know, my life was outside of my family was, you know, fairly, fairly good.
But it took me a little while...
to figure out why I had to be moved when I was around the age of puberty and the answer which I figured out and worked into conversations and got some fairly good confirmation from the answer Is that you might talk.
So you have to be moved.
Because as you grow older and you grow wiser, if you get into your teenage years, if you get into puberty, you get bigger and stronger, which means physical abuse can't be used to control you.
Because you get to be the same size as your mom, and then you get to be bigger than your mom, and then you might just fucking hit back.
Or at least physically restrain and control her.
She can't beat you anymore.
And so there's this great fear that without the physical violence to control you, or the abuse to control you, and if you have friends, and if you have relatives, and if you have a companionship around you, that one day you might just open your mouth and say, my family life is terrible.
I'm being abused.
So what happens is you have to be taken out of your environment.
You have to be moved so that you don't have...
Connections when physical abuse no longer is possible to use to control you and I don't know if that was the case with with where you were but That was sort of my big understanding.
It's like, okay Well, they're getting old enough to talk so I better take them someplace entirely new where they don't have existing family relations and long-lasting friendships and That was I think the unconscious plan Yeah, definitely because when you're in that position Everything is happening so fast.
You're still too young to really understand what the hell is happening or why things are happening.
You're never going to know at that age why things are happening because, of course, the person that you're living with is insane and is making up all kinds of crazy shit to fit her own narrative.
No, not insane. No, not insane.
See, you keep using this...
I'm sorry to be so nitpicky and annoying, but it is really important, Ed, that you keep using...
You know, mental illness, mental instability, personality problems, insane.
She's not insane, because insane people act randomly.
And the fact that your mom navigated this whole thing without ever being caught and having her ass thrown in fucking jail means that she was not random.
She was not crazy. She was selfish.
She was dominant. She was abusive.
She was evil, in my opinion.
I think it's a bit more than an opinion, but let's be nice.
But not crazy. So crazy people will do things that get them in trouble with no sense of consequences.
Right, so were you ever, I don't know, abused in public?
Did she ever, like when people were over, did she ever turn to them with a little glass of wine, her little finger raised, W.C. Field style, and say, oh yes, no, I sure wish my children had been evacuated from me with a coat hanger, because look, they're just terrible monsters that I have to put up with, and they mean that I have to go and fuck men for money and beat men for money, and it's very degrading, and none of this would be happening if it wasn't for my god-awful, hell-spawn children of my loins.
I bet you she never did that.
To your teacher, to a priest, to a policeman, to social gatherings, she kept it all hidden, right?
Yeah, she did. So that's not crazy.
Think of crazy like Tourette's.
You know how some people will just come up with the most explosive, vile profanity, and they can't physically control it, right?
Literally, they'll do it in front of a teacher, and they'll do it at a stadium.
They will do it on a podcast.
They simply can't.
It's like epilepsy. They can't control it.
And so, if somebody just likes cursing, but they can control it, then they don't have Tourette's, right?
And so your mother was not crazy.
We like using the word crazy for female evil because it's less disturbing to us than to look at the fact that women can be stone evil because we white knight, we protect.
And there's this, a lot of women will like say, well, you know, your mother was under a lot of stress and you don't know what it's like and she was a single mom, right?
But men never get these excuses, right?
I mean, evil men, it's like, why?
It's just evil, patriotic, scum, right?
I need to pull you away from the mental illness lie about female evil.
Listen, there are women who are crazy, for sure, and there are women who are insane, no doubt whatsoever.
And you can tell because they don't have any capacity to hide their insanity.
But the moment you start hiding your deeds, you know, like if you're a robber and you come to a convention of police officers and you start trying to rob the police officers, Well, clearly, you're not all there, and you would probably get off on the insanity defense, because who on earth would go to a convention of police officers and try and rob their police officers, right?
But if you...
Surreptitiously dig into a bank and take money from the vault and hide your tracks and make sure that nobody knows where you are and then you convert it to cash and you go to an offshore place.
If you do all of that, you're not crazy because you're not acting randomly.
You know that it's wrong, you know there are consequences, you know that bad things are going to happen, so you hide your crimes.
And the moment you hide your crimes, you're not crazy.
You're evil. Because it's premeditated.
Well, you know that there are negative consequences, and you also know and you demonstrate that you can repress your evil actions.
My mother never beat us in front of other people, ever.
And what that meant, of course, as you know, is that she was perfectly capable of not beating us.
Like, if she had epilepsy, it wouldn't matter if there were people or not.
If she had an epileptic attack, she would just have the epileptic attack, and I would have great sympathy for that condition, right?
But if she has the perfect capacity to not be abusive when she's with other people, then that means that she's not crazy, she's evil.
Because she can restrain her behavior and does so on a daily basis.
We go to the mall, she doesn't beat us.
In fact, my mother was very charming in public with us.
She was playful, she was fun, she seemed to relish our company.
She would counter-signal her immorality just to throw people off the scent, right?
Like the guy who robs the bank of a million dollars might live for six months really, really poor so nobody gets any idea that he's got the money, right?
He might counter-signal his real circumstances.
So my mother was perfectly capable of knowing how a good, fun, positive, engaged mom would act because she was able to imitate it in order to throw people off the scent.
And so if your mother was never caught...
If nobody came to you and said, holy shit, man, Edward, I see your mom acting in these horrible ways all the time.
It's terrible, right? Then she's not crazy.
She's evil. Because evil is when you have the capacity to suppress your behavior and you know what good behavior is.
And you just don't do it when you can get away with it, right?
Like, why is the thief evil?
The thief is evil because he violates property rights, which he thinks is a good thing, but then if somebody steals what he's stolen from him, he gets really angry.
It's that contradiction, right?
And so if your mom knew how to behave in a normal fashion, and did, On a daily basis for years, but then when you were alone and she had power, she indulged her evil.
Well, that's what makes her evil, because she knows what good is, she knows what better behavior is, she knows how to restrain her bad behavior, but then when she can get away with it, she doesn't.
That's not crazy at all.
It's not crazy. It's hard to comprehend for anybody who's got half a shred of fucking human decency, but it's not crazy at all.
It's just evil. Yeah, yeah, I agree.
Schizophrenia is a personality disorder that seems to have some organic basis and so on, and if we just assume that it does, or let's say Alzheimer's, you know, where there is some sort of decay in reasoning, that's not circumstantial.
Like, people don't have schizophrenia until a policeman shows up, or until there's a knock at the door, until somebody calls.
That they want to talk to or they need something from.
They have schizophrenia and they can't control it.
People who have Alzheimer's don't perk up and become really smart when it suits their interests.
They just have that organic problem, that degeneration or whatever you can call it.
So those people are genuinely mentally impaired because they can't will it to be otherwise.
I don't want this...
I really dislike...
This is not you, I understand.
This is just propaganda as a whole.
Evil people love...
If they're actually caught out in some manner, they love to blame external sources, like, well, it was stressed, it was difficult, money problems, you were difficult kids, blah, blah, blah.
They're just reacting, right?
And if all of that fails...
Then they crawl into the sympathy pocket reserved for people with genuine mental illnesses.
They mimic mental illness in order to gain sympathy and to have people distracted from the evil that they're doing.
And it's really terrible. She has done that as well.
People with genuine mental illnesses deserve our sympathy.
Like people with degenerative problems, people with Alzheimer's or people with schizophrenia or whatever, they genuinely deserve...
Our sympathy. Somebody's got a brain tumor and it's eating away at their personality or somebody has a traumatic brain injury or a concussion and it hurts.
That's genuine sympathy.
But what these people do is they morph or chameleon-like or mimic into people for whom we have genuine sympathy and hide there as a form of sympathy theft and a form of manipulation.
And it's absolutely wretched.
It's confirmation of their evil natures.
Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, you hit on the mimicking genuine mental health issues.
That is something that she's done.
She is currently doing, as far as I know, as well.
Last year, I understand that she claimed out of nowhere that she had Asperger's syndrome and apparently, according to her, went and got herself assessed and has an undisclosed diagnosis.
Well, when I say undisclosed, An indefinite diagnosis you know there's no she hasn't been able to put herself on the Asperger's scale but now she then now has said to me since oh well I now understand why I did the things I did is because I have Asperger's and I have some very you know I have a couple of very close very dear friends with Asperger's syndrome and I cannot imagine them even dreaming of behaving the way that she's behaved and I find it really insulting to those people that she dares to pretend that she has this This syndrome because she's just a horrible person.
Well, and she may be angling, of course, for some sort of disability payout or gaining resources for sympathy.
Because when women are young and attractive, they can gain resources by being objects of desire, right?
By being sexy, and they can gain resources that way.
And then when they hit the middle age and that starts to fade away, they start to work on manipulation.
And when that begins to fade away, then they start to work on sympathy by mimicking illness.
I mean, they can go literally from cradle to grave.
Always sucking at the teat, the unjustified teat of other people's manipulated sympathies.
And you can always find a new mark, and you become very good at playing the victim, and it's absolutely wretched.
And if you ever want to see whether somebody's really a victim, you challenge their victimhood.
And if they explode in rage, then they're not a fucking victim, they're just manipulating you.
You know, if, let's say, I think that I have a problem walking, right?
If I think, like, for whatever reason, I need a cane or something.
Like, if someone comes along and says, I challenge you on that, I think that you can walk, but here's the difficult things you need to do.
You've got to go to physio, you've got to stretch, you've got to whatever, right?
Now, if I genuinely want to walk, I'm thrilled and excited at the possibility Of throwing away my cane and walking normally, right?
Like, I'm like, oh really?
Could I? I mean, it's gonna be painful, it's gonna be difficult, maybe it'll be expensive, but I would love to be able to walk normally.
That's what a normal human being does who has a disability when the disability is challenged.
But somebody who's milking a disability or faking a disability, they explode in rage if challenged, right?
Because they don't want their resource-sucking, manipulative, bullshit, pseudo-disability to go away, because then They have to go and actually produce something in the world and they don't want to, right? That's harder.
Yeah. With my mom, it was a whole variety of pseudo-medical bullshit that she claimed.
Oh, that's the reason why all these terrible things happened.
Nothing to do with me. The doctors did it to me.
It's crazy. Sorry, it's evil.
It's hard, right? It's hard, even for me.
I've been working on this stuff for a long time.
It's so easy to slip into this language of sympathy rather than Moral condemnation, because particularly if you let go of religion, it's hard to maintain a belief in evil, and therefore we turn to secular explanations like insanity rather than moral explanations like evil.
It's just, by the by, it's kind of tough.
All right. So, how long were you with the girlfriend that you broke up with recently?
Seven years. Seven years?
Wow. And...
What did she think of your past, your history, your mom and so on?
Talking about my past with her was always something that was very difficult.
So obviously there are a lot of things that I didn't tell her, which I now in retrospect realize was not a healthy thing to do in a relationship.
She knew that it was a dysfunctional childhood.
And that my mother was an unfit parent because, you know, I told her as much.
And the two did not get along.
The unfortunate thing, though, is that she herself, and you may need to ring me in about talking about personal information about her.
Is that, you know, I don't know what the guidelines are on your show.
Nothing geographical, nothing that's specific to identifying her.
Okay. But she herself has a huge raft of issues as well.
Well, of course she does. I mean, I hate to say, really?
Yeah. Really?
I can't imagine. And she probably liked the fact that you've been smashed up by your mom because you were probably easier to control.
Yeah, very compliant.
I describe myself here, very compliant, very docile.
I mean, I had a horrible...
I don't put much...
Stock. Yeah, thank you.
In Freud, I've always thought Freud was a serial bullshitter.
But in therapy recently, I took a step back and I went, holy fuck, I was dating someone who was like my mother.
Oh, that's not Freud.
I mean, that goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks.
Dating someone like your mom is not Freud.
Desperately wanting to fuck your mom, that's Freud.
And that's nasty shit.
And that's not true.
But that's because he needed to explain away the prevalence of incest.
And so he said, well, all these women are complaining about being raped by their dads when they were children.
I can get in a lot of trouble if I start talking about this, and Lord knows that's true.
I found out myself, but someone said I'm just gonna betray the victims of childhood rape and say that they just fantasized it.
They really just wanted it deep down.
It's just wish fulfillment. But the fact that you could end up dating a woman like your mom, that's not Freud, right?
Okay. Well, that's reassuring because that was a horrible revelation at the time.
It was like, Jesus Christ, how do I process this?
Yeah. Well, you see, if you have such a dysfunctional and destructive mom, the only way you know you've got a good girlfriend is if she says, get the fuck away from her.
Because women, universally, as far as I've seen, which is kind of a contradiction, but I'll just stick with it for the moment.
So women, when they meet a guy and they're thinking about having children with him, want a clean house.
When a woman is pregnant, she'll just clean house top to bottom.
It's kind of a natural instinct to make sure that the child is not exposed to nasty germs and so on.
And a woman who cares about you, if you have a toxic, exploitive, destructive, vicious, succubi hag of a mom, she's going to work to get you free of her as quickly as humanly possible so that you can be a fit father and provider.
Whereas if she doesn't do that, then she doesn't care about you.
In fact, she might like you having your mom around so that you're more pliable and malleable, right?
More compliant, as you said.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I know that she complained a lot about my mother, but at no point did she ever say, this person is toxic.
You need to keep away from them.
Don't bring them into the house anymore.
I don't want to see her. I mean, even if she says...
Even if she doesn't say, you need to break with her, she will say, I don't want to have anything to do with her.
Yeah. The only time that she said that was towards the very end of our relationship, after they had both fallen out.
They had a disagreement.
And that was then when suddenly, you know, my mother was the worst piece of shit ever, and how dare she say this?
Right. So the fact that she traumatized and abused you...
For a quarter century wasn't as important as the fact that she ended up disagreeing with your girlfriend.
See, now that, that is really bad.
The fact that she abused you for a quarter century and was horrible and destructive and murderous and told you that she wished she'd scraped you out with a coat hanger when you were three or four, she can look past that.
But by God, if your mom disagrees with her, oh, that's a bridge too far.
Oh, that's absolutely unacceptable!
Yeah. Good riddance.
Seven years was about seven too many, in my humble opinion.
Yeah, I don't know what the fuck happened, to be honest with you.
What do you mean? I don't know how it went on for that long.
Oh, it went on that long because people let it go on that long around you.
And this is the problem. So if you're in a dysfunctional relationship, anybody who's not helping you get out is enabling the abuse and the dysfunction that's part of the problem and can't be trusted again.
Like, I'm sorry, life is short.
I was in a seven-year relationship that was not...
It was okay at times and it was fun at some times, but it was like one of these planes that can't stop and can't get off the ground and just bouncing along.
And everyone who didn't sort of sit me down, And help me out with that?
And help me to sort of come to some sort of resolution about that?
Sorry, you're part of the problem.
I can't trust you. Because you let this happen to me.
And I say, oh well, but I'm not taking responsibility and that's very passive and you're expecting other people to fix your problems.
Like, no! It's like, if you're not going to help me out when I can't see something myself because of my own traumatized history, then either you like the fact that I'm being traumatized and in this can't-get-it-started, can't-get-it-concluded relationship.
I mean, this is a woman I proposed to.
And, you know, people were enthusiastic about it.
And then there's one girlfriend of one friend of mine said, I think people who were engaged are supposed to be happier.
Aren't they? And I was sitting there thinking, like, you know, that's a really, really good question.
Am I happy that I'm engaged?
And so, just that little comment.
She didn't say, oh, it was a terrible person, or you can't get this relationship, or you've got so many issues, you haven't sorted them out.
She didn't say anything. She just said, I think people who are engaged are supposed to be happier, aren't they?
And... Yeah. Yeah, that's, you know, that person...
Close to my heart. You know, saved me, right?
Like Elton John's song style, saved me from a completely disastrous mistake that could have wrecked my life.
If I have people in my life, I'm in a dysfunctional or not great relationship, and they don't give a fuck about me enough to sit me down for five minutes and say, are you enjoying things?
Is this good for you? Do you think this is because of your history?
I don't get a sense of positivity or love or enthusiasm about you in this relationship.
If you can't be bothered to sit down with me for five fucking minutes over the course of seven years, Fuck off.
Like, just get lost. Like, I'm sorry.
You don't care about me.
You are self-involved, or maybe you enjoyed the fact, or you're completely indifferent to the fact that I wasn't happy.
So why on earth should I have any trust in you to go forward?
Because the funny thing is, I actually did sit down with people.
I was good with other people.
You know, like everyone, it's tough to see yourself.
Work with other people and try and see if they were happy and all this kind of stuff.
But, yeah, it was kind of a one-way street.
And... Yeah, so why were you in this relationship for seven years?
Because everyone facilitated and enabled and allowed it and encouraged it to continue.
So you were a victim, not just this woman, but your entire social circle.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, no one ever, like, you know, no one was ever stopping me from leaving at any time.
You know, I had agency, but having to really Ask myself what happened?
What went wrong? What could I have done better?
What could I have not allowed to happen?
All of these, you know, questions.
No, see, and the funny thing is, is that you give yourself too much agency, which is the consequence of giving your mother too little agency, and your father too little agency, and those around you too little agency.
Because, you know, you gave excuses for your dad, and you gave mental health Cover to your mom and so on.
But then when it comes to you, and these are adults, these are adults, and you when you're still a very young man, I assume, right?
Yeah. You're giving yourself 100% agency while giving excuses to your parents who were 20 years older than you when they made these mistakes.
And yes, you do still have agency for sure.
For sure. But we got to look out for each other, right?
If you're part of a family, if you've got friends, we need to look out for each other.
We need to watch each other's back.
And everyone around you, I assume, knew that you had a dysfunctional childhood and therefore had every reason to question your first serious romance.
Of course. Of course.
Because it's very hard to process and escape trauma when you're young.
It takes time. It takes clarity.
It takes perspective. And it takes help from people.
And, you know, we wouldn't need therapists if we just looked out for each other and asked some basic questions, I think.
I mean, we might for some more extreme cases and so on, but therapists are replacing people who give a shit about us in our life, who are around and don't give a shit about us, at least not enough to help us avoid obvious mistakes that we can't see ourselves because we're traumatized.
So, yeah, you have agency, no question, and there's responsibility for you in this.
But, first of all, why are we social animals?
See, we're social animals because we need that view of ourselves, right?
So, intense introspection Is more likely among people who spend a lot of time alone.
But when we, because we're tribal and social animals, we off-source some of our introspection to other people's view, and they have a responsibility to tell us what's going on, which we can't see ourselves.
It's like we don't have the ability to see in the dark because we didn't hunt in the dark.
We just hid in trees in the dark, right, or hid in caves or houses.
And so we didn't develop the ability to see in the dark because we don't do that.
And we don't have that same ability to introspect because we would rely on those around us to help us see what was going on, right?
It's sort of like this collective echolocation system to find the truth.
The truth is a communal activity.
It may be an individual pursue, but it's a communal activity in the long run.
And, yeah, those around you who didn't help you see the truth that you couldn't see yourself, they have more agency than you do.
Because they can see what you can't.
Right? If I have some spider, some little Australian death spider on my back, and you see it, and I don't, who's the most responsible for me getting bitten?
Yeah. Who?
You can see the spider, I can't see the spider, I get bitten.
Who's responsible? Obviously the person who didn't warn you that the spider was there.
Yeah, the person who can see the spider that you can't see is responsible for you getting bitten by the spider.
You say, well, I have agency.
I could have held up a mirror.
I could have checked my back. I could have taken off my shirt.
I could have run backwards into a wall.
I could have sprayed myself with some bug repellent.
Yeah, okay, sure.
Yeah, sure, but you didn't see the spider and someone else did.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, this is something that has always been...
A huge burden throughout all of this is that I have always wanted to resist blaming other people.
Sure. Because I do think that that is something that is just way too pervading in our society at the moment is people saying, oh, you know, I don't have agency because this person said this or this did that or I don't know, you know, So it's always been really tough for me to...
Well, you saw someone who took no responsibility.
So you go to the other extreme and take too much responsibility.
It's not solving the problem, right?
You've got to find the middle ground.
Yeah. Because she was paralyzed because she took no responsibility, but then you end up paralyzed, which is where we started the conversation with Edward.
You feel paralyzed because you take too much responsibility.
Yeah. So, blaming other people for not helping you when, I assume, when they say they love you, they care about you, they're your friend, they're your family, then they must want to help you.
Now, if they fail to help you, they're responsible for that.
If other people can see things that you can't see and they fail to tell you, Well, first of all, if everyone thought your relationship with the seven-year girlfriend was just absolutely wonderful and fantastic, it means they can't even see the spider that's on your back.
In which case, I guess they don't have agency, but then they don't have any wisdom, which means they can't even see in someone else what's a problem, which means they have no capacity to see what's a problem in themselves, which means that they can't ever help you.
They're useless when it comes to protecting you in the dangerous game called life.
Life is combat.
Life is a fight.
Life is a battle and you need companions who are strong and with you.
Otherwise, we just surrender everything to evildoers and we lose everything.
This is a fight in the world if you have any awareness and ethics and life is a fight.
It used to be understood in the Christian world that life is a battle.
It's understood in the Muslim world.
It's understood in the Jewish world.
To some degree, it's pushed away in the Buddhist world, but in this Rastrian world, mannequinism, there's a battle of good and evil.
There's titanic forces of good and evil, and it's man's choice that makes the universe tip one way or the other.
It's very, very...and this is a battle.
The battle is very key in religion.
In secular stuff, you end up with this vague Darwinian stuff that is then completely denied when it comes to human biodiversity and the welfare state, but anyway.
So don't go to the opposite extreme.
That's like, well, my mother was promiscuous, so I'm going to become a monk, right?
That's not solving the problem.
That's just going to the other extreme, right?
Yeah, yeah. So feel free to blame people without feeling like you're becoming your mom.
Or when you say blame, just hold people responsible.
Yeah, I think this is it.
I mean, you know, I was saying earlier how...
My mother would always, anything bad that happened was always like a conspiracy.
It was almost someone else doing this thing to you.
And I've always been terrified of sounding like that.
Sure. I mean, not just turning into my mother has been one of my main fears, but also just giving even just a photo fit impression that I could be like her has always terrified me.
Well, okay, but here's the problem that you run into, and once I point it out, it's a very logically obvious problem.
Because if you say, I'm 100% responsible for everything in my life, then you can say that, but then you logically have to hold that standard for everyone, right?
Mm-hmm. So if you're 100% responsible for your bad seven-year relationship, I'm not saying it was all bad, but let's just characterize it for the moment, right?
So let's just say you're 100% responsible for For your bad relationship, okay, are both you and your girlfriend 100% responsible?
You can't logically both be 100% responsible, right?
No, you're right. That doesn't mathematically make sense.
No. And anyone around you who might have seen the dysfunction in your relationship with your girlfriend, are they 100% responsible for not telling you?
No. But they will be partly responsible.
Yeah, you're right. So you can't be 100% responsible for your bad relationship.
It's mathematically and logically completely impossible.
You can only do it by separating yourself and isolating yourself as one-of-a-kind 100% guy and everyone else doesn't have agency.
See, you can create a monotheistic religion of Edward, wherein you're the only one with agency and everyone else is kind of like robots.
Because you wish not to be like your mother.
But you can only do that by dehumanizing other people and pretending they don't have agency, which is kind of what your mother did.
It would just dehumanize people for purposes of exploiting them.
You don't escape the problem, do you see?
Yeah, yeah, you're right. You're right.
And this is something that, again, has worried me as well.
Well, as I say, you know, not wanting to become like her is not wanting to emulate that behavior, this idea of dehumanizing people, of blaming other people.
Right. But if you take away, if you make it 100% responsibility, then you're the only living free will creature in the universe.
But that is very isolating.
Yeah, yeah. Free will is a complex interplay between us and others.
If you want free will, you have to surround yourself with people who will be forward, proactive, and honest with you, right?
So, not being bitten by a spider that's on your back that's too small to feel means that you also have to have people around you who can tell you there's a dangerous fucking spider on your back, right?
Because if you don't, if people won't tell you that there's a dangerous spider on your back, you don't have the choice to not be bitten, you understand?
Free will is a communal endeavor.
Because if you want to have the choice to knock the spider off your back that you can't feel, someone's got to tell you That there's a spider on your back so that you have the choice to get rid of it.
If nobody tells you, you don't have that choice.
You see, like, choice requires the integrity of everyone around you to tell you the truth, to be honest with you.
If they don't tell you the truth and they're not honest with you, like, I didn't fundamentally have the choice to break off my engagement until somebody said, I think people who are engaged are usually happier, aren't they?
And until that perspective, that door opened in my brain, I didn't have any practical choice.
My free will depended upon the syllables of the girlfriend of my friend.
That gave me a choice otherwise which did not exist in my mind.
It created a fork in the road.
It created a possibility of getting off the train tracks of incipient disaster.
So my free will was dependent upon her Syllables.
Now, I actually think that she only told me that because she was interested in me and didn't want me to get married because that's stuff I found out later.
But nonetheless, nonetheless, I'm so grateful.
Whatever the motives, it got me to jump the tracks, right?
So free will is not something that just sits in you because we can't see...
360, right? So you know how the divers do it, right?
The divers go back to back, right?
Scuba tank to scuba tank if they're in a dangerous situation because you can't see behind you.
So you go scuba tang, you back up against each other so that you get somewhat, because we don't have these fucking lizard eyes that rotate all over the place like a drunken chameleon brain, right?
So we have to go back to back, and then we face the world so that you can see what the hell's coming up behind you.
Now, if you're diving alone, you never have the choice to see what's coming behind you, because if you turn around, then you can't see what's behind you, which you could see before.
So the only way we get 360 vision is if we go back to back.
In other words, your choice in that situation relies upon somebody else looking and telling you what's going on or indicating what's going on, right?
So your free will is not just something that resides magically in your own brain and your free will is a collective and communal endeavor.
It's like culture. It's like literature.
You can't write all the books you ever want to read because if you've written them...
You know what's going to happen, right?
You rely on other people to write books and to create things.
This podcast is a communal endeavor.
It's what Barack Obama meant when he said, inelegantly, you didn't build this.
It's like, yeah, it's all a communal endeavor.
It should be voluntary and all that, but...
Your free will relies upon the integrity of those around you.
And if you don't understand that, you're gonna try and give yourself the magical power of perfect free will while stripping it from everyone else around you and then wonder why you feel unmotivated and isolated because you can't team up with people.
And your mother's central goal, Edward, is to have you be isolated.
To have you be alone, to have you feel alone, to have you feel separate from everyone around you.
And by not needing people because you're 100% responsible for yourself, by not needing anyone, you have no incentive to join the tribe.
You have no incentive to create a division of boon companions around you.
So... Thank you for that.
So that kind of...
Presupposition that you've got to be completely, or that I've got to be completely, you know, have complete agency, 100% agency is like a reaction to her complete lack of agency, do you think?
Yeah, yeah. And it's a way of protecting yourself from having to trust others.
Because if there's a problem, like if you see the spider on my back and I don't and it bites me and I take 100% agency, I don't have to have a conflict with you, which says, why the fuck did you tell me that I had a spider on my back?
It has to avoid conflict because you have people around you who can't handle conflict.
Your mother couldn't handle conflict.
So if you take 100% agency for yourself, anytime there's a problem, like your mother would solve the problem of conflict by blaming everyone else, and you solve the problem of conflict by blaming yourself.
Either way, you don't have to deal with the challenging mechanics of dealing with conflicts with people you care about.
I think that's a very fair assessment.
I have been doing that for a very long time.
And that's draining you of ambition.
Yeah. It's absolutely exhausting.
It is. It is.
And also, it doesn't get you out of bad relationships.
Because if you take 100% agency, then all the bad things that happen must be your fault.
So there's no point changing the relationship because it's 100% you.
Yeah. Yeah.
You can't bring any standards to bear on a relationship and everything's your fault.
Like, if you say to me, hey, let's meet tomorrow at 11 a.m.
for brunch, right? And then I show up at 1 p.m., can I blame you?
No, because I just made a mistake.
I wrote it down wrong. I forgot.
Whatever, right? But if I sit there and say, well, I can't go for brunch with Edward anymore because I was late, that would make no sense.
Why would I blame you for something, a mistake that I made?
Yeah. And that's where you are.
You can't have any leverage because everything's your fault.
You can't negotiate. You can't have requirements.
You can't insist upon anything.
You can't raise the standards.
Except on yourself.
And that means that you are isolated in purity and silent in conversation.
Essential conversation. Yeah.
And everything that you want to do in life is going to require, not everything, most, 99.9% of things you want to do in life are going to require cooperation from other people.
I mean, I guess I could do this podcast where I never spoke to anyone and so on, but it probably wouldn't be very good, right?
Well, yeah, it'd be less...
Less interactive, yeah. It'd be less interesting.
It'd be less compelling. It would be less useful to people, right?
And, you know, even then I still need to cooperate with people because I need to have a studio.
I need to know what's going on with audio-visual stuff.
I need to have an internet provider.
I need to have a host. I need to...
Right? All of this kind of stuff.
I couldn't go out and do documentaries.
I couldn't go out and do speeches because that requires cooperation.
I'd be crippled, right?
And my show would probably not succeed.
Because I'd be trying to do everything by myself.
And it's too much bloody work.
Division of labor is the essence of the modern economy.
It's the essence of the price system and the free market.
And if you deny yourself the division of labor, because everything is 100% your responsibility and nobody else has any agency, then you can't have a team.
You can't have boon companions.
You can't get much done.
You know, it's one thing to say, oh, you know, I really want to have a house.
I need to save up for a house or whatever.
But if you have to say, oh, my God, I've got to build a house from scratch.
Oh, man, and I can't even buy the bricks.
I have to make the bricks from scratch.
And I can't buy the concrete.
I have to make the concrete from scratch.
And I can't use any machines to dig the house.
I've got to dig it myself by hand.
I can't even use a fucking spoon.
At some point, you're like, oh, forget it.
I'm just, I'm not going to get a house, right?
It's too much bloody work. Whereas if you can divide the labor up, then it becomes possible, right?
And it becomes something you can be enthusiastic about.
But I bet you when you look at projects and events, it's kind of exhausting because it's like, I've got to do it all myself and I won't have any good advice and I won't have any people around me who can help me get things done and I won't have anyone I can surrender my will to for the purposes of efficiency, divide the labor and so on.
So it's just hard to get anything going, right?
Yeah, I mean...
That is something that I am very grateful for, is that I do now have a very valuable close circle of friends who are incredibly supportive and involved, I suppose.
They do have insight into my inner world.
I am able to open up and share stuff with them.
But that's taken a long time to establish.
But even now, I sometimes find myself just Worrying that, you know, am I leaning on them too much?
Am I dumping on them too much?
Should I be dealing with this myself?
You know, I look at people who are more accomplished than me.
You know, they're married, they've got their own home, they're more successful.
And it is a real struggle to not sink into this sort of abyss of resentment and go, well, you know, if I hadn't had a shitty mother...
Then this would have happened. Or if my life had been better, you know, of course, if my life had been better, it would be better.
But... Yeah.
Well, I know that because you tried to manage me pretty early on.
That was my first... Clue, right?
Because you said early on in that conversation, I may go on, you have to rein me in if I go to this, or you were trying to give me instructions on how to, you were trying to play both sides of the conversation.
As opposed to speaking about what's on your mind and letting me be responsible for my own actions.
Yeah. Because you say, oh, maybe I'm leaning too much on my friends and so on.
Well, then you don't trust your friends enough to say, hey, man, you're kind of one-sided at the moment.
Let's figure out what we... Like, you can't run both sides of the conversation.
I mean, you can. It's not real, though, because you don't actually control other people.
No, exactly. You give people a lot of feedback about how to behave around you.
And I think that probably is not ideal.
Yeah. No, it's not.
It's not. Because you can't be spontaneous and enthusiastic, because, and this is a British thing too, right?
Because you can be spontaneous and enthusiastic, but I don't want to impose.
And it's like, no, impose!
Impose! Like, it took me a long time to get over this, because as you know, I was raised British, and it took me a long time to get over this.
It's like, no, impose! And let other people manage their responses.
But don't try and control both sides of things.
That comes out of fear, right?
That comes out of having to manage your mom all the time because she was dangerous as fuck, right?
I think it's this, yeah, it's this feeling of just having to be on my guard.
Yep. I haven't lived with her for years, but it's so ingrained.
And I am, I feel, well, I know that I am working to break that down.
Right. But I just do wish that I didn't have to do that.
Well, let me ask you this.
Do you think I would have this philosophy show if I hadn't been raised by a crazy mom?
I think... I'm veering towards saying no,
no that you wouldn't. Because, you know, clearly you're an intelligent guy, you know, you've got cognitive skills, but you're able to draw from your hardships, from your hard experiences, your difficult experiences, and then learn from that and be able to relate those to other people's experiences.
Do you know how many people contact me but didn't want to talk just abstract philosophy?
I'm going to guess it's hundreds, thousands.
No, it's almost none.
It's almost none. The messages I do get, I'm not lumping you in with the collective.
I'm just saying that the messages that I get are around people who have issues in their personal life, who need a philosophical perspective on it.
Well, yeah, I mean, that was why I contacted you.
Of course, right.
And yesterday, there's a guy whose wife was about to divorce him, and he was desperate to try and stay in the marriage for the sake of his son.
And, you know, before that, before that, before that, right?
I mean, you listen to the call-in shows.
There's some abstract philosophical topics, for sure.
But for the most part...
It's personal issues of irrationality or anti-rationality that generally emerge from childhood.
So could I do what I'm doing if I hadn't gone through what I went through?
Well, first I wouldn't have the verbal skills.
I wouldn't have the jousting with anti-rationality.
I wouldn't have the pushback against contradictory statements.
And I'm not putting you in the same category as my mom.
I'm just saying that things you learn in desperation you can apply in skill.
And I would not have the power of what I do and the traction of what I do.
Because this is like an oasis where people can pick me up and you know when you contacted me, right?
You know that I'm going to listen.
You know I'm not going to try and impose an agenda.
I'm not going to try to run some scheme on you.
I'm not going to try and extract resources from you.
Like I never say, well, that was a great conversation.
I hope you'll donate. I've never said that, right?
Because I could not do what I'm doing if I had not lived through what I lived through.
And what I'm doing, based upon what people contact me for, is the most valuable thing that I could be doing.
It's not so much on YouTube, but the most popular shows are these conversations.
In general, the less I talk, the more people like it.
It's funny, it's true, right?
Well, I mean, everyone loves to hear themselves talk, I guess.
No, that's just a kind of cliche.
Most people hate to hear themselves talk.
I do. I can't even stand the sound of my own voice most of the time.
No, but this is where philosophy can actually help people.
Yeah. You know, it's one thing to say, well, here's the abstract science of curing disease.
It's another thing to hand somebody a bottle that cures their disease, right?
And people don't mind the abstract stuff, but it's kind of specialized.
I mean, I just wrote this whole book on abstract philosophy.
But what people really want is something they can apply, right?
If you've got a wound, talking about the theory of blood circulation doesn't help stop one drop of blood from escaping your body, but somebody who's got gauze and some tourniquets can really help you live.
And so it's this practical stuff.
And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because there is a way that you can turn your trauma into a strength.
I don't know what it is exactly, because I don't know enough about your life, and I can't tell you what it is.
But for me, I have turned my trauma up the fuck side down and I am using it to help heal the world and the people in it.
Yeah. And it has given me, because I braced myself against disapproval, not just from my mother, but a wide variety of people, In my youth to early middle age, I have braced myself against disapproval and survived and flourished despite it.
So when people say, oh, you can't talk about this, or you can't talk about that, or that's bad, or...
I'm not tempted by fame.
I'm not tempted by big speaking gigs.
I'm not tempted by television shows.
I'm not tempted by any of that.
I'm not tempted by, you know, the Cyrillic card.
Library card entrance to the intellectual dark.
I'm not tempted by any of that stuff.
I'm only tempted by telling the truth, no matter what the cost.
Because when I was a kid, when I was growing up, Edward, if I didn't tell the truth, I would die.
If I didn't tell the truth to myself, I would die.
That's not even hyperbole.
That's not an exaggeration.
I would have spiritually died if I could not hang on to the truth.
Because if I had not been able to hang on to the truth, I would have ended up like your brother.
Absorbed by the psychosis, absorbed by the evil, absorbed by the immorality.
And I would never have survived.
Never. I would have died.
Either physically, through suicide, or through dangerous behaviors of one kind or another, which I was very prone to as a child.
Extreme physical risks.
Or I would have just died because I would have been tempted to use my abilities for fame or money or...
Popularity or whatever, right?
Or pseudo-influence, which is when people come and listen to you because they know you're not going to tell them the most important things, right?
Most people go to see speeches because they know that people aren't going to tell them the most important things.
Biodiversity or whatever it is, right?
Race and IQ. All the stuff that really matters.
So, all of my experience as a child have gathered together and concentrated in me a ferocious Nietzschean will to truth.
Not a will to power, the will to truth.
Yeah, yeah.
And so, I was able to say, okay, well, this was all the shit I went through.
What skills has it given me?
Well, it's given me somewhat immunity to disapproval.
It's given me a ferocious commitment to truth because I understand what it is like to reject the truth and how it would have caused me a personal or spiritual death.
I also understand when I look at Europe or when I look at other places, all the people who want to sign this UN migration compact, this will be a form of death.
It may take a while to come and it may be a slow process, but nonetheless.
And so, if I can look at the lung cancer that comes from the first cigarette, what a wonderful gift to bring to the world, right?
So, if there is a way to have you not...
You never bless the past, you never bless being traumatized, but there is a way to take The bad things that happen to you and turn them to the surface of virtue.
It doesn't make the bad things good, but it's the best you can get out of a bad situation.
And that's, in fact, better than most people's lives.
There's a way to say, I had this much trauma, it can produce this much virtue and value in the world.
I will never be happy that I was traumatized, but I can end up happier than people in the middle who never have to make those stark choices and pivots.
I, yeah, I completely agree because I feel in my own experience that I've gone through the sort of, you know, like the stages of grieving almost because you are kind of grieving, you know, when you have a traumatic childhood, you are kind of grieving for the childhood that never was in a way.
And I feel like I've gone through that kind of like self punishing stage, the blaming other stage.
And as you can probably gather, you know, through, through some of my, um, So, you know, ticks and nuances throughout this conversation that there is still some work that needs doing.
But I feel that...
There is... It's got to...
It's finding the meaning and the direction that, to me, is the goal and also the challenge in the sense that, you know, trying to be more accepting of other people, trying to be more accepting of the fact that I'm not perfect, that, you know, these things...
Have shaped who I am, but I can change them.
And when I hear the people who call into your show, the discussions that you have with them, other similar intellectuals like Jordan Peterson and people like that, and it just really pisses me off that there are,
like if I look at my own experience and how difficult that was to go through and how Amazing it is that I'm not a complete babbling, heroin-addicted mess.
And then you have other people of my generation or of my age group who've gone through...
What happened? I don't know.
Someone posted a tweet and now they're traumatised.
And I just think, Jesus Christ.
You know? That is just...
It really fucking infuriates me.
That... And you have absorbed and contained a lot of evil in your life, Edward.
You have absorbed and contained within your heart and mind a lot of evil.
Now, most people, of course, when they contain a lot of evil, they discharge it by acting it out against others, right?
Which means how evil replicates, like a virus, right?
But you have absorbed and contained a lot of evil.
And because you haven't acted it out against others, you will be a potent force against evildoers in the world, if you want to be.
Because once you have acted out the evil, you can't fight the evildoers because you are one of them.
You can't fight Ed Norton-style fight club punching yourself, except to the death, right?
So because you have absorbed a lot of evil and been exposed in your face to a lot of evil and corruption and manipulation and parasitism, You know what it looks like.
You can smell it on the wind four miles distant.
You can see it gathering behind a cloud on the far horizon.
You can hear it as a wind chime in the distance that only teenagers can can, right?
So, because you have absorbed and contained without acting out a lot of evil, you are a very fine fucking tuning fork.
On the tune of evil. You are the dowser, the Y-shaped thing that can find the water underground.
You know what evil looks like.
You know what evil sounds like.
And deep down, you're afraid to confront it because you were a child and confronting evil and your mother might have got you killed.
Like, I'm not kidding about that.
Your mother has already threatened.
I mean, the reason she said, I wish I had aborted you, is she's saying to you, defy me and I'll fucking kill you.
Oh yeah, she used to beat the shit out of me on a regular basis, yeah.
So you know what evil looks like and you're afraid to stand up to evil because as a child evil had complete dominion over you, but as an adult it doesn't.
Yeah. Right? So you can be a great force for good in the world because you know what evil looks like and it don't look like you, which means you can fight it without hurting yourself.
You can fight evil without damning yourself.
You can fight evil without being tripped up by hypocrisy.
Because you've not been evil, you've only...
And this is why Socrates said, and Jesus said, it's better to suffer evil than do evil.
Once you do evil, you can't fight evil.
Because you joined the wrong team.
You joined the bad guys. Yeah.
But you can see evil.
You know how to fight evil.
Because if you hadn't successfully fought evil, you'd have succumbed to it.
And you haven't. Which is incredible strength.
Now, that strength is absolutely unique.
And when you go through a really shitty childhood, Edward, you either end up very broken or incredibly strong.
And a lot of that has to do with the choice and perspective of what you do with your trauma.
And I think that you're frustrated with feeling broken.
And you sense that there's great power embedded in the suffering you experienced.
And you want to get a hold of that.
And you can. Yeah, that's how I feel and it's only just this year that I've just started getting to a point where I feel confident enough to actually start building on that and to just trying to find a direction or trying to forge a direction.
You know, looking after myself better, just eating better, exercising regularly, just trying to work on those behaviours that are not just I know annoy the people around me, and they're too nice to say it, but annoy myself.
And I would say keep working along that, but be aware of the possibility that you can be an absolute fucking hero in the most necessary battle in the world.
I don't know what that looks like, because it's different for everyone.
It might be personal, it might be public, it might be literary, it might be vocal, it might be songs, it might be poems, it could be fucking dance, interpretive jazz, interpretive dance, jazz, I don't know.
But just keep your eyes peeled for that which leverages your historical trauma into future strength.
Because the depth of your suffering, if it matches the power of your exposition in the world, however it is, It doesn't mean that you're thankful for the suffering, but it means that you appreciate how the suffering gives you the strength that the world needs.
And to turn evil into virtue is the most incredible alchemy in the world.
To take the depth of evil that was done unto you and turn it into the power of virtue that you can advocate for.
Now that, my friend, that is beating your mom.
All right.
Well, I'm going to give you that stuff to mull over, and I hope that the call was helpful.
I certainly found it very important for me as well because it's good to revisit these areas with these kinds of new perspectives.
Will you keep me posted about how you're doing?
I will do. Thank you.
And that was extremely helpful.
Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
You're welcome, man. I look forward to hearing how things are going.
