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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
42:49
Love, Lust and Attachment
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Well, good morning, everybody.
It's 7-7-13.
I hope you're doing very well.
Two things I forgot to mention.
Three, in fact, I forgot to mention in my Man of Steel review.
Number one, high definition makes everybody over 30 look like they're the moon.
I just wanted to mention that.
That's fairly important.
Terraforming the Earth works about as well as transplanting democracy to a rather feral and medieval Middle East.
Also quite important.
And most importantly, Morpheus likes doughnuts.
Anyway, it's still an interesting film to see.
I'm afraid that the the October conference that was going to be run by Steph Kinsella, Jeff Tucker, and myself is on hold.
It will be delayed until next year.
But one of the things I was chatting about with the tuck of the Jeffrey is that it might be interesting to do a Conference in Rome next summer.
And I know I've got lots of European listeners who said, dude, come over.
Actually, they haven't said, dude, but they said, come, come to Europe.
And I would love to come to Europe.
It has been, I guess the last time I was in Europe, I was traveling to sell a product with IBM in Paris, which is a very interesting city.
I don't know, a story?
Do you want an inconsequential story?
I guess so.
Well, first of all, Paris is interesting because it really does look like you.
It feels like you're walking around the Death Star, these high buildings.
But they're like tenement buildings, and so it really feels like you're going overhead and all that.
This is when I used to live downtown, and I had some neighbors.
The neighbor's wife was French, from Paris, and she said, oh, you must go and you must talk to my friend.
Her name is like Giselle or something.
That's a Parisian name.
So when I was there, so I was there for a couple of days on business and Giselle and I ended up meeting up and she was going through a complete freakout because she had just bought a condominium at the bottom of one of these Death Star trenches with almost no light whatsoever.
And so I ended up helping her to find a lawyer and find a way to get out of the contract.
And so on.
And in return, she said, oh, you must come to dinner with my friends.
We have friends coming tonight.
I don't know what accent that is, but anyway.
And I said, well, you know, my French is really not very good.
It's certainly not.
Not to dinner table conversation, French.
And so she said, no, you must come.
We all, my friends, we speak English.
And, you know, to their credit, for about 90 to 120 seconds, they did in fact speak English.
And then they lapsed into rapid fire Parisian staccato Morse code French.
And I think there was some Klingon in there as well.
My French is a little rusty.
And two of two of the guys actually there were also named Stéphane.
So they kept, uh, Stéphane.
Oh, me?
No, no.
So anyway, it was not the most exciting dinner, but I was certainly glad to have dipped in and give her some help.
She did end up getting out of this wretched basement dwelling dark condo situation, but it was good.
You know, probably more memorable than going to the Louvre.
Anyway, so that's it for my introduction, and I guess we might as well go straight.
Oh yeah, so if you're interested, if you would come to Rome, or if you're in Rome and would like to come to a conference, just shoot me an email.
Donations, of course, always massively appreciated and requested.
I think I might need to upgrade my camera.
FreeDomainRadio.com is where you can send your questions for my pitter-patter of interrogating against the white background.
900 lights mailbag session.
So if you want to send your questions in, I will do my best to try and answer them.
Mailbag at FreeDomainRadio.com.
Donations, of course, always massively appreciated and requested.
I think I might need to upgrade my camera.
It's about seven years old, and it cost about $800 seven years ago.
And I just I was down talking to a camera guy who said, you know, massive changes and so on.
I've never really been too happy with the way the camera works in terms of how it picks up the light.
I've tried all the manual settings in the world.
I'm certainly no expert.
And if you do have any expertise in that, please let me know.
If you can talk me through anything, but I just never seem to quite get the light right.
I'd like something a little bit more automated.
So You know, it's the master of, you know, the philosophy show.
So I'd like to sort of keep that humming along nicely.
Other than that, I think we're okay for technical equipment.
But if you would like to help out, it's fdrurl.com forward slash donate.
Always massively appreciated.
So Mr. Mike, who do we have to chat with today?
All right, Jeremy, you're the first caller up today.
Go ahead.
Hello.
Hello, I'm sure you won't mind if I refer to you as JerBear.
Is that okay?
That's fine by me.
Whoever floats the boat.
So, I don't know if you remember, we had a talk like a month ago.
I had a nasty breakup from a girl that was kind of a nut.
I do.
Well, anyways, that turned out to be probably one of the best things that ever happened to me.
And the reason that is, is because after that whole incident, I kind of stopped avoiding the pursuit of self-knowledge I was putting off, I guess.
and delved right in.
Now that doesn't mean that I've achieved a complete knowledge or anything, but I've definitely examined my relationships very rigorously, I'd say.
And since then I've actually, I defood from my mom.
Honestly, it was something that was, in the end, I don't even think it was really that hard a decision.
And I'm not sure what it was that kept me from realizing the truth about the relationship, but when I examined it, it just seemed like she was the cause of so much grief for me that I was just, you know, obscuring and hiding.
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that it's obscured from us is that we've had a lot of information that has come out over the last generation or two about an abusive relationship in horizontal terms.
So in terms of like just about everybody knows that in a marriage, what is an abusive relationship?
If you're dating someone, if you're in a marriage, well, you know, they isolate you, they put you down, they verbally abuse you, they embarrass you, they shame you, they may hit you, they may sabotage you, they may spend your money, they may, you know, it may be one-sided, it may be, you know, whatever it is, right?
Those are the signs of an abusive relationship.
I don't know, you know, I'm certainly no particular expert on it.
There are lots of signs about abusive relationships in horizontal dating relationships and that's something that we're all becoming aware of.
Now, not a lot of people, sorry, a lot of people are still not able to solve that issue, you know, to get out of these relationships and so on, right?
So I just looked one up here.
Let's see here.
Signs of an abusive relationship.
So, someone pushes for quick involvement, comes on strong, I've never felt I've loved anyone like this before, blah blah blah.
There's jealousy, possessive, calls constantly, visits unexpectedly.
Right?
And again, if we translate these to parents things, right, these are signs of an abusive relationship.
At least, it would seem to me that that would be the case.
He's controlling, right?
Interrogates you about who you talked to and where you were.
Checks mileage on the car.
Asks for receipts.
Insists you ask for permission to go anywhere or do anything.
Unrealistic expectations.
The person expects you to be the perfect person to meet their every need.
This isolation.
Tries to cut you off from family and friends.
Deprives you of a phone or car.
Tries to prevent you from holding a job.
He blames others for his own mistakes or her own mistakes.
Do you have a parent who blames Everyone else for anything that's going wrong.
It's always someone else's fault if anything goes wrong.
Do you have a parent who makes everyone else responsible for their feelings?
The abuser says, you make me angry instead of I'm angry.
I wouldn't get so pissed off if you wouldn't habida habida habida, right?
So again, this is just some thoughts about it.
Again, I don't claim any expertise in this.
There is verbally abuse.
He criticizes you, says cruel things, degrades, curses, calls you ugly names.
He will use vulnerable points about your past and life against you.
Sudden mood swings, switches from angry to loving in a matter of minutes.
A history of hitting, threats of violence and so on.
Financial control, you know, obey me or you don't get any inheritance, whatever it is.
So again, this is just off the top of my head, just something I did a quick search of, and the reason it's hard to see with parent relationships is that we've had a lot of information about how to spot abuse in dating relationships, in horizontal relationships, but it's really hard to see it in parental relationships.
And there is, as I've mentioned before, there is quite a bit of change in the psychological field these days, psychological and psychiatry fields in these relationships.
So Dr. Phil, I think I mentioned this before, but Dr. Phil has an advisory board composed of Dr. Philip Zimbardo and other past presidents of the American Psychological Association and other, you know, all the top luminaries in the field and they review the stuff that's on the website and in one of his articles It basically says if you were abused, it says the emotional wounds caused by parental abuse can last long beyond childhood.
If you want to rebuild a relationship with your parent now that you're both adults, Dr. Phil has some advice.
One, be heard.
You won't be able to repair the relationship until your parent fully understands how the abuse has affected you.
He or she may feel guilty, but you're the one who needs to be helped.
So this is something I've been saying for years and years, which is if you have issues with your parents, it's really important to sit down and communicate with them and attempt to be heard as much as possible.
Second is redefine the relationship.
It's up to you to express yourself.
Tell your parent what you need now that you're not getting.
Be honest and clear.
This is your chance to say exactly what you need emotionally.
Nothing can change the past, but you can create a new history with your parent.
Treat each other as the people you are now.
3.
Do what is best for you.
Consider the possibility that it may not be healthy to have any sort of relationship with your parent.
It's a difficult pill to swallow and it should be used as the last option.
However, it may be the option that helps you the most and I think that's important.
You can find that at DrPhil.com forward slash articles forward slash article forward slash 35 and there's lots of other things there too.
So you know I know that sometimes people hear me talking about parents and abuse and and voluntarism and so on and they're all kinds of shocked but this really is It's mainstream.
I don't think anyone can tell someone, unless they're in imminent physical danger, that you've just got to get out of a relationship.
But it is very mainstream in psychological circles to remind people that it may be healthy to have no relationship with your parent at all if you continue to be stuck in a cycle of abuse and so on.
And it is hard.
It's hard for people to hear that.
We have this old thing, right?
Sorry, I know you want to talk about something else, but we have this old thing, honor thy mother and thy father.
Those of us who are into philosophy have looked at a lot of the Ten Commandments and found them to be somewhat wanting, but that's one of the ones that is tough.
So I just wanted to point out that I'm really sorry that this is where it got to, but if that's what's best for you, I'm certainly not going to criticize it.
Yeah, I appreciate that.
Go ahead.
Well, I mean, one of the things, one of the most nefarious things my mom would say, and it took me a long time to really see the implications of it, is she would say that, well, she believed in this, like, New Age spiritual stuff, right?
So she would say, you know, you actually chose to come into our family, right?
Yes, I've heard that theory as well.
So, basically, I realized that that was basically, like, Putting the onus on me, right?
So everything was my fault, right?
Because I chose to come into the family originally, right?
Right.
Now, I've heard that theory before, the idea that we sort of float, our souls float above the world and we have something to learn from our families and that's why we choose them.
And I mean, I've heard that.
It's insane, of course.
It's completely deranged.
But even if it were true, I don't see how that would alter anything.
I mean, that's like saying, you know, some guy beats up on his wife.
It's like saying, well, you chose to get married to me, so you can't leave.
It's like, no.
I mean, people make mistakes in marriage all the time.
And so even if you, I mean, you choose to get married, you can choose to get divorced.
So even if you did choose to enter into your family of origin, I don't see why that would mean you would have to stay forever.
I mean, what on earth would that have to do with anything?
Unless there's some sort of master spiritual thing like you just have.
Anyway, it's such an insane idea.
It's probably not even worth discussing.
Right.
Well, anyways, this whole process has me, like I said, questioning the nature of love because, based on what you said in the book, On Truth, that love is an involuntary response to virtue in another person, something like that, right?
It made me kind of realize that, I guess, by that definition, really, I don't have any experience of love in my entire life, you know?
Yes, I'm very sorry about that.
I'm incredibly sorry about that.
If you grew up in a very dysfunctional household, love is a distant rumor at best.
And what do you get instead of love?
You get neurotic attachment and sexual lust.
If my 20s is any indication, I'm sorry to make you laugh because it is tragic.
But the problem is when you're surrounded by toxic people, they are a human shield.
against virtuous people.
What on earth was any decent man or woman going to have to do with my mom?
What on earth would they ever have to do with her?
It would make no sense for them whatsoever to come into her life and be friends with her.
It is truly tragic that when you grow up with dysfunctional people Love is a galaxy away and it's not something you ever even hear of.
Let's say that there's a 5% or 10% variation in toxicity that's possible in a relationship.
So somebody who's like 80% toxic might hang out with someone who's 75% toxic or 85% toxic or whatever, right?
So think of these concentric rings, these shields around you when you find people who are not only 85%, not 85% toxic but 85% healthy.
I mean you're talking like 20 degrees of separation, right?
Like 20 people who would know each other, you're 20 layers away from a healthy person and that's assuming that it's as optimal as possible.
It's probably like 40 or 50 and you're never going to meet these people and so it is tragic the degree to which The concentric rings of dysfunction that surround a child in a highly dysfunctional family keep virtuous people at bay and away.
It really is tragic.
We should all in a sense be doing relief work among the people who need help, but in families it's almost impossible because parents will
Dysfunctional parents will almost invariably, I believe, keep healthy people away from their children because the healthy people will begin to provoke perspective in the children that are destructive to the selfish interests of the dysfunctional parents and so on.
It's really tough.
Parents do not want to expose their children to functional people.
Parents want to be the pinnacle of health and so on.
I'm sorry, I know this is a long lecture and I do want to listen to what you want to say, but I believe you.
I really believe you when you say that you didn't know what love was.
I didn't find it until I was in my 30s and I didn't even know really what I was missing.
Let me just tell you one last thing too.
When I was in a bad relationship in my 20s, The reason why it was so hard to get out of it was because everyone around me approved of that relationship, thought it was good and great.
My brother went to help me find a ring to marry this crazy woman and my mom didn't say anything when I announced and all this.
Everybody was kind of in on it, right?
And to peel back the layers of how destructive that relationship was.
It exposed a hell of a lot more than me and my girlfriend.
It exposed everybody around who was the support structure who either couldn't see that that relationship was dysfunctional, which meant that they were dysfunctional, or saw that it was dysfunctional and felt that it was just great and fine and dandy and wonderful for me to be in that kind of relationship.
You see, when I got out of that relationship, that's when everything began to fall apart for me.
Our dating relationships are mirrors of our original relationships, of our family, of origin relationships.
And if you get out of dysfunctional relationships, I mean just imagine, right?
You get out of dysfunctional relationships and then you go meet someone really healthy, confident, wise, articulate, curious, empathetic, virtuous, all these kinds of things, right?
And then you take that new lover, genuine lover, and you take that lover to your crazy messed up family.
Well, what's going to happen?
Are they going to like her?
No!
Is she going to like them?
Hell to the no!
My wife has never met my mother.
They share the name, but my wife has never met my mother and never will.
I couldn't do it.
I just, I couldn't do it.
So, this is the problem.
If you try to swim away from, you know, the dismal dirty volcanic ash and lava spiky little island of dysfunction, it's not something that you can, you can't blend the two.
You can't sort of drag that island to a better place.
To me, you've just got to leave that island of screwed up people and get to someplace healthy.
You know, they all made their choices.
They all had their lives.
You can either stay with them to no purpose whatsoever other than to repeat the dysfunctional, spiky, unicorn-horned, gouging DNA of dysfunction, or you can go to someplace healthier.
This is my opinion.
It's not an absolute.
It's not a reasoned argument.
I think there's good reasons behind it.
I've not been able to find a way to join health and sickness together.
To join virtue and vice together.
To join love and exploitation together.
These two tribes are at war!
Forever.
For the future.
Hopefully not forever.
Hopefully not forever.
And so, if you are looking for love, there are things that must be left behind if they can't be fixed.
But go ahead.
Well, I wanted some clarification though because you said that the sort of bond between parent and child, let's say for example the parent is an enlightened person, right?
Even so, that's more like you said it was an attachment in the book, right?
It's not mature love.
I mean, is that a right way of putting it?
Oh, you mean when I did a podcast called Your Children Do Not Love You?
Well, and on truth, you also mentioned that, for example, the bond between a mother and her child, it's more like a form of attachment than a mature love.
Well, absolutely.
Look, we can all understand that when a baby is seven days old, you don't love it for its virtue, right?
Right.
Unless by virtue you mean pooping so ferociously that you've got to clean the wall, right?
That's not virtue, right?
So you don't love a child for the child's virtue.
And the other thing too is that, of course, you hope that you teach your children virtue through your own example and through verbal instruction.
You teach your child about virtue and then you're not loving that child for the child's virtue in a sense any more than if you teach the child the correct word for tree, you don't love the child because the child knows the correct word for tree because that's kind of narcissistic, right?
Hey, all these these things I taught you, I love you for all the things that I taught you and so on.
Of course, the child doesn't have a comparison between you and other people and the child does not have a choice in the relationship.
The power imbalance is so enormous between a child and a parent that there's no choice.
There's no ...
I mean, obviously, you try and inculcate choices much, but my daughter doesn't have the choice to say, "Well, you know, baldy, I've had enough of your yammering.
I think I'm going to go and try out another family for a while and I'll let you know how it goes.
There's nothing like that that occurs.
So I can't compare the kind of love that I have with my daughter.
With the kind of love that I have with my wife, who has choice and virtue and has earned all these great things and come through many struggles to be such an amazing and wonderful and delightful and funny and warm and caring and committed person.
I just can't compare the two.
Now, I think that as a child grows, I think that you can get more love in the relationship, more sort of adult to adult respect and love.
But it's really hard to use the same kind of word for an infant that you would with an adult.
I just think that wouldn't make a huge amount of sense.
But sorry, go ahead.
Well, do you think that that form of like, I don't know, I'd call it attachment love maybe or something like that, is something that in a lot of relationships with parents never, so it just stays at that stage, it never matures to an actual Reciprocal sort of love, right?
Well, I don't think it can stay at that stage, right?
So there's somebody, Lori mentioned in the chat, there's a bond, oxytocin, that occurs, it's a chemical bonding that occurs, which is similar to, obviously, it's similar, not in content, but just in sort of, you know, when you meet someone you're very sexually attracted to, there's a lot of hormones and so on that kick in and this usually doesn't work out very well.
You know it's nature's very primitive way of making a baby in a very sort of fly-by kind of way.
But the bond that occurs, first of all this bond is not, it certainly doesn't occur with everyone.
I mean lots of people just don't have the capacity for this bond.
You know what is called postpartum depression.
I don't really know much about it but it's one of these things that sounds very suspicious to me.
With some people the bond doesn't occur at all and that sets you up for a hell of a rough time because you know babies are very hard work and the bond is so that you'll do the work and if you have to do the work without the bond it's really hard and I think you miss out on one of nature's great beauteous sunlit moments of attachment and merging in a positive way if you don't have that bond.
Oh, she says she has a whole blog on that.
If you'd like to give me the blog, I will pass it along to the listeners.
But so I think that a lot of times there is this attachment, there is this excitement about the baby.
And then the problem is, of course, that the children then begin to have ideas that are different from the parents.
And of course they do, right?
Because most of the parents' ideas have nothing to do with reality, right?
I mean, the nationalism, the superstition, the religiosity, I mean, you name it, the cultural nonsense that goes on, it's completely anti-empirical.
And so the children don't agree with the parents at all and find the parents' thoughts, as they get older, kind of incomprehensible.
And they find the parents' hypocrisy so often pretty incomprehensible.
You know, the parent who yells at you not to yell and hits you for hitting.
It's just crazy, right?
And so what happens is the natural rational empiricism of the child It collides with the House of Cards personalities of the parents that is built on culture, that is built on lies, nonsense, right?
I mean, we drive to the United States.
Why do we have to stop at a border?
I mean, we can make up these words to tell my daughter, well, you see, we're going from Canada to the United States.
But what the hell does that mean?
It doesn't mean anything.
I mean, that doesn't explain to her anything, it doesn't tell her anything.
I mean, do we then say to her, well, you see, there are guys with guns who run this particular gangland, and there are guys with guns who run this particular gangland, and they don't want people slipping from one zoo cage to another.
And, well, I can't tell her that yet.
So, there's a lot of things that the natural and curious empiricism of children collides against the incredibly fragile spider-string superstructure of the parent's false selves, and the false selves react with attack.
And the attack is how the irrationality reproduces itself.
Irrationality always reproduces itself through attack, because it doesn't have good arguments.
If you want to know the general mental state of humanity, just look at comments on the internet.
This is all of the irrationality that is striving to reproduce itself through attack.
Irrationality has nothing of value to offer other than relief from attack, right?
I mean, it's like when Winston Smith in 1984 loves O'Brien because O'Brien stops torturing him.
Well, that's all irrationality has to offer.
It's the cessation of pain that it itself is inflicting, which is also called the law.
So, the blue moon turtle blog dot blogspot dot com.
The Blue Moon Turtle Blog.
Blogspot.com.
I really believe that should be a Sting title album.
Anyway, so I think it actually does deteriorate quite quickly even if there is that bonding at the beginning when curiosity hits culture.
The result is almost invariably abuse of some kind or another.
Does it seem to repeat in adult relationships where you have this sort of like, you know, the romance period which kind of withers away and that it, you know, then you actually get into the meat and bones of it and it's just all false, right?
So it's like a repetition of what you did with your parents if they were irrational, right?
Yeah, I mean, it's the consolation prize for love is lust and codependency and attachment and all that kind of stuff.
That is the consolation prize.
Nature itself doesn't give a shit how you make a baby, frankly.
I mean it cares to some degree in that it wants someone to be around to raise the baby, but I think in the ideal healthy scenario it wants a pair-bonded couple who can raise the child and give it love and all these kinds of juicy wonderful things.
But, you know, in the absence of that, which was mostly absent throughout human history, in the absence of that is like, hey, you know, big tits, peck muscles, go to it, have sex.
You know, it doesn't, it doesn't, so it'll, you know, the consolation prize for love is lust.
And it is, frankly, dissatisfying.
And in the long run, it's kind of shameful.
And the reason that it's kind of shameful is it's very hard to To be honest with yourself about lust.
Right?
So, if you basically say, well, I just want to fuck this person because they're so hot.
I mean, I know some of the players out there and the guys, you know, the sort of seduce and destroy guys, they're very honest about it, I guess.
If you want to call that honesty, I suppose it's honesty.
But it's very hard to be honest about this kind of stuff.
It was for me.
Wanted to go out with this girl just because I found her sexy.
And I was going to ask her to a dance in grade nine or something like that.
And she was just she was sexy.
And she was a total troll as a human being.
I mean, it was nasty and unpleasant and coarse, and all this kind of stuff.
And I just remember, you know, people were bugging me who you who you can ask to the dance who you can ask.
I'm gonna ask this girl.
And everybody immediately gave me this look, like, yeah, okay, we know she's sexy, but she's a total troll.
What are you doing, right?
And unfortunately, she made some really coarse joke and laughed like, you know, a hyena suddenly surprised by an electric toothbrush in the nether regions.
And it was, I felt ashamed because I couldn't be honest, you know, but she's sexy and that's why I want to ask her to the dance.
I mean, I was 14.
What the hell would I know what to do with sexy?
But nonetheless, you know, the hormones were still raging away.
And so, it's hard to be honest about lust, which is to say, I basically want to use someone as an orifice, as a human Kleenex, and then toss them aside.
I don't like this person, but I will have, you know, intimate sexual vulnerability with that person, even though she repulses me as a human being.
You know, as a warm wet hole, she'll do the trick.
So it's, you know, without sort of colliding with your own inner sociopathy, it's really hard to be honest about lust and that's one of the reasons why I think it's kind of shameful afterwards because it's the degree, anything which tempts you to lie to yourself is innately dangerous, right?
Anything which tempts you to have to reshape your motives and to Pretend that you're doing something other than what you're doing is innately dangerous, and lust is one of these things that is the case.
I would actually, you know, just by the by, you know, let me just by the by, I want to sort of mention this very, very quickly.
One thing I wish that, you know, with men, I don't know if this is the case with you, but with men, if you decide that you want to just go out with some girl because she's hot, Then at least if you have friends like mine, they'll roll their eyes at you, like when I was sort of in my 20s or whatever.
I mean, so some of them might be envious or whatever, and I certainly did date some extremely attractive young ladies when I was younger, but they will kind of roll their eyes because they get what's going on.
I do kind of wish that women would start to do this a little bit more as well.
I don't just mean with the hot guys, I mean that's so obvious, who even bothers, right?
But, you know, like I mean, at some point, young women or girls, I guess more girls, they have to sort of say, oh come on, you know, you're into Justin Bieber because he's such a wonderful, kind, virtuous guy who drives drunk and beats up photographers.
At some point, it has to be just pretty boys.
That's fine.
We all like looking at pretty people, but that's not where you stick the wick of your future anywhere close to.
More importantly than that, I would like to start to see women roll their eyes when someone's just obviously going for the provider like the alpha male provider.
like, oh, you know, he's great.
He's going to be a lawyer.
He's this and that and the other.
That'd be a little bit of eye rolling, you know, as in, well, you just want money, resources or whatever it is, right?
I mean, your daddy's rich and your mom is good looking, as the song says, right?
Summertime.
I think it would be great if women would start to roll their eyes a little bit at each other when they were obviously just going for status, you know, pretty boys or money boys or whatever it is and just say, look, I mean, if you want love, if you want a great dad for your kids, you probably don't want some cold eyed, fish lipped lawyer who may make partner because he's working 70 hours fish lipped lawyer who may make partner because he's working 70 hours a week and he may give you a big house, but it's going to be as empty as the hearts of your children when all is said
I would like for there to be a little bit more skepticism about some of the natural drives that women have in terms of wanting men with resources in the same way that there are some eye rolling skepticism around men's natural drives to go for hourglass fertility silhouettes.
Anyway, just want to mention.
Yeah.
But the last thing I just want to ask you about love was, because I've not seen it in any of your podcasts specifically mentioned, but do you have a concept of self-love?
Like, I don't know, I guess just learning to love yourself authentically and maybe that's a process of, you know, self-knowledge and the pursuit of, you know, understanding your child and all that.
But, I mean, is there a concept of self-love that you kind of, can you detail?
Yeah, I mean to me self-love is like health, right?
So you can't aim directly at health, right?
You just can't.
You can't aim directly at weight loss, right?
You can't say, today I'm going to be healthy and lose weight.
What you can do is you can aim to exercise, you can aim to eat well, you can aim to expand your knowledge about whatever activities are necessary to To make or to keep you healthy, but you can't aim at health.
Health is an effect of specific actions that you can take, and each of those actions have to be studied and have to be understood and have to actually be enacted, right?
I mean, we've all had that moment where, you know, you've had a good meal and, you know, like, so I've gained five pounds doing chemo.
Why?
Because I'm a contrarian?
I don't know.
Well, I know why.
It's because I got this chemical taste in my mouth from the chemo.
And I have to eat too.
Even gum doesn't really help, but I have to sort of eat to make it go away.
And so I put on a little bit of weight during chemo, which is kind of the opposite.
And so we all have these moments where you have, oh, should I eat this?
Should I not eat this?
And you put it down.
So yeah, it was a good meal, but I'm not going to have the cheesecake.
I'm just not going to do it.
Or you're at the grocery store and you're like, oh, I like chips and onion dip.
It's one of my weaknesses.
I haven't had it for years.
I've had it during chemo because it's one of the few things that takes away that taste.
And so you're at the grocery store and you're like, ooh, three for eight dollars.
I should buy them.
And you're like, nope.
You know what?
Because if they're not in the house, I'm not going to eat them.
And if they're in the house, I'm going to eat them.
And so you just make those choices.
Now, the end result of making a whole bunch of those choices is hopefully you get some weight loss or you get some health or you get whatever it is that you're aiming for.
It's the same thing with self-love.
It's the same thing with self-love.
You just are conscious of your decisions.
You find a woman attractive?
Well, you scan her!
You get your tricorder of FDR virtue detection out, right?
And you ask her about her childhood and you examine her capacity for self-knowledge.
You examine her capacity for self-criticism.
I went out with a woman many years ago.
She never understood.
I went on two or three dates with her and she never understood why I didn't call her again.
But the reason I didn't call her again was because she found out I was in this relationship for like two years and we were living together and then one day I came home and he just cleared his stuff out and moved away.
I didn't even know where he'd gone.
He didn't leave a note.
I had no idea that anything was wrong.
He had just cleared up and moved out of our condo.
And he was just gone, and I never saw him again.
Still to this day, have no idea, no idea what happened with him.
Thank you for playing pole position Steph, but this ride is now closed.
And we didn't actually have sex, because third date, are you kidding?
Anyway, so you scan and you look, and you can either make those choices or you can fog out from those choices.
You can either specifically say, is this good tasting cheesecake that's going to give me a heart attack?
Is this going to James Galdolfini me into an early grave?
Or is this something that is really good for me or not?
You just have to be conscious of it.
Make those decisions.
Be skeptical and critical with your friends, with your family, with yourself, and aim for Virtue.
Aim to find the right people in your life.
Aim to find the people you can talk with.
Aim to find the people who make you a better person.
Aim to find the people who can listen, who can help you in life's journey towards the summit of virtue that we should all be striving towards.
When you make those specific decisions, you end up with self-respect and you end up with self-love, but you can't aim at it directly.
I did this interview recently with a guy who's skeptical of self-esteem.
And self-esteem, you know, I mean, I think it's just, you know, accurate or inaccurate evaluations of the self.
You know, as a philosopher, I'm pretty good.
As a gymnast, I'm not.
What does it mean to have self-esteem?
Well, just have an accurate evaluation of your own capacities and so on, but just try and do the right thing and each of those specific decisions will lead you more and more towards self-respect, but you can't aim at it directly and the idea that you can Encourage people to have self-respect by telling them that they're worthy of respect.
It's just like yelling at your fat to go away.
I guess it's just not going to work.
I hope that helps.
I was going to ask if self-love has to precede mature love for somebody else, but it sounds more complicated than that.
It's not just an A to B kind of thing, right?
Well, I mean, it is kind of a truism that you have to love yourself in order to be loved, but I don't know.
I mean, I've never really cottoned on to the concept of self-love very much.
I mean, other than the, you know, Baby Oil and Tom Waits' record, what does he say?
Making a scene with a magazine, one of his old songs.
Of course, that won't mean anything to anyone with a DSL connection, but I don't I wouldn't sort of say that I wake up and I love myself.
I respect the choices that I've made.
I've made some good choices.
I've made some bad choices.
I strive to consistently make as good a choices as I can.
I give myself the forgiveness and latitude to make bad decisions in complicated and unprecedented situations with the full knowledge that My adult self is largely constructed from philosophy and not inherently or organically inherited from history.
So I certainly, you know, I'm happy with what I'm doing in the world.
I'm happy with the degree of virtue that I'm bringing to the world.
I am satisfied that I'm doing as good a job as I reasonably can with the resources at my disposal and the abilities that I have, which are limited like everyone's.
But I sort of get out of bed every morning and James Brown, I step back, I kiss myself.
I think that's sort of like I'm the greatest, that kind of stuff that doesn't really resonate with me.
I think maybe you can feel that way if you've had your head jackhammered by George Foreman for about a month or so, like Muhammad Ali, but I just don't know that you can do that when you're just striving to make your way through a challenging world and trying not to get lynched.
That kind of thing is important.
I don't know about self-love.
I don't really think about it that much.
I focus on how much I love my wife and my daughter, how much I love the show, how much I love the listeners, how much I'm proud of the conversation that we're all having, but I don't know.
Self-love has just never really resonated that much with me, but I just wanted to mention.
Listen, I'm sorry.
We must, must, must get on to the next caller, so I apologize for the delay.
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