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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:42
Fearing Our Parents
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Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph driving home after my first week of work.
By the way, if you get a chance to listen to a song by Big & Rich called Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy, I would really recommend it.
It's a great deal of fun.
I actually did it in karaoke a couple of weeks ago.
And it's a crowd pleaser, I guess you could say.
But definitely give it a shot if you can.
It's a really, really fun song.
Great intro.
Anyway, I wanted to chat this afternoon about fear.
I guess we're going through all the base emotions these days, and one of the ones that comes up, of course, in a pretty fundamental way is the emotion of fear.
Now, I got a post and I unfortunately left it upstairs and can't read it now.
Perhaps I will read it tomorrow.
And in this post was a...
A gentleman who was talking about his own history with his family.
And it was very sad.
It was a very sad post.
And he was somebody who left the country for a good chunk of time, rather than spend time with his parents, which, Lord knows, I can understand.
And his parents, of course, are putting a lot of pressure on him to come and spend vacations with him, and to come over for dinner, and so it's a large hassle for him, and it's a lot of pressure that is being placed upon him.
And he's getting married, and his sister, it's all from memory, I think I've got it right, but his sister was given this lovely gem on her wedding day that this gentleman's father said to her, well, you know, I would have divorced your mom years ago if it wasn't for you kids, and marriage is a hellhole, and this, that, and the other, right?
Not exactly the kind of paternal toasts that you're hoping for on your wedding day.
So, he is talking about his own parents, of course, now wanting to spread their parental cheer over his own wedding day, like a rolling, acidic Beijing fog, and that he is finding it hard to resist the encroachments of his parents.
And it was a very sad post.
You can find it at freedomainradio.com forward slash B-O-A-R-D.
Just do a search for baby steps.
And what this gentleman said at the end of his post was that, you know, he's currently, he knows that his parents aren't good people, but he's having a great deal of difficulty getting them to To sort of keep their distance, to give him some sort of space, and so on.
And I fully understand that.
You know, I've got to tell you, my friend, that your parents sound completely and totally unmanageable.
Which is to say that they are, in fact, parents.
Which, you know, that's just the basic facts of the situation.
And from that standpoint, you are never, ever going to be able to manage your parents, right?
I know exactly what type of parents these are.
These are parents who rush you.
These are parents who take everything for granted, assume your absolute obedience and loyalty, and assume your virtue of wanting to see them without even a remote question.
They're like those bad, hyper-rushing kind of sales People who just assume you're gonna buy and keep rushing you forward and rushing you forward and rushing you forward and What?
What happens is that the moment that you try to slow them down they get offended they get angry It's a very bullying kind of interaction.
I totally understand it.
I totally think it's wrong.
I have absolute sympathy but What this gentleman said at the end of his post?
was that He felt that he was cowardly, or a coward, for not being able to confront, to control, to manage, to set boundaries, to do all of these sorts of things around his parents.
And, you know, that's a very, very common feeling.
It's a very common reaction and a very common feeling.
We really want to have some sort of capacity to have an influence over our own parents or perhaps older siblings or whoever, perhaps its bosses or teachers.
And we find that we quail or we hesitate before this kind of issue.
And what happens is that we end up feeling that because we are fearful of these kinds of interactions, We end up feeling that we are cowards, right?
That we should be able to deal with these kinds of things, and that it is a bad thing that we can't, and we are weakened, we are diminished, we are cowardly, because we can't, or won't, or quail before this kind of confrontation.
And, boy, you know, I totally understand that feeling, of course.
We all are brothers and sisters in this great tyranny of parenthood.
And the only thing that I would say is very important to accept in this kind of environment, or in this kind of situation, is that you're not a coward.
You're really, really, really not a coward.
We have such a strange notion of courage in our culture.
Courage is considered to be rushing into battle with a gun because someone in a suit tells you to.
That's considered to be courage.
Standing up for... Standing against racism, sexism and homophobia is considered, I think, to be courageous.
And, of course, it's scarcely courageous given that these are isms that society in general seems to have ended up or figured out to condemn them.
So there are very few people, of course, anymore who are ever going to say that Racism is a good thing.
It's sort of gone underground.
It's sort of hidden.
And...
It's considered to be courageous to speak out about this.
It's considered to be courageous to be not exactly pro-gay, but not anti-gay.
And of course, homophobia is something that is considered to be, in most of the places where you have these conversations, a bad thing.
And this is considered to be courageous.
In the same way that to take part in a peace demonstration or a demonstration against the war in Vietnam in the late 60s ...was considered to be the height of courage.
You know, burn your draft cards and so on.
Of course, the war had been going on since the early sixties, and by far, the bulk of the millions of Vietnamese who'd been vaporized, they'd already been vaporized by the time the late sixties rolled around.
And this protest had been going on for donkey's years at this point.
And of course, it was no longer the height of courage once the media had gotten a hold of the issue.
And once the media had broadcast the images of actual people getting killed in a war, God forbid!
How shocking!
How absolutely shocking!
I mean, what an incredible will's failure of imagination it is to picture that a war is existing without people being killed.
And that you see one naked girl running along the street in terror, and you think that that is the millions of Vietnamese who got vaporized by the tonnage of bombs that was dropped on Vietnam, North Vietnam in particular, and Cambodia to a smaller degree, that was greater than all the tonnage of the bombs dropped in the Second World War around the whole world, that the tonnage dropped on North Korea.
What did they think was happening to these poor people?
And so in the late 60s then, of course, it's considered to be the height of courage to stand up for a war, to stand up against a war that is already wildly unpopular among the elite and among the middle classes and so on.
After the damage is done, it's going to be considered wildly courageous to stand up against it.
After everyone is already on your side, Then it is very brave.
But of course, the people who in the early to mid-sixties were standing up against the Vietnam War were the people getting arrested and thrown in jail and having their careers ruined and so on.
Those people we don't really see.
We don't really see as much.
To stand against communism in 1930 was brave.
To stand against communism now is, you know, sort of pathetic, I would say.
So, There will come a time, of course, when it will be considered the height of courage to oppose brutal and violent state policies, which is to say, to oppose the state.
There will come a time where that will be considered the height of courage, and that will be after those of us who have fought the good fight for many years and have been ignored and excluded and derided and mocked will have carved a channel that people can recognize in their mind's eye and step down towards it.
with the feeling that they are enormous heroes of moral courage and it will be funny to watch because it's so inevitable.
So, this idea that we have of courage is really not anything to do with what is real.
What is real courage, right?
A real courage is to think for yourself in terms of universal principles and to live with the conclusions whether you like them or not.
That's real courage.
A real courage is to live with principles that are universal and to live by the conclusions whether you like them or not.
And there is no thinking in what is called courage these days, right?
And so cops are called courageous and firefighters are called courageous.
And soldiers, of course, are called courageous.
And that's, of course, because we're frightened of them, right?
Because they're Because they're violent, right?
So we're frightened of them, and so we call them courageous.
And they obey orders, and we consider that unthinking obedience to state power is something that we could legitimately and conceivably call courageous, right?
That's what's meant by a joke.
Right?
So, slavish obedience to state demands and state power is what the government, of course, the government, of course, would love nothing more than for you to believe that that is the cinquanat, the very height of courage.
Right?
To simply slavishly obey the state and call it virtue.
That, my friends, is what they would love for you to believe is courageous.
And This kind of conformity to the generally accepted conception of virtue, this conformity to the socially inherited or culturally inherited conception of virtue and integrity, is not courage.
That is cowardice.
That is complete and total cowardice.
To simply let other people define virtue for you, And to slavishly replicate it in your own mind and heart, this is not virtue.
That is a pretty sad substitute for courage and virtue.
It's not thinking for yourself.
It's not advancing the species.
It's simply inhabiting somebody else's fantasy of what virtue is, And repeating it.
You're like a broken record.
You're like a photocopier.
You're like a plastic mold, stamping out the same virtues over and over again, based on what benefits others, what benefits those who rule, and what decimates and destroys those who pay for the rulers, right?
Who are exploited for the sake of the rulers.
So, when this gentleman who is having The elemental, the tectonic courage to examine his own family, to question his own assumptions,
To drill into all of the cultural absolutes that people attempt to sort of encase our minds in like a gelatin mold to turn us out over and over again into the same gooey, exploited, destructive paste that most human souls turn into under this kind of pressure.
When this man has the courage To confront and to feel his fears of his parents.
And, you know, by the by, isn't that the great dirty secret of the world?
Isn't that really the great dirty secret of the world?
That we are all terrified of our parents?
And our siblings, perhaps, to some degree, especially the elder ones.
But isn't that really the great secret that nobody wants to talk about?
Amidst all of this fantasy talk of things like love and loyalty and family and blood is thicker than water and so on, isn't that sort of the great unspeakable fact that we all live with, that we are all terrified of our parents?
As we were all terrified of our teachers and our principals and our priests and our leaders.
As we are all now terrified of our leaders.
And the power of the argument for morality is such that we believe That it is wrong to be frightened, and so, in order to overcome the fear, which is natural and evil, like sexuality to a Catholic, in order to overcome the fear, we must create patriotic fervor.
Right?
If we are afraid of something, and we believe that that fear is evil or wrong or bad, Then it's almost inevitable that we will attempt to mask our fear with an exaggerated opposite.
Right?
If you don't deal with something, you always end up with an exaggerated opposite.
That's just a natural fact or factor within psychology.
And this great unspoken core of emotional life within society The great unspoken emotional core of emotional life within society is that we are all, that we are all terrified of our families.
And your parents are terrified of you.
I mean, that's something that's very, very important to understand.
When you become an adult, Your parents need you a whole lot more than you need them, as I've talked about in prior podcasts.
This crippling kind of dependence that parents have, and the fact that it is far too late for them to go back and redo your childhood.
There's no do-over for the first 15 years of your life.
The impressions that they've made, the power that they succumbed to, the brutality that they enacted, all of this is far beyond what can be recovered.
And so, when you look at Your parents and the fact that they need you, both from a material and even more importantly, probably, from an emotional standpoint, that they need your approval as you get older.
When you look at your parents in this light, I think you can quite easily see that they need you a whole lot more than you need them.
I mean, you don't need them anymore to take care and to shelter you and so on.
And you don't like them.
You also are not morally or emotionally responsible for what occurred between you when you were a child.
And so you have no guilt.
There's no guilt in your relationship to your parents.
There is no such thing as guilt in your relationship.
There's no such valid emotion as guilt.
As we talked about projection recently, the guilt that you may feel with regards to your parents is their projection of guilt upon you.
Your child is completely helpless in your relationship with your parents and you're helpless to love your parents.
You can't choose to love your parents.
You can't will to love your parents and that's all nonsense.
And so your parents are desperately afraid that you're going to figure it out.
They feel an enormous amount of guilt and shame themselves and they're desperately afraid that you are going to figure it out.
That they weren't good to you.
And so in the Emotions that swirl and coalesce between parent and child when the child is grown up.
It is... You know, most parents are sort of morally equivalent to war criminals, right?
In that if you mistreat a prisoner of war, somebody who is totally dependent on you and who cannot escape, if you maltreat a prisoner of war with either psychological or physical torture, then you would be contravening the Geneva Convention and you would be a war criminal.
And if the same thing applies to parents, which of course it does, insofar as parents have more power over children than camp guards have insofar as parents have more power over children than camp guards have over prisoners of Sure.
It is perfectly clear that parents who mistreat their children, who cannot escape and who cannot fight back, and who are completely and totally dependent upon the parents, but the parents who mistreat the children in this sort of environment, that these parents fall into but the parents who mistreat the children in this sort of environment, that these parents fall into the moral category of war So,
There is a great crime at the heart, of course, of families, right?
It's the mistreatment of children by the parents and, you know, by the schools and so on.
And it's not that the parents are supposed to be educational philosophers and have figured all this sort of stuff out.
That's not what I mean by that.
What I mean by that is that they're lying about everything.
To do with what they're telling you, right?
Because they're perfectly aware that school is compulsion.
It really doesn't take a lot of brain cells to figure that one out.
And yet they tell you that violence is always bad.
Violence can't be used.
And then, of course, when you become an adult, and you become a libertarian, or an anarchist, or something, and you begin to have sort of figured this out, that the state is violence, what happens then, is that your parents, as you say to them, well, you know, the state is violence and so on, your parents are perfectly aware that what you're saying is the truth.
And they won't admit it.
This means that they knew all along.
Everybody knows everything all along.
There's no knowledge other than technical knowledge and so on.
It's not like we know Java before we know Java.
But knowledge about ethics and knowledge about the truth.
Metaphysical, epistemological, ethical knowledge.
And knowledge about politics, too.
It's just a matter of introspection.
It's not a matter of political science studying.
I mean, that's not the case at all.
Everybody knows everything about the state.
There's no doubt, there's no question about it.
Something that libertarians forget quite a bit, I think.
Everybody knows everything about the state.
And the only reason that people get confused about the state is because they want to be.
Because it will cost them something to realize that they have lied to themselves.
Right?
If you go up to walk up to someone and say, you know, did you know that a new planet has been discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune but before the ex-planet of Pluto?
They'll be like, wow, that's really interesting, tell me more.
Right?
That's a piece of knowledge that people do not have any emotional investment into.
And it doesn't cost them anything to change their mind.
But if you go to the Nine Planet Deity Society, Who gain millions of dollars of donations based on a religion that there are only nine planets.
And you go up and you say, do you know that they've discovered another planet between Neptune and the ex-planet of Pluto?
They're gonna say, no!
No, it's false!
It's only an asteroid!
Or, it doesn't exist!
Or, well, it's still only nine planets because Pluto is an ex-planet and that's blah blah blah blah blah.
This is actually confirmation of our original thesis that we know there's a God because there are nine planets blah blah blah.
This twisting of reality to suit gain is innate to human nature in the absence of philosophy, right?
Just as superstition is innate to human nature in the absence of science.
to understand how the world works, and in the absence of science, you just make up crap to tell yourself you've got an answer.
So, your parents know everything that there is to know about your family history.
And they also know that, you know, the real question, of course, is why are people so resistant to the idea that the state is violence?
Well, of course, they're resistant to it, because as soon as you start going down the path that the state is violence, then you are openly accepting the proposition that Human authority covers up its corruption and evil in order to exploit those it rules.
Good heavens!
I wonder if that could have anything to do with most families, with almost all parents.
It's unthinkable.
The principle is perfectly acceptable, that if you understand that governments lie about their own virtue in order to continue to exploit Or rather, to have the citizens disarmed before them and to feel a kind of guilt for wishing to disobey and not pay resources and so on.
If those in authority lie about virtue, in order to control those they rule, and to have those they rule control themselves, right?
If you can teach your slave that it's moral for him to be a slave, you get to save a lot of money on fencing him in and electronic ankle bracelets and so on.
This is, of course, the great value that we've talked about before, with why the state pays intellectuals and why the church is so central to this kind of stuff.
If you can get people to enslave themselves, then you don't need to invest in the brutal mechanisms of state power.
And that's why the governments deal with public schools before anything else, right?
That's why it's one of the first things, before even the currency, it's one of the first things that Right?
And that's why when the state gets public schools, it gets everything else over time.
Because what's going to happen is, how many parents are then going to say, you know what?
The state is violence and public schools is based on coercion.
And so I guess I was pretty corrupt in putting my kids there.
Well, that can't be right.
I need my kids to support me as I get older and I need them to justify what I did as a parent and to pretend that they love me.
Because God knows I'm not lovable in fact.
So I must be lovable through brutality and through control and through subjugation and through fear and through intimidation.
Don't worry, I don't feel that angry.
I'm not going to yell too much today.
But parents know intuitively and at their very core that if they accept that the state is violence, And that the state is corrupt and that the state lies about its own virtue in order to get people to enslave themselves and feed the power and the pomposity of the state.
If you get that, you get your parents.
Which is certainly a hell of a long way closer to understanding your parents if you understand the brutality and corruption of the state.
And the reason why and the fact that the state uses the argument for morality to subjugate you.
So the moment that you say, gee, you know, I think the state is violence, bam!
Your parents make that connection.
Everybody knows everything.
There's no doubt here.
And if you doubt that, look at your own dreams, right?
There's a reason that I do the dream analyses here on the show, because you're making all these connections every single night.
With Dolby sound and three-dimensional IMAX views and all of that.
You're making all of these incredible connections in your mind every night.
Every human being makes all these connections all the time.
Bam!
That's what the human mind does.
It integrates disparate information into principles.
And so when you are, if you are an anarchist, or if you are somebody who heavily criticizes human institutions of power, then your parents totally get that if they agree with you about the state, they can't deny you about themselves.
It's a very, very important thing to understand.
Your parents totally understand that if they agree with you about the state, they cannot deny you about themselves.
And this all occurs in less than the blink of an eye.
Right?
This connection that everybody gets in their gut occurs in less than the blink of an eye.
This is how amazing the human brain is.
The reason that your parents simply assume your virtue and your loyalty, sorry, they assume your loyalty and they assume that you believe that they are virtuous and you owe them everything, the reason they assume that and act in a bulldozing kind of manner as if that were true is because they know that it's not!
A salesman Anyone who believes that he has a great product that you really need is going to let you take your time and evaluate it.
Right, if I'm selling a Lamborghini for ten bucks, I'm going to say, hey, you take your time.
You can go to every other car dealership in town.
Look around.
Go on eBay.
Anything you want.
Anything you feel like.
You can take your time.
Because nobody's going to come up with any kind of better deal than that, so I'm in no hurry.
You come back when you're ready.
But if I have a car that is a kind of piece of crap held together by bailing wire that is about to go, and I'm sitting there trying to pretend to be relaxed in the front seat as the person is test driving the car, and I'm just crossing my fingers underneath my ass and saying, oh my god, I hope that this car survives this test drive and doesn't fall apart, then I'm going to be in a hurry!
Because I'm trying to rip you off!
I'm going to say, you have to buy this now.
I've got another couple that wants to come and buy it.
They're showing up in 20 minutes.
They're going to pay $10,000 more, but I like you, so I'm going to give it to you.
But this is a one-time offer and it expires in three minutes.
I'm not going to want you to go and look it up on the internet.
And I'm not going to want you to go and get competitive quotes, because what I'm selling is a piece of shit.
So I'm going to pressure you and I'm going to make you buy quickly and I'm not going to give you time to reflect.
I mean, assuming that I'm like a nasty guy.
An evil, exploitative bad guy.
And so the reason that parents rush and make all these assumptions and just keep barreling forward is because they know that they're offering a shit car to you.
They know that they're offering a shit relationship to you.
They rush you along and they bully and they assume and they keep moving and they don't pause and they don't let you think and they don't ask you questions because they know that they're offering you just a pile of big shit.
Not even as manure, but as roses.
So they can't ask any questions!
They can't sit down with you as you should with your relationships in general.
They can't sit down with you and say, how's this working for you?
How's this relationship working for you?
What could I do to make it better?
How could this relationship be more satisfying for you?
I do this with Christina all the time.
You know, how's this whole marriage working for you?
Is there anything that I could do that would be better?
Is there anything that's discontented?
That doesn't involve, you know, me learning foreplay or how to wash a dish or vacuum or finish mowing the lawn or...
Clean the bathrooms properly, or make the bed in a way that doesn't look like somebody just threw the blankets up.
Anyway, I won't get into the whole list, but basically I ask you if there's anything that I could do to improve that involves doing more podcasts.
That really comes down to the only criteria, but I think you get the general principle.
What is it they say?
Why doesn't a woman blink during foreplay?
That's just not enough time.
But, parents know completely and totally what this is all about.
They know that they exploited you.
They know that they bullied you.
They know that they treated you wrongly.
They know that they're complete hypocrites.
They know that should you ever figure out the nature of state power, that you will then necessarily, of a next step, figure out their power and the entire justification.
For what they have done hangs by a thread.
The entire self-justification for their lives, right?
They've spent 20 or 30 or 40 years being a parent and have devoted an enormous amount of false self-bullshit into being good parents and loving parents and all this kind of nonsense.
And, uh, so the entire justification of their whole goddamn life, their social standing, right?
Because if you stop seeing them, their friends and their relatives and all these damn people are going to say, well, where is Bobsy von Bobsyville?
How come we don't see him anymore?
Well, he's busy.
Like, that might work for a while.
But it's the social humiliation, the self-humiliation, the self-incrimination, the rage, the whatever, all of the bad shit that you could imagine that is going to go on for your parents the moment you start questioning anything of substance.
All of that is perfectly cooking in their brains and is waiting like a viper to strike at any hand that reaches down that rabbit hole.
Let's just pretend that the viper has eaten the rabbit, but it's still hungry and wants to eat.
To eat your hand.
Anyway, you can play with that metaphor on your own and see if you can make it behave.
And the reason that I'm saying all of this is that this fine, fine, courageous gentleman is having the courage to examine the terror structure that is his family.
The vile, gruesome, dominating, interference, corrupt, prone idiots who are his parents, he is having the moral courage, as I said, the tectonic courage.
It does move continents, this kind of courage.
He is taking the courage to understand his family.
He is taking Socrates' dictum, which he quotes in the post, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Which is not true, by the way.
We can talk about this more another time.
The unexamined life is perfectly worth living if nobody else examines their life.
If you're all idiots who have no capacity to introspect or philosophize, then the unexamined life is perfectly worth living.
The unexamined life only becomes not worth living if other people actually examine their lives.
Right?
So being a brutal asshole parent only becomes not worth doing if children tell them to fuck off.
Right?
Beating your wife only becomes a maladaptive strategy if women will no longer date assholes who beat them.
That's how you change the world.
You stop supporting people who are doing bad things.
It's not rocket science.
It doesn't mean that you have to write another article for Lou Rockwell, although myself and a listener are at the moment, which I'm having a great deal of fun with.
But you want to... Being evil is a perfectly adaptive and positive strategy, as long as other people aren't good.
What Hitler did was a perfectly adaptive strategy for a homicidal maniac.
But it only worked because other people were willing to believe all of the bullshit he was spewing out and go and invade Poland.
So, the unexamined life is not worth living only if other people are rigorously and with integrity examining their lives and acting on the consequences.
Right?
I mean, this makes sense, right?
And that's why the greatest thing that you can do to make the world a better place is to learn about virtue and then when you're ready apply it consistently.
But this gentleman's magnificent courage in examining his own fears, in feeling the bullying and imposition of his asshole parents, is doing an incredibly brave thing.
This is how the world is saved, people!
This is how the species survives!
This is how society lives!
is the tentative and terrifying courage of people like this.
This is how the species is saved from lies and corruption and evil.
That tentative, grasping, groping advancement that feels like you're jumping off a cliff and makes you feel like the weakest and most weebly person in the world, that's how society advances.
I mean, when you're the first mammal, you're not the size of a dinosaur.
The dinosaurs rule the world, and the mammals are all darting around in between the legs of the dinosaurs, terrified that we're going to get stepped on.
It's terrifying to move forward.
To move the species forward.
It's absolutely terrifying.
And it would kind of be weird if it wasn't.
Because if it wasn't terrifying, why the hell would the species be where it is right now?
Which is up to its eyeballs in bullshit illusion.
If it wasn't scary, it would make no sense that it needed to be done!
I'm meaning, for this to be encouraging, I'm sorry to be raising my voice.
I don't mean this in any negative way.
I am a motivational speaker who berates people who are trying to improve.
This is why I do it from a car and not from the sky dome.
Never mind.
I'm just thinking of the word sky dome, and if you're watching the video, my head underneath the skylight.
Anyway, we don't have to get to that, I'm sure.
We've had enough bold jokes for this podcast series.
This is magnificent courage that this gentleman is displaying, and the fact that he calls himself a coward is injustice of the first order and is only the label that his parents are applying to his courage.
So I would suggest and highly, highly recommend, my friend, that you be a whole lot more gentle with yourself than you are being.
Gentle and kind and patient.
And patient and patient and patient and patient.
Because he's feeling like, oh my god, I'm getting married, I have to go and confront my parents, I have no time, I'm terrified, I've got to do this, I've got to do that.
Just as somebody else IM'd me at work today, during my lunch, and was saying, you know, with regards to the students that I podcasted on about some suggestions about how, well, you know, I'm getting a performance review, and these kids are out of control, and how do I do it in such a way that I can do it quickly, and so on.
It's like, man, relax!
I know it's tough.
I know you want to fix all these problems right now.
Relax.
Relax, relax, relax.
You have years to turn this around.
You know, most idiots never turn this around in their whole life and instead contribute to the corruption of the world.
Take your time.
It doesn't have to be this year, it doesn't have to be next year.
What you need to do is keep combing over the facts, keep combing over the truth, keep understanding what's going on, understanding reality.
And as you do that, your emotions will begin to swing in line.
We don't conquer our emotions.
If you're afraid, it's for a damn good reason.
Right?
If you're afraid and you confront your parents too soon, before you're ready to, emotionally ready to, not in your head, not based on some timeline, not based on some deadline, which is only going to weaken your argument and strengthen your parents.
If you keep combing over this information, keep listening to the podcast over and over and over.
Just keep thinking about integrity, keep thinking about universal reversible values, keep thinking about hypocrisy, keep feeling your way through your childhood experiences, keep reaching back through the tunnel of abuse to get to your original self, which is still in there.
You just keep working on all of this stuff.
And as you do this, and over time, your emotions will begin to swing into play, right?
You're changing the current, and as you change the current, your emotions are like fish, right?
They're like fish swimming in water, trying to stay in one place.
You change the current, the fish will all start to realign.
Or it's like you're turning a super tank, or it takes a while to turn it around, as the guy who crashed into Alaska may remember.
Exxon Valdez, that was it.
But what you need to do is not give yourself a deadline.
Not give yourself a deadline.
Philosophy can't be rushed.
You can't pull a rose and make it grow faster.
If you pull a rose, you will simply uproot it and have to start all over again.
This is an organic process.
If you want your child to be tall, you feed him well and give him lots of milk and hope for the best.
You don't grab him by the head and start pulling.
That's a stressful and unproductive... Change is organic.
Change is something that you just work over at an intellectual sense, and you wait, and you are patient for your emotions to catch up.
There is no time pressure for wisdom.
Wisdom is, to some degree, the abandonment of the sense of time pressure, which is almost always imposed by others for false self reasons.
And so, be gentle, be patient, be relaxed.
Keep studying knowledge, keep learning about yourself, keep introspecting, but without an agenda, without a big massive hunkin' stinking in order to.
Because that won't get you the kind of freedom that you're looking for.
The whole point of freedom is to take it now!
Now!
Now!
Not later.
Not when you have broken with your parents.
The whole point of freedom, the whole idea behind freedom, is that you take it now, and you get rid of deadlines, and you get rid of the pressure of others, and you get rid of the pressure on yourself, and the got to by this, and the have to by that.
The whole point of freedom is to take it now.
If I feel like calling my parents, I will call my parents.
If I don't feel like calling my parents, I won't call my parents.
If not calling my parents causes me too much anxiety, and then I feel like calling my parents to relieve that anxiety, then I call my parents.
It's about being in alignment with your emotions.
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
The emotions to be commanded must be obeyed.
It's about not imposing rigid and hyper-conscious agendas on your emotional and spiritual growth, but letting yourself grow, right?
You water your soul with knowledge and wisdom and logic and passion, and your soul then grows and gives yourself the good grace and the good taste and the good manners to allow yourself to maybe be surprised at how you grow.
Right?
Don't sort of put a destination out there that you've got to get to.
You don't know what you're going to look like after you grow up here.
Because you want to grow in order to be able to confront your parents.
And in order to be able to deal with this thing at work.
And in order to have a better marriage.
Never gonna work.
You do not grow in order to.
You grow as an inevitable result of watering yourself with knowledge and self-acceptance and patience.
Then, you grow.
And you grow in directions that ought to be surprising.
Because if they're not surprising, then they're not really growth.
They're an agenda that you have.
Grow in order to.
Let yourself be surprised by growth.
It's an incredible and powerful thing.
It does not have to be something that you consciously will to get somewhere.
Be patient.
Be loving.
Be gentle with yourself.
You know exactly what to do.
You need to take the rigidity and the control out of the equation.
So that you can grow with pleasure, with patience, with organic misdirection, according to your conscious mind.
But in a direction that will end up being much more powerful for you.
Because it will really last in that situation.
Anyway, I hope that this has been helpful.
I hugely, hugely respect the people who are going through this path.
But don't.
Try your best, if you can, to give yourself the space and the patience to deal with it in an organic manner.
You can control your pursuit of the truth and the rigor with which you apply principles.
You cannot control your emotions that result.
And you can't force yourself to do things you're not ready for.
I mean, you can.
I guess I could force myself to try a long jump in the Olympics when I wasn't ready for it.
But I bet you it wouldn't be very good for me in the long run.
Thank you so much for listening, as always, as always, as always.
Thank you so much to the people, as I mentioned this morning, who've signed up for the monthly donations.
It means a huge amount to me.
I would love to do this full-time, and I think that I could do some real good for the world by doing it full-time.
But I can't do it yet, so if you would like that, if you think that I could do some good for you, maybe even as good as a cup of coffee a day, Then if you'd like to sign up, I would really appreciate it.
You can do that at www.freedomainradio.com.
There's a subscribe button on the left-hand side of the main page.
You can either send me a one-time donation, in which case I will kick you a PDF or an audiobook.
You can choose from a number of different books of mine.
But what would be really helpful would be to get some people signed up, some more people signed up for the $20 a month thing.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
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