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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:51
Reason, Evidence and Relationships
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Hello, how are you doing?
I'm well, how are you doing?
Very well, very well.
Yeah, we've been emailing throughout the couple weeks.
It's just something that's been kind of bugging me.
I'm aware that you, I think you may have said that you spoke about this in RTR.
I've read it or listened to it in that way three times.
Maybe I'm missing the point here.
My main concern is, well, one of them that I wanted to cover was my friendship circle.
There's some people that I don't believe are the best kind of folks to hang around.
And there's all these feelings of confusion and ambivalence with certain things.
They're all into different things.
And I'm not quite sure how to deal with this.
And I was trying to see if I could petition you for some perspective on this.
All right.
Petition away.
Sure.
Well, I mean, I have one friend that, for example, I've talked with her about my, uh, parental history.
So she's a little more closer than other people are.
So, you know, I expressed I'm very angry about what happened in my history.
And she says, Oh, you're just being bitter, just being bitter.
And, um, the other one that says, uh, you know, there's a couple, there's a couple of people that when I told them I was in therapy, they gave me like these smug looks, uh, that, um, you know, disapproval.
That I did this step.
Another one that I've, um, I keep thinking about this one conversation I had with her at one point at dinnertime.
It was, uh, that she believes that, you know, the relationship between she and her kids are, are kind of, um, you know, she's the, the one that tells them what to do.
The powerful one, they, they obey me.
No questions asked, whatever.
And, uh, and a fourth one is, is, uh, is, is a pretty important one too.
It's a business venture he's starting up.
Is getting into like very esoteric topics like, you know, UFOs and politics is another thing that he's doing.
And, uh, you know, I've made a case for him that like, you know, a lot of, a lot of this stuff, you know, it's just, it's doesn't exist really.
Like, you know, the UFOs is one thing and doesn't exist in, uh, politics.
All you're doing is basically, you know, petitioning one, one gang, one criminal gang to, Replace another criminal gang.
Like, against a Republicratic establishment.
So you want Libertarians and Green Party in there.
Like, well, it's the same.
It's basically the same thing with a different name.
You know, Rose is still a Rose.
You know, it doesn't quite smell sweet.
So I'm just kind of like, I don't know what it is that's maybe something that I'm doing that's attracting these kind of people.
Or perhaps maybe I could also get some answers as to how I can maybe get the courage to honestly come and tell them.
Because a lot of times I feel helpless to kind of lay out certain truths to them that I feel that they may not be seeing.
Yeah.
I mean, it seems like, um, what's missing in many ways is, is, is empathy for you, right?
Okay.
You say, okay, like I'm going off on a tangent here.
No, no.
I'm listening in.
I'm listening in.
No, tell me what you think about the first thing I'm saying.
Well, yeah, I do feel a lot of the time, a lot of empathy is missing.
I mean, shit, I'm trying to get my own empathy, but I mean, that's a tough thing too.
I remember your podcast being like, the road to getting empathy is really tough because you really are facing a lot of your history that you may not necessarily be proud of.
I'm going to therapy and I'm talking about this.
Even now, I'm still kind of nervous, but it's this, um, first time I went there too, he was like, Oh man, just, I let out so much.
I even cried through the whole session.
It was crazy.
But, uh, No, that's good.
That's good.
Now, when you were a kid, what was the level of empathy of those around you, in particular your parents?
I don't know.
I never thought about it that way, like how empathetic they are.
I know my current workplace, there's not a whole lot of that going on too.
Don't you start drifting off to your workplace with me, brother.
Come on, I asked you about your childhood, you start talking about your workplace?
What do you think I'm gonna say?
Yeah, I understand that, I understand that.
I don't know, I can't quite say.
Empathy in terms of like, did my parents listen to me and let me express my purpose?
Yeah, were they interested in you independent of themselves?
So I mean I know it's a little abstract, right?
So I'll sort of give you some examples.
So if somebody were to ask me what's my daughter like, what does she like, what does she not like, what are her favorite things, her least favorite things, what motivates her, what unmotivates her and all this kind of stuff, I mean I could go on for days, right?
I mean I'm interested if she seems upset.
I want to know why she's upset.
Now I don't want to know why she's upset because her being upset bothers me and I want her to stop it.
I want to know why she's upset because I want to know why she's upset.
I don't even want to know why she's upset to make her feel better.
Yeah.
I just want to know what's upsetting her, what's bothering her.
Just for the sake of knowing her, not because I have some need or something that I want to fulfill in myself.
I just, right?
Just to know her.
Right.
I mean, like I know when I deal with my parents now, like a lot of, a lot of the way I guess It is kind of alien now in so far as... No, I'm talking again.
You keep, you go into work now, you go into now.
I'm talking about when you were a kid.
I don't know.
Is that I really remember them in terms of empathy.
That's the thing.
It's like, I remember events, but I don't remember certain empathy.
I mean, I'm kind of, a lot of the times I'm having to extrapolate backwards from now.
And kind of going back, but I would say, I guess a lot of empathy really wasn't shown for me all that much.
That's a very ambivalent statement.
A lot of empathy wasn't shown all that much.
Right.
So, I mean, can you think of a time when your parents really sat down and asked you how you were doing, what you were thinking, what you were feeling without having some agenda that they wanted to fix or change or whatever it is?
No, I don't think so.
So if you can't think of an example of that, that's kind of important, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, it is, it is.
And that would explain why the people in your life don't show you empathy and they're still in your life, right?
Right, right.
Because that's what you're used to, right?
Kind of like that boxer story?
Yeah, like the Simon the Boxer thing.
I mean, you're used to managing a lack of empathy, so you're drawn to people who don't show you empathy.
And then somebody who does show you empathy may not even come in.
Right.
Oh, gosh, what was the name?
Okay, I'm trying to remember some game.
People will email it to me.
So there was a game I used to play.
Where there was a spaceship in the middle and three rotating rings of energy around it, and you flew this spaceship around, you had to shoot through all these rotating rings of energy.
Starcastle!
I think it was called Starcastle.
You are way too young to even know what the hell I'm talking about.
This is back when ray tracing was a cool new thing in video games, but... Yeah, I guess I am kind of young there.
Yeah, you don't know what the hell I'm talking about.
But just think of three rotating shields, right?
You blast one little bit away and it starts rotating, and then you blast another one, and then you have to shoot through that one that you blasted away to get to the next one, which rotates the other way.
And then they regrow if you don't shoot them for long enough.
And so you had to basically go through all these defenses, and then you had to shoot the ship in the middle.
And in the meanwhile, it kept shooting these little sparkle of things out to chase you around.
It was a great game.
It was a really great game.
Yeah.
Very exciting, but frustrating at the same time.
I finally get through.
Oh, it's regrown.
It's not again, right?
Then these guys are chasing you over the screen the whole time.
But the point is, so the people that you have in your life are shields for the opposite kind of people, right?
Right, right, right.
So if you have non-empathetic people in your life, they will shield you from empathetic people in your life.
Because they are not going to know empathetic people.
So you go to a party with someone who's a friend of yours who's really non-empathetic, then all their friends are going to be non-empathetic.
Right, right, because like attracts like.
And all their friends are going to be non-empathetic, right?
It's like, you know, since I started listening to the podcast and even going to therapy too, like it really has redefined a lot of my relationships and what I didn't notice now is really clear to me.
And it's kind of like, you know, how the hell did I end up here?
Like, shit, why did I end up here?
What happened?
Well, I mean, this is sort of, we're just touching very briefly on this, right?
Now, it works to the negative, right?
That the people around you shield you from the opposite kind of people.
That's just a general principle that I work by and I think it's pretty true.
Like attracts like, self-esteem attracts self-esteem, that kind of stuff, right?
Birds of a feather flock together.
This is not any kind of revolution in philosophy.
I'm just sort of phrasing it in a way that I think is more actionable.
Right, so the people who are around you shield you from the opposite kind of people.
Now, it works the other way too, so if you end up with people around you who have empathy, they will shield you from non-empathetic people around you.
Right?
Like, you invite me over to a party, I'm not going to bring an asshole.
Right, right, right.
Because I don't know any assholes.
Right?
They wouldn't come to you anyway.
Yeah, I mean, assholes wouldn't want to have anything to do with me, because they're not going to feel like an asshole until they're around me.
So I'm shielded from assholes just by not being an asshole.
And the people around me, you know, what I'm trying to say is you need more biological carbon-based asshole repellents around you.
That's really what I'm trying to say.
But right now, you were grown up, you grew up, as you described, in a situation where, to put it as nicely as possible, it's hard to remember an excess of empathy.
People aren't used to that.
You're not used to that.
That's just kind of the language you speak.
So then the people around you, you say, oh, I had a childhood that was bad.
And you say, oh, people say, oh, you're just bitter.
Yeah.
I mean, she had a bad childhood too, this one that's called me bitter.
And I'm kind of wondering, you know, like, You know, she said her father was a bad person to her.
He may be in a terminal illness phase or something, but she's kind of going back and trying to restart a relationship with him at this time.
And I'm like, I don't know.
There's something I don't think she's processing there.
And I'm not sure how much credibility she has in calling me bitter about my own family when I'm in the middle of trying to process that kind of relationship too with my therapist and so forth.
But that's not just a lack of empathy, right?
See, and a lack of empathy is a nice way of putting it.
That's anti-empathy.
I mean, it's cruelty.
Right?
There's literally almost six billion people in the world who have no empathy for me at all.
They don't even know I exist, right?
I mean, I saw one in the chat room just now.
Who?
Like, yeah, okay.
Oh, somebody who's saying something mean in the chat room?
Well, yeah, but that's whatever, but yeah, continue, continue.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, but so there's six billion people, they have no empathy.
They may be empathetic people, but they have no empathy for me because they don't even know me, right?
So non-empathetic is not that helpful a term.
People are usually either empathetic or they're cruel.
There's usually not a lot in between.
I mean, once people know you, right?
I mean, people who don't know you, it's sort of a, who cares, right?
Yeah.
You know, Marshall Rosenberg may be a very empathetic person, but he's not empathetic to me because, you know, maybe if I chatted with him, whatever, it doesn't matter, right?
But it's a cruel thing, right?
Because you're saying, I was hurt as a child.
I was hurt by people who were supposed to take care of me and that was very painful.
And then somebody says, well, you're just bitter.
What they're doing is they're saying that you are the problem, that your lack of maturity and emotionality is the problem, that you weren't victimized and that you're now irrational and you're actually just being negative and destructive towards other people.
But that's a very harsh thing to say to somebody who was victimized as a child.
That's a really fucking cruel thing to say to somebody who was victimized as a child, right?
Yeah, and you're right, I did feel kind of hurt when she said that too.
Yeah, it's hurtful.
That's a very hurtful thing to say to someone.
It's not non-empathetic, right?
It's cruel.
It's using our perceptions of other people's emotionality to do them harm rather than to do them good.
Like a torturer really knows how the human body works because he knows where the nerve endings are, right?
Right, because he applies pressure or whatever, or some kind of... Yeah, he'll put a nail through your testicles, he won't cut your fingernails, right?
Right, yeah, yeah, because that's what causes the most pain.
Because you've got empathy, right?
In a weird way, right?
It's cruelty, right?
But the best sadists are the ones who have the greatest knowledge of other people's emotional responses, because they know how to hurt, right?
And I'm not saying that she's the best sadist, I'm just sort of pointing out a principle, right?
Right.
But that's cruel!
Yeah.
And parents who have a child around who don't show interest in that child, That's cruel.
It's not neutral.
It's not like some guy in India who doesn't know anything about me.
Hey, he's not showing interest in me.
That guy's cruel.
No, he's not cruel.
He's just a guy with his own life, right?
Why the hell should he care about me?
Right?
I'm remembering a lot of my childhood.
I did kind of bury myself into video games and books a lot, a lot of solitary activities.
And I didn't really, I don't really remember too much bonding with my, my, my mother and father all that much, especially as I got older.
So this, Yeah, I think I'm beginning to understand a little more now.
Right.
That's what you're used to.
And then if somebody says to you something cruel like, well, you're just bitter, you know, my guess would be that you just kind of say, okay, well, I guess I won't talk about this.
You feel hurt and then you bury it, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And then you avoid that topic again in the future, right?
But you still will hang out with them and you also won't confront them about doing something that hurt you, right?
Right, at least with her.
I haven't really, you know, talked with her about parents.
Neither hers nor mine.
You tried, and she said you're just bitter, right?
I've tried, yeah.
But it's also kind of like, I find myself not wanting to talk to her sometimes.
I mean, there's parts of me that say, I have to go talk with her.
You said you're a friend or whatever, but there's a part of me that's like, You know, she did kind of slap you in the face a little bit with that bitter comment.
And you can't confront her on it, right?
Or you haven't?
Well, I mean, I haven't done so, but I've kind of seen how she is when you touch on a touchy subject like that, though.
Sorry, I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, right?
I'm just saying you haven't, right?
Yes, I haven't confronted her about that, I don't think.
Right, and that's because when you were growing up, and I'm just going to be blunt here, because it's been a long show, but I want to be blunt.
The reason that you don't confront people on things they do to hurt you is because you couldn't talk to your parents about things they did to hurt you.
Right, right.
I mean, I haven't even confronted them about stuff either.
Right.
And the reason that you didn't... Everything is kind of fine.
My mom I'm not talking to.
But my father, you know, the relationship we have is not even a shadow of a former self.
I'm sorry, but continue.
And I'm very sorry about that.
But look, I'm a parent.
I do things that upset my daughter.
Yeah.
And she can come to me and talk to me about it, and I will continue to ask her about it.
Okay.
Until it's resolved, right?
I want her to always know that she can be upset with me, come to talk to me about it, and we will work on it until it's resolved, since it's essential.
Because, you know, she ain't here by choice.
She's a prisoner of biology, right?
She is my delightful little prisoner.
And so she's got to have as much freedom as I can possibly give her.
Of course, the first freedom is honesty and openness and so on, right?
And so when you were a kid, if your parents did things to hurt you, and this may be ignoring you as well.
Neglect is a terrible way to deal with children.
And if your parents did things that hurt or upset you or alienated you, You did not have the capacity, and I bet you were right, to talk to them about what was bothering you.
So what you do is you say, okay, well I guess it's my problem to deal with so I'll find some way to deal with it.
I'm not going to talk with them because if it escalates things are going to go really badly.
So I'm just going to work on it myself and eventually what happens is you end up sort of blaming yourself, right?
So, if somebody hurts you, you say, oh, I guess maybe I'm a little oversensitive about that stuff, or maybe it bothers me too much, or maybe they're right, maybe I'm just bitter or whatever.
You just internalize this stuff, right?
Because it's easier than the truth, right?
Because the truth is, I can't talk to people who claim to love me about problems I have with them, so what the hell do they mean when they say love?
Like, love isn't for the easy stuff.
Love isn't for the – like, let's say saying, well, my diet is chocolate.
That's my tough diet is how to eat chocolate and like it.
Well, you don't – look, if chocolate and all the tough stuff that tasted great for you was all you ever needed to eat and everything that was bad for you tasted bad, we wouldn't need nutrition, right?
Because everything that tasted good would be good for – we need nutrition because we have to go against that which is easy sometimes.
Yesterday, last night, I had like a – hour and a quarter long workout.
I don't really like to do it.
I mean, I don't really like workouts but I've been doing them for 30 years because they're good for me and that way I get to eat more chocolate.
So love is for the stuff that is hard.
It's like saying how hard is it to get along when you're both having a simultaneous orgasm?
Well, it's really not that hard to get along when you're both having a simultaneous orgasm, right?
It's when, you know, the dog is sick and someone has to visit the dentist and, you know, the roof is leaking and whatever, right?
Yeah.
The love part is for the difficult part.
And people who say, oh, we love you, I love you, and this and that, but you can't talk to them about anything that's problematic or difficult, I would really question that definition of love.
The whole point of the love part is to do the stuff that's less comfortable, that's not quite as easy, that's a little more challenging, to say the least, right?
Yeah, it is.
Anyway, sorry for that little lecture, but I hope that... No, it was good to know that.
But I mean, I'm not sure, I mean, So what am I to do regarding these people that are unempathetic in terms of, like, they're shielding me from meeting actual empathetic people?
You come to the truth, right?
This is what this show has always been about, and I'm not trying to say that you don't know that.
I just want to point it out that we're always aiming for the truth, right?
And I aim, and I sometimes hit, and sometimes I miss, and it's part of the conversation, right?
I got a great correction earlier in the show.
So we aim for the truth, and we aim to get Facts, right?
And you can get facts one of two ways, right?
And, you know, both is best, right?
So you get facts.
So you have a thesis, you have a question, right?
Let's call this friend Sally.
Is Sally empathetic?
And that's the question.
And so we say, well, we need facts.
So there's two ways that we can get facts.
We can Reason them out through logic, right?
Analytic, synthetic, rational, empirical.
We can reason out our facts, right?
And we can figure that out.
Or we can look to evidence, right?
Okay, okay.
So, I mean, and reason and evidence are not complete opposites.
They, of course, they do overlap.
So we have a principle which is the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, right?
That is about as factual a principle as you can get.
in the realm of human behavior.
This is the foundation of psychology.
The best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior.
If somebody has shown no empathy to you in the past, then they are going to show no empathy to you in the future.
That's the logic principle.
There's some evidence in there that you have to see.
If they've shown empathy to you in the past.
Now, if they have occasionally been mean and then apologized, which is true for every human being, I think, can't get perfection, right?
Yeah.
So if she said that to you and then the next day she called up and she said, you know, that really bothered me.
It really bothered me that you were talking about your difficult childhood, and I just gave you some stupid, snappy-ass comeback called, You're Bitter.
I thought about that.
I thought about my own history, and it really kept me awake.
It bothered me.
Well, hey!
Sally has a conscience!
Yay!
That's good, right?
Because the conscience is like that big-ass fin on the bottom of a yacht.
It's just what writes you back up again, right?
Right.
So, we make mistakes and our conscience, which is UPP, conscience in the UPP, I've got a whole podcast and premium section about this, but anyway, so the universalization part of our brain says, hey, wait a minute, that was a deviation, you were not being very kind there, and it troubles us, right?
Yeah, it does.
Yeah, and so then you come back and you think about it and you say, you know what, I made a mistake, the past overcame me, I left my principles behind, blah, blah, blah.
And then the person comes back to you and says, oh man, I was a dick.
Sorry about that.
Here's what happened.
Here's why.
I hope you didn't take it personally.
It's a shitty thing to say.
I'm really sorry.
And then you, wow, fantastic.
And then the next time the person is cruel, since again, it's always going to happen from now on, then you have something to appeal to.
But you know that person has a conscience even if they don't, it's going to right itself, right?
Yeah, eventually, yeah.
If they have a conscience.
Well, hopefully not eventually because you don't want to sit around You know, for 20 years waiting for the person to see if they have a conscience, right?
Usually, it's 24 to 48 hours.
If somebody has done you wrong, and again, this is my rule of thumb, and I think it's a pretty good one though, because the conscience really bothers someone, and if they're not bothered by the conscience, then, like, the conscience hits pretty hard and pretty fast.
And so, usually, if somebody's done me wrong, I'll give them 24 to 48 hours.
for their conscience, for them to find out if they have a conscience or not, right?
Right.
And if they don't contact me in 24 to 48 hours, then I know with virtual certainty that they have no conscience.
Okay.
Because it's never once happened in my life that it comes after that time period.
That's the crucial window.
And so if they come back, great.
Now, I may choose to have a conversation with them anyway, but I don't usually bother, because if somebody doesn't have a conscience, you can't have a relationship with them, because they can't self-correct, and they're just going to be impulsive, and, right, they're just going to be random, and, I mean, God, this is a horrible situation to be in, right?
Yeah, it is, it is, and it's caused me a lot of consternation.
I mean, so I guess what, should I kind of reevaluate, I guess, where these relationships are, perhaps Well, sorry, let me just finish the long, boring lecture about, you know, reason, evidence, and relationships.
Sorry about this, but I'll keep it brief.
So you can reason it out, you can say, so if you have a long history with someone, you can say, okay, well, they've been cruel to me in the past, and they've never shown a shred of conscience, and I've never had an impulse to talk about it with them, there's never been an opening, and I've not observed them being really kind and empathetic with other people, and I know about their history, and oh, right, no empathy, no conscience.
Sorry about that.
Would it behoove me to separate myself from them, I guess?
Well, again, I'm just giving you the process, right?
I'm just giving you the process.
What you do with it is up to you.
But you have to know what it is that is going on, right?
Because if they have no conscience and no empathy, there is no relationship.
You're not separating yourself from anything other than an illusion, right?
For somebody to have a relationship with you, they have to have empathy.
Otherwise, you're just a prop to them.
You're like Paris Hilton's handbag, right?
Right, I'm just kind of there, the plus one.
She may be very attached to it, but she does not have a relationship with it, right?
Right.
Because she doesn't sit there, you know, before her evening and prop her Hermes handbag up and say, ah, Mr. Hermes, I feel like going to this gallery opening.
Oh, gallery opening, who are we kidding?
I feel like going to this club.
Right?
Do you feel like going to a movie, Mr. Handbag?
Well, I don't know.
Let's negotiate and figure it out.
She's just like, hey, I'm going to the club.
I'm going to bring the handbag.
Now, if she can't find the handbag and the handbag's unavailable, she may be very upset, right?
Oh, that handbag goes perfectly with my chihuahua that I'm going to blow coke up its ass or something, right?
So she may be very upset that the handbag's not there.
And if your friend wants to go to a movie with you and they have no empathy, they may be upset, right?
But that doesn't mean they have a relationship with you.
It means they just want you there.
Because maybe they don't like going to movies alone or whatever, right?
Well, you know, that kind of brings me to the whole realization, too, that I think that really is probably killing me softly here, too, is that I may be living in kind of that whole illusory universe still.
Sure, yeah.
That is the great challenging question, right?
We're asking the truth about our relationships.
Because if we can't get the truth about our relationships, we cannot get the truth about anything.
People think that you find out the truth about the world and then you apply it.
No, we find out the truth about our relationships first and foremost.
Because if we have people in our lives who are deluded, we will never get to the truth about the world.
Because we will constantly be pulled back and blinded by all the illusions of everyone around us.
Because the exploration of the truth of the world is a social context, it's a social construct, it's a tribal communal activity just like the scientific method is a tribal communal activity.
Medicine, finding out accurate cause and effect in medicine is a lot of experiments, a lot of double blind, a lot of peer review, a lot of data review, it's a collective process.
Right, right.
And you can't have a whole bunch of great science with one scientist and ten thousand witch doctors.
You just can't get good science out of that.
Okay, I see your point.
You see what I mean?
So we have to be surrounded by good scientists before we can even attempt to have consistently good science.
We can't get to the truth about the world until we get to the truth about our relationships.
People always aim at the truth of the world, they ignore their relationships, and then they wonder why the world doesn't get better.
Right, right, right.
Aim for the truth about your relationships.
Do these people have empathy?
Do they care about what I feel when what I feel is inconvenient to them?
Look, if you go to a sports game and you see every empty-headed, chuckled nutjob cheering away with blue paint on his face, look, they're all getting along!
Because they're all on the same side, they're all cheering for the same thing.
Oh, the goal!
Let's jump up, right?
Right, yeah, but it's like... Like a bunch of extras from World War Z, right?
But that's easy enough because everyone's all there doing the same thing.
You don't need to – they don't go to couples counseling because they're all cheering at the same time because that's easy, empty-headed, stupid stuff.
Who cares?
It doesn't matter and so on, right?
The empathy is for when you – I mean do they have empathy for each other?
Sure, they're all cheering at the same time.
Do they have empathy for the team?
Yeah, they want their team to win.
But that's not – the empathy again, the virtues, the nutrition, the empathy, the resolve, the things that don't come easily and obvious to us, right?
You don't need to be a physicist to catch a ball, but you sure as hell do need to be a physicist and a mathematician if you want to fly to the moon and back, right?
So it's the stuff that's not natural, not easy, that's more challenging.
That's the stuff where you really need the empathy.
So the way that you find out if people have empathy for you is you talk to them about feelings that you have that are inconvenient to them.
Okay.
Wait, hold up a moment.
I'm on a phone call, let me catch you later!
but they'll continue.
Then, by gosh, they have empathy because you care about it even though it's inconvenient for them.
So they'll have that conversation because they care about you.
But if the moment you have a...
If you say something and it may not even be about them, you say anything that is inconvenient to them and they just shut you down, then no.
Wait, hold up a moment.
I'm on a phone call.
Let me get you later.
Say again.
Well, so if they just shut you down every time you say something Now, philosophy, of course, why does it challenge our relationships so much?
Because philosophy is intensely uncomfortable for other people.
It's intensely uncomfortable for us sometimes too, right?
But we stick with it because we happen to prefer facts to fiction, truth to fantasy, right?
And so philosophy... Go ahead.
It's extremely uncomfortable.
I mean, it's like you were saying before, it's like you really have to come in touch with a lot of stuff in your history that you may not necessarily be proud of.
You're putting a lot of your personality in a negative light sometimes.
Yeah.
Philosophy is always uncomfortable to people.
If it wasn't uncomfortable, it wouldn't be necessary anymore.
Changing your diet is uncomfortable for people too, and that's the whole point of nutrition.
If nutrition didn't change anyone's diet, it wouldn't be anything.
It'd be nonsense, right?
It'd be graffiti.
So, philosophy will always challenge our relationships and so what philosophy does is it exposes those of our relationships which have empathy and those of our relationships which do not.
Because by its very discomfort it requires empathy to stay in conversations with people undergoing philosophical rigor or self-knowledge or whatever it is.
Do you care about your illusions or do you care about the other person?
That's really fundamentally what it comes down to.
And philosophy, by focusing on disrupting illusions, causes great discomfort in personal relationships, which exposes whether there's empathy or not.
And then people get all mad at philosophy rather than their own lack of empathy for the problems.
So it's kind of like a natural progression of the path I'm on, is that I'm going to be seeing this a lot more often with people.
And so I guess the main thing is that I have to achieve the truth by looking at the evidence involved in these relationships, whether they're past histories, asking those uncoupled questions, do they have empathy for me, and so forth.
Yeah, yeah.
Do they care about you?
Even though it's a topic that may be uncomfortable to them, do they care about you enough to talk about it?
Well, if they don't, then what the hell does caring about you mean?
Well, as long as I'm enjoying everything that we're doing, it's great.
But the moment it becomes remotely uncomfortable, I'm going to lash out.
Well, that's not having a relationship with anything other than your own egotistical narcissism, and fragility, and insecurity, and pettiness, and smallness, and inconsequentiality, and, I don't know, defending an empty castle from people who are never going to come.
I just wanted to point that out.
I mean this is why I focus on relationships.
We cannot consistently get to the truth until we have the truth about our relationships and we cannot heal the world until we have an empathetic community and I think that libertarianism and also great stuff when it comes to economics and politics, yay, fantastic, but it still has a lot to work on in terms of empathy because that is the greatest activism.
It's not getting arrested for smoking pot.
The greatest activism is to promote deeper and greater empathy in a community because that community will rule the future in a non-ruling kind of way, if that makes sense.
Gotcha.
All right.
Well, I'll let you get back to it.
Thank you again for taking my call.
I appreciate the respect.
Thanks, I appreciate that.
Great chat.
And yeah, if you can't come to conclusions about your relationships based on past evidence and reasoning through all the examples and reasoning through their histories and so on.
If you are still ambivalent or doubtful, it could be because you're just denying the information and don't want to get there.
But either way, you know, or if you have doubt, and it's safe to do so, then have more conversations, right?
There's nothing like experiencing the empiricism of the present to free you from the illusions of the past.
So sit down and say to your friend, hey, you know, when you said this, it really hurt and upset me.
And let's talk about that.
And see what happens from there because, I mean, evidence trumps everything, right?
And so if you're short on conclusions, you can always get more evidence in your relationships by having the challenging conversations with people and see how they react, all right?
Yeah, sure.
All right then.
Thanks, Emil.
Drop me a line if you can.
Let me know how it goes.
Please send your listener comments and questions to mailbag at freedomainradio.com.
Mike's email, operations at freedomainradio.com.
My email, januaryfirefighterbigstudmuffin6205 at freedomainradio.com.
Actually, I don't even think that works, because I think I missed February.
Thanks everyone so much.
I appreciate that.
Donations always welcome.
As I mentioned at the beginning of the show, just to let you know as well.
I start my last round of chemo at the beginning of July.
I may be out for a while.
This is progressively a little bit more weakening each time.
And I also am going to have a bit of radiation on my throat, which may cause sore throat, so I don't know the degree to which I'll be able to operate in August.
But I will be thinking of you, and I will be continuing to work on the parenting book, which currently is sitting in a time out at the moment for lack of cooperation.
But actually, it's going all right.
It's just hard to find the time.
So yeah, I just wanted to let you know August may be a little light.
We have some shows that we've done before that I've done sort of recently that we're holding back until then, but just wanted to let you know if my productivity takes a dip in August, it's not because I am sunning myself on the Riviera, but rather being blasted with exciting tumor-killing radiations and all that kind of stuff.
So I hope you will forgive me for any lack of productivity and sample from the 12 billion podcasts that are already out there.
Thanks again, Mike, for listening to the – for running the Sunday show.
I really appreciate it.
And have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful week, everyone.
Love you all.
Love your support.
And thank you so much, as always, for your honesty, your generosity, your kindness, and for giving me the opportunity to speak the world to the world in this way.
The world is ever-increasingly listening and even more importantly, acting.
Thanks again.
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