All Episodes
Previous Next
July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:28
Mysticism as Scar Tissue Part 2
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
It's Def 817 on the 23rd of March, 2007.
One day before I go away to five stars for two weeks in Southland, where it's warm.
I can't wait.
It's going to be excellent.
And you, my friends, well, I guess if you're watching this, either A, you're being very naughty.
Big FreedomainRadio is fanking because you are listening out of order.
This whole court is out of order.
Or, you've actually caught up.
My God!
You have caught the rabbit!
You have caught the questing beast.
It's like that web page.
This is the end of the internet.
There's nothing more to see.
Now go back to work.
Oh, my God.
As the lane ends and nobody lets me in.
It's okay, it's a private road.
We'll survive.
So I'm going on vacation.
I hope that you have a wonderful couple of weeks.
The excellent crew of regular listeners for the Sunday shows is going to carry the torch and keep the show going on Sundays for the next two Sundays.
So I think that's great.
Have yourselves a good chat.
And I'd love to publish it as a podcast.
So just send me the files.
I do believe one of the gentlemen is going to record, which is good stuff.
So I really kind of need a part two because I didn't get to the end, shockingly, of the topic yesterday.
And the topic which I was talking about was mysticism as the scar tissue of guilt.
And I really talked about the paradoxes and contradictions that were impacted or inflicted upon us when we were children.
And how we really don't like to, and we resist, yea, almost it would seem, sometimes verily unto the death, to really understand the moral nature of those who inflict these contradictions on us.
And the absolutely revolting moral secret that floats around in this realm is A knowledge of virtue used for the destruction of virtue.
You see, that's the secret.
Now, of course, I've talked about this in some podcasts before, but in a bit more of an allusory manner.
So let's just square off and stare it down, shall we?
Together!
together.
Our parents know what is good.
Our Our parents know what is good.
You ever watch that sexy square beast Supernanny?
She of the enormously wide-set rhino eyes?
Whenever she asks parents, how do you discipline, they always look sheepish and bad when they discipline and they say, I give whoopins, I give beatings, I slap, I spank, I hit.
Your parents knew what was right.
They didn't abuse you in front of police officers or clergy or friends they respected or their employers or those who had any sort of power over them.
So they knew that it was wrong to abuse you.
But they used that knowledge in very powerful ways.
And this is really where the great crossroads lies between being a victim and being an abuser.
Everybody on this planet desperately, desperately, desperately, desperately, desperately, desperately, desperately wants to be a good person.
Even the cynic, even the nihilist desperately wants to be a good person.
Because a cynic will say that it is good not to believe in goodness, and a nihilist will say believing in truth is a vice, and I am wiser in that Dr. Cox kind of way, or that House kind of way.
I am wiser because I do not believe.
The person who believes in God, of course, believes in God because he or she believes that it's virtuous to believe in God.
I don't know.
At least, that's the scar tissue we talked about, the fear, which we've talked about before.
Everybody, you and me and everyone you meet, everybody you rub shoulders with on the subway, everybody you shuffle around on the street, everybody you stare at at the disco, everybody desperately, desperately wants to be a good person.
This is why being called bad is so painful.
And we want to be competent, and that's why being called incompetent is so painful.
And we want to be accepted, and all these sorts of things.
We want all of these things to come together.
We want to be competent and good.
And we want to be virtuous and accepted.
And we want to speak the truth and be loved.
And we want to obey and be free.
Thank you.
And what I mean by that is, when we obey human beings, we are not free.
We are enslaved.
When we obey rationality and science, and rational or logical morality, we are free.
Nature to be commanded must be obeyed.
Man to be free must obey nature, not man.
Whereas if you are a truth-teller in the modern world, you know exactly how this dismal song goes.
You speak the truth and are reviled.
You lie and you are, quote, loved.
And that is the agony that we face.
That's the impossible situation, fundamentally, that we face.
That you can be accepted for what you are not, or you can be hated for what you are.
You can be approved for ceasing to exist, or you can be rejected for being who you are.
You can be cast out for speaking the truth, or you can be kept in for lying.
And that contradiction is absolutely wretched.
And the approval and the disapproval is more rich and deep and horrifying, frankly, than the I like you, I don't like you situation.
You are called good for acting in opposition to goodness, and you are called bad for being good.
That's the most fundamental contradiction that we face in our lives.
And not to sound too dismal or hopeless, we have more capacity to fight this ancient terror and this ancient curse, this curse of the species.
This dismal death of man's happiness.
We have more power to fight this now than ever before.
This is why this conversation is possible.
And why the stars in the sky can join arms and bring sunshine.
Before we were just stars in the night sky with no knowledge of each other.
Now we can join together.
We can bring sunlight to this dark world.
Because we can see each other.
and we can see each other and through seeing each other we can see the darkness that separates us and bridge it with words, with truth, with logic, with science.
We want to be good and we are told that bad is good.
We want to be good, and we are told that violence is bad, then we are sent to public schools which are funded by violence, which everybody knows.
Everybody knows.
We are told that when we apply the rules our parents give us, to our parents, that we are bad, and that hypocrisy is bad.
We are told that we must obey because obedience is moral.
And when we ask others, namely our parents, particularly when we are adults, to obey us, we are called disrespectful.
Do you see this guillotining maze of acidic soul and skin eating and eye eating fog?
We are told to think for ourselves and not to follow the herd.
And then, when we think for ourselves and do not follow the herd, we are called difficult and troublemakers.
and often as children now, these days, you're drugged, sent to psychiatric care, psychologist counseling, sometimes to an institution.
We are told you cannot be a little bit pregnant.
You either are or you aren't.
And then when we say absolutes exist, we are called intolerant.
We are told if everybody jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?
Think for yourself.
And then when we say, but the whole world is jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge, including you, mother and father, We are told that we are being rude and intolerant.
It's all of the contradictory and horrible messages that were pounded into our good friend Mr. R in the podcast which we talked about, Mommy's Letter.
We are told that we are good because we are Americans or British or Iranians.
And we are told that other people are bad because they are born in other countries or to different belief systems.
So we are supposed to accept that we are good because we are told we are good, but other people are bad for doing exactly the same thing.
The enormous and horrifying mess...
This squalid, maggot-ridden, base-of-the-brain nonsense that is put in a big bag with spikes and nails and repeatedly swung over and into a child's white and growing soul is what this conversation is designed to unravel.
What this conversation, which can never be undone, which can never be undone, You think you are blind, you see a light, you are no longer ever able again to think that you are blind.
All you're able to say now is that there is no light, not that I am blind.
Very, very different situation, my friends.
Sorry.
But it really needed to be done.
It's time.
It's time.
It's time for this glorious species to give up its parasites.
It is time for this sky-reaching soul of mankind to shrug off its claustrophobic controllers.
It is time for us to spread our wings and fly.
And to stop huddling, nursing broken wings and think we saw.
It's time.
It's time.
Now's the right time.
Now.
Now.
Ha ha ha ha.
So all of these contradictions that we're taught with, taught, which use us, that we are used, are specifically and pinpointedly targeted to do the maximum damage.
Ethics, the ethics of gentleness used as the manipulations of sadism, is the true moral horror that is so hard to see.
and survive sane and survive happy.
It was the hardest for me.
The people in my life who hurt me the most knew everything about me.
They had enough empathy to know what would hurt me the most.
They had enough empathy to know what would hurt me the most.
So it was not that they lacked empathy.
Sadists don't lack empathy.
Cruel people don't lack empathy.
They know exactly what is going to hurt the most.
The people in Abu Ghraib who tortured the Islamic prisoners with menstrual blood and masturbation and all this.
They knew exactly what was going to hurt their prisoners the most.
What was going to be the most humiliating and degrading acts and situations for them.
Muslim prohibition on nakedness.
Even having dogs attack them.
Dog is a terrible insult in Arabic.
So, they knew exactly.
It wasn't that they lacked empathy.
It's that they used their empathy for evil.
Somebody comes up to me and says, well, you're just like a bald guy.
I mean, that doesn't bother me.
In fact, I kind of like it.
It's pretty efficient.
I don't think I'd take my hair back even if there was a pill for a penny.
So that doesn't bother me.
Now, maybe it would bother some people, and there are other things that would bother me that wouldn't bother other people.
But if somebody just comes up and starts swinging wildly, it's like a blind man with a machine gun in an open field.
You lie low, the odds of you getting hit are almost none.
The difference between random acts of violence, of emotional abuse, or physical abuse, and familial ones is that the family is a rifle shooter, it's a sharpshooter, it's a marksman.
It's got the laser-guided sight.
It knows exactly where to hit to do the most damage.
And that's not hit to kill.
That's not hit to kill.
That's hit to wound.
Families are sharpshooters that target your vulnerable fleshy parts that will hurt the most.
They shoot through your back fat or something and then they rush over saying, oh my god, where did that bullet come from?
You must have walked into it.
You're so incompetent.
Here, let me help you.
I love you.
Here's some drugs.
The use of empathy for the infliction of pain is like studying a doctor, studying to be a doctor for 10 years in order to torture people, to know exactly where their pain spots are.
And.
And in the same way, people know everything there is to know about virtue.
Everything that I'm saying is not complicated.
Violence is wrong?
Oh my God!
The man's a genius!
No, he's not!
Not for that, anyway.
Violence is bad.
You know, rape, murder, theft, assault, that's pretty bad stuff.
This is not a revolution in ethics.
This is not a revolution in ethics.
It's just a devolution of bullshit is what it is.
If those things are true, then certain consequences follow.
If those things are true, then certain consequences follow.
And if what your parents did to you was right and good, then they never would hide it.
We do not tend to hide our goodness and our virtue.
We do not tend to hide those things.
So your parents used your desire for acceptance, approval, and most fundamentally, virtue.
We only desire acceptance and approval because it is defined as virtue, which is why everyone tries so goddamn hard to tell you, oh my god, they're your family!
How can you stop seeing your family?
They're your family!
Family is everything!
Now maybe to the Mafia, but not to those with the eyes to see the truth.
Not to those who wish to live in some sort of rational realm, in some sort of realm of self-respect and dignity.
Not to us.
Not to us, the first free generation.
The first.
With the economic means, the communication technology and abilities.
To free ourselves.
To be free.
Finally.
It's only been five billion years since the amoeba was lit by lightning.
And your parents used your desire for virtue and their knowledge of virtue to control you.
They used, in the same way that the sadist uses his empathy for the sake of inflicting greater pain, your parents knew you, your sensitive spots, your weak spots, and your desire for goodness, and they also knew what goodness was, so that they could play you like a stradivarius.
Like Yehudi Menuhin on his Stradivarius.
So they knew.
They knew.
And parents always know.
And it's so ridiculous when you see these parents getting interviewed by Dr. Phil or by Supernanny or whoever.
They know.
They totally know.
They totally know.
And parents can always restrain themselves.
Because they do in public.
They drag you into the hallway and venomously hiss in your ear.
They don't full out slug you in front of the guests from the church.
They can always restrain themselves.
But they use your desire to be virtuous and their knowledge of virtue and their empathy to control and destroy you.
And this is the plague that has afflicted mankind for thousands and thousands and thousands and hundreds of thousands of years.
When a dog dominates another dog by standing on its chest and sort of pseudo-locking its jaws around its neck, the only reason that the dog can dominate the other dog is because the other dog wants to live.
If the other dog didn't want to live, you just fight to the death.
The only way that you can be dominated is because you want to be good.
Wanting to be good, a desire for virtue, is your greatest strength and your greatest weakness.
It is your greatest strength.
If you get the people who use that desire for virtue out of your life, if they use it for destruction, if they use it to control you, if they use it to bully you, if they use it to put you down, then it is your greatest weakness.
And virtue becomes terror, and virtue becomes subjugation, and virtue becomes being controlled, and the desire for freedom becomes the reality of enslavement.
That is what occurs when you have a soul that yearns for virtue and you surround yourself with corrupt, brutal and dangerous people who know exactly where your buttons are.
That is where your desire for freedom becomes your greatest goal and road to being enslaved.
That is the danger!
That is what I keep pounding and pounding and pounding about.
When you are surrounded by corrupt and dangerous people who know you really well, all of your virtues become vices.
All of your wings become chains.
All of your open vistas become entombed sarcophagi where you lie in poured over by a clear concrete so you can still see the sky and be tortured by immobility.
I'll talk about the guy this afternoon.
He posted a dream and I asked him what's going on in his life.
And we'll talk a little bit more about it later.
He said, oh, things are interesting.
I'm talking to a friend of mine who's a libertarian and trying to convince him about a stateless society.
I'll read the letter.
And then he said, oh, yeah, but my parents are all over me.
My grandma was droning on and on about every inconsequential detail of her day while I was watching the show 24.
And it just went on and on and on.
And I just sat there listening and rolling my eyes and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
This, of course, is a grave danger.
A grave danger.
And don't we all want to talk about a stateless society and don't none of us want to tell our grandmother that she's boring?
Don't all of us want to talk about freedom in the future when the state has fallen?
And don't none of us want to do the basic thing of hanging up on boring people?
The boredom is not accidental, my friend.
People don't bore you because they're boring.
People bore you because they're angry.
How could she fail to notice that you're bored?
That's a very important thing.
Well, we'll get to that this afternoon.
But this is the grave danger.
That we speak about freedom in the abstract, and we speak about freedom in the political, and we speak about freedom in the economic.
We don't speak about freedom in the personal.
We don't act on freedom in the personal.
And, of course, his true self is shooting up this flare so that concerned souls can find him.
and counter the propaganda.
So, our desire for virtue is used to destroy us.
Our desire for freedom is used to enslave us.
Our desire for approval is used to erase us.
Our desire for love castrates our capacity to love.
And this is the really basic contradiction that we are faced with.
And when you are faced with this contradiction, You have this great crossroad, you have this choice, you have these alternatives that you can pursue.
You can either accept the contradictions and call them virtue, or you can take the high road, the hard road, hoe the stony back 40 of saying something is entirely rotten with this situation.
You're in a room with refuse and rats, garbage, gnats and maggots, and you say either, well, I'm going to redefine these as this is a beautiful garden with pheasants and birds and butterflies, or you say, huh, I know that everyone is calling this pheasants and butterflies and all of these wonderful things, but I don't really believe that it is true.
And Then you can begin to examine.
And the first thing you examine is, holy crap, I'm standing in shit.
And the second thing you examine is, why is everyone telling me that it's roses?
Why is everyone telling me that this shit is roses?
That's fairly important.
The first thing that you understand is that you're not standing at roses but in shit.
And the second thing that you understand, which is far worse, Is that everyone's lying to you.
The third thing that you understand is that people are getting you to stand in shit because you want to stand in roses.
And they know that you want to stand in roses and they're telling you that the shit is roses so that you'll stay there.
They're using your desire for beauty to enmesh and admire you in filth.
And that is truly ghastly.
It's a truly ghastly thing to see how corrupted and broken human beings are by parents, politicians, and priests.
And soldiers, of course, as the strong arm of the politicos will.
Policemen.
And the jailers and the bailiffs and all these sorts of thugs.
So, You have this choice.
You have this choice.
You can either say, my God, I'm standing in shit and everyone is telling me that it's roses and they're telling me that because they know that roses are better than shit.
But they're telling me that shit are roses, even though they know that roses are better than shit and I want to be standing in roses, they tell me That shit is roses so that I will continue to stand in shit, even though they know that roses are better and that I want to stand in roses.
They're using my desire for that to make me stand in shit, which is the exact opposite of what they value and what I say that I want.
Do you see the torture, my friends?
Can you see it?
It is our desire for good that is used to turn us to evil.
Which everybody admits is the good, because that's what they say.
The moment somebody says, you're standing in roses when you're standing in shit, they know that roses are better than shit and that that's what you want.
And they're using that desire that you have to get you to keep standing in shit.
How tortured that is.
How tortuous that is.
And that's all of our instructions.
All of our instructions from our parents, to our politicians, to our priests, to our teachers, everyone.
Everyone.
So, when I say that mysticism is the scar tissue of guilt, what I mean by that is the fundamental principle what I mean by that is the fundamental principle that we're talking about here is that consistency with contradiction is a virtue.
Okay.
Consistency with contradiction is a virtue, which of course is completely contradictory at every level.
If contradiction is a virtue, then consistency with contradiction is a vice.
If consistency is a virtue, then consistency with inconsistency is a vice.
If you're standing in shit but you're supposed to love it because you think or you're told that it's roses, that is contradictory at every level and it's called a virtue.
So the question is, when you are told all of this nonsense, when you're told all of these lies, do you Look inward and find the truth and struggle through to some sort of clearer view of the world, however horrifying it is and however much ugly stuff it reveals about everyone around you.
Do you do that?
Or do you say, yeah, I guess it's roses.
I'm going to start telling everyone else that shit is roses.
And acting on that truth.
Do you have children and tell them that shit is roses and God exists and your country is good and soldiers are heroes and all of the shit that's turned into roses.
Do you do that?
Or do you take the tough road and say, well, kids, I've got to tell you.
I'm going to have to tell you the truth about all this.
I'm really sorry about it because, boy, we're going to be in for a rocky road.
But I've got to tell you, I think it's the better thing for everyone.
And the world has to be saved.
The world has to be healed.
It's time.
It's time.
If not now, then when?
When?
A thousand years from now?
What about all the people who are going to be alive and dead in those thousand years, having never known the truth, never tasted freedom?
If we can do it, we must do it now.
Now.
If it's going to be done, let's do it now.
Time is pressing.
And if you take the hard road, and this road leads to madness, isolation, bitterness, loneliness to most, And whatever we can do to help people avoid that so that we don't end up with a situation where virtue and integrity becomes anger and self-destruction, loneliness, self-hatred, where virtue once more becomes pain.
Either virtuous pain because you conform or virtuous pain because you fight conformity and are angry in this sort of hard case owns you, who's a user on YouTube who has these bitter rants about frustration with the hollowness, emptiness, and shallowness of the mendacity-based species that we live in.
And of course, I mean, he's right, but the response is not anger.
I think the response is at least not bitterness, right?
The response is laughter and passion, joy.
and angry joy can be a great disinfectant.
Do you fight these lies or do you tell these lies and then say that they're true?
Now, if you fight these lies and then say that they're true, then you're saying that consistency with contradiction is a virtue, which is a virus of insanity.
It is a complete virus of insanity.
It's like saying a square circle is a green egret that swims underwater in the sky at midnight when the sun is out, and exists and does not exist at the same time, and is blue and green and up and down at the same time.
It's all just a complete rambling statement of contradictory incoherence.
Extracting from the principles of reality, of consistent reality, concepts which you then just madly juxtapose and oppose together.
If you say that consistency with inconsistency is a virtue, then you have just spoken the moral destruction of your children, or all of those that you influence.
All of those that you speak with, you have become a virus.
If you say that consistency with inconsistency is a virtue, then you have become a cancer upon the face of the world.
You just have.
It's not my judgment, it's just a fact.
And you feel, obviously, guilty for that, fundamentally, because you've taken a cowardly road.
And there's nothing wrong with taking a cowardly road.
God knows I've done it at times.
Nothing wrong with taking a cowardly road.
You have full permission to be as corrupt as you want.
Just don't call it courage and virtue.
You can be as corrupt as you want.
Just don't call it virtue.
That is the final vice that destroys all reality in those around you, or at least attacks it.
So if you say, well, you know, I'm going to go over to my parents and I'm going to have dinner with them.
I don't really like them that much, but I'm just too chicken to not go.
That's fine.
At least there's a statement that's accurate.
At least that's true.
And people like that don't become mystics.
They may become nihilists, but they won't become mystics.
But people who don't like their parents and who don't want to go for dinner, Who nonetheless say, I am going to my parents for dinner because I love my dear parents so much.
My mother is so wonderful.
We have the best time.
And you become a walking advertisement for a band-aided over with a happy face, rotting saw.
Then, my friend, You have crossed over and you will become a mystic of one kind or another.
Whether it's a mystic of the muscle of the mind, as Ayn Rand calls it, whether it is patriotism or Zeus that you enslave yourself to, you will become a reproducive cancer of this virus.
And you will spread all of the horror that was inflicted upon you, and that you cannot abide, and you cannot survive.
And that's why I say mysticism is the scar tissue of abuse.
That is lied about.
Abuse that is rejected becomes mysticism.
Abuse, not only that it's rejected, but it's turned into virtue.
You could say these shit that I'm standing in are ball bearings.
That's neutral.
But you say it's roses, which are beautiful.
It's not that you are abused and it's not that you reject that abuse, it's that you turn that abuse into a virtue and an obligation to you.
That is what causes the destruction, the fundamental destruction involved in the realm of mysticism, of every kind.
So I wanted to talk more about the guilt, the scar tissue of guilt, the guilt of turning shit into virtue so that you can get other people to stand in shit and praise it.
To turn abuse into love and to get other people to continue to be abused and call it love.
Whenever you call your abuser someone you love or you give them obligations, you are implicitly saying to other people, abuse is love.
That you should reward those who abuse you with exactly the same goodies that you would hand over to people who treated you well or positively.
Which means that you are encouraging other people to be abused and you can't take that guilt.
I mean, you can, but only by becoming a mystic.
I hope that this helps.
I will have one more podcast and then I'm away on vacation.
So thank you so much.
I look forward to your donations.
Thank you so much last night to the gentleman who sent me a nice donation.
You have novels, which I will send you.
I have an entire novel, almost completely read, an audiobook, which is quite funny, I think, which you can enjoy.
It's really about family and philosophy, which I think you'll like.
And there's lots of other goodies for those who donate.
Thank you so much.
Subscriptions are also welcome.
It's only 18 bucks a month, 17 bucks a month.
And that's half a price a cup of coffee a day, which I think we generate in value here.
Thank you so much.
▲
Export Selection