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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:39:04
I Used to Be a Sociopath
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Good morning everybody.
It is Steph.
It is the 16th of December 2012 and I am pumped to be talking with you today.
It is truly one of my favorite parts of the week is chatting with you all about thoughts, ideas, history and consequences.
So I really appreciate you calling in.
I really appreciate your support.
I appreciate your honesty, your openness and thank you, thank you, thank you.
We have a bit of a hard stop today.
There is a birthday party occurring in the Molyneux household.
We will be chock full of children, guests and friends.
So it's going to be quite an exciting time.
We have a face painter coming by.
And we have entirely too much fun to be had.
So that's going to be our hard stop.
Isabella has a gratefully accepted people's birthday wishes.
And of course, she reminds you that all she ever wants is bitcoins and better lighting equipment for her daddy.
So, I guess we'll get started with the show.
The usual documentary is coming along well.
My condolences to one of the animators who had to pull out, unfortunately, according to a groin injury, as a result of a groin injury.
I really didn't know that animation was actually so gymnastic, but apparently it is.
I guess he does his own moves, records them, and then animates them.
And so, sorry about that.
Donations for the documentary and other sundry Freedom Aid Radio survival carbs are also gratefully accepted at freedomaidradio.com.
But that's it for my intro.
Thank you for everyone for your kind words about my words on the Connecticut shooting.
Truly tragic.
But we try to get as much silver lining as we can out of these dark Nazgul wing style clouds.
So let's start with our first caller.
And I am all ears.
All right.
First up today, we have Steve.
It's not Steve, my apologies.
I haven't called him yet.
Okay, we'll start the show again.
Hello everybody!
No, just kidding, go on.
We'll go with Ian first.
Hello, I just unmuted the mic.
Can everybody hear me?
Yeah.
Okay, I just wanted to quick ask a question regarding the concept of the soul.
I've been trying to figure that out.
I know you write about it a few times in some of your books and stuff.
But I'm not quite sure what you feel about it.
All right.
Sure.
Just kind of go and explain to me right quick.
Sorry, what I mean about with the word soul?
What is your belief or what do you think about the concept of the soul itself?
Because I know I have friends that believe that it's real.
I have friends that, you know, they tell me this stuff about like ESP and things like that.
I'm not sure.
After reading some of your stuff, I'm kind of beginning to have some conflicts regarding what they believe.
I'm going to try to see what your side of it is.
Well, I haven't sort of made up my own word with regards to this.
I think I have a pretty typical or average conception of the idea of the soul, which is that it is an immaterial essence of the personality that survives Past death.
And, you know, can't be killed, and in many ways, in fact, can't be corrupted, or is always savable.
You know, the deathbed confession and getting absolution from the priest for things you did that were bad.
And generally it is considered to be a virtuous part of you.
And so it is the essence of who you are that is independent of your material form.
I mean I think it makes about as much sense as ghosts.
In fact it makes less sense than ghosts because at least ghosts can go everywhere because they're immaterial but somehow your soul is bound to your flesh.
The concept of the soul, like many things that came out of religion, the concept of the soul makes a kind of sense in that we clearly can do some absolutely astounding things.
as bipedal mammals.
We can just do unbelievably amazing things.
The idea that the few pounds of meat sitting on top of our brain stems can write plays and compose music and design massive engineering structures and overcome history and heal itself and and I mean the things that the brain can do are Literally beyond comprehension, because I think we're only scratching the surface of what the brains can do over time.
So given that we have such unbelievable, literally universe-spanning potential locked inside a little cave called the skull, is something that's so hard to comprehend that I think people needed a metaphor or an analogy which made sense to them.
So I think that people needed to have a metaphor to encapsulate within their mind how much the mind was capable of, and so the idea that we have some essence to us that is beyond the material kind of makes sense.
Also, of course, we can create works of art that transcend our own physical lives, and by works of art I don't just mean paintings or whatever.
It can also be the personalities of your children.
But most importantly we can create things that outlast us.
We can write a journal of our own lives which last forever and we can tell stories which last forever.
This is unique in the animal kingdom as far as I know.
I mean certainly no other animals can write and they don't have an oral tradition of storytelling and so on.
So we have the capacity to live on through the works that we do in a way that is unique to us as a species and there is a kind of immortality in the works that you create particularly now of course when everything lasts forever.
I was just reading about Churchill and how Churchill always felt that he was destined for greatness and therefore he kept everything that he ever wrote or received and so on and this of course has created an immense treasure trove of arcana so to speak that people can claw their way through and attempt to shape.
So I think that it sort of makes sense, back in the day, to have a sort of anthropomorphic explanation for the wonder of the brain that seems so much larger than what's going on inside our skull.
And in the same way that we needed anthropomorphic explanations for other things, like lightning is the anger of the gods.
A tsunami is the anger of the sea gods or whatever it is that's going on or disease is punishment for wickedness and so on.
We couldn't find a real answer and the prejudices of the time did not allow for a real answer to be pursued because we came birthed out of superstition.
So let me just sort of make one last point, and I'm stealing this directly from Sam Harris.
Thank you, Sammy boy.
The pipes, the pipes are calling.
Well, he said that the brain is who we are.
Consciousness is an effect of the brain, like gravity is an effect of matter or life is an effect of particular cellular activities.
And he said we can see this very clearly, right?
So if people have brain damage to particular areas of the brain, with quite clear predictability we know what deficiencies they're going to experience, right?
There are people who have damaged a particular part of the brain and they can't recognize faces.
They can recognize everything else.
They just can't recognize faces.
So they have to keep being reintroduced to people that they know that they may be able to recognize the liver spot pattern on the back of the hand.
They can't recognize the faces.
Oliver Sacks has done some great writing in this area, which I actually I did.
I adapted to play as many years ago as an exercise in theater school.
So we can see with great regularity That when parts of the brain get damaged, memory or particular functions of the brain go dark as well.
And so the idea that if the entire brain goes dark, you know, suddenly, I think as Sam says, suddenly we float up into the heavens and can have conversations with our grandmother, is ludicrous.
You know, it's like saying, well if I have a hundred lights in a row and I turn each light off and each light goes on, and when I turn the last light off, All the lights suddenly come on, spin around, turn into disco balls, and float up into the skies like UFOs.
Well, this would not be a valid theory of science, and it can't be a valid theory of consciousness.
Right, yeah, I can see the contradiction in that kind of line of thinking.
The kind of three things that got to me, though, to ask me this question is that, I'm not sure if I'm getting this right, but did you say that That life is kind of an emergent property of organisms at some point?
Okay.
That was one of the things that got me to ask this question.
And I also thought that the soul did exist empirically because of the conservation of matter, where you can neither destroy nor create matter.
I think that's how it goes.
It's a little more specific, or a little more general, I guess.
Sorry.
Matter can't be created or destroyed, it can be transferred to energy or back to matter, but yeah, it can't be created or destroyed in that sense.
Right, right, right, and I think that there has been some studies, I'm not sure how credible they are, where they measure someone's weight before and after death, and they notice a change in the weight, very minute, but they notice a change there, and the belief is that that is the soul leaving the body.
I mean I know it's a 21 grams.
I mean I think that stuff is nonsense and wishful thinking.
The fact that energy leaves the body or energy diminishes or ends within the body doesn't mean that something has left, right?
And I'll give you a sense of how primitive a thinking that is and I don't mean to say that your friends thinking or your thinking is primitive but if I have a radio and I'm in some distant pick me amazon bush tribe or something like that they don't know anything about technology and i have a radio and i switch it on and there's voices say it's tuned to a talk station and the voices come out people are like oh there's a man trapped inside the box right and then you know they listen in great wonderment
and then you know after an hour or two the batteries die out right there's no more battery life and so the voices stop well most of them would say well the spirit of the radio has left the radio yeah The soul of the radio has gone up to radio heaven, where it's all FDR all the time.
But all that's happened is that the energy that runs the radio has run out.
But nothing has left.
It's just the energy is done, right?
It's dissipated.
It's been transformed.
I mean, the energy in the batteries has been transferred or transformed into Sound waves in the air which is you know turned into energy and and then it just runs out, but nothing's left It's just it's just done Yeah, but does that energy have some kind of a weight or some kind of a mass of some sort that?
Would create a reading in a in a scale that measures weight Well energy and mass I mean as far as I understand it This is the Einsteinian revolution E equals MC squared energy equals mass times the speed of light squared energy and mass are interrelated But when the energy has run out, the energy has run out.
You know, when your fridge breaks.
I remember many years ago I was trying to chip away the ice built up in a fridge and I busted through the Freon tubes in the freezer and the fridge died.
It died!
But that doesn't mean that the ghost of the fridge now floated up to the sky.
Okay.
Okay.
And say, for example, like, what about things like inspiration?
Like, I think you were talking about art at some point in this conversation, and where is it, you know, people that gain this inspiration, oh, I was inspired to make this painting of whatever?
Well, I think an easier question is where do our dreams come from every night?
I mean, you don't have to be an artist to tell stories that are incredibly vivid and powerful.
There's no entertainment system that can compete with the mere nightly dreams.
I had a dream last night that I was trying to get medicine from a doctor and the security guards were trying to catch me in the hospital because it was closed, although I knew the doctor had the medicine and I was hiding in a closet.
We were sort of playing chase and all that.
It was actually kind of a fun dream.
But where does that come from?
And the answer is, well, who knows?
I mean, people are still researching it.
They're still trying to figure it out.
The one thing that is true at the moment is that the human brain almost never gets to develop naturally and normally.
I mean it's so incredibly distorted through religion, through spankings, through yellings, through public schools and all this media nonsense and lies and I mean so the brain is growing up under immense pressure.
You know the brain now is like It's like the body during like the Roman Empire when the average life expectancy was 21 and people grew up malnourished, they grew up wrongly nourished, they grew up with war and famine and plague and you know I mean it was a mess and you say man that human body is crap!
I mean it's terrible and now you know average life expectancy up here in Canada is 70 to 80 years old from men to women or something like that, because the body at least is getting a heck of a lot more of what it needs than it used to 2,000 years ago.
And we're that way with the brain.
So we don't know what the brain is like in its natural state, because the brain fundamentally is an organ to be harvested by planting lies and contradictions and bullying and so on.
It gets domesticated to tyrants of the superstitious and the secular kind.
And so, to look at human society, it's best to look at it as a big field of brains that are being constantly clipped and snipped, like bonsai plants.
So, in terms of how the brain works, we don't really know yet, because how the brain works is its adaptation to trauma at the moment.
Yeah.
It's sort of like studying the feet of Chinese women 150 years ago and saying well these things are really weird because the toes curl back into the heel and like what what the hell is what kind of foot is that?
Well it's the kind of foot that is adapted to incredible stress and trauma and pain.
Right.
And so throughout in particular I mean to some degree it's better in the West and it has gotten over time in some ways in some ways not but you look at things like places like Africa and stuff like that I mean my god in heaven I mean the stress and trauma that the brain is going through It's like being a biologist and trying to study animals in a brutal Russian circus, you know, where the animals are beaten and whipped and fed vodka and taunted and teased and burned.
I mean, I don't know, not to pick on Russia, but whatever animals are caged and tortured and brutalized, studying that and thinking you know something about the habits of wild animals, well you don't.
We are not in our natural state.
We are not in a state of freedom.
We're certainly not in a state of consistency.
And consistency is the main purpose of the brain.
Universality is what differentiates us.
Concepts and universality differentiate us, I think, the most from the animals.
So in terms of studying the brain right now, I don't think people are aware of the degree to which we are studying a caged and brutalized brain.
And it's really not, you know, what is the relationship of the unconscious going to be in a world where children are not eternally lied to about just about everything.
And what is going to happen to the amygdala in a world where 90% of children aren't being hit by their parents on a regular basis?
Well it's hard to know, it's really hard to know, but I'm absolutely convinced that it will be vastly different from what it is now.
So anyway, that's just a minor sort of aside, but I hope that makes some sense.
Yeah.
I mean, I figure at some point, yeah, when we stop perpetuating the slave mentality kind of thing, that I think humanity can reach its highest and best potential.
But in the meantime, though, you know, I guess based on some of the stuff I've seen in the videos, we're just going to be enslaved until they can extract as much dollars out of us as they can, I guess, right?
Well I don't think it's quite that inevitable.
I think there's quite a lot that we can do and sort of working on something to explain that a little bit more.
But you know we're not doomed to live this existence forever but it's going to take a peculiar form of courage to extract us.
You know the courage to not pass along the tendencies for sociopathy.
that are so prevalent in society and that means disrupting.
Sociopathy is a virus that reproduces itself through abusive behaviors both verbal, physical, sexual, and emotional.
And so if we look at the sociopathic tendencies which you know seem to affect about 60% of the population and the pure sociopathy which is four to five percent depending if you lump in psychopathy in the same category.
And they have a disproportionate effect on society because the higher you go statistically in society the more sociopaths, they cluster at the top, right?
And so the more sociopaths you tend to encounter and they wield a disproportionate amount of, you know, in the same way that a lion exerts a disproportionate influence over the habits of gazelle, sociopaths exhibit a disproportionate influence and effect over society.
It's not just my opinion, this is the opinion of quite a number of People who have infinitely more expertise in the field than I do.
But the transmission mechanism for sociopathy is clear.
It transmits itself.
It reproduces itself like a gene.
It reproduces itself through abuse.
And so if you can disrupt the abuse, then you disrupt the reproducing mechanism, the transmission mechanism for the virus.
And then you either try to get people to not be sociopathic or you
quarantine them in your life right so you don't have these kinds of people in your life and that way your children grow up when you have disrupted the transmission mechanism called abuse and you do that by getting angry at least statistically that's the best predictor for ending the cycle of abuse and then if you cannot reform those who are sociopaths or sociopathic tendencies then you quarantine them from your life this is exactly what you do with any illness right so you know this these are the steps that need to be taken
In the same way that you wash your children's hands like crazy when they're in a hospital or have been anywhere near a sick person.
You just disrupt the transmission mechanism and sociopathy is far more dangerous than a cold or a flu.
So anyway, that's just, I mean, that's a very brief overview, but that's the general idea.
Okay.
Okay.
I think I'm starting to get a good understanding of what you believe on the soul too.
All right.
I'll look some more into it and see what happens.
Let me just mention one other thing.
I appreciate your question.
I've sort of been meaning to, at some point I will write a short book about, you know, stuff that I wish I'd known when I was younger.
My experience has been that people who believe in ESP are a little crazy.
No, I mean, it's been my experience.
Like, when I was younger, you know, I mean, I dated a lot.
I've always come across these women who believed in ESP and a few who believed in reincarnation, and I just kind of viewed it as a little quirk.
I think you had one in the story.
You were 17 years old and you had a woman who dated ESP.
You might have been in a real-time relationships or something, I think, right?
Let's say I was 17.
That makes me sound a lot better.
Okay, fair enough.
It's deeply nutty and it's such wish fulfillment and such anti-empiricism and confirmation bias.
You have to shield yourself from a huge amount of rational thinking and scientific reality in order to continue to believe in this sort of phenomenon.
It's kind of narcissistic in a way.
I mean I don't use that in any technical sense but it's kind of like you then become sort of Did I predict this?
Did someone else predict that?
You get this rush of this thrill if you find out something that may have been predicted.
You end up kind of navel-gazing a lot, looking at the mechanics of your own brain and reinterpreting coincidences as basic confirmations of your unreality and so on.
I'm just telling you that this is my opinion.
I don't prove this or anything, but I remember a woman I was dating who thought she was I said, well that's fantastic because now we're going to make a fortune because James Randi has for 30 years had a million dollar prize to anyone who can prove psychic phenomenon in any kind of controlled setting.
Man, we are rich!
And of course, what's the answer you get?
It doesn't work that way.
Yeah, but that's really disturbed, right?
Which is to say, I have this power that I know is true.
Oh, well, let's verify it.
No, it doesn't work that way.
That's very self-deceptive.
It's very manipulative.
To me, it's really quite disturbed.
And I'm not saying that as a rule for everyone all the time.
I'm just telling you one of the things that I wish I had figured out when I was younger was that crazy beliefs are not Little quirks.
They are pretty deep in the personality.
In fact, they really are in many ways the bedrock of the personality and that's some pretty dangerous stuff for your reality.
So I just want to point out it's sort of an organized delusion that is actually quite dangerous to you and of course to themselves as well.
But I just wanted to sort of mention that.
I guess I had to look at my friends a little more closely.
Well, just ask them for the evidence and point out that there's this million dollar prize.
I mean, you know, if somebody says, you know, I've got a lottery ticket, then you say, hey, I just saw that that one has a million dollars on it.
What's the first thing they do?
They run right out and cash that sucker in, right?
Whereas if you say, hey, you know, we just got to talk to the amazing Randy, you will be about the most famous human being who's ever lived, to prove this.
And you know, I mean, if somebody can prove it, then someone can prove it.
But you'll be rich beyond your measure, you'll be famous beyond measure, and you will do a huge amount of good to advance science and our understanding of the world.
If you can prove extrasensory phenomenon, it would be an incredible boon to the world.
And then people say, well, it doesn't work that way.
It's like, well, if it resists proof, how could you say it's true?
Right.
I mean, the deal with ESP, when I thought about it, is because if the concept of soul And there's always that argument that, oh, all the souls are connected as one kind of entity, and we're just kind of fractal beings of that.
And so, they were like, you know, because we're all connected, we can tell what each other's thinking, we can tell what each other's going to do.
I couldn't quite make sense of that.
So, that's why I was trying.
Another thing to be wary of is people who use scientific terms with no understanding of them.
Like I have very limited understanding of scientific terms.
I'm not a scientist but I try to keep it more or less accurate or at least talk about my limitations.
So you know people who say we're all fractal shards of one consciousness, they're just using this word fractal, right?
I mean it's like saying that Seale is a mathematician because he uses the word fractal in the song Crazy.
Through a fractal on a breaking wall, I see you my friend.
But he just used the word.
I mean, it's like the way people use quantum.
It's like, ah, so the astrophysicist prize must go to the writers of Quantum Leap because they use that word on the TV show.
I mean, people just use these words and it's really a sinister hijacking.
To use the word fractal or to use scientific terms or to think that the theory of relativity has something to do with ethics or to think that the quantum leap somehow or Schrodinger's cat or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle or Gödel, Escher and Bach and all this kind of stuff, to think that this has something to do with how we live our lives and ethical and moral choices or reality or consciousness or whatever it is, it is a hijacking of
The virtue of science, the humility of science in order to push a very crazy and disturbed personal agenda that's highly manipulative.
Again belief in ESP is just a virus and the earlier the trauma that somebody experiences and the less they admit it, in other words the more it transfers into some other nonsense which shields them from their own trauma.
The more dangerous it is because the more unconscious somebody's trauma is the more it's going to reproduce itself in you.
People's personalities and in particular people's traumas are highly contagious, highly contagious and they spread themselves either by you becoming somebody who believes in the soul and reincarnation and psychic soul bubbles or whatever it is that people talk about or UFOs or Bigfoot or you know all this crazy stuff that goes on in the world.
Either you get sucked into it or you harden against it and you end up in despair, cynicism and scorn for the world that you have to live in.
So they're very dangerous things to – people's crazy beliefs are very dangerous.
You should wear a hazmat suit before you go in to these kinds of things.
Seriously, they're toxic.
They are toxic brain patterns that reproduce through manipulation.
So be very, very careful around people's crazy beliefs.
It's an essential self-protection tip that I wish I had known more about when I was younger.
Now, people who believe that we are all part of one, that we all affect each other and so on, my guess is, and I think it's more than a guess, they would have experienced trauma in infancy.
significant trauma or abandonment in intimacy and this comes straight out of Freud which doesn't mean that it's true I just you know I always try to give credit where credit is due where I remember but Freud talks about this oceanic feeling this this idea that that you are we are one with the universe and someone but this is an infant this is an infant's experience of the universe the universe being composed mostly of mom or in my case mom and dad and the oneness that occurs the lack of sense of identity that this feeling of spiritual bliss through unity and so on well
If those needs are met then you move on and they don't hang around in your brain as eternal needs to be filled.
But in an infant's state of mind psychic phenomena seems quite real.
Right?
They don't even know they're crying, right?
I am upset and magically my mother is there and magically my mother knows what I need and then I feel better and we melt into each other and remember the skin-on-skin contact that is so essential for the growth, literally the physical growth and survival of the baby.
Babies that are not held just die.
Right.
And so the sort of physical unity and the sense that other people know what you want even though you don't know what you want and they can provide it and other people can read your thoughts.
This is all very early infant experiences, and people who hang on to this stuff as adults are doing so because the needs were not met as infants.
And if needs aren't met as infants, that produces character-based traumas.
Not like I have a character and I have a trauma.
You know, like I have a little scar on my thumb, right?
So I have a thumb and I have a little scar.
But this is like having no thumb.
It doesn't regrow.
So, and just pointing this out, again, I'm not saying this is all true, proven, blah, blah, blah.
I'm just saying that this is stuff that I wish people had told me when I was younger and unfortunately it's not common coinage and I think it should be.
We should be very wary of people with early traumatized and very disturbed beliefs.
So, just to kind of draw my conclusion from this one then, am I getting the feeling here The crazy beliefs on ESP, the soul, whatever, is that some kind of a sublimation of the person's childhood trauma, taking the form of these beliefs?
And then, number two, I guess, are they using that to manipulate me, or are they stuck in some kind of a childlike state of mind, I guess, because of their needs not being met?
I think those are all fair approximations of what I said.
I don't want to correct you on every minor detail because that's really annoying and I don't have every minor detail to correct you on since I don't have any real facts to talk about with reference to these theories other than some tendencies, but I think that's good.
I mean I think talk to people about their early childhoods, about their early experiences.
If you want to figure out where people's core beliefs come from, Yeah.
I think that it's very important to talk about their early childhood because very, very few, I mean, none of us are born blank slates.
I mean, sorry, none of us achieve the philosophical time of life without having been impacted positively or negatively or both, of course, by our environment.
And if people don't understand the connection between environment and who they are, then it's really hard to take their ideas seriously.
Because then it's like somebody who rides up to you on a horse and you say, well, that's a really nice horse and they say, no, what are you talking about?
I'm not riding a horse, I'm just a really fast runner and a really high jumper and I can go and I like apples and so on, right?
I mean, somebody sitting on a horse who says that they're not on a horse is not a healthy person and people who think that their beliefs are not somehow, did not somehow come from Their early childhood experiences do not have enough knowledge, self-knowledge, knowledge of the facts of how personality develops.
They're taking claim for something that is in a sense not theirs.
Anyway, so I mean I'll just give you one very brief example then we can move on to the next caller.
So I'm different from other people in my family.
Oh thank you Jesus!
I'm different from other people in my family.
Now I don't know for sure because There were no video cameras recording everything that happened to me as an infant.
But when I was a baby, right after I was born, my mother collapsed into postnatal depression so severe that she was hospitalized for months.
I mean, that's how severe, inert.
She was hospitalized for months.
And I was given to a nanny.
And that nanny and I, according to all of the scattered reports I've heard over the years, had a deep, abiding, and significant bond.
She loved me as a baby.
I'm sure I was a great baby.
I mean, who wouldn't love a baby who looks almost exactly like Winston Churchill?
As Winston Churchill pointed out, almost all babies do.
But she bonded with me in a very powerful, deep, and significant way.
And there was such a bond that years later she was quite young but years later when she had a baby she called him Stephan.
She gave him my name because there was such a strong bond between us.
Now do we think that that gave me some capacity to weather the storms of my family in a way that other members of my families I believe were not able to?
My brother was born in Africa and had A nanny who was very depressed, a very depressed local woman.
I assume no bonding.
I've seen pictures of her.
She sure didn't look very happy and so these were two very different beginnings.
Does that have an effect on how it is that I can hopefully reproduce some of these beneficial aspects of bonding?
Does that is that you know the fact that I bonded so well with a caregiver for those first crucial months and so on.
Well this is important stuff relative to other people and I'm aware of it but it's important for people to be aware of this as a whole.
This doesn't mean that this is all destiny although it can be.
I mean if the theories around sociopathy and psychopathy are true then these conditions are incurable.
In fact I was just reading a study about a Canadian researcher in the 1960s who set up a
treatment program for sociopaths and psychopaths that I just use the terms interchangeably as many researchers do not that I'm a researcher but and and he tried to he gave them LSD they were naked in counter sessions they would you know marathon 18-hour therapy sessions and so on and in attempts and they felt that they were making real progress and then the program was shut down over ethics concerns and
What happened was somebody years later followed up on the people who were in this program and they found that the recidivism rate or the rate of reincarceration for sociopaths in general is about 60% and for the people who were treated under this program it was 80%.
In other words this therapy and whatever was tried made them worse.
In other words it was a finishing school for psychopaths because As one of them said, he said, oh, that was great because it taught me a lot about what people mean by empathy, which meant I was much more able to manipulate people.
So, there does seem to be an incurable aspect to certain kinds of human evil and that is truly tragic.
But for most of us, that's not the case.
So, I just wanted to mention that.
Okay.
Well, I'll let you get to the next call.
I'm sorry I kind of tied you up for a bit.
No, no, no problem.
If I could get more indefinite listener conversation at some point, I don't know, maybe, but that's for another time.
Oh yeah, listen, so people are sort of asking me about listener conversations, love to listen to conversations.
So, you know, where I can fit it in, I'm very eager to do them and I really appreciate people's trust and all that.
People say, can I pay you for them?
And the answer is you can't.
You can't pay me for a listening conversation.
Look, I mean, if it's a great conversation and you want to donate, that's fine.
But no, I don't, I don't, I don't want to do that.
And so, I'll never charge for listening to conversation, never have.
If you want to donate, yeah, of course, right?
If you don't want to, that's fine.
I generally like them to be able to go public, so I don't use names and identifying characteristics, but in the end, that is always your choice.
And if you tell me ahead of time, I want to listen to conversation and I never wanted to be public, I will still try and fit it in, though with slightly lower priority to the ones That can become a show.
So I just wanted to sort of mention that.
You can just email me, host at freedomandradio.com.
Let me know your time zone and when you want to chat and we'll try and figure it out.
Sounds great.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Thank you.
See you around.
All right.
Next up today we have Steve.
Hello.
Hello.
Hey, Steph.
Hey, well, can I ask you, I got a few questions here.
My first one is, I've been trying to get in the good habit of, when I'm wanting to find someone I'm interested in, you know, with what they're doing, I like to ask, what would be, like, I like to ask book recommendations.
So, for you, what would be, like, maybe the number one, or maybe you can give me two, maybe three, but the best books you can think of on the topic of self-knowledge?
Those are great questions.
I'm going to defer it because I'm going to put out early next year, like in January, I'm going to put out a page.
I mean I get so many requests for the library, the recommended library of reading, and so I'm going to put out a whole, you know, this is what I've read in philosophy, this is what I've read in history, this is what I liked in science, this is what I know read in psychology or self-knowledge or whatever.
So I'm going to put that together.
The most influential book that I read in terms of self-knowledge I think was the first one which was The Psychology of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Brandon.
So that's one that I would thoroughly recommend.
In fact, I did read it again with my wife.
We read it together about nine years ago.
My goodness, do you know, January the 11th, 2013, just in a couple of weeks, we are going to be celebrating, and a celebration it shall be, our 10th year wedding anniversary.
Wow.
Amazing.
I mean, I realize for our lizard rulers who live for thousands of years, that's just a drop in the bucket.
It's quite a substantial chunk for me.
But I mean, I think the Nathaniel Brandon stuff is There's almost nothing you can pick up of his that isn't a value in some way or another, so I'd really recommend it.
I hope that helps.
Thanks.
Yeah, I've heard that exact book recommended before, so I definitely better get it.
Really, the meat of my question here that I really want to get on is your view of the subconscious.
I mean, I've been reading about it and I hear it mentioned a lot.
And do you consider this like a... I mean, do you consider it a useful abstraction?
Like, I can see how it kind of is.
Like, I don't understand why there should be a split in the mind.
It seems like it is just one thing.
It's your mind.
Like, why have we created this unidentifiable subsect called the subconscious?
Do you think it's like a useful abstraction or...
I mean, or is it like mystical foo-foo?
Well, if it's a useful abstraction, it must be describing something real.
And so, I certainly don't believe it's mystical foo-foo, and the unconscious can be studied, right?
The unconscious can be studied, and that's really important.
So, for instance, the unconscious It has been calculated having, I don't know, it's some crazy number, I can't remember, 20,000 times more processing power than the conscious mind in general circumstances.
We do want the brain to be split up into various categories, right?
I don't want to sit here every day and say, oh right, breathe in, breathe out, shit, breathe in, breathe out, oh my god, I can't go to sleep because I won't remember to breathe in and breathe out, right?
So we want the body to, like the deep base of the brain to regulate breathing and and heart rate and whatever goes down there in the basement.
We don't want to concentrate on that stuff.
We do want to translate skills into automatic behavior.
I mean, I don't want to sit there and have as much difficulty riding a bike the 10,000th time as I do the third time, right?
So we do want to push down skills like language, like walking, like tennis, like whatever.
We want to push those skills down into the automatic part of the brain.
And really, the skills acquisition, which seems to take about 10,000 hours, is generally about pushing down, right?
This is why Eric Clapton doesn't need somebody to put his fingers in the right place when he's doing a concert, because he's just wailing away.
And jamming, to me, is always magic.
It's amazing.
People are amazed by what I do, which is great.
But I'm truly amazed by what musicians do.
That's just fantastic.
Because my musical skills, even after 10 years of violin when I was a kid, remain rudimentary.
It's a caveman's understanding of physics.
So there definitely are automatic aspects of the brain and skills acquisition is about going from conscious concentration to unconscious excellence.
So I think that we can definitely say that there is an unconscious.
It actually can be studied and mapped and of course the original idea Freud had was that where people hesitated or stumbled over word associations and so on that you could find out what was going on in their unconscious.
He believed the dreams are the royal road to the unconscious and I'm going to be very ridiculously brief here because it's such a huge topic but I believe that our unconscious generally is the zombie land graveyard of truth in our lives.
So we are told lots of lies as children.
And we're told them very convincingly and yet we still know the truth.
We are given huge amounts of morally contradictory behavior when we're children.
We get hit being told don't hit.
We get hit being told this hitting will keep you safe just like we are taxed to protect our property.
It's the same thing writ large but we are told a lot of lies that we're given massive amounts of contradictions and we can't then slip into Contradictory planet.
It's like schizophrenia or something, right?
We still need to walk and talk and not eat poison and eat food and not attempt to breathe water and so on, right?
So we have to stay in reality land but we are stuffed full of propaganda and the propaganda has to inform our behavior otherwise we get attacked, right?
If you don't want to go to church or you don't stand for the national anthem or you don't praise the troops or whatever, Then you are attacked and children really can't afford to be attacked by the tribe because generally a disobedient child was killed as you can see very clearly in the Old Testament where God says hey if your child is disobedient you know just pick up a couple of rocks and stone him to death because remember God's all about thou shalt not kill.
So the unconscious is where we put the corpses of truth slain by the blunt cudgels of culture And they never die.
And so, this is why I said earlier, what will the brain look like where we don't have to conform to madness in order to survive?
Well, it will look enormously different.
There still will be an unconscious because we do want to automate the things that we get good at, but it will look vastly different.
than it does today.
I mean I think in even in the scans it will look different you know the parts of the brains that light up and go dark in various circumstances will go different and we know this is the case or scientists know this is the case for instance with you know not to harp on the same topic but psychopathy of course you know they've done studies where they take and this is one of the first studies I think it was by Robert Hare where he took a prison population back when you could give them incredibly painful electric shocks and
He said he would put criminals down on a slab, wire them up to these electrical devices and he'd say, I'm going to count down from 10 and when I hit zero I'm going to give you a very big and painful electric shock.
And so he was not counting down and on the non-psychopathic prisoners they'd start sweating, their heart rate would go up, they would like oh my god I'm going to get a shock that's terrible.
And then afterwards he said I'm going to do it again and they spiked even higher because they were afraid of the next one right and that could be very easily measured and it wasn't just brain scans although the brain scans were there but you know sweat sensors and heart rate sensors and skin temperature sensors and so on.
Now when he put another prisoner down who was classified as a psychopath and he said I'm going to count down from 10 and I'm going to give you a big ass electric shock He would count down and the psychopath would not change, right?
His physiology would not change, there would be no anticipation, there would be no fear, no increased heart rate, no increased sweating, no anxiety, fearless.
There'd be then a spike of reaction when the electric shock hit and then afterwards when he said he was going to do it again, exactly the same thing.
No anticipation, no fear, no concern.
Astounding!
In fact, when he submitted his results to a scientific journal, they were sent back unpublished with the guy saying, look, I've had a look at these brain scans and these data that you call psychopathic.
These can't come from a human being.
It's impossible.
But they do.
So anyway, I hope that helps.
Yeah, it makes me think, you know, we'll call them the elite, the ruler type.
They probably do believe they have a much greater freedom than the feeling public who actually have empathy and care about other people.
I can imagine that, you know, being in their shoes, thinking, these people that I rule over, they're chained by their emotions, but only I am truly free, because I'm free from all guilt, shame, and anticipation.
Yeah, it's funny.
You're like, not to go off on a rant about psychopathy.
You have been going on, but I understand because I'm like that too when I read a lot about something.
I just want to talk about it.
One last quick thing here.
One last quick thing here.
I'm trying to make this quick.
The view of how emotions affect the physical body, I think last time I asked you something like this, I didn't make my point very well.
If having a severe emotional stress can cause ulcers, in some cases people who get cancer, that's entirely a result of an extremely stressed life.
If your emotional state can cause physical illness in the body, do you think it's possible that someone who I mean, I think so.
Again, this is all just speculation, at least on my part.
I don't know of any studies.
But it seems logical, of course, that if particularly the stress hormone cortisol, which is associated with problems in the brain in excess and many other ailments.
If through therapy, meditation, you name it, you can lower your stress levels, it would seem logical that it would have a beneficial effect on health for sure, which is, of course, one of the reasons why it's important to try and stay calm, relaxed, and happy even in the face of adversity.
And once you get the trick of it, it's not too hard.
Yeah.
Okay.
Well, hey, thanks for the call, man.
And one last point.
I really want to thank you again.
And you're doing great work.
And I'm sure you're used to everyone kissing your ass.
I think you deserve it.
So good work.
And I can say you've definitely changed the course of my life because now I'd say you and I don't know if you've heard of me.
He's kind of cheesy, but the one guy, he's a motivational speaker, Tony Robbins.
He is a little bit...
Banana hands.
Um, sorry.
Yeah.
But the way I look at it is, what do I want to do with my life?
And I see that Tony Robbins dude, there's some stuff I like about him because he tries to market positive self-esteem and psychology to people.
I mean, I don't agree with a lot of the stuff he says, but the fascinating fact to me is he's made himself pretty wealthy just by marketing his ideas to people.
I was thinking, what else would I want to do with my life?
Like Ron Paul said, fighting for liberty, what else is there to do?
My whole goal is to take the philosophy of non-aggression and respect for property and I want to apply it in a way that I can make a living out of it.
I want to say thank you!
If it weren't for you and a few other influences of a lot of audiobooks I've been listening to, I never would have realized that people can make a living by spreading ideas.
I mean, well, you could be a pastor, but I don't want to spread the ideas.
Right.
Right.
You want to be a carrier of healing, not… Right.
And I appreciate that.
And I don't know much about Anthony Robbins.
I think I've seen a speech of his or two.
And, you know, he seems pretty engaging.
He certainly seems high-energy.
And I guess, you know, it must be a little easier, perhaps, to have people look up to you when you're nine feet tall and look like a piano-teeth Ken doll on steroids.
But nonetheless, not to diss his ideas.
I mean, he does seem to try and get people to look more deeply into their lives and their origins and so on.
I think he looks a little bit at people too individually rather than in their relationships.
But, you know, who cares, right?
I mean, good for him.
Yeah, he's a little mystical, but I think the guy's done his best.
And it's just really, I mean, wow, the guy, he's making good money at people, you know, at those seminars.
It's like, wow, I should be able to do that with Anarchy.
But anyways, I'll let you go.
Thanks, Steph.
I appreciate the talk.
You're very welcome.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Next up today, we have Anarkopack.
Hello.
Can you hear me?
I can.
Okay, I want to raise some objections to universal preferable behavior, your meta-ethical theory.
Fantastic.
Well, I was outlining the proof which I think you offer, then checked that that's okay so I'm not strawmanning you.
You say that to argue against UPB is to show universal preference for truth over falsity, therefore to deny UPB is to demonstrate UPB and assert it, therefore UPB is true because you can't deny it without resulting in a performative contradiction.
Is that your argument?
Yes.
Okay.
These are my criticisms.
I just want to see what you think of them.
One, by denying UPB, I'm not necessarily making a universal preference for truth over falsity.
I am showing a particular preference against UPB.
So I could be arguing against UPB not because I believe it to be false, but because I think doing so is funny, or it will give me kind of, I don't know, greater status in the society.
Also, if I have arguments...
Sorry to interrupt.
I want to make sure if you pile up too many objections, then we forget which ones.
So let me start with the first one.
So if you say, "I think that UPB is funny," or if you say, "I think that pretending to attack UPB will raise my status," then that obviously is not an argument against UPB.
Yeah, I know, but I'm saying your reason for arguing it isn't necessarily a preference tree for a falsehood.
I then accept, then I say, okay, then let's move on to the next premise.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry.
This is important to distinguish, right?
So, if the motivation for the argument is immaterial to the content of the argument, right?
Mm-hmm.
Right, so someone could say, blacks tend to have darker skin than whites.
Now, he could be the head of the KKK.
He might be some stone-ass, crazy, nasty racist.
But still, the argument is either true or false.
The motives don't matter fundamentally when it comes to evaluating the argument.
Now, if somebody has made 100 crazy arguments, then you might say, I'm not going to evaluate 101 because this person has a pattern.
And so if somebody's motive for criticizing UPB is not material to the content of their argument, the moment they say that UPB is invalid or UPB is false or whatever, then they have invoked UPB because they're saying that theories should be consistent, theories should be then they have invoked UPB because they're saying that theories should be consistent, theories should be true, and those theories which do not meet the standard of internal consistency or empirical evidence should Well, you've got truth, which is universal.
You've got falsehood.
You've got consistency, which is objective and universal.
You have empirical evidence, which hopefully is objective and universal.
And you're saying that we should infinitely prefer truth over falsehood.
So, these are all universal standards.
Okay, that makes your definition of universally preferable behavior far more clear.
Thanks for that.
The problem is that so far we're only showing universal preference for matters of fact.
And the problem is, how are you going to go from these matters of facts that we have preference for, so for example, a preference for truth, a preference for factual and logical consistency, how do we go from that to making objective value statements?
This is the problem I have with UPB, because it seems to be inferring... Sorry to interrupt, let me just make sure I understand.
So, you're saying that we can have an objective and universal preference for truth over falsehood, But how do we use that to make value statements or value judgments?
We can have a universal preference for matters of fact.
So I can say that I think when arguing we should be concerned with the truth.
Now that would be a value statement, correct?
However, if I'm just saying that I reject this theory because it's false, or I accept this theory because it's true.
I'm not making a value statement.
And I can... Sure you are.
The moment you say true, sorry, the moment you say true, you're making a value statement.
Because true has to be true according to universal objective standards, right?
That's not a value statement.
Sorry, so to say that the truth of a theory must... Sorry, sorry to interrupt.
Just to say... So, let me make sure I understand.
So, if I say...
That the validity of an argument is dependent upon its conformity to universal standards of truth and evidence, and that theories must conform to universal standards of consistency, reason, and evidence in order to be true, and we should reject theories which do not universally, and everyone is bound by that, that these are not value statements?
As part from one at the end, though, is statements.
And you can argue against UPB without having the statement at the end that as a human agent you ought to adhere to this principle.
We can just say that I do adhere to this principle and now I'm going to argue on this principle.
And is the principle something that somebody else should be bound by?
In other words, like I have a principle called I like apple pie.
Is it reasonable for me to argue that everyone ought to adhere to the principle I like apple pie?
No, but what about the principle of, say, the rules of formal logic?
And what is a valid or what's an invalid inference?
That, you can say, everyone ought to apply to if they wish to have a logical argument.
So if they don't want to have a logical argument, well, they don't have to abide by these logical rules.
However, if they don't even want to argue logically, you know, no point really talking to them.
So if they do have a desire... Sorry, they're certainly not going to be constructing arguments against UPB if they're not interested in logic, right?
Because if they say, you know, I don't like the font that UPB is written in, people could say, okay.
I mean, maybe I do, maybe I don't.
But that doesn't have any truth content other than their statement of their own personal subjective preferences or experience.
That would be a value statement.
That would be a value statement.
That the matter of fact that, say, UPB is an incorrect theory, that isn't a value one.
And when you argue that if you want to have true beliefs, then you ought to reject UPB, you don't have to deal with the resort problem then, because you've got a goal based on a universal function.
But the problem is, with ethics, we don't have such a goal.
So my problem is with UPB is how do we go from the matter of fact that I have a universal preference for truth to having this universal preference for value statements.
But we don't have to, sorry, we don't have to inflict a universal preference for truth and reason and evidence on other people.
They do that for themselves the moment that they make a truth claim.
It's like saying, well, how do I get people to wear clothes at the mall?
Well, you know, pretty much always when they're at the mall, they're in clothes, right?
Or how do I get babies to stop driving tractors?
Well, babies don't drive tractors, right?
So we don't have to worry about, I don't think we have to worry about getting everyone to do UPB, but the moment that people start making truth claims that other people are bound by, and the moment somebody uses the word incorrect, then they're not saying, they're not stating a personal preference, they're not stating an aesthetic truth, they are stating a universal truth.
This theory is incorrect.
And of course, incorrect is a value judgment.
David Morgan: Incorrect is not a value judgment.
It can be, but within the realm we're discussing, it wouldn't be.
So if I say that your answer to this mathematical equation is incorrect, that is not a value statement.
Likewise, if I say x ethical... Sorry, it's not an ethical statement, but it is a value statement for sure, because there's a universal standard of truth Which your answer, your mathematical answer does not conform to.
It's not consistent.
It's not whatever, right?
I mean, it's got internal contradictions or whatever.
That's not from a value statement as understood in Western analytic philosophy.
Well, again, sorry, if we're using the word value to mean both conforms to the truth and morally good, then I agree that it's certainly not a moral statement.
I mean, we can make, we can say two and two make five, and we are not
doing an immoral thing, but if if we say that 2 and 2 make 5 is false then that certainly conforms to UPB in that 2 and 2 makes 5 is false and it's incorrect and Therefore we should strive to get the correct version and discard the incorrect version Okay, I think the problem here is that you're saying that UPB applies to these value statements and
And then using that term to apply to things which includes the is-ought divide.
And so I think what we can say is that UPB applies to is-statements, matters of fact, but doesn't apply to matters of value.
So we can have UPB with regard to certain epistemological considerations, say, for example, arguments about logic or about how do we learn knowledge, say, for instance, or questions of the soul, that type of issues.
But when we're talking about these ethical questions, in what sense can UPB be applied?
It seems to me that it can only be applied to these matters of fact and can't be applied to values, which means, well, in what sense is it an ethical theory then?
And in what sense is it useful for meta effects?
That is a fine, fine question.
And I wish to pause to applaud you on your rigor.
I wish to applaud you on and without any condescension.
It's not pat pat.
Like, good.
Good.
I mean, I appreciate your expertise.
I really appreciate your interest.
And I appreciate the criticisms.
I just want to sort of point that out.
Really enjoying this.
Now, what UPB does
It says, you know, we'll argue about whether it should or shouldn't, but it says basically that if ethical theories are subsumed under the kind of rigor that we would expect from a mathematical theory, then we can judge ethical theories with the same level of precision and rigor with which we would judge a theory of mathematics or a theory of science or whatever.
In other words, there's not a separate category It's called ethics where logic dare not tread, right?
I mean because there's generally this discontinuity in ethics.
Ethics is, you know, obviously considered to be cultural or it's an argument from a fact, you know, like if we build the bridge according to this equation and the bridge stays up, I guess it's a good equation or this bridge has stayed up for 20 years, I guess it was a good equation.
That's not how we do engineering.
We do engineering by doing the math ahead of time and knowing ahead of time.
There is generally in philosophy, as you say, I mean the human is or divide has been very And of course the stranglehold of governments and priests over ethics has excluded it.
from strict rational examination in my experience.
I agree with the fact that, say, the public education system and the Catholic education system that say monks would have received wasn't particularly concerned with logic and reason and far more concerned with, you know, a lack of logic, lies, propaganda, and so on.
But I guess what we're discussing here is a matter of philosophical consideration rather than historical consideration about how ethics just got completely, you know, ruined, say, you could argue, by certain kind of societal beliefs, such as the societal belief that racism, okay, or slavery is okay, whatever that is.
We're concerned here with philosophy, and within philosophy, philosophers do apply reason and logic to their ethical theories, and if they didn't, they would just be laughed out, you know, of the philosophy world.
So if Alistair McIntyre in his books is a famous modern ethicist, didn't all his arguments say weren't logically constructed, made logical fallacies, he wouldn't be as well known as he is.
By stating that we ought to apply the same rigor and standard by which we consider non-ethical belief systems, so the rigor by which we discuss, say, God or epistemology, and applying that to ethics, you're just repeating what philosophers have been saying for some time.
Now the question is, how do we go from, you know, applying these rigour, which we seem to be able to apply to is-statements incredibly well, you know, we can use a huge amount of logic and rigour to show that the is-statement as so exists just is quite an incredibly, well, it's a very queer argument, doesn't really work, loads of problems with it that, you know, are raised by many philosophers, you know, but then when we try to deal, apply the same rigour to value statements, how, you know, it's far harder it seems, and so I don't see how
applying UPB to value statements kind of does, you know, saying anything more than philosophers have been saying for ages that we ought to apply reason to ethics.
Yes.
I mean, I understand everything that you're saying, but I hope that you will understand that I'm talking to a general audience who may not have the history of philosophy at their fingertips.
Oh, yes.
I've tried to avoid you.
So I'm not trying to say that.
So telling me that I'm not answering the question, but really providing a framework which is common knowledge is actually not a very accurate statement that I'm dealing with a layperson audience who doesn't have all of this stuff at their fingertips.
And what I'm pointing out is I'm saying that there is a divide, right?
The is-ought dichotomy is, you know, split Western philosophy.
In many ways you could say pre-human as well, because the realm of ethics has been the realm of superstition, and the realm of science has remained the realm of science, is the mind-body dichotomy, all this kind of stuff, right?
So I'm just putting it in context as to why there is this issue for the general audience, just to be clear on that.
I've realized I'm not answering the question yet, I'm just putting some context in it so people understand why there's an issue.
Now, the is-ought dichotomy, I do not consider to be particularly valid.
I know particularly valid is not a very clear way of putting it, but the is-ought dichotomy I certainly accept in that just because a rock falls to the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second doesn't mean that it ought to or should or is bad if it doesn't.
And just because a man kills another man, that's a fact, right?
He killed this other man.
There's nothing in that physical action That says it should be otherwise.
There's no moral gravity, so to speak, like in terms of the physics gravity, not the emotional gravity.
There's no gravity which says that he shouldn't, right?
You throw a ball up and it falls back to the ground because, as Aristotle said, that's where it wants to be, right?
Because that's the actions of gravity.
But if I go and strangle a homeless guy, there is nothing in nature which says that I ought not to do that.
There's nothing, in the same way that there are physical laws which prevent or permit me to do various things, there's nothing in the universe.
Which of course was quite a radical statement back in the day, right?
Because it was the soul and the conscience and God's law and all that kind of stuff that we were supposed to tend towards virtue in the way that rocks tended towards the earth.
So generally, the way that I approach it is that the moment that somebody engages in true-false statements, then they're demonstrating UPB.
And that does not mean that therefore any particular ethical theory is true.
It just means that the moment somebody starts talking about reason, evidence, truth, falsehood and all that kind of stuff then they're making universal claims and they are staking a claim called universally preferable behavior.
So there's nothing in nature which says that truth is preferable to falsehood.
I mean, obviously, right?
I mean, because nature is just atoms and energy, and they don't tend towards truth, they tend towards obeying physical laws.
I'm sorry?
There's nothing in the fabric of the world is the language many philosophers like using.
Fair enough.
So there is nothing in the fabric of the world.
Yeah, sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, numbers don't exist like in the grass, you know.
Yeah, despite that, they're still in some sense true.
Yes, I mean if you've got four coconuts in a row and you take them all away, the number four doesn't burst into flames and vanish in a puff of smoke.
So the concepts are derived from instances in the world and concepts exist in our head.
They don't exist in the world and yet they are rational because they should be imperfectly derived from things in the world, right?
So if there are four coconuts and I say there are five, The number four, the number five, they don't exist in the world but there's still a way in which they are true to what is there or false to what is there.
If I say five coconuts when there are four, I'm wrong.
So the concepts do not exist in the world but they're not subjective and in the same way that the scientific method doesn't exist in the world but the scientific method is not subjective.
So I just sort of wanted to give that as a very brief framework and then to say that once we have started to argue for truth or falsehood, then we have argued for a universal standard of truth and falsehood.
And anybody who's serious in the field has reason and evidence as their standard for truth and falsehood.
Reason, of course, is the first standard, I would argue, although a lot of people from the pragmatist viewpoint or the utilitarian viewpoint viewpoint tend to look at the effects of an argument to determine its validity, you know, that the greatest good for the greatest number and that kind of nonsense.
And I think that's entirely ridiculous and bad and false, although, of course, it's quite a popular argument.
That's a straw man to authoritarianism.
It's applied only to normative issues, not to the true value.
So they believe that it's true that actions ought to maximize utility, but not that, say, you ought, you know, say what they often make arguments that we ought to value retrieve an argument more than anything.
So, say, if they were disproven, then they would say, we ought to value the truth of, I don't know, God's non-existence, if they were previously a religious person, so that they don't just apply it, they only apply it to normative ethical issues, rather than, say, beliefs.
Okay.
Well, this is my understanding.
Certainly, if I'm strawmanning, I apologize and I will certainly look deeper into utilitarianism if I've missed something important, which is not to say that everybody who's utilitarian only applies utilitarian because then you wouldn't actually just take Paul's.
You wouldn't do any study of reason or evidence or you just take Paul's and that would be the truth.
But I think that aspect of utilitarianism tends to look at effects more than reason and first causes.
Anyway so but the approach that I take is once somebody has established that theories must be internally consistent and hopefully backed up by evidence and they have already at the moment they've made a truth claim or truth statement they have crossed over from is to ought and now we're in the realm of ought.
Now again ought doesn't exist in the world and I get that and the telios nothing tends towards the fabric of the world does not support or whatever I get all them that's all fair.
But to me, it's analogous to the moment somebody says, we should use the scientific method to test this hypothesis, then they're in the realm of science.
And you don't need to argue that science is good, because somebody has already said, let's use the scientific method.
I don't need to go to Richard Dawkins and debate him and say, you know, we should really use the scientific method to determine the truths of biology.
You'd be like, yes, that's been my whole deal, right?
And so, going to a scientist and arguing for the validity of the scientific method is... I'm sorry?
These are still matters of fact.
So, for example, it's a matter of fact that the scientific method works.
Sorry, that was my phone, how unfortunate.
The scientific method works, and that's why we use it.
And also, we can give reasons in support of it being true, and correct, and a correct epistemology.
So we can have arguments and evaluate reasons in support of the proposition that the scientific method is correct.
Now, the problem with ethics is that what evaluative process can we go through by which we show the normative ideas that we have to be true?
We have to have some kind of evaluative process to get past the is-ought dilemma.
And philosophers occasionally like to argue, well, if we want to do X, then we can get around it.
So you can say that if we want to win a race, we ought to run quickly.
The problem is that unlike a race, humans don't have a universal function.
arguably without a creator.
And so then it's kind of difficult how we can structure an evaluative process which allows us to go from these is-ers to oughts, because we have a second wonderful little ought in there.
But my argument is that once you have said truth, falsehood, universality, you've already crossed over the is-ought and you're in the realm of ought, which is why I say that it's like arguing oughts with somebody who's arguing for truth and universality is like arguing pro-scientific method to a convention of scientists.
It's already accepted.
It's already accepted.
Now, once somebody is making truth statements about anything, then those truth statements being universal should apply to every proposition.
So if we have a truth statement or truth standard called internal consistency, then that should be universal to all human propositions from mathematics to engineering to physics to chemistry to geology, whatever I have.
I mean, these should be universal to all human propositions.
And so if we have something like, it is universally preferable to murder, right, that this is fundamentally no different to evaluate than two and two make five.
In other words, if we can show that inevitable logical contradictions arise from thou shalt murder, then thou shalt murder is a false proposition.
Okay, this seems to be a restation of Kantian ethics, but what's interesting is that you can make rational egoism a universal principle without it resulting in contradiction.
So rational egoism, for the listeners who may not know, is the position that we ought to act in our self-interest.
Now, you can apply this universally.
So let's make this, for argument's sake, we're going to make this a universal statement.
You ought to act in your self-interest.
Now, what will happen is, as individuals act in their self-interest, they may end up, say, attacking each other, but they'll still be in line with the principle.
So say, for example, somebody tries to murder me because it's in their self-interest to do so.
Well, now it's in my self-interest to not allow them to murder me.
So the universal principle, we ought to act in our self-interest, is still consistent, and there's no contradictions here from making it a universal concept.
There's contradictions between us enacting this principle, because our own preferences will, you know, be different because we're different people.
But the principle won't result in contradiction, just conflict between the individuals acting out it, but not the principle itself.
But I would argue that saying that people should act in their own self-interest is an is, not an ought, because of course people act in their own self-interest.
I mean, of course.
I mean, that's not a description of an ought, that's a description of an is.
There's a difference between psychological egoism, so the view that humans are motivated primarily by self-interest, and rational egoism, the position that we ought to.
So some philosophers may accept psychological egoism, but then say, no, we ought to attempt not to act in our self-interest.
So through some kind of, I don't know, Buddhist meditation process, we can try and get rid of our ego, so that we no longer are acting in our self-interest.
And how would we measure that?
What would be the empirical test for whether somebody is acting in their self-interest or not?
Scientists tend to do experiments on the matter, but psychological egoism is a separate issue to rationality.
I don't think that there's any scientific test which can prove whether somebody is acting in genuine or false self-interest.
Many scientists will disagree with you.
There's been some recent research.
I can't remember off the top of my head.
I'll send you a message or something detailing the studies.
Um, but they, um, yeah, there was a major field of experiments where they would, they can't, it's so annoying I can't remember it in detail, it's just annoying, I should, I should revise.
But yeah, they've since found that in many cases people act altruistically, and then there's a whole discussion about, okay, were they motivated by, um, So, what's called an I-desire?
So, I acted altruistically because if I hadn't, I'd feel guilty and then I feel bad.
So, I'll do it so I don't feel bad.
It strikes me as very ex post facto reasoning because everybody has a motive for something they do.
And again, this is a little bit Kantian as well, right?
But the idea that we should give to charity out of sheer benevolent love and not because giving to charity makes us feel good.
Even though there are studies that show that altruistic behavior does release endorphins within the brain, we're not supposed to do it for that reason or whatever, but this all, again, this to me is not in the realm of real philosophy, and I know that's an annoying thing to say, and what am I just an idiot on the internet, but it's completely annoying, and it's a ridiculous thing for me to say, but the reason for that is it requires a knowledge of a person's motivations that is completely unavailable in the moment.
So there's an X factor here called self-interest which can never be proved after the fact because you can't hook up someone to a machine after they've done something and it requires you know maybe some level of self-reporting.
People don't always know their own motives.
A lot of people don't have the self-knowledge to know their own motives and so on.
So anyway to me it's a very interesting speculative idea but it's not something that would really go in the realm of I think it's sort of the biosciences, you know, sort of the overlap between, you know, maybe ethics and psychology and brain science.
It's an interesting thing to explore.
Yes, but let's go back to something that is a little bit more verifiable.
I'm sorry?
Verifiable?
A universal principle without contradiction.
I'm sorry?
Which means it would then be moral.
If rational egoism can be a universal principle without it resulting in contradiction, then what we can do is make all actions which are in your self-interest then become moral.
And that seems incredibly counterintuitive for an ethical theory.
This is mysticism, because it requires a level of knowledge that is impossible to attain, which is the true knowledge of somebody else's motives, and also the true knowledge of what constitutes self-interest.
A self-interest is something that is incredibly subjective to circumstance, right?
So we would say generally that it's in your self-interest to put money aside for a rainy day because that way if an accident or tragedy occurs, you've got some cash on hand.
On the other hand, if you're going to die in six weeks, you might want to go and blow it all, right?
So again, this is just one sort of particular example, but the self-interest for somebody who has no conscience is very different from the self-interest for somebody who has a conscience.
So, I mean, the self-interest of working on your own, say, emotional issues, which is short-term pain, long-term gain, the self-interest of balancing that out.
Obviously, if you're 16, it probably is worth dealing with any trauma you've experienced.
If you're 90, it may not be worth entering into therapy.
The self-interest of should you go running or should you smoke a cigarette?
Well, that's hard to say.
It's hard to objectively quantify what somebody's self-interest is in those circumstances or situations.
Should you take a government job, even though it's funded through violence but gives you more money, Or should you not, which is going to cost you, I think, about 40% of your salary and benefits in the US, at least.
I mean, these are questions for which there aren't... So saying that self-interest can be an objective standard, I just can't see how that could be measured, how that could be universalized.
And this is why I say it's not in the realm of philosophy.
No, you can say that people ought to act in what they believe to be their self-interest.
It doesn't matter if it actually is.
So we could show, say, somehow hypothetically, objectively, It's actually in your self-interest currently to like, you know, have an ice cream.
You might not currently have that desire, and that's contrary to the facts which we've hypothetically just demonstrated, but nonetheless you ought to act as you believe is in your self-interest, and that should be the ethical principle by which you live.
That's not a principle.
That's saying everything that you do is right.
Well, no, you should act in accordance with your self-interest.
Right, and since everybody acts in accordance with their perception of their self-interest, what you're saying is everything that everyone does is right.
That's not a moral theory.
All math answers are true.
You can universalize it, is the point, and we don't want to.
No, you can't universalize it.
You can't universalize it, because you can't measure it, and it's subjective.
I fail to see how to know, but the principle itself isn't.
In action, it is, but the principle itself isn't.
So like, a critique of utilitarianism, say, is often that people aren't very good at working out the outcomes of their actions.
That doesn't invalidate the principle, it just means that perhaps in practice, people ought not to think like utilitarians.
Give me an example where Somebody would fail to meet the standard of morality called, you should act in your self-interest.
How would somebody be categorized as immoral in that standard?
By not acting in their self-interest.
Okay, but what does that mean?
That's just rephrasing it with a negative.
That doesn't prove anything.
So what is an actual action that somebody could take that would be immoral under the standard?
Well, say for instance that I know it's in my self-interest to, I don't know, buy a Christmas present.
My friend I then despite it being in my self-interest choose not to Then I would be acting unethically according to this universal principle So that would be immoral According to this principle I don't I mean, I don't ascribe to this principle.
It's just a challenge which Advocates of ethical theories like yours have to you know, it's one of those problems, which is actually it's not one that I have to deal with at all It's just an interesting one to deal with and I'll tell you why after but so if somebody believes that it's in itself It's in his self-interest he in other words in other words He wants to that's what it is being in accordance with your self-interest is I want to because that's what you're doing, right?
So if I want to buy a present for a family member, a Christmas present for a family member, and then I don't, then clearly I didn't want to.
In which case it was in my self-interest to not do something.
I'm sorry?
Surely there's a difference between what's in your self-interest and what you may want to do.
So it might be in your self-interest to do X, But due to a variety of constraints, you end up actually doing Y, even though it's not in your objective self-interest to do so.
I still don't understand how that can be validated.
What is an objective self-interest?
I don't understand what an objective self-interest is.
That seems like objective subjective to me.
It's one of those problems.
I don't actually ascribe to this theory.
I'm just putting it out there and see what you think.
Okay, well, let's put the theory aside because I consider it nonsense.
Again, it's an annoying thing to say, but let me just give you the very brief, because I want to get on to other callers, but let me just give you the very brief reason that UPB can work.
So, if we say, for instance, that murder is universally preferable behavior, we immediately run into insurmountable contradictions in the formulation of that statement.
I mean, they're detailed in the book.
Very briefly, two men in a room cannot logically both murder each other at the same time, because if murder is a universal value, then everybody should want it, and the moment everybody wants it, it's no longer murder, right?
So, if I say rape is a universally preferable behavior, then everybody wants to be raped, but if everybody wants to be raped, it's called lovemaking or sex.
It's no longer categorized as rape.
Rape has to be something that somebody wants and somebody desperately does not want.
And therefore it cannot be universalized to say that rape is universally preferable behavior.
Now not raping can be universally preferable behavior, not murdering, not assaulting, not stealing.
Stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior.
Then it becomes endless borrowing and lending and whatever it is, right?
And so there are no appeal to consequences.
It's simply in this really no appeal to effects.
It's like well somebody's unhappy, their happiness quotient goes down if they're raped, which I'm sure is true, but it's simply that the internal consistency of the statements cannot be maintained and therefore you know there's a problem.
Now generally when we have logical contradictions in our thinking there are bad effects.
So in communism some people get property rights and some people don't.
Some people get to initiate force and some people don't.
in statism as a whole.
Some people get to counterfeit money and other people don't.
And some people get to initiate the use of force and other people don't and so on.
So where we have contradictions in that which we claim to be universal, we tend to end up with bad results.
I think the empiricism holds this up, right?
The communism fails.
The current Western societies are failing as they increase their use of force and they increase the divide between those who use and profit from violence and those who are barred from any use of violence.
So if we create contradictions, in other words, if we say, okay, well, we're going to have a war on drugs.
Well, the war on drugs is a fundamental contradiction, because you're initiating force against peaceful people, and you cannot have the initiation of force as universally preferable behavior, for reasons that I go into in the book.
So, we would expect, in general, bad results to occur from inconsistent theories, but the inconsistency of the theories is all we need to do to disprove them as valid moral ideas or valid arguments.
And so, I won't put a division between Any proposition of claimed universality, whether it is mathematics or engineering or physics, biology or ethics, they all to me fall under the same category.
That's why to me I just need to say, you can't have murder, it can't be UPB.
Rape, theft, assault, they can't be UPB.
You put moral propositions through this.
Taxes can't be UPB.
Because you can't universalize it.
Taxes only work if some people get to tax and other people don't.
Some people get to take money by force and other people don't and so on.
So just very briefly that's the way that UPB works and I think that all of this other stuff strikes me as very academic.
You say that philosophers can't say nonsense without being ridiculed.
Well, I submit John Rawls.
who talked about if we were floating above the earth in a platonic pre-birth state, and we got to choose what kind of society we wanted to be someone.
I mean, I don't think he got laughed out of the profession.
It's not worth the paper it hasn't been written on.
Well, he certainly did get quite a lot of...
I was taught him in university, and I was not taught Dianetics in university, so he...
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S.
and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA, SIFMA.
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And I really, you know, please call in anytime.
And, you know, I'm not saying that I've closed the case and therefore, right?
I'm just saying that that's my argument.
If you mull it over and find a massive, gaping, horrible holes, please call in and I will correct away.
I'll consider your points.
It was very nice talking to you.
Thank you very much.
You too.
Bye.
All right, next up today, I guess this is the last caller today, maybe, unless it's really, really short.
Aaron.
Aaron or Aaron?
Aaron, there we go.
Hello.
I think, I think, I think Aaron is Irish.
Aaron is Irish.
No, I'm just trying to get, is it, are you first in the phone book?
That's my only question.
Yeah, so I just, I wanted to talk to you today about your videos, The Fascists That Surrounds Us.
I thought those were very well done.
And I just have some questions about specific parts of that.
Specifics?
Let me put on my specific helmet and say, I don't know, there was a lot of talk.
There was four hours.
Anyway, go on.
So when I've listened to your videos, I've read a handful of articles.
I've read the book The Sociopath Next Door.
And what's in common in all of that is this idea that a sociopath can never be cured, can never grow a conscience or any sense of empathy.
Right?
Alan, do you have a question?
You do make that claim, right?
No, no, no.
Listen, be really clear.
Be really clear.
I do not make that claim.
I repeat that claim.
I am not a researcher so I can't say according to my study.
People would get upset with me when I put the argument out there's no such thing as mental illness and people would say I can't believe that you're saying this.
It's like I am actually just gathering, don't shoot the messenger, I'm just gathering the research from a whole bunch of experts and passing it along.
So yes, there does seem to be a consensus among the experts who've studied it for many decades that this is not a curable mental state.
Okay, so then I guess what I'm wondering is what exactly is that based on?
Because I can't really find anything to that.
If I can just go into it personally for a second, just my own experience.
Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry.
If we say what is this based on in terms of evidence and then you want to talk about personal stuff, I don't think we want to blend those two.
I can't speak for the researchers, but my understanding is that one of the ways in which it is generally Thank you.
Sociopaths, and of course they make up a significantly high proportion of prisoners, which is not to say that all sociopaths are criminals, but certainly a lot of criminals are sociopaths.
They go through treatment, right?
So prisoners go through treatment, and some prisoners who have a conscience who were in for crimes of passion or whatever, they go through treatment and their recidivism rates tend to be lower, but it seems like no matter what the treatment sociopaths go through, their recidivism rate remains constant.
They don't tend to improve over time, so borderline personality disorders mellow out a little bit with time.
Sociopaths, due to a smaller degree, they just get older and so on.
But they don't tend to settle down.
They don't tend to end up with more stable relationships later on in life.
They don't tend to end up in less trouble with the law later on in life, other than a little bit of decay from just getting older.
And they don't seem to, according to the studies that have been done on their brains, they don't Have the capacity to learn from experience, which is why when you say, I'm going to shock you again, they don't get upset because they don't have the capacity to learn from negative experiences, which is why, you know, guys who are sociopaths, they go out on a day furlough and they go kill someone or they go rob a bank or whatever, which is ridiculous because they're just going to go, but they don't have the capacity to learn from negative.
So punishment doesn't work and they're quite satisfied with who they are because they externalize everything that happens, right?
killed a guy over a bar tab when asked about it said, well, I mean, the guy was an idiot.
Anybody could see I was in a bad mood.
And another guy who got out of prison went to a diner, I think, and there was some aspiring actor.
And he said, the guy said, I want to use the washroom.
He said, they're for customers only.
The guy said, let's take it outside and settle this like men, which is a good sign to run for the hills.
And the guy went outside and he stabbed him 20 times and walked off into the night.
This was actually a friend of Norman Mailer's who Norman Mailer, the writer, championed and got out of prison and hired and introduced to the New York literati scene and so on.
And his argument was like, so I killed the guy.
I mean, he was never going to make it as an actor anyway.
So because they don't have a conscience, they don't process anything negative about what they've done.
They don't want to achieve a better state because they don't consider anything wrong with what they've done.
They don't have the capacity to learn from negative experiences.
Therefore, there's no stick and no carrot and no change in behavior.
Again, this is my amateur understanding of the research.
I'm certainly happy to be corrected, but that's why it appears that this is not a solvable problem.
Okay.
Well, I guess I just want to try to understand how we can say that.
with any certainty.
Because my experience with a sociopathy has been different to that.
So if you're going to, if someone or if these researchers or whatever are asserting that, you know, we can say with certainty that they, you know, they can't have empathy, they can't develop a conscious, like, like, what specifically can they do to tell that?
Like, what about like, so they see I'll give you another example.
It's a fair question and I'll give you another example.
So they startle people, right?
So they'll show them a series of bunnies and happy scenes and children laughing and playing and then they'll show a picture of a guy whose face was shot off in a shotgun.
His eyeballs are hanging out all over the place.
He's got no nose.
You can see his back teeth through his like just a grotesque, grotesquely wounded human face.
They measure people, and so what happens is the people who are not sociopaths recoil.
Their blood rate goes up.
They're horrified.
Their skin crawls.
They sweat.
They're upset by this, and the only markers they can find in sociopaths is sort of an increased level of attentiveness, like, oh, that's interesting.
There's a sort of famous story about a psychopath interviewed by a researcher who showed the psychopath a picture of a terrified face, and the psychopath, he said, She said to the psychopath, what's that emotion?
He said, I don't know, but that is the look that crosses people's face when I kill them.
And so they can't measure responsiveness that shows up.
So for instance, one woman showed up to be tested for psychopathy and she said, oh, I have a really bad personality.
I like to hurt people.
It gets me off.
And they showed her grotesque torture images and she showed all the clear signals of sexual arousal.
Which would be unbelievably not the case with somebody who was not a sociopath or a psychopath.
So there is clear physiological evidence of a difference, like a clear unambiguous difference between sociopath and non-sociopath.
Okay, well here's where I'm struggling with it then.
So through all of my childhood and my My teen years, I was a sociopath.
Sorry, when you say that, do you mean that you were diagnosed?
I don't, no.
I would never ever have put myself in a position where I was near a therapist or diagnosed or anything like that.
But that's an important thing because you're using a technical term, a diagnostic term.
You're self-diagnosed as a... I've never been diagnosed as a sociopath.
When I start to learn about sociopathy and I look back on my own childhood, my own teen years, it fills in a lot of blanks of my confusion about the world around me and why I was so different from everyone else and how I could never relate.
I was brutal.
I was a bully.
I was violent.
I would use threats.
I remember one time I was on a playground as a kid and there was another kid there and I had no problem with him.
He didn't hurt me in any way, but I just thought it would be fun to jump on top of him and start slamming his face into the ice over and over again.
I wasn't mad.
I wasn't upset.
You were curious?
I guess, yeah.
I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm just trying to figure out the state of mind.
Yeah, I was.
It was almost like... I don't know if it was curiosity.
I think there was some sort of... It was fun.
It was an activity to do.
Like, oh, we're just going to go out and play some basketball.
It's like, well, no, I'll just go out and smash someone's head on the ground.
And what happened to the boy?
Nothing.
What do you mean?
You missed?
He was injured noticeably, but I found in the public school system I routinely got away with violent acts just by manipulating teachers or lying or just sort of weaseling out.
I was disciplined sometimes, but it was very rare.
So you could manipulate, in a sense, the system and not get negative repercussions, right?
Correct.
Okay.
Again, I'm not trying to put words in your mouth, I'm just trying to understand what you're saying.
Yeah, no, that's exactly it.
And from there, the list goes on.
Torturing animals, insects, things like that.
What animal tortures did you engage in?
Just like nothing like insects like we'd always have all over our playground we'd always have like hordes of or hives of caterpillars just everywhere and I would take a stick and like poke this caterpillar and turn the caterpillar inside out right?
You mean sort of peel it like a little banana?
No, no, no.
I would actually shove the stick into it and it would actually turn itself inside out.
Oh, I see.
Yeah, yeah.
So the legs go all curled around the back and stuff, right?
Okay, okay.
Right.
And that, I guess, it was a certain curiosity of like, oh, this animal.
Like, oh, this is just weird.
I guess it was like a game to me.
And let me ask you, if you don't mind, I think I get the picture, and let me ask you, if you don't mind, what your home life was like?
My home life was terrible.
It was pretty much, if you're in an environment, right, where you're pretty much a prisoner, and every single day is a battle, or a war, of wills, right?
So that you could have any preference at all.
Even the tiniest preference is always like a constant battle.
Do you mean sort of like control freak parents kind of thing?
Just anything.
I spent the vast majority of my childhood just grounded, just doing nothing.
Because if I was ever to deviate from a certain set of
Rules of like how I'm supposed to speak what I'm supposed to say what I'm supposed to do if that can you give me an example Okay, oh I like like one time I mentioned that my mother had gained weight right and oh he gained weight and She's like like that's just me expressing something and she's like oh, well, that's so incredibly lewd How dare you talk to me like that don't ever talk back to me like that again?
And then proceeds to take all my possessions away for a period of time.
And lock them all away so I couldn't- I was just pretty much in a house, I couldn't do anything.
Did she also ever tell you that truth was important?
Uh, of course, yeah.
That's fucked up, right?
Right, oh no, it's just- You know, it's really really important to tell the truth, unless the truth that you're telling is uncomfortable to me, in which case you're being rude, right?
Right.
And I feel that if you're put in an environment like that, if you have emotions, it's not really beneficial to you when you're dealing with an individual who is just... I would go further than that, right?
It's not that they're not beneficial to you, wouldn't it be fair to say that they're kind of used against you?
Well, yeah, and exactly, totally against you, but if you don't have any emotions, then You can't be manipulated.
It doesn't hurt when, you know, if you're trying to battle with this horrible person and they can do all these horrible things to you, but then you're bound by a conscience, you know, that puts you at a huge disadvantage of trying to survive.
I'm sorry to interrupt, but what I'm thinking of is, it may be an extreme example, it may not be, right, but I'm thinking like if I was on a torture table, And some guy was just truly screwing with my body, you know, pulling fingernails and hammering nails through my scrotum or something like that.
I would be very desperate to not have a nervous system, right?
Because it was being used against me, right?
The pain that we feel is supposed to help us, right?
Don't do that again and, you know, don't swing the hammer so you hit your thumb and don't stub your toe and all that kind of stuff.
It's supposed to help us but it can be used against us by a real sadist, right?
So in that instance I'd be like, If somebody gave me morphine right now and cut off my capacity to experience pain, I would be overjoyed, right?
Exactly, and I don't blame myself for that.
It was just a strategy.
I was never conscious of any of this, right?
It was just something that was happening to me.
It was like an adaptive thing.
And I don't blame myself.
It's a necessary thing, yeah.
Yeah, exactly.
What about your dad?
He was not around at all.
You didn't have any contact with him?
They divorced when I was one years old.
I saw him maybe one Christmas, like each Christmas until I was probably about four or five.
And then I never saw him again after that.
Do you know why?
Partially, it's a combination of things.
One very just kind of, you know, what I expect from my mother is she cut him off from me.
For one thing, like she would say, you know, always talk bad about him and, you know, pretty much get like a four or five year old kid to not want to go see his dad because she's saying all these horrible things and like, why would I ever want to go see this person if he's so horrible.
I'm just believing whatever she's telling me.
Sure.
So in that sense, I was a little bit cut off.
And then I think it was also on my father as well because he didn't really pursue that.
He just kind of faded away.
He didn't say, oh, no, screw that.
That's my kid, right?
He just kind of went with it.
Right.
Well, you don't know if he was threatened by... Anyway, it doesn't matter.
And how were you... You said you were grounded.
Were there any other ways in which you were disciplined as a child?
I was spanked a few times.
It was not a regular thing.
It was an extremely rare thing that happened maybe once every two years or something until I was maybe like nine or ten or something.
And just a lot of verbal and just psychological things, like I would just have to sit there for like hours just listening to her just rant and rave about something that was completely illogical, just had nothing to do with anything, and I could sit there and I can reason through it and I can say, no, this is ridiculous, this is why, this is why, this is why,
But if you try and interrupt, if you try and interrupt that verbal diarrhea, you get punished, right?
Yeah.
Oh, I'm the parent.
Don't talk back to me.
I'm right because I'm the parent.
Now you can go sit in your room and do nothing for the rest of the day.
The reason I'm saying that is I spent approximately 70% of my childhood trapped in a room with my mother pouring her verbal diarrhea at me, so I'm trying not to make sure that we had the same experience, but I don't think it was too dissimilar.
And I'm really sorry for that.
That's a horrible... To me it felt like being trapped by a predator.
You can't really move.
You can't express any preference.
You can't get away.
You can't get out.
While all of this crazy shit gets poured into your mouth.
Like Hamlet with his uncle just pouring poison.
It's like you're a prisoner.
For sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a prisoner of words and it's a prisoner.
It's like an invisible electric fence.
It's like a fucking dog collar.
Yeah.
You can't get away from the crazy.
And it's coming at you like, it's like trying to stand in front of a jet engine that's at full blast, or behind it, in fact.
And it's, you know, I felt like an astronaut in a centrifuge, you know, their cheeks go, right, because they're just going around so fast.
It felt like standing in front of a crazy hurricane like that.
Again, I'm trying not to mix up our experiences.
I don't know if you had the same experience, but that certainly was my experience of it.
No, that's exactly, it's just, it's a complete another.
just power like you have no power you're completely powerless um at least for me anyway and um i i would almost find myself just wishing that she would just like die in like a car accident and like it like she'd she'd be late coming home and i'd get excited i'd be so excited i'd be like oh maybe she's maybe she's staying over somewhere and she's not coming home or maybe she got in a car accident she's in the hospital and then i'll have the house to myself for a week or maybe she died and like
That was like the one little glimmer of hope.
It wasn't that I wanted her to die, but just that I wanted to be free of her.
Right.
Right.
Would you say that your mother was cold?
Yes, but she... Yeah, she was cold.
I mean, I don't mean that she wasn't volatile, but I mean, like, emotionally, was she accessible to you?
I mean, it doesn't sound like that, but again, tell me if...
She was fake emotionally accessible to me.
So she'd pretend to care.
She'd pretend that she was a good mother and that she loved me and that she was doing everything right.
But if it ever came to actually putting that into practice and actually getting any sort of benefit from her, she was completely closed off.
Was she able to switch emotions on and off rapidly?
Yeah I'd say so.
It was like I remember I was on summer vacation and off school just staying at home and I didn't do the dishes or something I left them and she came home which is you know oh hey how's it going sees the dishes and then just starts from a completely normal state starts screaming and raging about how I didn't put the dishes in the dishwasher so I'd say yeah she could probably Switch pretty easily.
Could she go the other way, like if she was screaming and ranting and then the doorbell rang, could she compose herself quite quickly?
Oh, the whole family construct in our household was when you go out into public, there is this face that you put on called your normal, and you're happy.
So of course you could flip that on a dime.
Right, okay.
Can I tell you something that struck me about you attacking the child on the ice?
Okay.
And look, I really appreciate you talking about this stuff.
I mean, it may not feel that difficult, but I know that it is.
No, it's really difficult.
And I'll get to my sympathy in a sec, but I was struck by the first attack that you talked about was pounding a child's face into the ice.
Right.
And that strikes me as a very powerful metaphor for your relationship with your mother.
Trying to burrow through the ice, trying to get your face through the ice of her coldness, of her indifference.
Yeah, I see that.
Tell me what you think.
It's just, it just makes a lot of sense to me.
You felt something there though, right?
It's a very hopeless feeling.
It's a very hopeless feeling.
Well, tell me more.
Of course, it is hopeless.
You can't go through the ice, right?
Exactly.
You will only injure yourself in going through the ice.
I think that childhood violence is like a waking nightmare.
It is how we attempt to communicate our experience of the world in action.
We don't have the words, certainly if we have This kind of parents, we don't have the language, we don't have the emotional language, and we will act out what we're experiencing.
And I'm not putting you in this category, of course, right?
But the guy who just shot up the Connecticut school apparently had a hyper-control freak mom.
And again, I'm not putting you in the same category, I understand that.
But it just struck me that slamming a child's face into ice was probably not unrelated to your experience of trying to connect with your mother.
Which you wanted to do, right?
Oh yeah, of course.
And I see that, and I get what you're saying, and I've totally thought about stuff like this before.
If you're dealing with someone like that, of course, this is how you're going to react to that, right?
Now, is that sociopathy or not, though?
I'm no expert, but I'm just going through My experience as a child and it's, you know, there was no empathy.
There was, I never felt like I had no idea what love was.
Like there's these songs on the radio and I don't know that.
I like love songs.
It's like, I have no idea what they're even talking about on a love song.
It's just emotions were so foreign to me.
It just, and maybe that's not sociopathy.
I don't know, but it feels like it is to me.
I don't know if that's maybe one of the ways that sociopathy comes about.
I don't know and I would really try to advise against the language because that's a label, that's a conclusion.
Tell me about the helpless feeling.
Your voice broke a little bit and you'll hear this when you hear this back, but your voice broke a little bit when I talked about trying to connect with your mother and you said that there was this helpless feeling.
What was that feeling?
Just pure misery and despair and like you know like just anxiety like always just this a constant feeling of anxiety in your chest and like a knot in your stomach and you know and it's just forever like it's just There's no, okay, I'm good this day and then, you know, I'm feeling a little bad that day or I have a little bit of anxiety when something, you know, unfortunate happens.
It's like this tight chest and this knot in the stomach like just for your whole life or your whole childhood.
Right.
I get a sense of, and again, I'm trying, again, really trying to separate our two experiences similar than they may have been.
And let me just talk about myself because I don't want to obviously tell you what you feel.
That's ridiculous.
But when I was a child, recognizing that I had no bond with my mother, that I could not count on empathy from my mother, And this is not to say that she was always cruel.
I mean, when I was sick, when I was helpless, she could actually be quite nurturing when I was not in any kind of state to disagree with her or anything like that.
That always fascinated me is how can you just flip to now when you're sick, oh, you can take care of me and it's all great.
It's ridiculous to me.
Sorry, go on.
Yeah, but I mean, so that seems to be quite, and it can be confusing, right?
Because there seems to be nurturing.
In particular circumstances, but that's only because you can't you don't represent any kind of threat Right I mean so Really cruel people can be incredibly fond of animals like Hitler was a big fan of animals Because they don't represent any kind of threat to him.
They don't disagree with him.
They bond they right so they're not they don't it's very primitive, but but it's um it's possible, but but it wasn't real empathy because Empathy is really needed where we disagree, right?
I mean, that's where we, you know, liking people who agree with everything you say.
Well, I guess it's not really that nice.
But what I felt as a child was a feeling, I read in Catcher in the Rye, there's a description that that possible pedophile gives to Holt and Caulfield.
Which is something like, he says two things.
He says, I see you in the future like a guy in an office shooting paperclips and not knowing why.
But there was also a description of him that you're going to be falling and falling forever and not even knowing it.
And that fucking chilled my bone marrow when I read it.
Because when you're not attached to people who have authority over you, you are never ever safe.
Right.
Empathy and bonding is security.
It is safety.
And as a child, if you're never safe, the world is in danger.
Exactly.
Violence.
yeah, violence from children is the revenge of a slave, right?
I mean, if we read about slave rebellions and the slaves rise up and cut off the head of their masters or whatever, we don't sit there and say, well, that's weird.
We sort of sit there and say well wonder why there's not more of that right?
But it's a bottomless feeling of insecurity and for me at least, and this may be the case for you as well, I mean there was a feeling of incredible distance from society as a whole.
Like I had to pretend obviously, I couldn't be honest about what I was experiencing because everybody knew what I was experiencing, everybody knew what was going on in my family.
My friends all knew, the neighbors all knew, we'd always lived in apartment buildings, very thin walls, lots of screaming, throwing, beating, screaming, crying, shrieking, throwing, punching, right?
I mean it was everybody knew and so I was, the conspiracy of silence and avoidance and cowardice was far beyond the walls.
The evil within my home spread like treacle, almost like quicksilver, like a fog, like a toxic invisible gas through everybody who knew.
My mother's mind was the world because everybody deferred to my mother.
Everybody avoided the topic.
I just wanted to say, like, I had that same sort of feeling with my extended family.
So it's like, you know, all the aunts and uncles and all the grandparents and everything, like, they can see what's happening, you know, they know what's going on.
It's under like a thin veil of delusion, I guess, but, you know, generally they know what's happening, but they're not really They're not doing anything about it.
I don't know if that's what you... Oh, they're doing something about it.
Do not confuse avoidance with inaction.
They're doing something about it.
Do you know what they're doing about it?
Nothing.
No.
I didn't do anything about it because I didn't even know about it.
I would have if I could have and if I'd known.
But no.
I guess they're enabling... Your extended family... Yeah, of course.
They're completely supporting and enabling it.
They are completely supporting and enabling it.
If you know of an evil and you do not act, you are a fucking accomplice.
Yeah, that makes me feel really cold.
Go on.
It's just, uh, I think it's the same thing.
A lot of loneliness, um, from society.
Um, if all these people, you know, you know what's happening to you, um, They're just and they're fine to just let it let it happen, not to a child.
You just kind of feel pretty lonely and cold.
Yeah.
And let me ask you a question.
So let's say you're at a Thanksgiving or family Christmas dinner.
The whole extended family is around there.
And you say something like this.
Sometimes I wish that my mother died in a car crash not because I want her dead but I just I need relief from the agony of being her son and we really need to talk about this because I feel like I'm losing my soul.
I feel like I'm dying deep down on the inside.
I feel like I'm being strangled by these indifferent selfish tentacles.
I feel like the umbilical was a noose and I was hung And I feel like I'm dying and I'm feeling like I'm going to do harm and I'm feeling cold and I'm terrified of what this might mean to me for the rest of my life and we need to talk about this because we have a huge problem in this family.
There is great evil being done in the midst of this family and like good German soldiers y'all are just following orders that come from the worst among us at my expense And I am the innocent one here.
I am the child here.
So we need to talk about this.
What would the general emotional reaction be if you said something like that?
Shock and just scared, but not scared for me, but just fearful that they're going to have to deal with this.
Or that I've actually said it.
Who would they be upset at?
They'd probably be upset at me for pointing it out.
Right.
I believe that is entirely the case.
They would not be upset at your mother.
I mean, maybe in some weird abstract way, but they would be most bothered by the fact that you had spoken the truth about your experience, that you had brought any shred of reality to this ghost clan, right?
And isn't that completely fucked up?
That when the innocent... Yeah, when the innocent victim speaks the truth of crimes, the only people that anyone has trouble with is the honesty of the victim.
That's really fucked up.
And I guarantee you, you knew all of this as a child. - Yeah, I don't know if it was conscious, but definitely almost instinctual.
I knew about certain things, yeah.
And if you had brought it to a teacher, and if you had brought it to some other authority figure, well, I mean, who would have won there, right?
Right, not me.
Yeah, bullies run the world.
Still.
But I just, I'm feeling all sad now.
But I just wanted to, I guess, I don't know, I guess I'm changing the subject.
I just wanted to mention the positives of, you know, You know, I have felt a lot of this pain before and, you know, it's a tragedy, but just a lot of good that's come out of it because, well, I know avoidable sociopathy, but while I've had these, I think I've had these traits through childhood in my teen years.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm sorry.
I got to stop you right there.
No, you didn't have these traits.
You don't think so?
Why?
What color are your eyes?
Blue.
Blue.
Alright.
So, you had blue eyes as a child, right?
You have them now.
And nobody inflicted blue eyes on you.
You weren't punished and tortured into having blue eyes, were you?
That's just what is.
Do you see the difference?
I have a birthmark.
I have a birthmark.
I have a little brown spot on my ankle.
I have a birthmark.
I was born with that.
That was not inflicted upon me.
But if I'd been stabbed as a child, I would have to understand the difference between my stab wound and my birthmark.
Do you understand?
One is a scar inflicted by others that is not innate to me.
The other is genetics and is innate to me.
It was nobody's fault.
It's nobody's fault that I had blue eyes or a birthmark on my ankle.
But if I were stabbed as a child, it would be somebody's fault that I had a scar.
And the scar would actually be owned by the person who stabbed me.
It would not be my scar.
It would be the scar created by somebody who attacked me.
It would not be me.
It would not be innate.
And I would really need to differentiate between the automatic And the unchosen and the inflicted.
You did not have these traits.
These traits were inflicted upon you through unbelievable abuse and neglect.
These traits were inflicted upon you like a stab wound, like a broken bone, like a mashed finger in a vice, like a ball cut off with scissors.
These traits were inflicted upon you by the monstrous selfishness of your mother, by the cruelty, by the randomness, by the abuse, by the abandonment of your father, by the indifference of your extended family, by the cowardice of your entire fucking society.
This shit was inflicted on you.
Do not mistake it for you.
It is scar tissue.
It is not your natural self.
You know, I really appreciate you saying that.
And I agree with that.
For sure, I do agree with that.
The only reason I mentioned that before is just, I guess I'm trying to understand sociopathy, right?
the way.
I'm trying to understand sociopathy, right?
And to me, I don't attribute this to my fault, but is there not a nurture component to sociopathy to say that if these people are nurtured in this horrible way through no fault of their own?
I just asked you not to assign labels and you write back to doing it.
And look, I'm not trying to criticize you.
I'm just pointing it out, right?
I'm really not.
You put the sociopathy label on, right?
First of all, I mean, you You, me, not competent, right?
Takes a trained professional.
Right.
Secondly, I have read, I was initially skeptical of this, but I have read that somebody, I think it's the woman who wrote The Sociopath Next Door, and she said, if you're really worried about being a sociopath, you're probably not.
If it is of concern about being a sociopath,
I truly believe, and maybe I'm completely wrong here, but I truly believe that the only reason that I'm not that way, the only reason that I have a sense of empathy and a sense of a conscience right now, is because of philosophy.
Yes.
I truly believe that if I was just left And I went unchecked and I didn't do any work or anything, you know, I would have a lot of horrible negative traits that I don't necessarily have now.
Yeah, I mean, so the part five around UPB and so on probably had some resonance for you in that area, right?
Yeah, I was just going to say, when you apply UPB to your life, There's some great things that happen when you're honest and open with people.
There's really great things that happen.
It was never me saying, you know, oh, I want to go out and learn emotions and have empathy and sympathy.
I never wanted that.
I never thought to go and get that, really.
But if you understand the intellectual side of UPV and how it's a preferable way to behave, and then you start behaving that way, You get these people that are better than most and you can actually, with being honest and open with them, start to create some sort of a friendship and have feelings and have a sense of empathy.
I have a lot of empathy right now and I totally have a conscience.
I'm completely certain of that.
Just to back up what you're saying.
sort of real characteristics of these kinds of disorders is self-contradictory speech with no knowledge of the contradiction, as I sort of mentioned in the series, right?
So a guy who says, who was asked, did you do anything violent?
He said, no, no, I've never done anything violent.
I mean, I killed one guy, but I've never done anything violent, right?
So there's complete contradiction, but no consciousness of the contradiction.
And UPB messes with that static, right?
Because UPB says you got to be consistent.
And so consistency is a way of knitting together the shattered fragments of the alter egos that are sprayed out from the hammer blows of repeated early child abuse.
Yeah.
It's a way of knitting back together the statue that was broken, reforging the sword that was broken.
Elendil?
I can't remember what his name was.
Oh dear, geeky reference.
But philosophy is a way of universalizing which really should happen at the emotional level.
Empathy should happen through an emotional experience but as I argue in the show, this is the fascist that surrounds you part five, you can do a software rendering if not a hardware rendering of empathy through philosophy because philosophy universalizes and through universalization we learn To be consistent and to learn to be consistent is also to recognize that other people have feelings and at least most other people have feelings like we do and so on.
So I think that's that's a valuable point but let me let me ask you one other thing and I look I really appreciate this is very tough stuff to talk about and I you know I hugely appreciate you bringing this stuff up and I I'm trying not to be too emotional here.
I feel very very strongly very strongly shock, horror, goosebumps, skin crawling about your experience and I The reason I'm not going into that is that I want to make sure that you have the capacity to feel that rather than provoke the feelings in me.
But they're there, I'm telling you.
I mean, it's absolutely beyond appalling what happened to you.
Do you have any siblings?
No, I was an only child.
I had a half-brother when I was My mother remarried, and when I was about 16, 15 or 16, they had my half-brother, and then I was thrown out of the house shortly after he was born, so I never had a relationship with him or anything like that.
And why were you thrown out of the house?
Well, it was the devil.
He had an influence on my life, apparently.
Oh, who's your mother?
Is your mother Christian, too?
Oh, yeah.
Hardcore Baptist.
And, uh, yeah, he was working all of his evil deeds in my life, so, um, you know, she just dropped off a couple duffel bags at school and said, uh, don't come home.
Holy fucking shit.
Yeah.
Holy, holy fucking shit.
Jesus Christ on a stick, that's unholy.
That's unholy.
Yeah.
It was pretty rough.
It was pretty rough.
What did your stepfather think of you?
My father?
I don't... I don't really know.
No, your stepfather.
Oh, my stepfather.
He was... We were friendly before he married my mom.
Like we would play video games or hang out like he was he's pretty decent Once they got married there was a lot of friction When he started to fill try and fill the role of a father, which I didn't necessarily want It was more of just you know you were my friend before I just you know you're a
My mom's husband, but you're my friend now, like, don't- I don't need you to step into that- Well, I don't- At the time, I didn't want him to step in that front door, I just- Uh, what I thought is I wanted to just, you know, hang out, we're buddies, but he- That's- He kind of took on the role of, like, just as the same as my mother, so punishing and doing stuff like that, and it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy, like, what are you doing?
So not great, but it wasn't as horrible as with my mother.
Well, except that he married your mother, and he also didn't say to her, are you fucking crazy?
You don't throw your 16-year-old out on the street with no warning, duffel bags, and like, no, I'm gonna go pick him up.
You crazy bitch.
Yeah, exactly.
So your view of men must be not stellar.
That women rule and men conform, right?
Yeah, I try to push away from that, though, as much as I can.
Like, I don't want to be skewed in that way, you know what I mean?
What did you do with these duffel bags and this unbelievable situation?
Well, for a bit, I just, like, random, like, friends' houses.
I'd stay on their couch or whatever for, you know, a week here, a week there, until pretty much their parents got sick of me.
Um, and, uh, then, uh, I went to, um, my aunt, my aunt lived in the, in the same city as me.
I stayed after, you know, maybe three months of just friends, I stayed at her house for maybe about four or five months, which I paid rent the whole time.
And then I was thrown out of there too because I was using drugs.
And then I I started living with another friend and paying rent there.
How did you get the money to pay rent?
I've been working ever since I was 13.
Even when I was like 11 or 12, I would go on a golf course and pick up balls for like a dollar an hour and stuff like that.
So I had A lot of savings from all my work because I didn't really spend a lot of money.
So I just use that.
You get that that's a big strike against the sociopathy diagnosis, right?
That you're willing to work and save and plan.
You're not impulsive.
You're not predatory.
You're not criminal.
So I just want to point out that that's actually a mark very much against the diagnosis but I just wanted to mention that.
That's true, I guess.
I guess how I just didn't have anything to spend it on, really, is how I thought it.
Like, there's never anything that I desired or wanted to spend the money on, so I just kind of... I never liked work, per se, but I did it.
Yeah, well, all teenage jobs suck.
I mean, yeah, I get it.
Yeah, I was 11.
Actually, I was 9 when I got my first job and then 11 when I got my first job outside the home.
So, yeah, I mean, if you've got a shitty home life, you start gathering resources and I mean, I wasn't kicked out when I was 16, but my brother and I kicked my mom out when I was 15, and that was a bit different.
It was more of our choice.
Plus, I mean, I had a sibling, so tough that it was at times.
It definitely had its advantages.
I mean, is there a single fucking deck that wasn't stacked against you as a human being?
I'm not so sure about that.
No, seriously.
I mean, without being born with like a hair lip and exploding eyeball syndrome, I mean, What the hell could have happened to you?
You were abandoned by your dad, raised by a crazy ass to abuse a single mom, kicked out when you're 16, and where the fuck are your friends' families doing?
Why are you on their couch?
Why aren't they asking these questions?
Why aren't they getting you the resources that you need?
Why aren't they getting you emancipated?
Why aren't they getting you student welfare?
Why the fuck don't people help people like you out?
Sorry, I'm not mad at you.
No, I feel that too.
It's enraging, right?
And it was, I don't know, the way it went about it, it was very frustrating.
Eventually, after I was gone for so long, say maybe eight or nine months, my mom did start calling these parents and saying, oh, Aaron's not home.
I want him to come home, actually.
We want him to come home, and by that point, it was like, I'm not going back there.
Are you kidding me?
Like, you know, that's so... I slept in a Tim Hortons coffee shop in the little ATM area of a bank.
I slept in there, and I slept on a park bench rather than go back to that house.
Because I would never do that.
So you really were homeless for a while?
For a brief, very brief period of time, yeah.
But, I mean, that's pretty terrifying nonetheless.
I mean, you don't know.
If you say Tim Hortons, I assume it ain't too toasty in the winter.
No.
Yeah, you don't know how long that's going to go on for.
You know when they say, oh, what about the people who slip through the cracks?
Bullshit!
People don't slip through the cracks.
People stand by and push them down with their heels.
I mean, how many chances for intervention did you have in your life?
Probably hundreds of chances for people to intervene, possibly thousands.
And how many people did it?
Our noble fucking human species.
Oh, you see, we have to have the welfare state because we care so much about the poor.
We have to have old age pensions because we care so much about the needy.
And you go through the hallmark, oh, all about the children.
We care about the children.
We need public schools to educate the children.
Everybody says this, twisting themselves into reptilian asterisks, patting themselves on the back for their moral courage.
We stand up to evil and they go watch these films where everyone stands up to evil and does the right thing despite the cost.
And then a child slips into the sewers Hanging onto their legs, and all they do is fucking shake their leg and kick him down.
It's horrifying.
It's absolutely horrifying.
This is about as angry as I've felt in quite some time.
I'm just telling you, this is repulsive, reptilian, wretched, evil behavior.
And your mom is only part of it, of course.
I am so sorry.
I would like to apologize on behalf of the entire fucking human race for all the shit that everybody put you through.
Unbelievable.
Unholy.
The entire gene pool owes you a forehead scraping to the ground, massive pile of gold, here's my kidney in case you ever get into trouble, and some bone marrow in case you ever get leukemia.
Apologize to you.
You are unbelievably sinned against.
You grew up in a completely indifferent, brutal, disgusting, vile community of people who would rather snap it that you're taking up room on their couch than reach out an extending hand.
Were these people all Christians by chance?
Pardon me?
Were these people all religious by chance?
I don't know.
To varying degrees, I'm sure.
I hated religion, so most of my friends weren't religious, but their parents would be the Christians that, you know, we go to church a few times a year and we believe in God.
Whatever you do to the least among me, so do you also do to me.
Whatever you do to the children, so do you also do to me.
Just another example of how religion has explicitly failed to stop the problem of child abuse, in fact contributes to it significantly in many ways.
The idea, not the individuals.
But I would just like to take the entire human race smack it upside the head and get it to apologize to you because you really fucking deserve that because oh my god oh my god that people do entirely the wrong thing around you at every level in every context in every circumstance and I hope I hope
That you don't take an atom of that shitty behavior on you.
It is their shame.
It is to their shame that they failed to help a breaking child in need.
They didn't have to confront your mom.
They didn't have to do any of that shit.
They didn't have to get involved in all that trolly stuff that happens when you help victims of child abuse.
They could have just made a fucking phone call to child welfare services.
One fucking phone call.
How many TV shows did they watch?
How many computer games did they watch?
How many beers did they open?
Which precluded them or was much more important to them than picking up the goddamn phone and getting you some help?
One phone call.
One phone call.
Too much effort?
Too difficult?
Is it hard to dial?
Did they have to dial with huge spikes attached to their forehead?
No.
They're not unicorns.
Yeah, there's really no excuse for it.
There's zero fucking excuse for it.
And in fact, since they subscribe to an ideology which is all about the supposed protection of children, they are evil by their own standards.
Yeah, I agree.
I think they know that on some level.
Like, how can they not know that if they have these principles?
That they say they believe in, but then, you know, they act differently than those principles.
They must know that they're doing something wrong.
And treating you like a stray, flea-bitten dog?
Oh, I'm tired of you sleeping on my couch.
Go off into the fucking night, young sir.
How fucking stone-hearted do these people have to be?
The fuck is wrong with people?
These are broken children in desperate need.
And the teachers do fuck all.
And the friends' parents do fuck all.
And the parents, and the dad, and the stepdad, the extended family... You're drowning.
You're drowning!
Yeah, I have that dream a lot.
They toss you a fucking rock.
Sorry, go ahead.
I just, I always have, I always used to, uh, when I was a kid, I always had that dream over and over again of, um, drowning.
Or just not being able to move, like I'm moving as fast as I can, but it's only moving really, really slow, and I can't get anywhere.
Right.
And did you, was there anyone else in the dream?
Anyone on the shore, anyone around?
No, it's always just by myself.
Or actually, and sometimes people just passing by, not doing anything.
Right, and you get that this was very accurate.
You were drowning.
Right, exactly.
And people were walking by.
And the most awful thing is that they're actually lifeguards who were walking by.
And in fact, saving a child from drowning is a lot harder than making a phone call.
Yeah.
But I want to apologize for everyone.
I want to apologize for everyone.
You'll never get an apology from these stone-hearted golems, but I really, you deserve a huge fuckin' apology from the entire gene pool of the species.
And from everyone who ever came in contact with you, who appear to have the conscience of a fuckin' ashtray.
I don't think the label really should be applied to you.
Social label.
Yeah, I guess so.
I guess so.
I mean, you took care of yourself.
They didn't.
That's true.
You learned very early not to rely on people.
I'm sorry?
I just said, well, you have to learn very early to not rely on people and rely on yourself.
If I'm not going to take care of me, then no one else will.
Right.
Now, I mean, I hope that you understand that this is not the entire world.
To be honest, it's a depressingly fucking large percentage of the world, but it's not the whole world.
I'm actually surprisingly optimistic about the world.
I think that it has the potential to be a really, really amazing place.
I agree.
I don't take that as that's how everyone is, for sure.
If you look at the night sky, you can either look at the dark or the stars, and I think virtue is about as common in the world as stars are in a polluted sky, but they're there.
And that's what we guide ourselves by and we find the good people in this world, the people who've got a conscience, the people who feel, the people who have empathy and we hold them to us with all the security that comes from genuine emotional visibility to other people.
And I am unbelievably sorry.
I mean what I see is, this is going to sound ridiculous and I apologize, but man if you've been my son, just imagine, just imagine how different your life would be.
Imagine that you would not have had anxiety, that you would not have had fear, that you would have negotiated, that you would have been loved, that you would have been treasured, that you would have been played with, that you would have been cared for, that you would have felt secure.
All of the things that you needed to learn, all of the things that you needed to learn would have been effortlessly passed down.
And the struggle to Become human to retain humanity would be something that would be incomprehensible to you.
You would never have been threatened, never have been yelled at, never have been hit, never have been frightened, never have been bullied, never have been punished.
But everything is sweet reason, peace, love and negotiation.
That's what you deserve.
That's what every child deserves.
And if you can get a sense of exactly how much was stripped from you, exactly how much was robbed from you, Exactly how cold monstrous and indifferent your entire community was to your fate and how that shit is all going to pass away.
That is all going to pass away.
The society that is is mere Roman ruins to tomorrow.
This is all passing away.
The world is waking up to the humanity of children.
Children are more people than people.
We are getting there.
We are working on that.
There's tons of people working in this particular movement.
I'm just one of many many many people and I'm certainly not the most important but I'm working it with everything I've got.
This is changing.
This is changing.
I really genuinely believe that you should take a metal approximately the size of Alpha Centauri and pin it to your chest as being part of breaking the cycle of turning these child sacrifice amphitheaters into mere ruins for tourists to pose with photos.
I went to Aztec ruins where they used to play some weird ball game and slaughtered their children and people walk around holding their children's hands tossing them up and down and laughing in a place where children used to have their living hearts pulled out of their chest.
And it is mere it's a mere ancient story now And this is where we're going as a society, that the horrors that you experience, for which I am so sorry, I am so sorry, my God, what an unbelievable, lonely, chilled existence you had, a bare scrabble for the merest atoms of sustenance to get you over the next hump of the next day of days that seem to go on forever with no break, no hope, no change.
I am so sorry.
You didn't even have a companion.
You didn't have a sibling.
Your friends wouldn't talk about it.
Your friends' parents wouldn't talk about it.
Your fucking family wouldn't talk about it.
Your dad vanished.
Your stepdad wouldn't talk about it.
Nobody helped you.
The fact that you've come out with any sense of self-empathy, the fact that you've come out with any sense of optimism, is really, really noble.
And this is a fire under the rocket of the future.
This dissolves the presence of the present into the ancient ruins of the past, and it can happen like that.
It can be like throwing acid on a building.
It melts into history like that.
It only takes the willpower of one generation to change all of this, and you're doing it, I believe.
That is incredibly admirable, but I am so sorry for everything that you went through.
That is just unholy.
I really am so sorry.
I really appreciate you saying that.
It does mean a lot.
I completely agree that you can be optimistic.
Things can change.
I don't want to make all that suffering for nothing.
It's just good to know that you can do something to make the world a better place and to change things.
That gives me a lot of hope.
That's why I like Free Domain Radio so much and all the other philosophy that I Is there anything else you wanted to mention just before we end the show?
I don't want to make sure that I never want to get the last word for listener calls.
No, I think that's pretty good.
I really enjoyed the conversation and I appreciate you listening.
And how do you feel now?
I mean, if you had feelings.
I'm just kidding.
If you had feelings, what colour would they be?
What type of unicorn are you currently experiencing in your chest?
I'm just kidding.
What do you feel now?
Well, for that whole conversation, it was a lot of sadness and some tears, to be honest.
Just over the great loss, you know, that I experienced.
But it's okay.
I'm okay with it.
It's hard to... I feel like I'm fucking up.
Maybe I am, but it's just... It happened.
It sucked.
What else can I do but move forward?
I guess that's all I can say.
I don't really know what to say.
I'll tell you, sorry, just after saying I won't get the last word.
I'm so sorry.
I'm going to take the last word, but it's really about you.
So, you know, when I'm talking to someone about these kinds of issues, I am very strongly trying to figure out what they're feeling, but I also have to stay in touch with what I'm feeling.
That's the de juggle act, right?
Because my feelings shouldn't eclipse the other person's feelings, but if I don't focus on my own feelings, I'm not getting a true experience of the, a true and valuable experience of the interaction.
And of course I'm no diagnostician so this may be worth nothing.
It probably is worth nothing but I will tell you that I got no sense of grandiosity from you.
I got no sense of manipulation from you.
I got no sense of cruelty from you.
And so for my money, you're not a sociopath because you didn't – first of all, you're in this conversation at all.
And sociopaths do not like to talk about their childhood as far as I understand it.
You did not manipulate this conversation.
You stayed true to your feelings in the conversation.
You were honest.
In the conversation, I got no sense of dissembling or avoidance or manipulation.
So no sense of grandiosity, no sense of impulsivity.
Even in a difficult conversation, you were able to stay in the conversation and stay present in the conversation.
So I am – this means nothing, clearly.
But if I had to put money in it, I'd put money on the not so much with the sociopathy thing.
And you have damn good reason, as somebody in the chat room is saying.
You are not a psychopath.
You are just pissed off for damn good reasons.
And you sound like a great friend.
And so I – that's – The sympathy that's coming out from the community here is huge, and this is one of the things I absolutely love about this community, is the basic empathy.
You'll get more empathy from one person in a chat room in Free Domain Radio than you will from some adults in 20 years of your life.
I just wanted to point out that I have pretty good instincts with these things.
That means nothing, I understand.
I have pretty good instincts with these things, and when I'm in the presence of somebody dangerous, I feel alarmed.
I felt no sense of danger from you and no sense of manipulation, no sense of grandiosity, no sense of impulsivity, no sense of manipulation.
I'm just telling you that as my honest experience, which does not appear to support the thesis of sociopathy.
But the last thing, of course, I'll say is please, please, if you can find a good therapist, particularly I think the internal family systems therapy is very important.
I mean you've imbibed a lot of poison through your mom and that's going to set up residence in your head.
So if you can get a good therapist to work on this.
If you don't have any money and of course you know when you start with this kind of stuff it's really problematic, let me know and maybe we can do a whip around on the Freedom Aid radio board and raise some money to get you to a therapist.
I would certainly contribute to that because I think that would be hugely helpful and I just really wanted to tell you how much I admire everything that you're doing to bring about the change that is so necessary.
Thank you very much for that.
Those are very kind words.
I appreciate that.
So yeah, tell me if you've gone to therapy.
Just drop me an email at hostoffreedomainradio.com.
If you can't find it, then let me know and we'll see if we can find someone through the message board and if you need money, please let me know and we'll find a way to get you what you need, okay?
Because you're owed and it ain't going to come from your past but maybe it can come from your present.
Yeah, I think finding the right one.
I went to one before and I think it would just help in finding a good one would be really appreciated as well.
Okay.
Well, yeah, if you want to email me your location, then I'll see if I know anyone, but we'll find a way to get you to somebody good, and we'll find a way, if you can't afford it, to get your costs covered.
I would be happy to help out with that, and I'm sure other people in the community would as well.
So, great job, man, and thank you so much for trusting the show enough to talk about this stuff.
It's hell, I know, but you did fantastically.
All right.
Well, have a great rest of your day.
Thanks for your time.
Thanks man.
Take care.
Bye.
And I think that's it for the show.
Thank you everybody so much for listening.
Have yourselves a wonderful week.
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