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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:38
Vulnerability
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's 8.30 on the 29th.
I will check for you.
No, I won't. I'm driving.
It's something like the 29th.
Certainly a Friday of September 2006.
And I hope you're doing well.
For those who listened to or watched the podcast on humiliation, which has caused...
Some consternation among listeners, and I certainly appreciate that.
It was a very angry podcast.
I was going to say in a sort of sleazy way, well, it was a very passionate podcast and you people clearly can't handle the passion.
And I think that would be a very unfair approach to take.
It was an angry podcast.
There we go. Nice and centered.
Yeah, I was very angry.
And I've received a number of email complaints, and I did respond to one of them the next day.
And so I sort of had Christina look at it yesterday.
She watched it. And she didn't find, I mean, this doesn't mean anything to anyone other than to me, but she didn't find that it was problematic.
She relished the passion and so on, and she knows that I'm as gentle as a lamb, and sort of in the real world, and, well, maybe not quite as a lamb.
So, I do sort of recognize that I was, and I sort of posted this on the board, and I sort of mentioned it here.
I think what was probably going on for me was, I sort of got a taste, or I should say a vision, it sounds a bit grandiose, but I sort of got a mental picture of, you know, the world is in extraordinary agony.
None of this justifies, you know, if you felt that it was abusive that I was yelling at you or that I was irrationally angry or difficult or unpleasant.
I mean, this doesn't excuse that.
I mean, I'm not trying to. I still don't believe that I was being abusive.
I think that I just sort of want to explain to you what was happening for me.
Maybe it will help put it in some perspective for you, because I certainly don't want to be perceived as a...
A raving Grant Looney in a car, but nonetheless, I think that there's good reasons to be angry.
I'll sort of tell you what I was experiencing during that podcast.
The world is in extraordinary agony.
It's certainly moving in the wrong direction, right?
I mean, this is sort of the topic of the podcast for this morning.
And I sort of can't help but think of the billions of mangled minds that are created through the torture of children Around the world, you think of these billions of cowering children.
And they can either be cowering from blows, or contempt, or hostility, or indifference, or manipulation, or control, or brute violence, or sexual assault.
But the world is a prison for children.
And that's why it's a prison for adults.
It all starts, right?
The child is the father of the man, as Wordsworth said.
It all starts with the children.
The experiences of the children condition the experiences of the adult.
As I've always talked about, as Christina helped me to understand, it all starts with the family.
And the ruin of the world, relative to what it could be, relative to what it could be, the ruin of the world, the agony of the world, is overwhelming.
I mean, I have a fairly good imagination.
I'm a novelist and I dabble in poetry.
I have a fairly good imagination, and I can certainly picture this stuff quite vividly in my own mind.
But, I mean, I can't get more than an atom of it.
The agony of children, the agony of the world, and I'm angry about it.
I am. I mean, and I'm not going to stop being angry about it.
It's funny to me that We philosophers, those of us who are libertarians, I mean, I'll just talk about philosophers as a whole, Socrates accepted, are fairly unanimous in their belief in self-defense.
And if you are witnessing a child being abused, then you are actually allowed to use physical, coercive, destructive, skin-violating violence to Attack the attacker,
right? If you see somebody beating a child and they don't stop, you are literally, according to the doctrine of self-defense, which I certainly support, you are literally allowed to gun that person down if there's no other way to stop.
To stop it. If he's some big burly guy and you're some frail old woman with a magnum, you're allowed to shoot a man for For abusing a child if he won't stop when you ask him to.
Now, that's quite important.
I mean, just from my standpoint, right?
Because when I'm talking about the abuse of children, yes, I'm angry, without a doubt.
I am enraged at how children are treated.
And yes, yes, lots of people can say, well, Steph, it's because of your own childhood and this and that and the other.
So what? They're still mistreated.
Let's say that it is completely because of my own childhood, which is a bullshit argument anyway.
Because there are very few people who have abused childhoods or non-abused childhoods who become philosophers to the depth that I try to work it at.
And so it's all bullshit psychological nonsense to say that it's caused by the childhood.
Sure, I'm sure that I have some capacity to empathize with other abused children because I went through some hard times as a child.
But so what?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
It doesn't have anything to do with anything, right?
People will pull out the psychological shield to avoid the content of what I'm talking about.
There was a daily show.
I can't remember when. I recorded them, but then watched them from time to time.
And there was a daily show where Clinton kind of went medieval on some reporter's ass, right?
He went totally postal.
And then he put out a whole bunch of arguments, and the reporter was asking him about, why did you let Al-Qaeda blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, of course, the whole news establishment, as Jon Stewart was pointing out, kind of just went, oh my god, he totally lost it.
The man was completely enraged.
Oh my god. He was, you know, he just went nuts.
And John Stewart was like, well, sure, okay, yeah, he was angry.
What was the content of what he was saying?
And he had a mock interview with Samantha Bee, a deliciously funny Canadian woman, where she was talking about his rage, and then he's like, okay, yes, but what about the substance?
What about the facts of what he was saying?
And... Of course, she had no comment on it.
She just wanted to talk about his emotions.
And that is a very...
I thought Clinton was a...
I mean, he's a pretty crazy guy in a lot of ways, right?
Certainly, if you read George Stephanopoulos' All Too Human...
A fine reference from Nietzsche by a man who sort of lived the Nietzschean ethic of the will to power and had it pretty much wreck his life.
But, yeah, the Clinton has a problem with rage and he is a sexual predator, right?
So, what is it?
I think, oh gosh, what's his name?
Bill Moyer?
A book called New Rules has a joke about letting Clinton run again for a third term if Schwarzenegger was allowed to run as an alien.
It would be alien versus predator.
That's pretty funny. Jokes that people just won't get when they listen to these in 200 years.
I'm just helping the people in the footnote industry, if you don't mind.
So, if you're out there doing your PhD on my podcast in 200 years, you'll know exactly the kind of people that I'm trying to give good employment to.
Yes, it's the people a hundred years ago who put the links on Google.
Anyway. So, gosh, oh dear.
Oh, heavens to Betsy, I dethrended a tangent.
Rewinding. Alright, so...
We were back with that.
Brain just feels like a large cloud of floating, gassy sheep that I'm trying to herd in a vacuum with...
a breath. So...
Yeah, so this question of self-defense, which is...
You know, accepted by the vast majority of libertarian thinkers and most philosophers, if you are allowed to shoot a child abuser who won't stop, That's okay, right?
People wouldn't say, if I shot a child abuser, who wouldn't stop and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
People, I don't think, would say, oh, Steph was just irrationally enraged, right?
But like, no, good for you.
You defended a child against an abuser.
You had no other way to stop the abuser, so you shot him, and you shot to wound, but sadly, you're not that good a name, and you blew him away.
And I think people would say, regrettable, sad incident, but you did the right thing.
I don't think people would say, oh my god, you totally went postal and lost it, and you should write blah blah blah blah blah, right?
So, the funny thing for me, and again, this doesn't mean that everything I did was right.
I mean, I think it was, but this is not proof of it.
It's just sort of the way that I'm thinking.
But it's funny to me that I would be applauded for shooting a child abuser But I am castigated with horror for raising my voice in the privacy of my car about child abuse in general.
So you're allowed to shoot them directly, but you're not allowed to raise your voice about their evils indirectly.
That just seems to me a kind of semi-Victorian moral sensitivity, like where women would faint if somebody mentioned the word pee-pee.
It just seems to me.
And the other thing, too, is that I certainly have had a fairly substantially large number of Hyper-passionate?
Hyper-passionate to most people, for sure.
Passionate podcasts.
And the only ones that I ever get criticized for are the angry ones, right?
I mean, nobody... I guess I got one or two criticisms for laughing at religious people about their criteria for proof for evolution.
And I get a little bit for when I... I certainly got some on the great debate on free will versus determinism.
I certainly got some criticism for mockery of a position, of the determinist position, but I have lots of passionate podcasts, and the only ones I ever get really castigated for are the angry ones.
Now, y'all out there might have a category of acceptable and unacceptable emotions.
I don't. I don't.
For me, hatred, perfectly valid, perfectly fine, perfectly healthy, perfectly needed emotion.
And anger, sure.
You know, if you're going to end up having to defend yourself physically or defend someone you love physically or...
You know, whatever, then you're going to need to get angry, right?
You can't sort of be in this placid, non-entity, pushover, Buddhist, Socrates world of just folding whenever anybody acts against you.
If you're going to be interested in self-defense, you're going to need to have access to anger and to hatred.
Those are perfectly healthy emotions.
As I've talked about before, our immune system attacks.
Obviously, I know that the white blood cells are not angry, but we kind of want them to be angry and to persistently hate.
The cells, right?
The invading viruses, right?
So whenever we attack a cold, our immune system attacks a cold, not only do we want it to be angry, not only do we want it to hate and relentlessly hunt down and kill the cold virus or the cancer cells or whatever, But we also want it to hold a grudge, right?
Because the immune system remembers the shape of the cold, and you never get the same cold again.
I think there are about 100 colds, so maybe by the time you're 70 or 80, you never get a cold again.
It's just great, you know?
At least you know what you won't die of.
You know, we want to hold the memory of that attack, right?
And we want this relentless attack from our immune system.
And when the immune system fails to attack relentlessly, then we call it a sickness, right?
We call it an illness.
And that's a big problem, right?
Fails to react to invasions, we end up in a bubble.
We're hypersensitive to our environment.
We can't go out in the world.
And I would say that the same thing is true for hatred and anger, which are emotional, and to some degree are ethical self-defense systems.
So I would say that in those circumstances, we also have to understand the purpose and reasoning behind why we have these emotions, right?
They're there to help us be ethical.
They're there to help us be moral.
They're there to give us the energy to fight those who would undermine and destroy our interests.
And our interests, once they're aligned with morality, then anger becomes healthy.
I'm certainly aware that anger is used as a tactic to bully, especially children, right?
And one of the most fundamentally tragic things that occurs when children are aggressed against through anger and through physical or emotional violence is that children grow up fearing the very agency that would save them in the future.
The very agency that would save them in the future, which is anger.
If you can make a child afraid of anger, that child will be a passive manipulative patsy suitable for ownership by state, church, God, whoever, employer, teacher.
You've broken that child's spirit.
A person who cannot get angry is fodder for ownership, is a slave.
This is certainly one thing that is entirely true of slaves.
One thing that slaves are always punished the most for is anger and hatred.
Because people get that if slaves get angry, then slave-owning ends.
Slave-owning is only economically productive because slaves don't get angry.
If all the slaves in the South walked off the job in the same day, the whole damn thing would be over.
They could not afford to go and round everybody back up.
So, you have to understand, slavery primarily is self-policed.
Slavery is self-policed.
And the best way to get somebody to self-police, to self-enslave, to self-imprison, to self-degrade, is to deny them access to their anger, and the best way you do that is to make them frightened of anger.
That's how slavery works.
The state does not work on guns.
The state does not work on guns.
Guns are incidental.
The state works on you.
The state works on you.
The state works on you not having access to your anger.
That's all it works on.
That's the fundamental sum root of why slavery exists, of why governments exist, of why churches and hierarchies and bullying parents and bullying teachers and bullying bosses and prisons and wars and all of the moral horror of an enforced and subjugated human hierarchy.
It only exists because you won't get angry.
And so what is the state's relationship to your anger?
What is your parents' relationship to your anger?
They want you to be terrified of anger.
They want you to associate anger with insanity.
They want you to associate anger with ashamed and degrading loss of control.
They want you to associate anger with immaturity, with, oddly enough, with vulnerability.
The number of people who said to me, you got angry because of your childhood, was absolutely fascinating.
They saw my anger as a kind of self-exposure, as a kind of vulnerability.
And then, duly, of course, they lined up, as they were trained to by their parents, they lined up to attack me for getting angry and being vulnerable.
And they basically said that your anger is a form of mental illness, right?
I mean, this is what those in power, those who hold power over you, your parents, your teachers, your states, your priests, your...
This is what they desperately need.
They desperately need for you to associate anger with insanity.
For you to associate principles, principles with insanity.
And if you stand on principle, you are always called mentally ill.
If you get angry, you are always called unstable.
I'll read to you this afternoon an anonymous post from the gentleman who we were talking about a few days ago in terms of maternal seduction.
When he stands on principle with his parents, they accuse him of having a breakdown, of having a mental breakdown.
Most parents will talk the exact opposite of truth, just as the state talks the exact opposite of truth.
When he is becoming mentally healthy, he is termed having a mental breakdown.
But, you know, if there's one thing that I could sort of, if I could wave my magic wand and release into the world, it would be just anger.
Just anger. Not destructive anger, not rage, not control, not bullying, not contempt, not domination.
None of those things. Because that's not what just anger is all about.
Just anger clarifies.
Just anger is intimate.
Just anger is rational.
It's healthy. It saves the world.
Just anger does not make you want to destroy people.
You don't want to destroy people when you get angry in a just and free sense.
This is absolutely essential to understand.
I don't feel angry with my mother very often.
I would say very rarely.
I don't think about my mother more than once a week.
And I can't even imagine the last time that I felt sort of hotly angry with my mother.
I don't feel angry at my brother.
He sent me an email for my birthday, which was, you know, I'm always here for you, the door is always open, I love you, and blah blah blah.
You know, I was a little sort of cheesed off and I sort of laughed about it at the time, but I haven't thought about it since.
Just anger eliminates the problem from your life.
Right? The reason that people's anger turns rancid and destructive is because they're not free to leave.
Or they don't feel free to leave.
The reason that you may be angry at your parents in a way that is fearful to you or destructive to you is because...
Well, there's a couple of reasons.
One, you know that what you're angry about is perfectly valid.
And is perfectly just and is perfectly right and is perfectly fair.
You know that about your own anger.
Otherwise, you wouldn't feel afraid to express it.
The basic fear that we have around our family is the fear that we cannot speak.
The fear that we cannot be self-expressed is the main reason we fear our family.
The fear, actually the fear comes from the knowledge that we cannot be self-expressed, that we are stuck in this paradox that intimacy is destruction, right?
That when you are close to your parents, you must cease to exist as an independent psychological entity.
That's why I'm always like the gadfly, urging you forward, urging you forward, urging you forward.
Go talk to your parents.
Go talk to your brothers.
Go talk to your sisters. Be real with them.
Be real with them.
Tell them what you think and what you feel.
Tell them what means something to you.
Tell them what is important to you.
Be intimate. Be open.
Be vulnerable. Tell them about your feelings.
Tell them about your thoughts.
Tell them about your life.
Unpack your secret chambers for everyone to see.
That is strength, my friends.
That is strength.
Because from openness we get the truth.
From openness we get the truth.
Do not hide yourself from the people you claim to care about, who claim to care about you.
Don't hide yourself.
Don't live a secret life and then be pleasant and conformist and empty and absent and resentful when you're around the people who claim to love you and who you claim to love.
Be as wide open as the skies I know that the instinct when you're around people who've hurt you in the past is to close yourself into a little armadillo.
Do not do that. Be like one of those slutty, sleeping on its backs, legs spread cats.
Expose yourself to your parents.
And to your siblings. And to your extended family.
Be who you are.
Be honest. Be vulnerable.
Be open. Talk and sit about what is it that makes you passionate.
Why do you listen to these podcasts?
Why are you interested in philosophy?
What do you really care about in your life?
What are you hopeful? What are your dreams?
What are your fears? What are your aspirations?
Talk to people! Talk to people!
Open yourself to people!
Don't hide and cluster and huddle around people who've hurt you and not be open with them.
And I'll tell you what, I'm not trying to trick you here, I'll tell you exactly what will happen.
I'll guarantee you exactly what will happen.
You will open yourself to your family, your extended family, your siblings, your friends, whoever, you will open yourself to them And they will strike you down.
There's a reason you're closed.
There's a reason you don't talk about your feelings with people.
Because you know what's going to happen.
But you don't feel what's going to happen.
You don't feel what's going to happen. .
You know, if you've got a cancer that's causing you great pain and you drug yourself with morphine, then you stop searching for a cure and you become addicted to the morphine, to the emptiness.
Stop taking the morphine because you got morphine in your left hand that you keep chugging and chugging and chugging But the truth of the matter is that once you stop taking the morphine and you get the pain of your cancer, you open up your right hand and you've got a pill that will cure you.
I'm not saying it's painless, but it's definitely a cure.
The cancer sure as hell will kill you.
Like, your soul can be extinguished while your body still walks.
I mean, the soul murder is, you know, you are at risk.
I mean, understand that.
This is not a neutral proposition to be around people who despise you and who hold you in contempt.
It's not a neutral proposition to be in this kind of situation.
So, you know, time is not eternal in this world, and the health and flourishing of our soul is not eternal in time is not eternal in this world, and the health and flourishing So, I'll guarantee you that you'll get smacked down again.
There's no question of that.
There's no question of that whatsoever.
And you need to feel that.
You need to feel that.
Because if you stay in this narcoleptic, absent, empty world of not being and having to hide everything and having this secret life of philosophy and freedom and joy and love of ideas and all the good stuff,
If you hold this secret life, you are acceding to the proposition, you are agreeing to the proposition that It's a guilty secret.
I don't know, like you're into animal porn or something.
The greatest pursuit of truth, the greatest and most joyful occupation, the pursuit of truth and integrity and honesty and virtue and all of that.
You're saying that this is a shameful secret and it must be hidden from people because it's bad somehow, bad.
Well, it's not bad. Not bad at all.
It's glorious. It's glorious.
It's sheer joy.
And you need to go and talk about what means something to you, what is meaningful to you with those who are close to you.
And they will smack you down, and they will strike you down, and you knew that was coming, and this is why you hold it out as a shameful secret and don't talk honestly about what means something to you.
I mean, this is absolutely... You know!
You know! You know, and failing to act on that knowledge keeps you trapped in an orbit of empty relationships.
So go and talk to your family.
Go and talk to your family.
Now, now, turn this off.
Go talk to your family. Go tell them about what you care about.
Be vulnerable. Be open to rejection.
Don't fear rejection. Don't fear rejection from your family.
You're an adult. Unless you're 12, in which case, stop listening to this.
Actually, do listen to this.
Most importantly, gee, if I could reach everyone who was 12, that would be fantastic.
Yeah, go talk to them. Go talk to them.
You must. You must go talk to them.
And then you will be rejected by them.
And you will have your childhood right there in the palm of your hand.
You will have your entire childhood of being rejected.
You didn't turn into an armadillo because you're a coward.
You turned into an armadillo because you were being attacked.
It's very important. Don't call yourself a coward.
You're not a coward for cowering in a trench when the shells are coming down.
You would be insane and have a death wish if you didn't.
You don't want to become a nihilist that way.
So you need to go and re-experience that.
You need to go and re-experience that.
And why? So that you can feel the rejection and the sting of the hypocrisy of those who claim to love you and reject everything that you care about.
What sense does that make?
I love you. I love you.
I love you. I would do anything for you.
Just don't tell me about anything that's important to you and don't tell me about anything that you love and don't tell me about anything that you respect and don't tell me anything about what you love.
I don't want to hear anything about what's important to you or what makes you passionate or what motivates you or what moves you.
I don't want to hear anything about that because I love you so much.
I love you so much that I just want you to be empty and conformist and pleasing to me and convenient and so on.
Because I love you so much that I don't want you to exist.
You have to sort of get that paradox that's involved in modern families, most families, all families throughout history pretty much.
So... You must...
Gain access to your anger, and in order to do that, you have to expose yourself to rejection again.
There's no other way to do it.
Now, once you've exposed yourself to rejection, you get your childhood all over again, you get the emptiness, shallowness, and hollowness of these relationships, and then you can leave.
That's what anger is designed to do, to get you out of this nonsense.
And don't drug yourself with conformity and don't drug yourself with hiding, with being fearful and having a guilty secret called your soul.
Don't have a guilty secret called your soul.
Your soul is glorious!
Your soul, your true self is a shining beacon of truth and hope and joy and anger and intimacy and honesty and integrity.
Don't hide.
Don't hide all that is glorious about you.
Don't have a guilty secret called yourself.
You don't get any days added on to the end of your life.
For hiding your true self throughout your life.
You don't get anything extra for it.
It is a net, total, empty, dead, horrifying, horrible loss.
See how I'm not raising my voice?
I can do it! But...
Really, you know, like in all seriousness, don't hide yourself.
Don't hide yourself.
You are not a guilty secret.
Your love of ideas, of philosophy, of truth, of virtue, integrity, honesty, it's not a vice.
It's not a vice. It's not something to be hidden.
It's beautiful.
It's beautiful. And as, you know, as we like to quote the Bible as much as possible, do not cast your pearls before swine.
But... But be open and be honest and be vulnerable with people and that will help you to sift out the people who are not interested in you in any real way.
It will help you get those people out of your life.
Desperately important that you do that.
You don't get another life.
You don't get a second chance. You don't get rewarded in the afterlife for hiding everything that is beautiful about you in the present.
You don't get that.
You don't get that later.
You don't get rewarded. It's a huge loss.
You're throwing your gold down a sewer, and you don't get it back and you don't get rewarded, so stop doing that.
I understand why, but stop doing that.
Be vulnerable, be rejected, get angry, and get these people out of your life.
But they have a great thing to offer you, which is a memory of the rejection.
Because if you can't identify the rejection as having come from outside of yourself, Then you will only end up with self-rejection and self-hatred.
You will think that you are a coward.
Unless you remember the attacks, you will think that you are a coward.
If a soldier is cowering in a trench because the shells are coming down, we don't say that that soldier is a coward, we say that he is sensible.
If a man is cowering in a trench on a peaceful day, we say that there is something inappropriate and he must have a form of mental illness.
So you need to experience the rejection from outside of yourself so that you can get out of the slave cage of self-rejection and recapture and re-own yourself.
Once you recognize that you were in a war, you can cease to think of yourself as a coward for hiding.
Once you remember being attacked by people five times your size when you were helpless and dependent, then you can cease to reject yourself, right?
And you can get out of the world of being self-hating and self-doubting and self-attacking.
You've got to re-experience that attack as something that came from outside so that you can stop doing it to yourself internally.
That's the fundamental release, right?
What I'm basically saying is you're angry.
You're angry either way.
You were hurt.
you were harmed, you were attacked continually as a child.
And that's made you angry, and it's healthy, and it's right, and it's just that it made you angry, that anger can either be turned against its proper object, which is the people who attacked that anger can either be turned against its proper object, which is the people who attacked you, or it will There's no possibility whatsoever that the anger will simply vanish.
That's not going to happen.
And you can either be angry at yourself for being hurt and humiliated as a child, and how just and sensible would that be, Or you can get angry at the people who actually did you harm and release yourself from the prison of self-hatred and self-contempt because it was not your fault.
And you are not to blame.
And you need to start using your anger and intimacy to stop hiding and start living.
So go talk to your parents.
Yes.
Go talk to your parents and become free.
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