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April 19, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

20:47

Grief Part 3: Rejection

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	Good morning, everybody.
	Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
	Hope you're doing well. So with regards to the recent death of my father, I've really been thinking about what does it mean or what are the steps through which a relationship becomes irreparable?
	It's a really, really important question because if a relationship is repairable, we want to fix it.
	If a relationship is not repairable, then we don't want to waste time trying to fix it.
	You know, it's the kind of thing that you have when you have a car.
	My first car I had for like 14 years and at one point just keeping it running was more expensive than just getting another car.
	In looking back on my 53-year on-again, off-again relationship with my father, I've sort of been trying to figure out, okay, what is it that makes a relationship repairable?
	And I had decided some time ago that it was not repairable because I was tired of chasing after the man.
	And I was tired of trying to make some sort of connection when it just wasn't happening.
	And I was thinking this morning about one time when I was in university in Montreal.
	I was at McGill. I was taking my undergraduate history degree and he came to stay with me for a couple of days.
	He was in town for something else and he had arranged ahead of time to give a lecture at the university.
	My father was professionally very accomplished in his field and he gave a lecture at the university and lots of people showed up.
	It was an hour-long lecture and he was Pretty good.
	I mean, it's not my feels, but he seemed pretty good.
	And he was, you know, quite insistent that I come.
	And of course, I wanted to go and see his thing, see what he did.
	But I remember sitting in the top back row of the university lecture hall and watching my father do his thing.
	And I didn't feel much at the time.
	And looking back on it, it sort of makes sense to me now.
	Which is, I think he wanted to show me how accomplished he was.
	And that I can completely understand.
	I mean, showing off to your kids is kind of one of the dirty secrets of parenthood and you have to really restrain it to some degree because you want to give them room to sort of grow and flower.
	But he wanted to show me I think he wanted to give me a reason to have pride in my heritage.
	He's very big into family history, which I understand.
	I remember sitting in that university lecture hall for a psychology class and coming across the name of William Molyneux, one of my ancestors who was best friends with John Locke.
	And a great philosopher in his own right and just being like, whoa, how come I'm finding out about my family history from a textbook in an undergraduate psychology course rather than, say, from my family?
	But this had all been shattered and wrecked by the Second World War.
	So I think he wanted to show me that he was an accomplished person and good at what he did.
	And he was. And he was.
	And he was. But...
	It's kind of a mixed bag, right?
	Because if you have abandoned your children, the more successful you appear, the more accomplished you appear, the more you seem to Associate rejection of your children with accomplishment, with success. And I mean, I've had people on my show who've talked about how their fathers ended up with a second family that was very successful and so on.
	And it makes you feel kind of like loser dust in the wake of an accelerating vehicle to some other kind of success.
	And so while I did admire him for what he was able to accomplish, I thought, well, If he wants to show me how successful he is, then part of his success is involved in not being my father.
	So it's one of these things where you hit the gas and you hit the brakes at the same time in your relationship.
	And it took me a little while to figure that out after it happened, why I was like, yeah, I can objectively see he's very good at what he does and he's in demand and he can come in and give a guest lecture and people want to come and hear what he has to say.
	And, you know, he's pretty, pretty good up there.
	But at the same time, the more you show off to your kids that you've abandoned, the more It's kind of like a torture in a way.
	And I'm not blaming him for this.
	I mean, he wanted to show me his accomplishments.
	And part of that was a good thing, to show me that I at least had the The lineage possibility or potential to achieve something great intellectually and knowing more about my family history on both my mother's and my father's side is pretty powerful in terms of giving me some encouragement that there's some family history of significant accomplishment when it comes to intellectual realms so I could sort of step into that without feeling total imposter syndrome.
	It happened early on from time to time.
	But I think that is important when showing your accomplishments is actually kind of painful to your child because one of your accomplishments or one of your activities was to not parent your child.
	Look how great I am.
	The greater he is, the more I would miss him.
	For not being my father when I was growing up.
	And the worse he is, the more painful it would be in the present, but the better it would be that he didn't raise me, if that makes any sense.
	It kind of ends up in this impossible situation.
	And I think that's...
	Now, one of the things that I've worked with for many years on this show, in my life really, is The question of restitution.
	To make whole someone that you have wronged.
	That's very important, right?
	Because making someone whole indicates that you understand the seriousness and the gravity of the wrong that you've done to someone.
	And it's not so much like, you know, you ding someone's car, it costs them 500 bucks to repair it.
	You should at least pay them the 500 bucks, right?
	I mean, it doesn't make them whole insofar as they'd rather have not had the hassle of going to get their car repaired.
	But at least they're not out direct cash.
	They're out time and hassle, but not...
	Direct cash and so that kind of restitution I think is really important and so the question is when someone has done you wrong to me the relationship is repairable if there's some restitution that You can provide to that person,
	sorry, if someone has done you wrong, if that person can provide to you something that makes you whole, that makes it okay that it happened, you don't want it to be great that it happened.
	You don't want to pay someone $50,000 for a $500 ding, otherwise they're going to keep trying to get their car dinged by you to make a huge amount of money.
	You don't want to make it too little because then they're, you make it, you fill it up so it's even again.
	You know, like if you spill someone's drink, you don't buy them 10 drinks, but you at least fill up their drink to where it was before, right?
	So this restitution thing is really important.
	I think relationships become broken beyond repair when no restitution is possible.
	When the wrong that has been done to you is of such a deep and permanent nature that there's no amount of restitution that would make it okay with you.
	So, you know, the question is, okay, so what recompense would I take for growing up with my mother and growing up without my father?
	Well, I asked and answered this question for myself many, many years ago.
	And I said to myself, there's no...
	There's no recompense.
	Like, there's no amount of money. There's no amount of investment.
	There's no amount of time. There's no...
	Like, there's nothing that I could take that would balance that out.
	Now, when you're in that situation, you have...
	I mean, I think the relationship is basically not repairable.
	And I think... A lot of this, it's an annoying card to play, but it is a real card.
	A lot of this came to me after I became a father.
	Because it's another one of these secrets.
	I wouldn't say it's a dirty secret, but it's kind of like a secret of parenthood that really parents are...
	I wouldn't say kind of terrified, but we're kind of nervous about our children's disapproval because, you know, we start off as gods to them who can lift them and throw them high and know everything and have all of this size and strength and power.
	And then, you know, as they level up to our eye line and maybe they go taller than you, they see us as just people.
	It's kind of like a fall from grace.
	I think you do. I mean, you can't really bypass that worship stage and I'm not sure that you should.
	But you do have to accept that balancing stage where they start to see your weaknesses, your foibles, your faults, and all of that.
	And that's natural.
	And you do want to humanize being a person who happens to be a parent or who is a parent rather than some godlike parent.
	But fear of children's disapproval is one of the great secrets of parenting.
	Even little things, like I'm playing some video game with my daughter, I want to be really good at it, because I want her to be impressed.
	Is that good? Is that bad?
	I don't know. It just is, right?
	And I'm pretty honest about it and I talk about it pretty frankly and all that because, you know, whatever you give words to loses power over you, right?
	Spells are cast in silence in a way, right?
	So whatever you give language to loses power over you.
	It's a chain-breaking set of syllables, which is why I'm talking about all of this stuff.
	I know that these shows are not going to be like staggeringly popular with people, but You know, a lot of you are young and parental death is decades away.
	Good, good. But, at least I hope that's good.
	But this will be things that you will remember when the time comes.
	These are seeds that are planted.
	You will remember this stuff when the time comes.
	So, with my father, I'm sure of this.
	Because his comfort in giving a university lecture versus his awkwardness when one-on-one with me It's because He was prone to unhappiness, to put it mildly.
	And I think that I was kind of like a person around with their hand on the pin of the grenade at all times.
	And that's going to make him kind of jumpy.
	In other words, because I could at any time talk about my history, talk about my life, talk about what it was like for me growing up, which would have sent him into a real tailspin, I was...
	Kind of like a ticking bomb that needed to be eternally diffused with both proximity and distance.
	So he kind of had to write me letters or he had to send me stuff, but he couldn't actually interact with me in a two-way street because in my mouth were the syllables that could break him in a way.
	That's complicated stuff, right?
	That's tough stuff.
	And I mean, obviously, it's not my fault, right?
	I mean, these are not decisions that I made and not decisions that I was responsible for, but that potential to detonate the happiness or the serenity or the contentment of people.
	Like, when people have wronged you, you do gain an enormous amount of power over them.
	Which they have to constantly defuse by silencing you.
	Now, sometimes they silence you just by plain running away.
	But if they have a conscience, then they're going to be aware of that and they're going to feel bad about that.
	And they're also going to want to constantly return to make sure that you're not talking about it.
	This need to seal up the silence of the past is really powerful in families.
	I mean, these are coffins of history that continually need to be re-nailed shut.
	And so I think trying to figure out what danger I posed to him is pretty important to understand.
	If you've been wronged by your parents, if you've been wronged by anyone, but let's talk about parents, what's on my mind at the moment.
	If you've been wronged by parents, Then you have an awful kind of power over them.
	Because if you begin to speak the truth, their sense of themselves, their sense of being good people, this can all begin to unravel.
	And the sort of raw naked wound of history can be opened up.
	And so the power that they had over you when you were children is nothing compared to the power you have over them now that you're an adult.
	Because it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong.
	And as a child, if you suffered wrong at the hands of your parents, their power was only to harm you.
	Your power, and it was unjust and abusive if they did it, but your power to tell the truth Is very unraveling to them.
	So I think that there is this power that we have, we often mistake for rejection.
	Like, oh, my father's rejecting me or my mother's rejecting me or whatever it is.
	No, I don't think that's true really.
	I think what is true to say is that they reject direct knowledge of their own Past misdeeds, their own immorality.
	And you hold the key to that in whether you speak or whether you are silent.
	And knowing...
	I don't know what it's like. I can't imagine what it's like.
	I mean, maybe if you have an affair or something, or you've defrauded people, or I don't know, like there's someone in your house who could continually go to the police and get you thrown in jail.
	Like, I don't know what that would...
	To live that jumpy and to live with that massive need to control others, That's a pretty terrifying existence.
	It's a pretty terrifying existence.
	And if you understand the power that you have, if you're the victim of parental abuse, if you understand that power, the whole dynamics of the relationship become so much clearer that you are A bomb of light that can blow truth and visibility into their darkness of self-detachment.
	And this is why the need to put you down, perhaps the need to control you, the need to avoid continual subjects.
	And I didn't really understand this as much, even when I started this show and I was talking to people about, you know, just go be honest with your parents, go talk to your parents, go, you know, I didn't realize really what a tripwire that was in the world.
	Because I thought that the abuse that I had suffered was extraordinary.
	It kind of was, obviously, much worse out there in the world.
	But I didn't realize just how, this is kind of a boomer thing to some degree, but just how united the parental layer is for many people in suppressing and censoring the information that trips their guilt wires.
	And also, as you get older, if you're a parent, right?
	As you get older and you don't have direct control over your children, but you begin to need resources from them.
	See, when you're a kid, you need things from your parents.
	You need attention, you need resources, you need toys, you need fun, you need shelter, you need healthcare, you need food.
	Like you need, need, need from your parents.
	You have no choice how else to get it.
	And so when you're in a position of being needed, it's a very powerful position.
	It's a very powerful position.
	When your parents get older, they are in a position of need and they can't enforce anything.
	I mean, I think out in Japan, there's a law that you have to call your parents.
	Like, it's become that way.
	And you have to really build your parenting on the basis and the reality that you're going to be old.
	You're going to need things from your kids desperately.
	And they don't have to provide them at all.
	I mean, you have to provide food, shelter and healthcare to your child, but your children don't have to come visit you when you get old.
	And so if the relationship has become unrecoverable, then you have to constantly avoid those topics that would reveal that basic fact because you're in a position of need rather than a position of dominance.
	In other words, you now dominate by avoidance and manipulation.
	And the great terror that they're going to cross that red line and trip the parents' guilt wires and therefore potentially reveal that the relationship is unrecoverable, then the sins of the parents rebound to them in the isolation of their old age, which is a truly terrifying thing.
	Also, a lot of times, parents who abuse children do so because they're afraid that the children will somehow harm their status, their social status and so on.
	And listen, letting go of social status and being willing to endure the disapproval of evildoers is foundational to living a moral life.
	You live a moral life, you're going to get a target on you.
	By evildoers who are going to want to discredit you and destroy you and keep your reputation in the gutter so that people don't listen to you.
	That's inevitable. There's no way to be good without crossing that river Styx or that Rubicon of being willing to accept, almost embrace, the hatred of evildoers.
	It's like saying, well, I want to cure a disease, but I never want to do any harm to that disease.
	Not possible, right? The disease recognizes you as an enemy just as you recognize the disease as an enemy, with the difference being that with evildoers it's a moral situation.
	And so the other thing too is for parents who are elderly or older, if for some reason you discover that the relationship is not repairable because there's no amount of restitution that will make up for what happened in the past, and I hope that that's not the case, genuinely do. It was the case with me, but I hope it's not the case with you, but it might be.
	You need to be aware of that.
	Then what happens is if you take a break from seeing your parents, then they have...
	The extraordinary challenge of trying to explain to their peers, their relatives, why you're not coming over much, why you're not seeing them much, or, you know, how's your daughter, how's your son doing?
	They're like, Fine.
	You know, it puts them into a very awkward position, which is very difficult for them, right?
	And, you know, if they're selfish parents, if they're selfish people, then that difficulty is going to be extraordinarily uncomfortable for them, and then they're going to have to start blaming you.
	So this processing of, if you feel rejected by your parents, my guess is, most likely, it's because you hold...
	This grenade. It's the wrong thing because the grenade, of course, is a weapon of destruction and this is a process of illumination.
	But in that illumination, which is Good for healthy people.
	Well, it's extraordinarily bad for immoral people.
	In other words, sunlight, in moderation, very healthy for us.
	But it does destroy the vampires in the world.
	It's really, really important to be aware of that.
	And I will keep you posted.

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