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April 25, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:03
Grief Part 4: Acceptance
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine.
Hope you're doing well. So, in talking about my conclusions regarding the death of my father, I'm going to actually do a walk in these wintry April woods.
I feel like I'm strolling into a discarded manuscript for a Harold Pinterplay pause.
And, so I'm sorry if there's a little background noise or there's a little wind rumbling or whatever, but this is the environment to talk about this.
Because from the winter of my discontent has come a form of acceptance that I wanted to share with you, and I also wanted to share the methodology as to how I was able to achieve this acceptance.
Whether it will last or not, we'll see, and I'll keep you posted about that, but let me be frank with you about the process.
So, as you know, I have a truly ferocious devotion to free will.
I view free will as an essential mechanism for sanity, survival, love, virtue, and the very rationale for philosophy is based upon free will.
Insofar as if you can't choose a better or preferred state, then there's no such thing as philosophy, in the same way that you don't have a lot of There's no free will, there's no philosophy, there's no love because there's no moral...
Virtue, there's no courage.
We're all just rocks bouncing down a hill, crashing into each other, making more rocks, and it's a very amoral, Nietzschean, empty, soulless view of the universe, so I'm not a fan.
And I view, to be frank, I view arguments for determinism in the same way that I would view somebody trying to inject a virulent pathogen into my bloodstream.
That it is an attempt to transfer a sociopathic nihilism to me that is going to strip me of joy, and virtue, and love, and connection, compassion, and all of these things.
Now, you can say, oh, that's not true, that's not true.
I don't care. I know better.
I've been doing this for 35 years.
I've seen the arc life play out of people who are determinists, and it's horrible.
It's horrible. So, yep, sorry.
You can't convince me that I should change my mind into a state of mind that says I can't change my mind.
Come on. It's ridiculous.
It's embarrassing. It's foolish and pathetic hijacking of sovereign consciousness.
So, the reason I'm talking about free will, of course, is because How was I able to change the dismal trajectory of life of people who suffer from severe child abuse?
How was I able to achieve what it is I've been able to achieve in my life, in my work, in my marriage, in my parenting, in my friendships, in my happiness, contentment and peace of mind?
How was I able to achieve this?
Well, by a steadfast devotion to free will.
To my capacity to choose something better and bring it into being.
Now, here's the thing, though.
You ever mess around with an equalizer on an amp or something like that?
So, an equalizer, sometimes there are dials, most often there are sliders going up and down.
So, in equalizers, you can do sort of bass, mid-range, treble, and all of the gradations thereof.
You can work each one of those individually, right?
You can up the base, you can lower the treble, and so on.
But that's not how free will works.
That's not how universals work.
That's not how truth works in our mind.
Whatever we define for ourselves, we define if it is a common human characteristic for all humanity, obviously, right?
You can't say, well, I'm a mammal, but all other human beings are reptiles.
You can say, I'm a carbon-based life form, But all other human beings, starting with Mark Zuckerberg, are silicon-based life forms.
But this is just not how science works, not how truth works, not how reality works.
So if you say, I have free will, I have a choice, I've got a Rush song stuck in my head.
If you say that, then you say it for all humanity.
If you can choose better, then all human beings can choose better.
If you can change the arc of your life through knowledge, willpower, commitment to virtue, then everyone has that capacity.
None escape the moral responsibility of free will.
I mean, save, of course, those Who are insane, those who are in comas, those who have brain damage, brain tumors, extraordinarily low intelligence, and so on.
But for the vast average, the vast majority, sorry, free will is the hot potato that you can use to warm the fires of your heart to strike you out for a better life.
So, accepting free will for myself is difficult, and it was extraordinarily painful for me to do that, because It took me a little while to figure it out.
But the reason why it's so hard to do that is because when you accept free will for yourself, you're inevitably granted to everyone else in your life.
In other words, if you say, well, I can change the course of my life and I do not have to be a prisoner of history, or as a character in my novel once said when he lost the fight against his bad habits, he said, I am what remains when history wins.
It's always struck me as a very great line, which is why I repeat it on this show from time to time.
So, when I said I can do better despite my history, the problem is, of course, I then have to say about my own parents, they could have done better despite their history.
Because what do we do? If we want, what are we encouraged to do?
We're encouraged to take responsibility for ourselves, but deny responsibility to our parents if we've been abused.
That's called, oh, they did the best they could, but the knowledge they had...
That's a bullshit argument. That's a bullshit argument.
Imagine if I go and steal a plane with people on board and I hit the gas and I pull back on the joysticks and I basically stall as I take off from the runway and kill all the people, all the passengers. All the passengers.
I walk away. And then people are mad at me and they say, hey man, you just, you stole that plane and you stole, taken off and crashed, killed all the people.
And I say, hey man, when it comes to flying, I don't know how to fly.
I've never studied it.
I don't, you know, never even flown a flight simulator.
I don't know what all this stuff is for.
Would you say, oh, well, okay, off you go then, you're fine.
You'd say, no, no, no, no, come on.
If you get behind the joystick in an airplane, you better bloody well know how to fly it, or you're liable for the resulting crash.
So, when people say, well, my parents did the best they could, but the knowledge they had, they're dodging the real question, which is, why didn't your parents study...
How to become better parents.
That's the fundamental question, right?
You understand? That is the fundamental question.
Parenting is complex.
Parenting changes. Society's values change.
Virtues change. Knowledge is gained.
You don't know how to parent based on how you were parented any more than you know the current geography of the world because you learned that there was a Soviet Union 30 years ago.
Or 40 years ago.
Configurations change. Knowledge passes by.
If you're not using a rotary phone, a rotary dial phone, to make your calls, but you're instead using a sleek new cell phone, then you're willing to upgrade your knowledge, your skills, your expertise based upon new technology, new information, new possibilities, new potentials.
So, if your parents have upgraded their consumption of technology, if they don't have a cathode ray tube camera anymore, but a flat screen, if they installed central heating, they're willing to upgrade their if they installed central heating, they're willing to upgrade their technology, and the same, of course, should be and would be true of their capacity to improve their parenting based upon new studies, new information, new facts.
It has been since the Second World War that anti-spanking has been promulgated, and it's very easy to look up the studies on spankings.
It's very easy to find out the facts about spanking.
It's bad. It's bad.
It's wrong. Well, I was spanked and I turned out okay.
Well, not if you spank your children you didn't.
Not if you hit your children you didn't.
So, when I attempt to wrestle the joystick from the inertia of a destroyed history and turn myself Towards something better, something virtuous, then I can only do that if I accept my capacity for free will, and to change the course of my life, regardless of my history.
But if I accept that for myself, I automatically grant it to my parents.
Think of the bass and the treble, upy-downy sliders, On an equalizer, imagine that the base and the treble move up and down, they're tied together, they're locked in together, bolted together. It's the same thing with free will.
So if you say, well, my parents didn't have any free will, they couldn't have done any better, you're automatically including yourself in that category of people who have no free will and cannot do any better.
Whatever metric or standard you apply to your parents, you also apply to yourself.
Whether you're aware of it, whether it's conscious, Whether it's just occurring deep down.
Look at that. The wintry path to wisdom.
You can't just exclude yourself from the laws you apply to all other human beings, and you and your parents are both human beings.
If they don't have free will, you don't have free will.
If you have free will, which is necessary for you to improve your life, they get free will.
You can only improve your life to the degree to which you are willing to give your parents responsibility for the choices they made.
If they couldn't do any different, you can't do any different.
If the excuse for them is, well, they did the best they could with the knowledge they had, then all you have to do is avoid the gathering of knowledge and you're off the hook.
But, see, here's the thing.
Like, I was taught this when I was a kid.
And I accept it.
I really do. Do you know what I was taught when I was a kid?
That I've universalized and people don't seem to like so much anymore?
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Well, why? Because everybody would say, Steve Martin style, I forgot, armed robbery was illegal.
Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
Ignorance of the moral law is no excuse.
Ignorance of how to parent is no excuse.
If your parents did not study How to become parents if they didn't do any research, if they didn't take any parenting courses.
Hell, I took parenting courses.
I read books.
I researched. Figured out how to become a parent in a productive and positive way because I'm a responsible human being who doesn't blindfold himself, strap himself in front of a car and say to the resulting mowdown, hey man, I drove the best I could given my lack of vision.
It's like, well, A, don't tie yourself up with a blindfold and B, if you do, don't drive a damn car.
And people try to juggle This contradictory notion that they have free will and they can improve their lives, but their parents were completely trapped by history, by destiny, by their own terrible childhoods.
But of course you can find countless examples of people with terrible childhoods who ended up becoming very good human beings and great parents and sensitive and empathetic and all of their man's search for a meaning style.
You can find tons of examples of that.
And what one man can do, what one woman can do, another man and woman can do.
So, the only way that you get to control your life is to give your parents full authority in what they did as parents.
Full responsibility. The only way you gain responsibility for your own life is to hand over the hot potato of responsibility to others.
And if your parents, you sit down and talk to them if you had a bad childhood, your parents say, well, we did the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Then, of course, the basic question is, was that a standard that I was allowed to have as a child?
Like when I was six and I spilled some milk or I knocked something over, did you say, oh, well, you know, you're doing the best you can, you're still a kid, so no punishment, no punishment for you.
If your parents punished you for what you did as a child, then they're saying that as a child you had full moral responsibility for what you did, despite the fact that you were a child and they were supposed to be your tutors and all that kind of stuff, right?
But they're saying you had 100% moral responsibility for what you did as a child, which is why we punished you, right?
So how on earth is it even remotely possible that a child has full moral responsibility at the age of six But an adult at the age of 30 or 35 is not responsible for what they did to that child because, hey, they were just doing the best they could with the knowledge they had.
No. No!
Absolutely not. Absolutely not.
That is a weasel defense that merely reaffirms free will in its attempt to exercise brutal parental power over the needy dependence of children that lasts, well, their whole...
Certainly the lives of their parents.
Certainly the lives of their parents.
So, no. Accepting free will, which is a necessary prerequisite to changing your life, requires that you grant free will and moral responsibility to every single person in your life who has a functioning brain.
Fact one.
All right. Fact two.
So... What I've been thinking about as well, with regards to my father's death, is this.
I am...
I don't know if it's an Anglo-Saxon thing, I don't know if it's a just-me thing, certainly not the case with the rest of my family of origin, but I am a fundamentally practical person.
A very practical person.
Which is why I've been doing this call-in show for almost 15 years, wherein I talk to people about How philosophy can actually help them in their daily lives, in their real lives, in their actual existence.
I don't care about the philosophy of language and concepts, and I don't care about Metaphysics, as the old saying goes.
Metaphysics is not a problem to be solved, but a disease to be cured.
Who are we in a simulation?
Does reality exist?
Are we just a thought in the brain?
I mean, that's all garbage.
It's all garbage. It's all the distraction.
And it is a slander and a smear on the practical value of philosophy.
That's why I called my book, which you can get for free at EssentialPhilosophy.com, that's why I called my book Essential Philosophy.
Because philosophy is essential to life.
Well, it's certainly essential to happiness.
So, as a practical person, yesterday, I thought to myself, okay, your father is dead.
What practical effect does that have on your life, on your existence?
You haven't seen the guy for like 25 years.
You have maybe had four or five ridiculously awkward conversations with the guy when he called you on your birthday over a quarter century.
You had no plans to visit.
You had no plans to reconnect.
You had no plans to attempt to rekindle a relationship that you had burned yourself out trying to rekindle in the past.
I hate to repeat any phrase that comes out of Hag Hillary's mouth, but it's a basic fact and a basic question.
At this point, What difference does it make?
What practical difference in my life does it make that he died?
I haven't heard from him in years.
He certainly made no attempt to reconcile or Connect with me.
The man died in hospital, right?
So, I assume he didn't die peacefully at home.
Suddenly, he died in hospital, which means that he must have had some indication that he was unwell before he died.
Knowing that he was unwell, what was his reaction?
Well, his reaction was to not contact me in any way, shape, or form.
I won't even get into the absolute abomination of a death notice.
I'll keep that one. But that was my father's choice.
He hadn't contacted me in forever, and even when he knew he was dying, he made no effort to reach out, to apologize.
Now, he also was an atheist, or at least an agnostic, for a good chunk of his life.
I assume he was raised Christian, then became atheist or agnostic, and then he became a Christian later on in his life.
And as a Christian, of course, he would have been required to apologize and to seek forgiveness from those he had wronged.
But he didn't. So it's not really a very good Christian.
Not a Christian in the way that causes him to do emotionally difficult things, right?
So, although he knew he was sick, ill, and died in hospital...
He did not try to contact me.
Now, I don't hate him for that.
In fact, in some ways, having the band-aid off all at once is kind of important and has great value.
I mean, if I'd have known he was dying for six months, that would have been a complicated thing that would have dragged on emotionally.
So, a band-aid off all at once, with all too sympathy to his death and his suffering, it's not the worst thing that could have happened with regards to me and my emotional state.
So, what practical difference does it make if a guy who never called me is never going to call me?
What real, tangible, material difference does it make?
Because there is, of course, as I talked about in my second video, there's this pull towards sentimentality, right?
There's this pull towards, but my father, my father, I don't know, Luke Skywalker or Buzz Lightyear style, right?
But what practical difference does it make?
I didn't want to talk to him.
He obviously didn't want to talk to me.
Well, I mean, see, I tried.
As I said, I tried for quite some time to get him to understand at least the basic reality of the hell that he left me in.
And, you know, he was perfectly willing to have me suffer in addition to my prior suffering by commanding me to take care of my mother.
Right? So, the woman who abused me, I was supposed to take care of.
Now, I did try taking care of her for some time, but it ended very badly.
Don't need to get into the details here.
But yeah, I spent years trying to take care of her.
But she doesn't listen to the reason, and she wishes to pursue a destructive course that abuses others in her life.
So, yeah, I can't support that.
I can't. So...
Because he felt bad about my mom, and he didn't want to do anything to take care of her, he just commanded me, the victim of her abuse, to take care of her for his own particular comfort.
In other words, I should take care of the woman who he abandoned.
The family, right?
Now, I don't know if this sounds bitter or not.
I don't feel bitter. I'm simply identifying the bold and basic facts of the matter.
This is the truth. of what happened.
So, what practical difference does it make that a guy who treated me badly, who didn't want to hear any truth from me, who demanded that I silence my own history with the woman he chose to marry in order to have any kind of connection to or relationship with him,
what does it matter? In my tangible life that he's gone.
Or, to put it another way, if somebody had told me that my father never intended to contact me again, I would have been, well, okay.
I mean, I'm 53 years old, for heaven's sakes.
I'm old enough to be a grandfather.
I really don't need a daddy at this point.
I really don't need a daddy at this point.
So if somebody contacted me and said, oh, your dad's never going to contact you again for the rest of your life, I'd have been like, well, that's a shame, but, I mean, it's kind of what I expect, right?
Because there was always a condition on any communication, right?
Like he was handling a bomb, as I talked about, the bomb of the truth that I could say that would destabilize him.
I mean, all of the little things that he did...
You know, like when I went to go and visit him at the age of 15, I think in Africa, he put me out in the hot sun on the roof of his garage to scrub all the rust down day after day.
Kind of like a slave labor from the dad I was supposed to be visiting and reconnecting with.
Not ideal. I can't imagine bringing a child of mine halfway around the world and then putting them to work on grunt labor on my property.
There's no conversation. I was just up there day after day scrubbing away on the corrugated tin roof of his garage because he needed to repaint it, but it was half rusty, so I remember listening to a little tinny radio he gave me.
I remember listening to Crimson and Clover by Joan Jett and the Blackhearts when I was up there and really liking that song.
But there I was like a coolie, struggling away in the hot sun in Africa at the age of 15.
Well, that's nuts.
That's nuts. And he put me up there because I think he was depressed and didn't know how to connect with me and was, of course, afraid of the truth or the facts that I might reveal.
That would make him feel bad.
Which, again, I sympathize with.
I really do. I've not done the kind of terrible things where there are people out there in the world who can say things that are going to blow up my life and my happiness.
Well, I mean, there are people out there who've tried to do that, but a swing and a miss has been the situation.
All right, I am now off the path.
In more ways than one, he said, grinding the metaphor into dust.
So, what practical difference does it make that a guy who was never going to contact me is now never going to contact me?
You know, if a guy owes you money, you know he's never going to pay you and then he dies.
It doesn't make any difference to your income.
You get it? Now, does that sound cold?
Well, I don't know. See, it's funny because sentimental people will generally label practicality as cold and unfeeling because if you're practical, then you're less susceptible to manipulation, right?
And that's really important. There's so many people out there in the world who will try to manipulate you in order to gain access to your resources.
And they do that, three.
And I think of white guilt and all that, right?
Or the Marxist thing that the poor are stolen from by the rich.
And it's just manipulation to get resources if you're not sentimental.
Like, sentimentality is...
The Trojan horse through which the barbarians enter the gate, right?
Or get into the city.
And sentimentality is extraordinarily dangerous.
Pathological. Altruism, they can call it, and so on.
So, whenever you talk about practical consequences of other people's decisions, then people will attempt to...
Take away the basic practicality of what you're talking about, the basic reality of what you're talking about, and substitute a kind of syrupy, saccharine, Hallmark card sentimentality in its place, because that way they gain access to your resources, right?
It's a terrible manipulation, and, you know, obviously kind of sociopathic, in that sociopaths know that you care about things, they don't care about them, but they know that you do, like China calling people racist.
For criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, even though there are many ethnic Chinese in Hong Kong and Taiwan and other places that hate the Chinese Communist Party with damn good reason, right?
But it's just sentimentality, right?
And here's the thing, too.
If this sentimentality, but he's your father, it's like, well, certainly don't give more sentimentality to people than they give to you.
So if people say to me, ah, Steph, but he was your father, well...
How many people went to my father and said, but Steph is your son!
You should listen to him.
You should reach, right? You understand, it's still a one-way street.
And one-way streets are the road to hell itself.
So, no. No, thank you.
I will be no more sentimental than someone else in my life.
I'm very tender-hearted to people who are tender-hearted in my life.
But... If people are cold and manipulative, no.
Practicality wins out. What does it matter in a practical sense?
And of course, yeah, there's this undertow of sentimentality.
I get it. Right?
The sentimentality of that little boy who supposedly washed up on that beach in Turkey and his father had overloaded the boat and pretty much caused his death.
You know, you let your kid ride without a bike helmet, you can get a ticket.
This guy can... Load his kid on an overloaded boat because he wants to get to Canada for free dental care.
And suddenly, Europe can't have any borders.
So that aspect of things is pretty important.
That I will not have a shred or an atom more sentimentality in my life than the people around me have.
What practical difference does it make?
I can't see any.
I can't conceive of any.
And that basic reality is what informs my current emotional state.
And the thing is, too, You know that old Sting song, Why Should I Cry For You, that he wrote about his father?
You know, it's kind of mournful and kind of sad, but Sting had a close relationship to his father.
He would get up and go on his milk rungs every morning at the crack of nothing, or as the army say, at zero dark stupid.
As I close this walk, the wind comes down.
But if you've already grieved, in a sense, for 53 long years...
Your father's death, my father's death, is actually kind of an end to that grieving, if that makes any sense.
Right? So, for a long time, I very much grieved not having a father.
As they said on my show, I had to figure out how to shave by picking up an old Life magazine in the library and flipping through it.
Mom couldn't teach me.
Don't need to shave my legs.
Well, maybe I do, but I'm not going to.
So, I did grieve that.
I did mourn that. There's an old joke when I was a kid where one kid says to another, you know, my dad could beat up your dad, and the other kid says, really?
How much would that cost me?
That kind of antipathy to an absent father.
So, if I've already been grieving off and on for over half a century, the final death, the death, it's kind of like an end to grieving.
I'm hearing strange sounds in the woods, my friend.
Hopefully this won't be found tomorrow with a bear creeping up from behind.
If it is, I'm sure it's CGI'd.
So it is an end to grieving to have this finality occur.
Okay.
And that is an important metric.
As I said before, I wish I were sadder.
But I'm not taking this terrible deal.
This terrible deal is that you suffer because the person is not around, and then you suffer also when the person can never be around because they're dead.
Like, that's a bad deal, man.
That's a really bad deal.
So what happens, of course, is that if I loved my father, as I hope my daughter loves me, I know she does, but if I loved my father...
Then his decline, his old age, and his death would be utterly heartbreaking to me, right?
And I would go through all of that pain of losing him, but basically based upon the pleasure of having him in the past, right?
By the way, it's now been three or four days since I've had much of a meal.
Oh, well. It's just the way things roll when you're this way, right?
Sorry, I'm going to try and stay away from the wind here.
But this is the basic reality.
I'm not going to feel very sad now because I've already had the sadness in the past of the disconnection.
And to take that sadness and plow it into what's going on for me now would be to get...
The worst ends of the stick. The only consolation for having had this kind of very sad experience for many years when I was younger, for decades really, the only consolation is that I don't have the same kind of grieving that I would have had if he'd been in my life, he'd been a wonderful guy, I'd have loved him.
And the last thing that I wanted to say is this.
So, I think it is really important not to be bitter about the bad choices that people make in your life.
I think it's important, you know, you care about them, their family, you try to make their choices better, you try to reason them into making better choices.
That's a good thing to do. It's not a good thing to burn your entire life doing, but it's a good thing to do.
But here's the reality.
I now have lived long enough to see the arc of people's lives and how their various beliefs play out.
I've seen what happens to the relativists, to the nihilists, to the subjectivists, to the postmodernists.
I've seen what's happened to the socialists.
I've seen what happened to the rational people.
One or two that I have been able to track over the course of our life.
You don't need to be terribly angry or bitter about people who make terrible choices because life...
It horrifyingly punishes them in a way that you don't need to lift a finger.
Even if you want them to suffer, you don't want people to suffer, and that's why you try and help people to be more rational.
But if they do, if they do make terrible choices, they hurt others, they don't listen to reason.
I've seen a couple of instances where I've been able to see under the cauldron lid of people's self-hatred when they do that kind of stuff.
It is a life of unbelievable suffering, my friends.
You don't need to be angry.
Nature imprisons evildoers through the natural course of their own corruption.
It's a terrible thing.
I wish it didn't happen. But it's not up to me to change it.
Because I can't control human nature.
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