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June 24, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:49:06

"SHOULD I HAVE AN ABORTION???" Freedomain Call In with Stefan Molyneux

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	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from FreedomAid doing an unusual Tuesday this is Stefan Molyneux from FreedomAid doing an unusual Tuesday night call-in show.
	This actually could be one of these call-in shows that might save a life.
	So it's going to be a pretty powerful topic.
	I don't even know whether to include trigger warnings since if I'm going to include trigger warnings for powerful topics, all I'm going to be saying for every single show is trigger warning, trigger warning.
	But James, do you want to lead us into where we need to get to?
	Absolutely, we'll do so. So the caller writes, Hello, I'm a long-time listener and a new subscriber to you.
	We've already talked, and I appreciate the insight you gave me, but I have a very big dilemma on my hands.
	I'm married, and I'm a mother of two.
	I love my family.
	It's given me a new purpose and perspective in life, but I recently found out I'm pregnant.
	It was an unexpected surprise.
	I felt, in a way, looking at the state of the world, that I need to terminate this pregnancy.
	But as soon as I walked into the women's clinic, I felt an overwhelming feeling of terror and I had to leave.
	I'm not sure what to do.
	My husband says it's my decision.
	My mother-in-law tells me that abortion is the best decision at the moment.
	And I have no idea what to do anymore.
	I feel like I need help.
	I'm not sure if you'll see this, but it would be nice to hear your thoughts.
	Well, welcome to the conversation this evening.
	How are things? Um...
	I'm sorry, I'm just a little nervous.
	Things have been a little stressed.
	No kidding. I mean, you hold life in your hands.
	I would be too. Yeah.
	It's been pretty difficult, but I still have to wake up and do things, so I gotta put a smile on my face.
	Especially, you know, if you're a parent, this is a funny thing that people who aren't parents don't usually know this about being a parent.
	But when you're being a parent, you don't have a lot of time to dwell.
	You don't have a lot of time to, I mean, worry, I suppose, because you've got to be there for your kids, right?
	And so they need you and you want to be enthusiastic participants in their life.
	And so you don't have a lot of time to...
	Play the what-if game and to ruminate and generally the only parent-to-parent conversations that occur occur at like midnight when the kids are asleep and you're fighting being tired yourself.
	So I appreciate you making the time for this and I really do appreciate the challenge, the huge challenge that you're facing with this life in your belly.
	How far along are you at the moment?
	So when I went to the clinic, I was 10 weeks, but right now I'm 11.
	Right. And how far along were you when you got, I guess, what some would call the blessed news, but you may not at the moment?
	I didn't even know.
	So I didn't check.
	I'm sorry, I'm a little nervous.
	That's fine. When I didn't know how far along I was.
	It's because I had an ultrasound at the women's clinic.
	And they told me I was at 10 weeks.
	But right now I'm at the 11-week mark.
	And what was it that gave you, because you weren't expecting to get pregnant, what was it that gave you the sense that you might be?
	Oh, I have been pregnant twice.
	Oh, so you know the...
	It's easier to spot now.
	I immediately felt like my emotions were a volcano.
	I couldn't keep myself together as I did before.
	Anything anybody did that sort of annoyed me made me yell.
	And I'm not usually like that.
	And then I started to get sick, so I just...
	I just knew that there was something wrong.
	So, is it that you're more irritable as a whole, or is it that your emotions as a whole are stronger?
	They're stronger, and I have a three-year-old, and they like to challenge your authority a lot.
	And my three-year-old is particularly persistent, so...
	It might take me about an hour of struggle, power struggle, to tell her, you know, no, you're not going to do this.
	And then she'll give up.
	Right. And normally you have the patience for that, but you felt that you were not that way in the time, right?
	No, I was losing my patience much more easily, and that's not me.
	Right. Now, I hate to be annoying, but that's kind of the job, right?
	So I hope you'll forgive me.
	Don't you worry about that.
	How did you get pregnant? Yeah, of course I knew.
	It's sort of like, you want to say it's unexpected, but at the same time, it's kind of dumb to say it's not.
	See, you've spent a lot of years not getting pregnant, and you've had two kids.
	So you know both sides of that coin.
	Yeah. And were you having unprotected sex?
	Yes. Yeah, the longer the pause, the more you know what the answer's going to be.
	In a way, you can say that it usually took me a very long time to get pregnant, and this time it was just as quick as it could be.
	Oh yeah, a friend of mine and his wife, they say they're so fertile they're afraid of sharing a coffee cup.
	So how long did it take you to get pregnant in the past?
	About a year or so.
	Oh wow, okay. Was that for both kids?
	Yeah, pretty much.
	It didn't happen very fast.
	Our second child, we planned and we stayed a...
	A while trying until we got him, so we really did not expect to be this quick because of the whole corona thing.
	We couldn't get any sort of contraception.
	You couldn't get any sort of contraception because of the corona thing?
	Well, any that I can use.
	Now it's China's fault! Any that I can use.
	Because, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	I'm allergic to the others, but still that's not an excuse for it.
	Well, no, hang on, hang on. So, I mean, because the, you know, the drugstores are open, right?
	The pharmacies are open.
	Well, I'm allergic to most over-the-counter and hormonal ones make me go crazy.
	Condoms? Yes, I'm allergic to them.
	Oh, okay.
	It's a little bit complicated with that.
	I was using the pill but I had to stop because it was making me lose my hair.
	It was making me have enormous mood swings and I can't I couldn't keep on taking it.
	It was damaging my health.
	Oh, it's heavy stuff, man.
	The hormones in the pill are pretty rough on women and I think have a lot to do with some of the masculinization of women that's been going on over the past couple of decades.
	So you get a bit of a pass in terms of You know, there wasn't any particular birth control available that you could take or handle.
	But you can still have sex without vaginal ejaculation and all that kind of thing.
	I mean, obviously, right? But you're like, hey, took a year last time.
	That's just, right? Roll the dice.
	Well, it was that way.
	It was something that... We didn't really think it was going to happen this fast, but then again, we should have had some sort of protection at least, because you never know.
	Well, you know now.
	Yeah. Now you know.
	I know now.
	All right. And so when you really began to suspect that you were pregnant, what was your first thought or thoughts?
	Um... Okay, I didn't want to believe it.
	I didn't want to believe that that was actually the case, and then I came to terms with it, and I just kept on thinking, what am I going to do?
	Because my husband already talked to me, and he said he couldn't handle another child.
	I've had through some time mental health issues and there are some days that I rely on my husband because I feel exhausted and I need help.
	His job currently at the moment, he's a Coast Guard man and there are times where he Sleeps about two hours in a day.
	And he's being overworked and he's currently in an environment that he doesn't like.
	With a bunch of people he doesn't like.
	And he comes home exhausted.
	And he just said to me that he didn't feel like he could take care of me and another child and the children that we have now.
	But he just couldn't handle it.
	So that's why I thought about going through with this abortion thing, because I do care about him.
	And I wasn't confident in my abilities to keep it together.
	Your husband is the gamer, or was the gamer?
	Yeah, he's gotten so much better with that.
	He barely plays now.
	He spends so much time with his kids.
	No, that's great. I wasn't trying to bag on him.
	I just wanted to remind myself of the call that we had earlier.
	Okay, good, good. And what's going on with the mental health stuff?
	I love a long story.
	Yeah, I got time. I'm here for you.
	Whatever you need. It's a long story.
	I guess it's been going on for some time.
	And I've ignored it and tried to focus on my responsibilities as a mother.
	But it's sort of popped up to the surface in unhealthy behaviors.
	So, for example, when my daughter was two, I spent about a whole year that I wasn't eating correctly.
	So I was trying to starve myself.
	And I lost a lot of weight.
	And I barely slept.
	And I was just kind of overworking myself and pushing myself to a point that I felt so exhausted I didn't want to get up.
	Not that I didn't.
	I couldn't get up from the bed.
	And I got so sick that my husband had to help me.
	He had to call me at night to ask me if I had eaten or not.
	You know, call me in the morning if I slept anything because sometimes I would go without sleeping and sometimes that would make me emotionally volatile and I would let my daughter just walk over me.
	I would do everything she wanted to and So that she would leave me alone because I didn't want her to see me sad.
	I didn't know.
	I just kept on hurting myself.
	I had no idea why I was doing it.
	I just kept on doing it.
	So I already did that.
	I've recovered.
	Thankfully I'm in a healthy weight now and I have an appetite.
	But I was worried that these hormonal changes and afterwards giving birth, that that may bring me back to that certain point again.
	And my husband was worried about it too, and that's why he asked me to consider the option.
	He did tell me it was up to me.
	That he didn't want to push me and either Sort of way, but you just told me to look at that side too, and my stepmother, she really thinks that that's the way to go for me.
	I don't talk to my parents anymore, so I can't talk to them.
	I don't really have any other adults I can talk to.
	Right, right.
	Why were you not eating?
	Were you trying to lose baby weight, or was there something else going on?
	I was trying to hurt myself.
	Why? I didn't like myself at all.
	Well, that's given. We don't hurt things that we like, right?
	But why? I mean, don't make me work too, too hard for this, if that's all right.
	I mean, why? Why? I just thought I was the worst person and I needed some sort of punishment.
	I know, I understand.
	I understand. But why did you think of yourself as a bad person?
	I guess the people around me when I grew up just kept on putting that in my head.
	And I had a really bad relationship with my mom as a teenager that really cemented that idea in my brain.
	A young adult's been pretty hard to get that out.
	Right. What was the language that your mother would use about you?
	Or to you? So I couldn't really talk to her about any problems I had.
	So I constantly lied to her to tell her I was okay and nothing was wrong with me.
	And so she would call me a liar.
	She always criticized the way I dressed, and it's not that it was something revealing or anything.
	It never was that kind of girl.
	It was just dark colors.
	She was always saying that I didn't do enough.
	It was always something I didn't do enough, or I didn't do this right.
	It's just constantly criticizing everything I did.
	And everything I liked.
	Even though I didn't see the problem with it.
	It would be a certain cartoon she didn't like.
	It didn't have any nudity or violence.
	She just didn't like it.
	And I had to deal with that.
	I had to deal with her constant criticisms towards me.
	I did mention last time she still is a Jehovah's Witness.
	They put a lot of pressure on me to excel.
	So any weird thing that she perceived out of me, she wanted me to change that.
	She wanted me to be perfect, in a way.
	I would try my very best to be her ideal.
	And whenever I went up to her to say, am I doing good?
	Looking for some sort of praise, she would say that I don't have to praise you.
	I don't have to say that you're doing good.
	This is something that you should be doing.
	I don't have to reward you for the good things that you do.
	She was very, very strict with me.
	And at that time, I wasn't really listening to her.
	I didn't think that what she said to me was How can I say?
	It didn't make sense.
	It just didn't make sense to me.
	She really wanted me to be part of these witnesses and I didn't really want to.
	So that was a big fight.
	Always. That's why she expected me to be this perfect Jehovah's Witness daughter.
	And that's not what I wanted to be.
	And that was a really big fight.
	Always. Anything that I did that was against what the religion said at the moment, I couldn't do.
	And if I did it in secret, she would punish me.
	She would... Not let me hang out with people I chose to hang out.
	She would choose everything for me.
	I had no free will of my own.
	Everything was very controlled.
	My schedule was controlled.
	I almost felt like a prisoner in my own house.
	I got overwhelmed with the expectations.
	And then I believed I was just never going to be good enough.
	So I just started to believe myself I was a bad person.
	Like, if I don't like to do what the Jehovah's Witness tells me to be or do, then I'm a bad person.
	That's what they say.
	So I did internalize that.
	That I'm a liar.
	I'm a bad person.
	I just want to be a degenerate because I don't Want to be part of their religion or I don't think that it makes sense.
	And that's what's messed me up in a way.
	But it's the thoughts that continue that mess you up.
	Mm-hmm. Right? Because if we say, you know, like you ever see a tree...
	Between you and the sun at sunset, I mean, that tree's shadow just goes on forever, right?
	But that's based upon the location of the sun.
	If the sun is overhead, the tree has almost no shadow at all.
	So it's not, you say, well, it was the past and my mom who messed you up.
	But, and this doesn't make it easy, but to be accurate, it is the thoughts that continue.
	That are causing you the problems, not the direct experiences themselves.
	Because the direct experiences themselves are long in the past.
	And you've changed enormously from being a child to being a mother yourself, from being under the control of your parents to being independent.
	And so you'll never have a bigger change in your life than going from being a child to being an adult.
	So it's not what happened to you As a child that is causing you problems in the here and now, it is your thoughts about what happened.
	And I don't mean to put the responsibility on you.
	The events that happened to you as a child absolutely have a huge effect, right?
	They do cast a long shadow, but we still have to stand in that shadow.
	We can step to the left, we can step to the right, we can step out of that long shadow.
	Because if the past messed you up, it's almost impossible to get un-messed up.
	Because the past happened.
	The past was real. The past was a fact.
	And so if the past messes you up, the past will always be a part of you.
	And then it's like, okay, how do I not be messed up if my present is just a whole series of dominoes knocked over by the past?
	Does that make any sense?
	So, you're trying to say it's my...
	My reaction to all of these events?
	It's what you think about with regards to your mother.
	One word that you said was you said your mother was strict, right?
	Yeah. That's not the right word, is it?
	Controlling, manipulative.
	Bullying, abusive, whatever, right?
	But it's not strict. Like, listen, I'm pretty strict when it comes to philosophy.
	I'm pretty strict with myself.
	If I have a debate to prepare for, I'll spend days reviewing material.
	When I'm working on a book, I will really go over, like, every sentence to try and get it just right.
	So having, like, or you could have a strict workout, you could be on a strict diet if you have medical issues or you're really trying to lose weight.
	So strict is not a negative thing.
	So if you cast your mother in, well, she was a disciplinarian, she was strict, she was whatever, maybe she was too strong a moralist or something like that, right?
	Then I don't think that's accurate.
	You're right. Think of your body and you have an infection.
	You want your body to have no mercy with that infection.
	You don't want your body to say, well, maybe this could be okay.
	Or maybe there's something positive about this infection.
	You want your body to be like, oh, virus?
	Kill it. Oh, bacteria that's dangerous?
	Just, like, no mercy.
	And to me, as far as staying healthy goes, mentally healthy, that, in a sense, that strictness is really needed.
	If you give neutral or positive language to abusive people, you can't fight them in your head.
	Because you're allied with them now when you're a kid.
	You have to do that, right? You have to.
	You have to say, well...
	My mom is not so bad, or she's just trying to help me, or she's strict, or she's doing the best she can, or whatever it is, right?
	You have to do that when you're a kid, but you don't have to do that when you're an adult.
	And so I would be, my sort of first thing is to say, with regards to your mother, it's not that your mother was critical.
	Because to be critical is not a bad thing.
	It can be a very good thing, right?
	If you want to learn something and you're doing it wrong, someone criticizing you, Can be very helpful, can be very, very positive, right?
	So being critical is not a bad thing.
	Being disciplined, being strict is not a bad thing.
	Caring what the world thinks about you is not a bad thing, right?
	Being embarrassed or shameful about misbehavior is not a bad thing.
	It can be very helpful. So my concern is that if you give all of these neutral or positive terms to your mother, then your mom still controls you.
	Because you can't use your antibodies, so to speak, to just say no.
	No to all of it, right?
	I mean, you're very right in a way, she's still...
	I still feel like she has control with me, over me, over my thoughts, over how I behave.
	And that's based on the language that you use about her.
	And... It's taken me a long time to actually see her as a...
	to see what she did to me as bad as it did affect me.
	Yeah, it did. A very long time I just excused her because everybody around me just said, well, you're a teenager who just wants to misbehave and do whatever they want and your mother just cares about you and that's why she does these things to you.
	Right. And...
	I guess I was just a teenager who couldn't express her feelings that well.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	Now you're not being fair to yourself now.
	You're being over fair to your mother.
	Now you're not being fair to yourself because you said I'm just a teenager.
	I couldn't express myself that well, right?
	Well, why couldn't you express yourself?
	I felt like nobody was going to take me seriously.
	Nobody was going to really listen to me.
	No, you're still too nice.
	You're such a nice young lady.
	And I'm here to try and talk you out of that.
	No, it's because if you were honest, you were punished.
	Well, yeah. Yeah, I was.
	The only time I was truly honest with my mother, she looked at me dead in the eye and said, no, that's not true.
	Oh yeah, you already told me that.
	She called you a liar when you were honest, so you would be punished.
	So imagine, like, when I was a kid, that every time I saw a duck, or the image of a duck, or a rubber ducky or something, let's say that every time I saw a duck, my mom punched me in the side of the head.
	Hard, right? Now, when I grew up, would I say, you know, I just have this weird fear of ducks.
	I guess I'm just nervous around ducks for some reason.
	I guess I'm just not a big fan of ducks.
	It would be to internalize something.
	So if you say, well, I guess I just wasn't that good at expressing myself.
	It's like, well, no, you were punished for being honest.
	So it's not like you have some deficiency any more than I would just be weirdly duck-phobic, right?
	No, I was punished. Every time I saw a duck, I'd get punched in the side of the head.
	So every time I see a duck now, my body is expecting to get punched in the head.
	Okay. You see what I mean?
	Yeah, I understand.
	Because here's the thing, like your mother let her own history rule her.
	And I'm trying to break that in you, letting the history rule you, right?
	And there's only one way to have your history not rule you, and that is to judge it unambiguously.
	Because we're nice people, we always want to give people the benefit of the doubt.
	Well, you know, she was harsh, but, you know, whatever, she was trying to help me be a better person.
	Like, you're always trying to give these excuses, right?
	But that's not... Your antibodies can't do that.
	Your antibodies...
	You know, like if there was some...
	I don't know, you go to the park with your daughter, right?
	and let's say there's some wolf mysteriously appears in the park and starts stalking your daughter you don't sit there and say well maybe it's a female wolf she's a mom she just wants to feed her own kids and uh you know i don't want to be cruel to animals and you know you'd be like what would you think what would you do ah well i would try
	i would try to run away but i'm pretty sure it would catch me Well, no, you would protect your daughter no matter what, right?
	Well, yeah, but I ran away with my daughter.
	No, I get it. I get it. But you would do whatever you could.
	We all have this as parents, which is these bloody dogs.
	Now, I like dogs.
	I really like dogs.
	But I really don't like dog owners who let their dogs just run around.
	And they bark at people and they charge you and it's like, I don't know these dogs.
	I mean, I remember being in Africa with my dad when I was 16, and we were being hunted by a pack of wild dogs, and he had to kick them.
	Like, it's terrifying, right?
	And so I remember going hiking with my daughter, and some big dog, like, ran down the path and jumped up on her, and it terrified her.
	It happened in Brazil as well, that a dog jumped up on her and scratched her.
	When I was a kid, there was this Great Dane that kept me pinned up against a tree when I was six or seven years old for what felt like forever.
	And, you know, when you're that small, you look it up at this thing.
	It's like a bloody horse with giant shark teeth.
	It is a gigantic dog.
	It is a gigantic dog, right?
	So I like dogs as a whole, but I really don't like these.
	So every parent has this thing where you walk in somewhere with your kid or your kids and some dog comes charging over and you're like, is the dog wagging his tail?
	It's barking. What do I do?
	You look around for a weapon.
	You know, like, do I throw the kids up in the tree and do I kick the dog?
	And like, you go into fight or flight because this dog is loose.
	And again, 99% of dogs are friendly and it's all fine.
	But you just don't know.
	We've all heard these stories.
	And I actually know a friend of mine, their daughter, was attacked by a dog and had to have reconstructive surgery.
	And it's like, it can just happen, right?
	So the reason I'm saying all of this is that if there is a dangerous animal around your child...
	You don't empathize with the dangerous animal, right?
	No. You just, like, sorry, like, if it's you or me, or you or me or the kid, it's you.
	Dog, wolf, whatever, right?
	So that's, if there's a predator around who's done you a lot of harm, to me, just looking at that and saying, okay.
	That's bad. That's just a negative.
	That's just a negative.
	And if you think that your mother was critical, I would say that...
	I think the more important thing is that your mother was incredibly...
	Susceptible to criticism herself, which is why she wanted to...
	Why did she want to control you?
	Well, you're a parent, I'm a parent.
	I'll tell you a tiny story and this will explain your mom.
	And I'm sorry to reference myself in explaining your mom, but it will make sense, right?
	So my daughter was, I don't know, three or four years old and some kids came over and...
	She started gathering up all her toys because she didn't want to share them.
	She's just like, the kids aren't getting my toys, Dad.
	And I suddenly felt real shame.
	Like, you know, like the kids are going to come in and my daughter's going to be like gathering up like Gollum with a ring is going to be gathering up her toys and not sharing them.
	And I literally, I kind of panicked a little too.
	And I was like, I'll give you candy if you share.
	It was not my proudest moment as a parent.
	But it was like, I'll give you candy if you share your toys.
	I mean, every now and then you make the odd misstep.
	And it was my fault for not preparing and not being ready.
	I was just kind of surprised. I was just kind of surprised.
	And she's always been a little, like, focused on property rights, I think is probably the nicest way.
	I was not going to say, an only child is not used to being, you know, touched on her toys.
	Not used to sharing and all of that.
	Yeah, not used to sharing.
	And, you know, to be fair, you know, when you're a kid and you share your toys, it's really rolling the dice.
	Yeah, it could be broken at any moment.
	Absolutely. You know, your favorite toy could just, the kid could just wham it on the ground and smash it into a million pieces.
	And so, I get it.
	Like, sharing is a little dicey.
	So, and I felt very, I took it personally.
	Like, it was a, somehow this was bad for me.
	And you get these domino catastrophe situations where it's like, oh man, she's going to be the selfish kid and no one's going to want to come and play with her.
	And of course, she's got great friends now and all.
	It's just had sleepovers all weekend.
	So, I think?
	And if you, I mean, I'm sure you've, I hope you've had that experience.
	Maybe it was just me, but everyone's had that experience.
	Your kid is doing something, you're like, oh no, you can't.
	It's not, please, it's not, it's not allowed, right?
	It's not allowed. It can't happen.
	And of course, my daughter is smart, right?
	And my daughter was like, really?
	How much candy? She goes straight from protecting her toys to candy maximization.
	Oh yeah. And I'm like, okay, it's all going to be fine.
	It's all going to be fine. So the reason I'm saying that is that your mother would feel probably a million times the embarrassment or shame or humiliation or whatever it was that I felt in that moment.
	Your mother would feel that so much stronger because this was just some people coming over with their kids, right?
	And we're still friends and nice people and all that.
	But for your mother, the whole Jehovah's Witness community and the quality of her parenting and is she bringing the child to God and is the child like that's a whole thing a million miles higher than what I experienced, right?
	And so controlling comes from a terror of being criticized, right?
	So me, I wanted to control my daughter's behavior, to have her share her toys, because I was afraid of being judged myself.
	And I was afraid of the negative consequences of her not sharing her toys.
	And that was my issue.
	That had nothing to do with my daughter's perfectly free to not want to share her toys.
	And of course she is, right? I mean, that's fine, right?
	It wasn't something she'd had a lot of experience with and all that, so it was fine.
	And as I thought about it later, she had had a toy broken, one toy broken, another toy a kid stole.
	Oh, that's a topic for another time.
	That's a very interesting story.
	And so, yeah, that was also interesting, right?
	So I could kind of understand where she's coming from.
	It made sense, right? So...
	With your mother, if you understand that it was a terror of being judged by her community rather than anything to do with you, that you had to be controlled because she couldn't control her own shame.
	She couldn't control her own terror of being criticized.
	I know that this She feels like she failed with her other children and to be real, she did.
	She did. My other brothers and sisters were just degenerates and they made a lot of bad decisions and They ended up pretty rocky lives themselves,
	and I guess my mom saw that, and she was terrified that I was gonna grow up to do the same, so I guess that means that she's a bad mom, and nobody wants to feel like they're a bad mom.
	Wait, hang on. Oh my gosh.
	You gotta fight this niceness.
	It's not your friend.
	What do you mean nobody wants to feel like they're a bad mom?
	Have you never heard? I mean, that's like saying nobody wants to starve themselves.
	Nobody wants to hurt themselves.
	Nobody wants to eat badly, right?
	But you did all those things.
	Nobody wants to cut themselves, but there are people out there who are cutters, right?
	They cut themselves, right?
	I had a call, I don't even think I published it yet, but I had a call not too long ago with a woman who literally carved her mother's most critical phrase about her into her thigh to the point where it was so scarred it would be visible forever.
	So the idea that people don't ever want to do things that are bad or harmful to themselves or harmful to others, of course they do.
	They say, well, nobody wants to be thought of as a bad mom or no one wants to be a bad mom.
	Sure they do. Sure they do.
	They really, really do.
	And that's self-hatred, self-fulfilling prophecies, it's shame, it's cowardice, it's...
	You know, because if your mom wanted to be a good mom...
	The first thing she would do is take courses on parenting.
	She would read books on parenting.
	She would figure out better ways.
	She would deal with her past. She would maybe question the church.
	There's things that she would do to improve her parenting.
	And if she didn't do those things to improve her parenting, then there's no way that she wanted to be a good parent.
	I used the analogy before, but it's like if I blind myself and go and take off in a Cessna airplane, I don't know how to fly.
	I mean, I've flown a couple of flight simulators.
	That's about it. I don't know how to fly a plane.
	And if I'm up there in the plane weaving around, crashing into things, and I say, well, I didn't want to be a bad pilot, it's like, well, yeah, you did.
	Because you took off in the plane without any preparation.
	You didn't know how to fly a plane, but you decided to fly a plane, plus you blindfolded yourself.
	So there was no possibility that you could ever be a good pilot in that situation.
	So, of course, you wanted to be a bad pilot.
	No matter what you say, you took every single step, every single action, guaranteed, That you were going to crash that plane.
	So don't tell me that you wanted to be a good pilot.
	That's just the surface story.
	Your mother did not want to be a good mother, I bet, because it would have challenged what happened to her as a child and she just grimly reproduced it rather than try to improve.
	She said to me that She had no idea what happened to me when I was a teenager, that she did everything she could as a parent, that she's not ashamed, that other people see her as a witch or as a bad person, but she knows she's not, that she followed what God told her and that's it.
	I'm not sure that was God.
	No, because one of the points of a relationship to God is humility.
	And so, if we're all sinners, and we're all tempted by the devil, and succumb on a regular basis to those temptations, how can she have no regrets?
	That's called the sin of vanity, right?
	The sin of pride. In a way, that's why I have to see her as a manipulator.
	She always chose the right words to make me feel like crap.
	Right. And to make me say what she wanted to hear.
	Because she always wanted to hear, no, I didn't do anything.
	I'm okay. I am studying.
	I'm going to try harder.
	I'm going to do harder. I'm going to try harder on...
	On the witnessing thing and, you know, I believe in it.
	It was almost like I was a...
	What can I say?
	It was already pre-recorded messages.
	Right. That I knew that she wanted to hear.
	And whenever I said, well, you know, I'm not okay.
	There's something going on.
	Um... It would always land, well, I'm going to send you to a psychiatric hospital.
	And so I pretended I was okay, because I didn't want to go away to a new place, away from my home.
	Well, and they can also pump you full of some pretty dangerous drugs in there.
	Yeah, and I already went to one of those places, and they...
	I went through postpartum depression when I had my first child, and so they gave me some medication, and it was terrible.
	I felt terrible, and I'm never taking any of those drugs ever again.
	I mean, just look what happened to Jordan Peterson, right?
	Mm-hmm. You know, there are some that do help people, but they're...
	You're basically a guinea pig to them.
	They'll prescribe you whatever they think that is going to help you.
	You know, they'll play with the dosages.
	I know all of that.
	I want to make sure we don't get distracted by that because I'm with you 100% on all of that.
	And for people who want to read Whitaker's book, Mad in America, it's an incredible book.
	Okay, so your mother basically was, I'd rather put you in an asylum than...
	Than deal with me. No, than change anything about what she did, right?
	She didn't want to hear what I have to say, truly.
	She just wanted to sit me down and give me a sermon on how bad of a daughter I was, how much I hurt her, and how much I embarrass her.
	Now what if she's just all toxic?
	What if it's all toxic?
	What if there's no redeeming qualities?
	I don't know. I currently have to keep some sort of contact because my brother passed away in the hospital.
	They killed him in the hospital.
	My dad did a lawsuit and we all won a part of that money.
	And it's being holded over there until I go over there and get it.
	And so I have to keep on in contact with my parents.
	No, I get all of that. No, hang on.
	I don't want to be in contact.
	No, sorry. I don't mean I get all of that.
	But what I mean by that is, in your mind.
	Forget about the consequences of this.
	Because so often we'll steer ourselves away from the consequences of an idea.
	I mean, this happens when I talk about IQ, and people are like, well, what are we supposed to do with this knowledge?
	It's like, well, can we first talk about it, and then figure out, can we first accept and acknowledge, and blah, blah, blah, and then...
	So, because I say, well, what if your mother was just all bad, right?
	And I know people say, oh, well, you know, there's this.
	It's the yin and the yang and the tau and the blah, blah, blah.
	And there's bad and the good of us and good and the bad of us and blah, blah, blah.
	I get all of that. I mean, sure.
	But what if there just wasn't really any good in your mom?
	Because... That way, you can get her out of your head.
	Because if you've got all of this ambivalence going on, some good things, and you know, she did this one.
	Yeah, listen, I can talk about a few of the good things that my mom did, for sure.
	For sure. But you see, all of the good things that my mom did were equally bound up in the destructive things that she did.
	Because they created a sense of obligation in me towards her that...
	Bound me to her dysfunction and destruction even closer.
	So even the good things, the good things were like the worm on the hook.
	Mmm, tasty, right?
	But that gets you hooked, right?
	So it's like saying, you know, drugs are destructive.
	Yes, but cocaine is wonderful.
	Yeah, that's why it's destructive, because it is wonderful, right?
	So, like, cocaine is just bad.
	It's just bad. And that's, I think, really, really important to understand, that if somebody is destructive, they're going to try and lure you into a complicated view of themselves.
	Like, hey, I wasn't all hook, I was bait too.
	It's like, yeah, but you understand that the bait and the hook are the same thing.
	So my mom, she helped me with my books, and she, you know, did the German part of the first book I wrote on the First World War.
	She did all the German stuff, and, you know, she was very, very keen on helping me with various things and all that.
	Well, that had a lot to do with her own vanity, with her relationship with her father, who was a writer, and her brother, who was a writer, and wanting to continue that family tradition and say, Oh, well, my mother was, when I was in grade eight, I took a grade 13 writing course.
	When I was in grade nine, I took a college level computer programming course.
	And my mom was all like...
	You say, well, she was proud of all of that.
	She'd brag about that to her friends.
	But it's like, but that didn't have anything to do with me.
	That was just my mom wanting to show me off like a, you know, a well-groomed poodle or something like that, right?
	So even the positive things are negative.
	Sorry, go ahead. Sorry, sorry about that too.
	She used to do the exact same thing.
	So she would brag to other people.
	about how good I was and she would say that she was so ashamed that you know that I was attracted to boys and I wanted to have a boyfriend or that I you know wanted to wear this type of clothes and whatever stupid thing was because there was never really any problems really any problems that What can I say?
	Her reaction wasn't...
	I don't know how to explain it.
	She always overreacted to the problem.
	I thought...
	How can I say?
	The perfect view of her daughter crumbled, she told me.
	I remember she said to me that I wasn't her daughter anymore.
	I was somebody else and that she did not know me.
	Right. And, you know, that as a teenager when you don't even know who you are, it hurts you.
	Well, no, listen, I understand that.
	I really do. But it only hurts you if you have any respect for her judgment at all.
	Well, I did. I did.
	No, no, I get that. I thought she was my only friend.
	I get that. But what about now?
	I still try to cling on to her in a way.
	I still want to believe that she could say sorry.
	Why do you want that?
	That she could come around.
	Why? Why do you want that? Because I want my mom back.
	Hang on, hang on. Okay, hang on.
	Which... Mom do you want back?
	In other words, was there a good mom at some point that was wonderful and kind and thoughtful and loving and accepting?
	What's the mom that you want back?
	Well, when I was a child, she was.
	It's just that I started growing up and doubting what was said in the church.
	Hang on, hang on, hang on.
	You're saying she was a good mom when you never opposed her.
	Yeah. Well, you know that's not being a good mom, right?
	Well... I... I don't know.
	No, sure you do.
	Sure you do. First of all, how do you know that you didn't oppose her?
	Or rather, that she bullied you into agreeing with her because she was bigger and stronger and tougher and meaner and willing to cut the bond, which no child can ever...
	Survive, psychologically. You can't survive the parents totally threatening the bond.
	You'll always comply, right?
	So how do you know?
	How do you know that you even agreed with her when you were younger?
	I don't ever think I did.
	I just went with the flow, in a way.
	Because if she was good and then became bad...
	You're going to feel guilt.
	And she, of course, this is what abusive people do, is they will say that their problems stem from you, that their unhappiness stems from you, that all the problems in your relationship with the abusive person stems from you.
	And that is a complete and total lie.
	Absolute, top to bottom, back to front, horribly abusive, soul destroying or an attempt to destroy a soul lie.
	Your mother was responsible for your relationship with her.
	I'm responsible for my relationship with my daughter.
	And you are responsible for your relationship with your children.
	You define it. You manage it.
	It's your responsibility. So the abusive person will always want to say to you, and with parents, they have this additional thing of, oh, when you were little, you were so loving, we had such a great relationship, but now that you're getting older, you're just becoming mouthy and resistant and don't give me attitude and you talk back and blah, blah, blah. Yeah.
	But that's a Garden of Eden fantasy.
	It's the same ridiculous fantasy that the Marxists have, that life before the state was just wonderful.
	And then things just went bad the moment that we got any kind of government or technology or whatever, right?
	And this Garden of Eden fantasy, it's a form of abuse.
	Because things are bad, and they're bad because of you.
	But I guarantee you, your mother was not a better mother when she was younger.
	That's like saying when she was closer to her own childhood, she was much better healed of her own childhood than when she was further away from it.
	Right? That's like saying there's less radiation 50 yards from Chernobyl than there is 5 miles from Chernobyl.
	She was closer to her own childhood.
	She was more triggered by you and the idea that she was a good parent back then and then became a bad parent because of you, or things became unhappy because of you, wildly destructive.
	It has been to me.
	I'm sorry? It has been towards me wildly destructive.
	It's even trickled down to my own family.
	Well, you know, this is why I'm talking to you so much about this, because you said that you get into hour-long conflicts with your three-year-old daughter, right?
	She... How can I say?
	I think this is the problem, that I don't respect myself, and that she sees...
	that I don't have no confidence in myself. - No, no, no, no, no, no, no, don't overcomplicate things yet.
	Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.
	But that sounds like you've just read that off the back of a self-help book and not a very good one.
	Okay, what do you, what was the last, you got into an hour conflict with your daughter?
	What was that about? Um...
	So, uh...
	I would just tell her, for example, please don't run in the house.
	And I would ask her again and again and again until I have to grab her and, you know, get her attention and tell her that I've been talking to you for a long time.
	I've warned you and now you have to sit down for a while.
	And, you know, that's her getting up and...
	Me having to bring her back.
	Her getting up from her corner.
	Oh, the time out? Yeah, time out.
	Time out with her.
	It's like that.
	She does most of the time stay in, but there's some days where she's very reluctant.
	I've noticed it's when her dad's around too.
	She starts to defy me more.
	I'm not sure why that's a thing.
	Hang on, hang on. Sorry to interrupt.
	Why can she not run in the house?
	Oh, we live in an apartment that's upstairs, so she's constantly running.
	The neighbors downstairs are going to hear that, and if they complain to the office, then they can kick us out if there's too much noise, so...
	Can she get slippers or anything, thick socks, that could reduce the noise?
	Could you put in carpets?
	I'm just spitballing here, maybe.
	There is. I just worry about that.
	But we are getting...
	Have you tried going downstairs to your neighbors and saying, is the noise bothering you?
	My daughter wants to run, but how is it for you down here?
	What can we do? Is there any possibility of that?
	I guess I could do that.
	Because kids want to run, right?
	Yeah. I mean, I miss those days where you want to get someplace, you just sprint.
	You know, like you just sprint.
	I can't sprint anymore, right?
	But you just, when you want to go someplace, you just sprint.
	That's great. That's a wonderful part of childhood.
	And, you know, kids are not exactly designed to be in apartment buildings with, you know, whatever, right?
	But so there's things that you could do to lower the noise.
	You could also talk about it with your neighbors.
	Give them the number and say, listen, if it's bothering you, Then, you know, please give us a call.
	Like, we'll sort it out.
	Or you could say to your neighbors downstairs, do you work during the days, right?
	Because then if they work during the days and they're home and they're not home, then at least during the day your daughter can run and she's not going to be bothering you.
	Like, I'm just looking at different ways other than getting into an hour-long conflict with your daughter, right?
	I would try to do something else because I don't like it neither.
	Being 11 weeks pregnant, it's harder to keep that patience with you.
	I really don't like struggling with her like that.
	Sometimes I feel like I hurt her, which I don't.
	She's a very smart kid.
	No, but you're concerned about, hang on, you're concerned about being shamed by your neighbors or having negative consequences from your neighbors, right?
	But that's similar to your mom fearing criticism from the other people in the religious group, right?
	Yeah. And the best way to try and not have that is to try and cultivate a positive relationship.
	With your neighbors. And say, look, I do have a three-year-old, so there's going to be some running.
	I will try and keep it to a minimum.
	Please let me know if there's any, you know, if you're home and watching a movie 7 p.m.
	or whatever, or whatever.
	Give them a, you know, here's my phone number.
	Just text me if it's bothering you and we'll really...
	And that way you have a positive relationship.
	Because if you don't have that relationship with your neighbors, they may run to the superintendent or the building manager or something like that, right?
	As opposed to, you know, I want, you know, I want you guys to have a quality relationship living under me.
	But I do have, you know, kids and they're going to run and I don't want to spend all day trying to control my daughter because that's going to be a mess.
	Or maybe you can send your husband down if you're shy to do it because sometimes it's easier if the other person does it or whatever, right?
	There's things that you could do that could give you some comfort with regards to that.
	And then you wouldn't have to control your daughter.
	And of course, you would also, you could take your daughter down, right?
	And then your daughter would get to see her mom, her dad, or both talking through a problem, talking through an issue, and trying to find a way to resolve it to some degree, right?
	Okay. Well, I do a lot of times feel like it's a losing battle, you know?
	Trying to keep a toddler quiet.
	Oh, it's horrible.
	It's a horrible way to spend a day.
	How can I say?
	It's a hot summer in Texas, which is you barely can go outside to play.
	So she's stuck in an apartment.
	And I feel sorry for her a lot of times because, you know, right currently we can't go outside that much.
	So she's just stuck in here with her baby brother, and baby brother's not that interesting yet, you know.
	Well, and your concern is that your downstairs neighbors are going to turn out to be kind of like your mom, right?
	Yeah. Right, right.
	So, you know, you've got to just try and, you know, when I... Oh, gosh.
	So when I was... I guess 17, I threw a pretty epic party at my high school, and my mom was away, and it was a...
	The word went around.
	This is before social media and all that.
	But word went around the school that I was throwing a party.
	And I had recently – I was considered to be kind of nerdy when I was younger.
	But then I got a nice haircut.
	I kind of grew into myself.
	I started working out. And then a bunch of the kids who maybe thought I was kind of nerdy came to a nightclub that I used to go to from the age of 16 onwards where I'd sort of dance all night.
	And they saw me there at this nightclub.
	And I was busting some pretty serious moves.
	I was moonwalking out.
	You know, I was doing some pretty cool moves and I was chatting with the ladies and all that kind of stuff.
	And I suddenly, like, my whole social cachet, like, just went through the roof of that situation.
	And I went from, like, one of the...
	I wouldn't say... I went from a kid who was considered still somewhat nerdy to, you know, like, a kid who was, like...
	You know, like the librarian who takes off her glasses, sweeps back her hair, or like when Superman takes off his glasses and he turns into like the coolest guy around.
	It was one of these weird flips.
	I've had a whole bunch of these flips in my life where I go from sort of one thing to another.
	So I threw this party.
	And, I mean, it was pretty epic, but it was in an apartment building.
	So I went to all of my neighbors, upstairs, side by side, all the neighbors below, and I said, listen, I don't have a lot of parties, but I'm having a party.
	And I'm just like, here's my phone number, man.
	If it gets too loud, I'll try and keep it under control.
	But there's going to be a lot of people there.
	And there was. And just call me, you know, and I'll do my best.
	So I got a couple of calls over the course of the evening.
	And eventually the police showed up a couple of times.
	But it's funny because the police showed up and they said, you know, we're getting complaints from the building.
	But, you know, we're standing out front of your door here because there's an apartment building, too.
	We're standing out front of your door here.
	Yeah. Doesn't seem that loud to us, so, you know.
	In fact, once they didn't even knock, I just opened the door to my apartment building, and the cops were in the hallway, and I'm like, hello, officers, can I help you?
	And they're like, yeah, we're getting these complaints about this party, but I'm...
	You know, it's really not that loud.
	So, you know, we don't really know what to do.
	Your neighbors are all up in arms, or at least some of them.
	And some of them called me, but then some of them just called the cops.
	But, you know. Anyway, so, but at least I went to the neighbors and said, I'm having this party and, you know, I don't want this to come out of nowhere from you.
	And please understand, I said, I'm not going to start having parties every weekend.
	But this one kind of grew and went crazy.
	Pretty cool. That happened once when I was in Montreal.
	I was in a play called The Elephant Man.
	I was playing the doctor, the Anthony Hopkins character in the movie.
	I played the doctor in The Elephant Man.
	And I threw the cast party afterwards.
	And it was another one of these.
	I had to go to the neighbors and say, I'm having a party.
	It's going to be kind of loud.
	It's a Friday. I'll try and have it done by midnight.
	But... Anyway, so when you're living in that kind of communal environment, you just kind of do your best to keep a good relationship with people and all of that.
	What can I say? If you deal with the world as if it's friendly, the world is a lot friendlier, if that makes sense.
	If you deal with the world as if it's hostile, the world becomes kind of hostile in a weird way.
	Because the people downstairs, if they keep hearing this thumping and so on, they'll be like, well, why doesn't she come and talk to us about it?
	Does she think we're just mean people?
	I can't believe this, really. And you actually kind of, the world becomes as you expect it to be.
	As you expect it to be.
	I love the world as a whole.
	And... I'm very excited to share new arguments, new ideas, new data, new facts and so on, right?
	And yeah, there are some people who get mad and there are some people who they think they hate me.
	They just hate the facts or whatever, right?
	But I'm very positive towards these kinds of things.
	And I think that gives me a certain amount of, I don't know, I wouldn't say invulnerability, but a certain amount of ability to ride certain things out, right?
	The sort of oppositions and negative stuff and all that kind of stuff, right?
	So if you say, around the world as a whole, Okay, if I go talk to my neighbors and, you know, say, look, the coronavirus thing sucks for everyone.
	You're stuck at home. I'm stuck at home.
	I got kids. I spend all day—it's driving me crazy.
	I spend all day trying to have them not run.
	Oh, I get into all these conflicts, and it's driving me—and I don't even know what you can hear.
	And, you know, but I want—I don't want you to have a bad time living here.
	I don't want to have a bad time living here.
	Oh, and by the way, we're going to move in a month or two or whatever.
	But just try and find like if you deal with the world as if the world is nice, the world ends up being fairly nice to you.
	I don't mean like you have some magic healing power for everything.
	But if you deal with the world as if the world is hostile and people are going to try and get you kicked out of your apartment, then your world does get kind of tense and negative.
	But that's to do with your expectations.
	People see most people don't have an identity of their own.
	This is the great secret of the world.
	Most people do not have an identity.
	They don't have fixed opinions.
	They don't have morals.
	They don't have a relationship to reality that is constant.
	They're just blobs.
	They're amorphous blobs.
	And as amorphous blobs...
	No, I'm telling you, this is...
	I'm laughing because I know somebody exactly like you.
	You're currently living with me at the moment.
	Wait, who are we talking to?
	So, during the virus thing, right, everything was on lockdown and we were helping a family member because he was going to be living in his car and I felt bad.
	So, you know, we help him, but we're about ready to kick him out because the description you just said fits him like a glove.
	Fits him like a glove.
	And I've had it with the person.
	And I've had it with the person.
	Right.
	Right.
	And so most people, they don't have any fixed relationship to reality or truth or virtue or standards or anything like that.
	They will judge you as you judge yourself.
	And so if you have a good relationship with yourself, they'll find it very hard to criticize you.
	If you have a bad relationship with yourself, it's like you draw them into criticizing you.
	Not because they have any objective criticisms.
	They're just like, oh, this person is very self-critical.
	I guess I'll criticize them.
	And it's not like this is the NPC thing.
	They don't have any particular standards.
	If you're vulnerable, they will attack you.
	If you're insecure, they will put you down.
	If you're confident, they will defer to you.
	There's no people there.
	There's no integrity.
	There's no spine.
	It's just water.
	It's liquid. You pour it into some container.
	You pour it into something that looks like a cup.
	Hey, it looks like a cup. Look, it took on the shape of a cup.
	If you pour it into something that's like a test tube, then it looks like a little vertical, clear plastic penis.
	It just turns into nothing.
	So most people are just kind of like, I mean, I'm trying to give them spines or give them principles and all that stuff to stand up to.
	And this is why some people really hate UPB, because UPB challenges the formlessness that most people are.
	And you can tell the formlessness because they're all into democracy and they're into political correctness and they're into the greatest good of the greatest number and all of this utilitarianism and pragmatism.
	That's all just spineless water, empty nothingness.
	And UBB comes along and says, hey, you need a spine.
	And they're like, what do you mean I need a spine?
	I'm just going to be amorphous and blobby and have positive intentions.
	And so the reason I'm saying all of this is that the best way to be bullied is to imagine yourself surrounded by bullies.
	If you go down to people and you say, I really want to work something out so my kids can run and you don't have a bad life to your neighbors, right?
	Then they will, in a sense, respect that, they will defer to that, and you will head off problems before they arise.
	And that's really important.
	Because that way, because you feel bullied by your neighbors, you're kind of bullying your daughter, right?
	And if you were to sit there with your neighbors and, you know, you go and move to some new place and, you know, get to know your neighbors and get to have a good relationship with your neighbors, it makes your life so much easier as a whole.
	So I'm just sort of pointing that out because your mother had a bad relationship with her community.
	She was terrified of them, right?
	So what did she end up doing? She ended up turning around and bullying you because she was expecting to be bullied My mom and my whole family.
	The whole thing.
	My brothers were bullies and my dad just...
	He wanted to be oblivious to it all.
	He didn't care what my mom did.
	He got from work.
	He sat down. He watched TV. He fell asleep.
	He wasn't really involved.
	I would ask him to go out with us and play with me.
	He would always put it off.
	He didn't want to be involved.
	My brothers were real, real bullies.
	One time they taped me to a chair and locked me in a room and just kept me there until my mom found me.
	They would constantly terrorize me and terrorize each other and my mom, I don't know why she kept on having children because she could not control them.
	She couldn't help them. No, no.
	You don't control children.
	What are you talking about? Well, yeah.
	No, you're saying she could not control them.
	Boy, if only she'd been able to control her children.
	No, no, no. This is the split, right?
	So you listen to me. I assume you're into peaceful parenting, right?
	But at the same time, you say, well, the problem with my mom is she couldn't control her children.
	Now, that's not...
	Children are not there to be controlled.
	Come on.
	They're not there to be controlled.
	They're there to be guided.
	They're there to be instructed.
	They're there to be shaped to some degree.
	You can only shape them so much because your kid is the kid you get, right?
	You know the nature of your child is the nature of your child.
	I guess that's why she failed because she tried to control us.
	Right, right.
	And she tried to control you and she tried to control your brothers and your brothers tried to control you and she couldn't, like she could not control herself.
	And your brothers could not control themselves.
	It's self-control that is important in parenting, not the control of your children.
	That is very true.
	So, yeah, stop trying to control your daughter.
	It's your job to create a safe environment for your daughter.
	If you're concerned about your neighbors, it's your job to go downstairs, knock on the door, and have a conversation with them.
	Frankly, I'm...
	I'm tired of it.
	I want to find other options and, you know, what to do with her.
	No, I get that. But the fact that you move away from this apartment doesn't solve that basic question that you need to be proactive in your life about solving problems.
	Because if you're reactive, your kids are going to suffer.
	Which is, like, because you're reactive.
	Oh, well, you can't be too loud.
	The neighbors are going to be upset, right?
	Well, how do you know? Have you talked to them about it?
	Maybe they don't hear. Maybe they don't care.
	Maybe they love the pitter-patter of little feet.
	Maybe they love the sound of children's laughter or whatever.
	Or maybe they listen to music on headphones all day and don't...
	Like, you know what I mean? Just go find out.
	In the next neighborhood, or whatever, right?
	I'm just... There's ways to...
	Now, and of course you may run into real trolls and you've got to be aware of that and that's a reality and there's things you can do about that.
	But I just wanted to point that out.
	Okay. So I'm sorry.
	I know we've been talking for a long time. I want to make sure we get to the subject of the conversation, right?
	Yeah. Okay.
	So you... I know you're not comfortable with criticism.
	This is going to sound critical.
	I don't really mean it that way. No, I... I'm just...
	No, hang on. I'm just pointing something out here that you didn't give me a very straight up email here.
	No. Go on.
	It's fine. It's fine. I want you to know that I know, just so you know that I know, but I'm not mad.
	Oh, the state of the world, right?
	But it's not the state of the world that's troubling you so much, right?
	It's myself, Ben.
	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
	Yeah. Although it is scary what's going on, but I'm scared of myself.
	It is absolutely scary what's going on.
	I think about it.
	Of course, it's kind of my job in a way, so I get all of that.
	But, you know, it's like there's this old show from way back in the day called WKRP in Cincinnati, and this old guy and his middle-aged wife, she gets pregnant unexpectedly, and they're talking about whether to have the baby or not, and he says, these are troubled times.
	Do you know what she says? People have been saying that for 5,000 years.
	And it's kind of true, right?
	I wouldn't be here to have a conversation about it if my mother's parents hadn't decided to have a baby in Germany in 1937.
	Oh my goodness.
	You want to talk troubled times?
	Yeah. Germany, 1937.
	Pretty bad time to have a baby.
	Yeah, that's one of the things that I thought similarly.
	If people had babies in the Great Depression, And, you know, in worse times, you know, how can I? Now, I can deal with the world very quickly, and I can give you the argument that will save your baby if you want to hear it.
	Guaranteed. Okay.
	You ready? Yeah.
	All right. This is going to be the show that your baby listens to in 20 years and saying, man, that guy spent three minutes talking to my mom about this.
	Because you think I'm going to talk about the world.
	I'm not going to talk about the world.
	I'm going to talk about your other children.
	So listen, my friend.
	If you terminate this pregnancy because you're afraid of the world, that fear, because it is now claimed to life, will transfer to your children in such subtle, powerful, and fundamental ways.
	That they will spend the rest of their lives terrified that the world is so bad that their mother terminated a pregnancy.
	That will communicate to them against your will, against your intentions, against your words, against your language.
	It will be there. It will be there every time that you lay the table and you put out two plates for children and you'll say, there's a plate missing.
	And why is there a plate missing?
	There's a plate missing because the world is terrifying.
	And that fear of the world to the point where you will kill a fetus.
	Because of your fear of the world, that fear of the world will transfer to your children.
	And they will grow up so scared of the world that asking them to go out and take on the evildoers and fight for their place in the universe and carve out their Sane square of existence will be an impossible task.
	You will be crippling them, I believe.
	By ending a life out of fear for the world, you will make them so terrified of the world and have such a negative relationship to the world because the world will have killed their sibling.
	The world will be a murderer.
	And you do not want to give your children the impression that the world Is worth killing over.
	That the world is a murderer.
	That is very unfair.
	Now, whether it's adoption or...
	I mean, I can't talk to the others, but in terms of terminating the life, even outside, like, the ethics, we could go back and forth, and I get all of that, but you don't need me to lecture you about anything to do with that.
	I think you need someone to say the effect it has on your other children that you will go out and kill a sibling Because the world is so terrifying.
	And that will for sure cement your fear of the world permanently.
	Because if it turns out the world is not that scary and you terminated a pregnancy, For a fear that was irrational, the amount of guilt that it will give you will be beyond imagination.
	It will be staggering, right?
	So this means once you sacrifice a kid to the evil gods, you can't ever be free of the evil gods, right?
	You understand? Now you're enslaved to them forever.
	If you sacrifice a child to your fear of the world, it will rule you forever.
	And your children. I wanted to say that...
	The reason why I felt such terror when I was there, when I was pregnant with my daughter, when I first knew that I was pregnant, I was 17. My husband wasn't my husband at the time.
	He was 19.
	And we were terrified of it.
	And we thought about, is this an option?
	And we didn't go through with it.
	I said no.
	And then I had her.
	I loved her with all my heart.
	And for a while, I was very, very...
	I felt shame and guilt that I thought about it and I still to this day feel shame and guilt because I don't think I would have lived by myself knowing that I did that and you know I thought that I could go into the clinic and do it.
	I tried to somehow convince myself in my head and you know so did my Stepmom, she tried to convince me in a way she said, no, it's not going to be that bad.
	The past is going to be the past.
	Think about your children now.
	Think about how much money you're going to waste and whatever.
	Waste? Yeah, she was worried about other things that I wasn't worried about.
	I wasn't worried about money, but she was.
	It almost felt like everybody was Trying to tell me that the other option was more logical.
	I knew deep within me that I didn't want to do this.
	And when I stepped into that clinic, I knew I couldn't do this.
	Because I wasn't even going to do it that day.
	It was just a consultation.
	And I freaked out.
	I stormed out.
	I got scared. And it didn't help that I saw somebody who just finished having it and was so high on anesthesia that she didn't even know where she was.
	And she was a very young girl, too.
	It shocked me the most.
	Everything in that place shocked me into coming to terms like, you're about to murder your baby.
	Are you really okay with that?
	And I bursted out crying.
	I couldn't hold my tears anymore and I had to leave.
	And I felt... I felt guilty because the people around me were making the case for that option and...
	Wait, wait, hang on. But why would you feel guilty for the case they were making?
	Because you didn't do it. Well, I felt like I was, that they thought I was making an irrational choice.
	And, you know, that I couldn't handle having another child.
	That I was too weak. That I was going to put more responsibilities into my husband.
	Right. I do want to step up as a mom and not be weak anymore, not be scared of the world or, you know, scared to...
	But this baby is here to cure you of that.
	Because if you say, I'm going to have the baby, and again, I don't really want to get into the discussion of adoption or anything like that.
	Let's just talk about having the baby, right?
	Because that's the life, right?
	But if you have the baby...
	Even with your fear of the world, and we all have it, and we all think about it, you know, what is it going to be like for my daughter to grow up with the reputation that I have and be out there in the world?
	It's something that is important to consider, and it's actually one of the things that helps motivate me to fight so hard for the truth, right?
	But if you have this child, you're basically saying a giant F you, right?
	To the bullies and the fear mongers of the world.
	No, I am not sacrificing life because you tell tall, lurid tales of terror.
	I refuse to kill my womb because you're trying to turn the world into a horror movie.
	I will not let the bad people in the world take the life from my body.
	I will not sacrifice this child on the bloody altars of social terror.
	I don't negotiate with terrorists.
	I don't surrender to criminals.
	And I don't empty my womb for fear of bad people, because then they've already won.
	they have caused me to take a life.
	And how on earth can you fight for your children if you surrender to that degree?
	Thank you.
	I don't really think I could...
	I don't really think I could smile the next day after doing that.
	And take care of my children and have a clear conscience.
	And what if your children one day find out?
	So we talked to my mother-in-law and she told me she had three abortions, two before her first child was born, which is my husband, and one after he was born.
	And he did not know that.
	And he's not a man To take things and, you know, let thoughts torture his mind for a very long time.
	But it told me that shocked him.
	And that made him go like, oh, wow.
	And I don't really want my kids to think of me that way, too, you know.
	Yeah. I don't want them to think, oh, that could have been me.
	If I was inconvenient to you at the moment, that could have been me.
	Look, I mean, I know what you're saying, but I know it's not a matter of inconvenience.
	I also know it's not fundamentally the world as a whole that has you the most concerned.
	So I know that you are in no way as selfish and shallow a person that you would end...
	A fetus's life for inconvenience.
	So I know this is a very, very deep and powerful thing.
	But I'm also of the opinion...
	Some people would call it God.
	I would refer to it as the unconscious.
	What if the baby's here for a reason?
	What if the baby is here for you to stake your claim in this world and stop being afraid?
	What if the baby is here to make that choice of whether we fight or we die, very real and very vivid to you?
	What if the baby is here to give you the strength so that all your children can flourish in this world?
	What if your baby is here to cure you, not to scare you, or to cure you of fear?
	Because, you know, children can do that, right?
	Your daughter running down the hallway Is trying to cure you of your fear of your neighbors.
	You understand? You tried to cure your mother of her fear of her community.
	I tried to cure my mother of her fear of the world.
	Because you keep thinking that you need to control your environment in order to minimize your fear.
	I would argue that your environment is here To have you overcome your fear.
	This baby is coming so that you can learn to love the world.
	Your daughter is running down the hallway so that you can learn to love your neighbors as yourself.
	These are all opportunities.
	It's a muscle that grows through resistance.
	And you can't spend the rest, I mean you could, a lot of people do, spend the rest of their lives hiding from the world.
	People hide in drugs, video games, promiscuity, alcohol, travel.
	But what if it's all here to help you?
	What if it's all here to peel back the layers of fear and expose the lion's heart within?
	What if nature, the universe, God, virtue, necessity, is constantly reaching down to pull you up to a stronger place?
	And all you have to do is grab that hand and pull.
	I thought of that too.
	I thought maybe it would be the motivation to stop being afraid of progress.
	To stop being afraid of the world in general and that People are gonna judge me or hate me or not like being around me.
	Your mother killed her relationship with you out of fear of the world, you understand?
	Yeah. She killed her relationship with you out of fear of the world.
	And now you have a mother-in-law trying to get you to kill a fetus out of fear of the world.
	It's time to break the cycle.
	In my opinion.
	Stop letting fear kill life.
	I agree.
	And you're not alone in this, you understand.
	This is why you got to the very front of the queue, not only because of the urgency of the situation, but we told everyone else to get lost tonight.
	It's all about you.
	It is because there is this urgency, 11 weeks, but there is also, there are so many people out there who are letting fear rob them of life.
	There's a video that came out.
	It's got over 8 million views.
	Some black guy doesn't seem to like white or Asian women that much.
	Some woman, I think, cut him off probably accidentally.
	He says she gave him the finger.
	He followed her to her home.
	He filled her in front of her home.
	He filmed her license plate, put it out there in the world.
	She's terrified. She's terrified because she knows.
	She's a white woman in conflict with a black man, and she's terrified about how this is going to wreck her life.
	And the fear overwhelms her.
	Rather than saying, what are you filming me for?
	This is my home. Don't talk to me, bro.
	So we had a conflict on the road.
	This is what you do. You follow people.
	You stalk them. You follow them home.
	This is wrong. I can't believe people can do that to other people.
	Oh, it's terrible. It's absolutely terrible.
	It's absolutely terrible.
	And her fear, of course, of the world.
	Well, we saw this with the woman who had the dark, right?
	There was another black guy, right?
	There's this guy who his sister, I think, claimed he was a bird watcher.
	Probably was.
	I don't know.
	Whatever, right?
	But there was this conflict, I don't know, a while ago.
	Everything's getting so blurred these days, right?
	But I think this was before George Floyd.
	They always put half of the situation outside to make, you know, the not protective group look bad.
	Right. And this woman was like, you know, really terrified of this black guy and what he might do to her dog and so on.
	Like this fear, it's a very, very big thing.
	And, you know, we're in life.
	The option of just being terrified her whole lives is not really much of an option.
	It's modeling it.
	It's modeling that fear to your children.
	It is bringing the bullying.
	It's bringing the bullying.
	Why did that guy follow the woman home and film her?
	Because he knew, or he had every reason to believe, that she was going to be terrified and freaked out, and she did.
	And he was going to film it.
	He was going to film it.
	And I consider Karen to be a racial slur because it's only ever applied against white women.
	And so, yeah, he was basically calling her a racial slur, filming her, doxing her.
	It's something that Jesse Lee Peterson said, that white people are bringing on this bullying because we just are scared.
	What's our choice? Continue to be scared, fade out of history.
	I can't let myself go out into the world, be scared all the time.
	Why? That's not living.
	No, it's not.
	It's not living. It's not living.
	It's surviving. Barely, right?
	Yeah. And especially once you become a parent, right?
	You simply can't, you know, when my daughter was with me in Australia, and we were in Melbourne, and the hard leftists were attacking the venue that Lauren and I, Lauren Southern and I were speaking in, yeah, I go out and I go look.
	When people get mad at me, I would just stand my ground and listen to them.
	I can't...
	You know, somebody phones in a bomb threat for me to give a speech, I'll go up and give the damn speech.
	What's the choice? Run?
	Hide? Okay, that's one thing, but once you have kids, it's not really an option.
	Because you've now got a stake in the future.
	And you have to model things for your children.
	And so... If you let your fear terminate the pregnancy, you won't be able to model moral courage to your children.
	And then you're basically raising them and throwing them to the wolves, so to speak.
	Because in a world that is increasingly bullying these days, you will be raising them to surrender, as you surrendered.
	And to raise children in a world full of bullies and model life-killing fear to them is raising them to be harmed.
	If that makes sense.
	It does.
	A lot of times it does feel like people around you bully you into having a certain Type of mindset and making decisions that are not really beneficial.
	I never thought that this was going to be beneficial.
	I actually was extremely afraid that this was going to psychologically scar on me after I did it.
	If you want to get the strength though, you've got to stop thinking about yourself.
	Who is it going to harm the most who have the least choice?
	It's your children. My children.
	It's your children. If I get harmed like that, then it's going to trickle down to them.
	If you end a life for fear, the fear transfers to your children.
	Mm-hmm. And more than...
	I'm around them most of the time.
	I'm their primary caregiver.
	I need to stay strong for them and to do the right things.
	I want to practice behavior that they can see.
	Sorry to interrupt, but I would also say, before I forget the thought, that I don't know that there's a lot of accidental pregnancies in this life.
	No. I really don't.
	I know everyone says that there is and oops and blah, blah, blah.
	I mean, you knew what to do to not have a baby and you chose to do the actions that could result in a baby.
	And your husband chose those actions too.
	Yeah. Right?
	So your husband cannot dump this choice on you.
	Because I know you said in the email, my husband said it's my decision.
	No, you made the baby together.
	It's not just your decision.
	But he acted in a manner that could bring life into this world, and if the exploration is not there, at the level of, why did we do this?
	Not, oh, why did we, like, self-castigating or self-accusatory or self-critical, but, like, genuine curiosity.
	Why did we engage in sex that could produce a baby?
	Why? Why?
	Oh, it was an accident.
	Oh, we didn't think... Come on.
	That's such a surface-level thinking that it's not going to help you.
	In fact, it's going to make things worse. Why?
	That's the big question to have your husband.
	Why did we do it? Why?
	Was it so we could have an abortion?
	I don't think so. Because why would you do that to yourself?
	What if you guys, through caution to the wind, rolled the dice because...
	This number three, the Holy Trinity, the third of the Holy Trinity, this number three, this number three might be the one who saves the family, who saves you from the fear, who saves you.
	And also who reveals the stepmom as somebody who's a little messed up.
	Yeah, she is.
	And by little I need a lot.
	Both of our parent and our family life is not really that good.
	We keep as much distance as possible just because we don't they've already affected us so much and we don't want to keep on giving them.
	Although with me saying afraid of things I feel like I am giving I still have what can I say I'm still giving them power, in a way, over me.
	I'm letting what happened in the past control me still.
	I'm getting so exhausted of it.
	I am so exhausted of it.
	It's mentally draining.
	It's physically exhausting.
	I'm just done with being upset and sad all the time.
	I want to enjoy being a mother.
	I really enjoy it.
	Without waking one day and just wanting to stay in bed.
	Not in this feeling of constant self-doubt and not giving myself worth and Thinking that everything I do is wrong or that I'm going to always hurt my children.
	Being afraid of failing.
	I'm so exhausted.
	And as far as the world being scary, it is.
	But it's much better that it's all happening now than 10 years from now.
	Or 20 years from now.
	Which is kind of when it was supposed to happen, you know, when whites were a minority and couldn't do anything and all that.
	But... Now we can engage in a conversation that is actually quite positive.
	And just as you get a little inoculation to cure you from a big disease, we now get to see what communism looks like in real time as it is forming.
	We get to see the start of the cancer without any propaganda.
	And people, it's a very strong possibility that we could be inoculated against this without another world disaster like China or the Soviet Union.
	I really hope so.
	Well, I'm doing my best to try and help that along.
	I really hope that people can see past the propaganda and really see that there's something going on in here that's not right.
	Yeah, because people are always nagging at me like, hey man, how come you were interested in Trump's election?
	It's like, because if Trump gets in, he exposes the left.
	It's like saying, why do you want to turn the light off if you're hunting a mouse in your kitchen?
	Why do you want to turn the light on if you're hunting your mouse in a kitchen?
	Because you can't see it otherwise.
	Because this creeping communism shit that was going on since the 1950s has been too subtle and too gradational for people to notice.
	Trump gets in, they go freaking nuts because he's an anti-communist.
	So he exposes them.
	By exposing them, They can no longer think that it's some puppy.
	It's now a wolf right in their house.
	And they can't miss it.
	So although I get it's alarming, I get all of that for sure.
	But now this has been a giant red pill for millions and millions and millions of people in the West.
	To look at this and say, hey, do you feel like a Catter-sponsored warlord being in control of your neighborhood?
	A guy who's this Raz guy who's been involved in videos where they...
	Simulate the gang rape of white women by black men.
	I mean, do you want this in your life?
	Do you want this in your neighborhood?
	Do you want an autonomous zone to curl its fist around your neighborhood?
	Is that how you want to wake up tomorrow?
	How are you enjoying having fireworks all night in New York City?
	Well, because it's a form of sleep deprivation and they're also conditioning the population to get used to the real explosions coming down the road.
	You say, okay, well, this is really bad.
	Yeah. But you know what's important if you're going to get cancer?
	That you detect it really early.
	And for sure this cancer was coming.
	Now we've got early detection because of Trump.
	I talked about this years ago.
	Now we've got early detection because of Trump.
	Now we can cure.
	If you don't catch the cancer until it's metastasized, until it's gone all over your body, you're dead.
	You're a dead man walking. If Hillary had gotten in, she would have just ushered this stuff along nice and easy, and it would have metastasized to the point where it couldn't before.
	Now, there's a chance.
	And that was the purpose of Trump.
	Turn the light on.
	You can see what's actually around you.
	And catch it early.
	I never understood how people could...
	I could look at her and think that she was genuine.
	Well, that's terrifying too, right?
	But forget about her.
	I want you to look at your mom.
	You know? I mean, you're selling me on your mom.
	Who's done more harm to you, Hillary Clinton or your mom?
	My mother. I know, and you're giving all these get-out-of-jail-free cards to your mom, so to hell with Hillary.
	Focus on momery. I think that's the power of females in a way.
	Manipulate you in a way that you are going to feel like it's your fault.
	And you're in the blame when, you know, it's the other way around.
	Right, right. My mother was always very sneaky.
	Communism is feminism on steroids or female nature on steroids in the same way that fascism is male nature on steroids.
	Alright, so listen, let's not get too abstract.
	Is that at least a useful way to begin approaching this question or this issue?
	Is it a helpful framework?
	It is. I've been thinking a lot of the same things, not in that type of a manner, but I have.
	Everything has gone through my head on how much it would cost, on how this is going to morally affect my family.
	And, uh, it's been very stressful because I don't think this is just my decision, like you said.
	It's a part with my husband and I haven't really gotten that feedback because, you know, he was raised by a single mom too for a long time, so...
	Right. What's the most popular thing, you know, is the woman's choice, which, you know, it wasn't only my choice because I made...
	You know, this child with you.
	So, you know, you have a part in this, too.
	Right. Will you keep me posted about your decision?
	Yes, I will. I don't think I'm going to go through it, going to the clinic anymore.
	I think that if I do go through with this, it's going to be psychologically damaging to my whole family.
	I love all my children.
	I really do. And I don't think this one's going to be damaging.
	All right. Well, listen, I really appreciate your call.
	If your husband wants to chat, I'm certainly happy to listen if there's anything I can do about that.
	But I just can't tell you.
	I mean, I feel very humbled and honored by the fact that you would trust me with such an important thing in your life.
	And I just admire you so enormously.
	having the strength and the courage to reach out to something that can be helpful.
	I think it's helpful.
	And for what you have survived and what you have committed to improving in your life, it's really powerful.
	It's really magnificent.
	I've always said I think there should be the greatest medals for those who've overcome the greatest odds.
	And to have a childhood like this and to be where you are and to have the sensitivity to life and the commitment to great parenting that you have is noble beyond words.
	And I just really wanted to just tell you how much I admire and appreciate you for that.
	Thank you.
	All right. She may have left.
	She may have left. All right. Well, she can hear this, I guess, in the post.
	So thanks, everyone, so much for listening.
	Freedomain.com forward slash donate if you would like to help out the show.
	I think you can pretty much see the kind of work that we're doing here.
	So I appreciate everyone's support.
	That has gotten us to this place on this extraordinarily challenging year, freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	And yeah, I'll take a short break and then we'll do a bit of feedback on the show.
	I kind of wanted to do a bit of a post-mortem on the show because they kind of come and go.
	And then I wait for the comments sometimes quite a bit later.
	Lots of love from you here, and I will take a couple minutes, and then I'll join everyone in the call-in, and we'll talk about what we thought.
	So lots of love from here.
	I'll talk to you guys soon.
	Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
	And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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