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Sept. 2, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:19:07
AYN RAND AND THE ETHICS OF SEX - FREEDOMAIN CALL IN
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Hey everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
I hope you're doing well. I hope you are enjoying this fine Sunday close to the ass end of August and enjoying the light tentacles of wintry slitheriness that are coming through the summer haze of heat.
And a couple of housekeeping notes, of course.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Pleased to help out with the show.
As you know, we have taken a pretty significant number of body blows over the last six, eight months.
But we are soldiering on, as we must, I suppose.
So, fredomain.com forward slash donate.
That's the ask. The offer, of course, is please to check out my free audiobook, fdurl.com forward slash almost, fdurl.com forward slash almost.
And listen, thanks everyone so much who wrote back to me after I sent my newsletter out yesterday asking how you all are doing and dipping my toe into the prognostication pool, making a couple of guesses about how things are going to go.
And philosophy generally means being sorry that you're right.
So I hope I'm wrong, but we will see.
Thanks to everyone who replied.
I actually, I'm going to do something, which is I get so many emails.
I'm actually just going to start replying to them.
Of course, no names or anything like that, but just replying to them.
So if you did write to me, please check out when I do the replies and you will probably be in there somewhere.
So I hope that you will find that a useful way.
I'm a bit of the hub of the wheel, and you fine listeners are the spokes, so to speak.
I guess I'm the spokesperson. Anyway, let's not milk that analogy too hard.
But today, we are chatting mostly, I guess, with our We're good to go.
If you ever see a duck, it looks like it's gliding across the surface of a lake while the legs are working madly underneath.
Well, I guess I'm the duck and James are the legs.
So he is working his level best to keep everything flowing, particularly in a time of significant technical disruption when YouTube's gone down, when Twitter has gone down and other issues are plaguing the show.
It is James who keeps it going, and I owe him an eternal debt for that, and I hope that you will join me in appreciating him for that.
So, with that having been said, let us move on with the questions.
All right, thank you very much for that, Steph.
I really appreciate that. It goes into what you've said several times before about not taking people for granted, and I do appreciate that you live your state of value.
So, the first question up today, we have a listener on the Discord who's not in the call right now.
I'd like to hear your thoughts on this.
He writes, I'm rereading The Fountainhead for the first time since listening to your shows.
I'm up to the part where Dominique tells Rourke she's going to marry Winand.
She seems monstrous to me, a rich white girl throwing an intellectual tantrum.
Please help me understand why she is doing what she is doing in the novel.
Well, I'll do my best, although I will say that Dominique, kind of aptly named, of course, but Dominique is a real puzzle.
And Ayn Rand herself got these questions fairly often regarding, like, what the hell's up with the Big D? So, for those of you who don't know, and, you know, I feel it's safe to do a spoiler on a novel that came out in the 1940s, but it's not going to be big spoilers for the novel as a whole, but Dominique is a...
A sort of rich, entitled, beautiful, savage kind of woman and, you know, full of dripping contempt and hostility and so on.
And to Ayn Rand's credit for self-knowledge, she said that Dominique Francon is me on a bad day or a crabby day or whatever, right?
So this is something that Ayn Rand pulled deep from within herself and created a character and The hero of the novel, Howard Rourke, is a man of, you know, shining, quicksilver, almost abstract, Christ-like perfection of integrity, to the point where he's offered a massive amount.
He's an architect, right? And Ayn Rand worked in an architect's office for a number of years to get things right, and it's a really beautiful novel that way.
And a friend of mine, who became an architect, was very cynical about this novel, which is a real shame, because he could have learned a lot, but It's a novel that really does redefine the question of selfishness, and it had a huge impact on me.
It is probably one of the top three novels that's impacted me.
And there's a great scene in the novel, which I reread every decade or so, but there's a great scene where Howard Rourke is offered an enormous amount of money to compromise his vision of how a house should be built, of how a building should be built.
And, I mean, he's facing absolute poverty if he doesn't get this job.
And he gets 90% of what he wants by taking this job.
But what he does is because they want him to compromise in an area that he doesn't want to compromise in.
Because, you know, he points this out.
He says, listen, there are all these stupid columns in architecture.
Like, why are there these columns?
And why do they have those little...
I don't know how to call them, these like vertical hollows, you know, that go round and round the columns.
And he says, well, why do we have these things?
Why do these things exist in the architectural world?
Why does every house have to have these giant columns with these flutings that go up and down the columns?
And, well, the reason is because these columns were originally made of wood.
And wood had to be bent in that particular fashion so that it could...
Support extra weight.
Now, when they switched to stone, they just kept these flutings, these vertical slight depressions, because they were mirroring the way that the wooden columns had to be.
And then they would do the same in marble, and then they would do the same in...
And it's like there's no reason for it at all.
Things aren't being reinvented based upon current need and current capabilities.
You don't need those flutings if you're using stone rather than wood.
But you keep them because that's just the way columns are supposed to look.
That's a very powerful point, and I remember reading that when I was 16 or so, and just like, yeah!
Why do we have all of these things that we inherit and never reinvent, right?
Why do we have these things that we inherit and never reinvent?
And that gave me sort of this intellectual spark or this willingness or willpower to blank slate the shit out of everything, right?
Because that's really what we should be doing when we think for ourselves, is erasing history.
Now, erasing history sounds bad.
It sounds like we're toppling statues and all of that.
I don't mean forgetting your history or anything, but saying, well, what if I were to think from scratch?
Now, I think it's important to learn from history, it's important to recognize history, and it's important to be informed and respect the lessons of history.
I mean, that's what conservatism is to some degree.
Conservatism is saying we don't just throw out everything without understanding why it was there in the first place.
And... That's something that somebody wrote to me.
It's a very powerful email when I was talking recently about my mom and God and why I have such a tough time with religion and Christianity.
And somebody wrote to me and said, Steph, you don't seem to get the Christian thing at all.
Number one, your mother had free will but were constantly tempted to immorality.
And she failed that test and became immoral, became evil.
And that's perfectly encapsulated within Christianity.
And the second thing that he said was, with regards to what I talked about, sort of burden of colonialism and civilizing the world, which turned out to be impossible, he said that the Old Testament in particular is continually talking about how different tribes are constantly at war, that diversity plus proximity equals war.
And that's also very well encapsulated within Christianity.
And I just wanted to sort of mention that, that I am engaged in these great conversations with people.
So when it came to something like ethics, right?
Okay, well, what happens if you simply wipe the slate clean and start from scratch?
With respect and with an acknowledgement of history.
It's really, really important, right?
And I've said this a million times, I mentioned it again for the newer listeners, that Aristotle said, I don't care what your system of ethics is, if it can be used to prove that murder is good, you've made a mistake.
So, with UPB... I wanted to respect the historical and near universal, at least for the citizens, ban on rape, theft, assault and murder.
So I wanted to respect the history of ethics to the point where I was not going to come up with a theory of ethics that would contradict virtue's most basic commandments.
But to get there, I was willing to be as original as humanly possible and started with a blank slate.
It's the same thing with me.
All the stuff that I get in, quote, trouble for, right?
All the stuff I get in trouble for is all related to the blank slate stuff.
Which is kind of funny because the left claims that there is a blank slate for humanity and everything's environmental and so on, right?
But so for me, it was, okay, well, what if...
Family of origin relationships are not absolute and obligated and unavoidable and blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah.
What if they could be chosen, right?
That's a very important question.
What if they were voluntary?
And what if taxation changed to something voluntary and so on, right?
This is all very important.
Hang on a sec, kind of buzzing overhead.
It's just so people don't imagine that I'm doing a show while I'm about to jump out of an airplane with Tom Cruise and Rob, whatever his name is, Cordroy?
Anyway, so the blank slate stuff for me is, okay, what if values matter more than the inertia of history?
What if original thought trumps what we have inherited from the past?
Because, you know, what we've inherited in the past is a certain view of ethics And what we've inherited from the past is, well, you always have to see your family, no matter how abusive they are, and so on.
And I'm like, okay, well, what if this is not true?
It's the same thing with my conception of human rights.
Because that's just a word that gets so abused, it's ridiculous.
Everything becomes a right. Everything is twisted and tormented on this altar of human rights.
And what if there's another way of looking at it?
And this is when I started coming up with the idea of human properties rather than human rights.
The rights don't exist.
Properties do. So, in The Fountainhead, there is this focus on not being carried like a cork on a tsunami from the cascading waves of history.
And that's really important.
And Ayn Rand, of course, did that with the novel format as a whole.
And it's very old, in a sense, what Ayn Rand did with the novel.
The novel has always been torn, storytelling has always been torn between entertainment and instruction.
There's an old saying, a novel is a chance to try another man's life on for size.
And novels...
If you look at entertaining without instruction, you look at this empty-headed, low-rent Marvel stuff, and the DC stuff, and the endless comic book mining of Robert Downey Jr.'s insouciate charms and rather empty life.
And in the beginning, stories were instructional.
Stories were instructional.
Think of the story of the Garden of Eden, which was one of the first podcasts I did, it's very instructional.
The Bible is full of stories, parables, allegories, short stories, I suppose, although the thing might be considered a giant story, and it's instructional.
Morally instructional.
Moral instruction was the key.
Now, the novel started as a form of moral instruction.
That's very important. It's the same thing with Shakespeare.
Shakespeare, Dickens as well.
Dickens, of course, being the preeminent novelist in the world, in history.
But Shakespeare, typically, the story is that there's a hero who has a fatal flaw, and that fatal flaw causes his downfall, which is a way of scaring you off from pursuing whatever that fatal flaw is.
Everybody has a susceptibility.
Everybody has a fatal flaw.
Mine is to be too abstract and not see things manifesting on the ground.
But everybody has these challenges.
We all do. And sometimes there's more than one.
And novels are a way of scaring you into avoiding your fatal flaws, or at least wrestling with and managing them.
The fatal flaw, of course, for Christianity being sin.
The fatal flaw for Hamlet being indecisiveness.
The fatal flaw for Macbeth being ambition.
And so on, right?
And so the novel was for...
200 years, 150 years, instructional.
And one of the great lamented losses of this instruction was the novel, because women are fantastic at writing novels.
It's one of the areas like high fashion and pornography where women generally tend to out-earn men.
And it used to be the case that novels would remind women of the fall of their sexual market value.
When the bloom is off the rose, and there would be, of course, endless stories of women who were tempted by a shallow, pretty, rich man who was not a good partner or father for her children, and then some more plain but sensible fellow would come along.
I mean, this is the story of clerks, Kevin Smith's breakout.
Film where there's one girl who's hot and dangerous and one girl who, as the long-haired creepy sidekick says, you know, she brings you lasagna.
She helps you study for exams.
She's like a good, nice girl.
Why are you chasing after this crazy, pretty dangerous, right?
Shiny versus solid.
That's the difference, right?
Because, you know, your penis wants hot and your children want solid.
Your future children want solid.
And so there was a lot of...
Novels that came out in the 19th century, late 18th, 19th century, which were about don't chase the high-status narcissist.
I guess we've got an update of that with the podcast series.
I think it's also on Netflix called Dirty John, which is well worth checking out from the LA Times, I think.
And so women would be warned about using or burning up their youth and beauty in pursuit of men who weren't suitable as long-term life partners and fathers for their children.
Instructional. Instructional.
Like if you ever watch America's Funniest Home Videos, you know not to buy those weird little walkie devices that spin people around and crash them into their oven on a regular basis.
Just not a good idea as a whole, or I guess...
Don't buy an electric bike and don't read the instruction, as Simon Cowell tweeted after he broke his back recently.
Instructional. Can you avoid particular mistakes?
And then what happened was, and this really was shortly after the rise of Marxism, you got extreme naturalism.
So, of course, if you look at...
Something like Shakespeare.
Nobody speaks in iambic pentameter.
Nobody comes up with these beautiful poetic lines.
I try, obviously, but Shakespeare on the fly is a wee bit of a challenge.
And so we're not supposed to be realistic.
I mean, Shakespeare's characters are about as realistic as Marvel characters, the superheroes of syntax.
But they were supposed to get to the essence of things, in the same way that your dreams are not realistic.
You know, you defy physics and time and age and all of that and place and so on.
So your dreams are not realistic, but they get to the very essence of things.
And with the rise of Marxism, with the rise of socialism, progressive movement and so on, what happened was the artists began turning from the ideal to the mundane.
And you get this, you know, Shirley Valentine stuff where it's all kitchen sink stuff and it's, you know, the poor and the average did show up in Shakespeare's plays, but usually as comic relief and as a way of appealing to the cheap seats in the back and all of that.
But it turned relentlessly into the small, the...
John Osborne's Look Back in Anger kind of stuff where, you know, people behaving badly, nobody's a hero, and generally they replace morality with comedy, which is a sure sign of a decadent society.
Because, you know, there are things to laugh at in the world for sure, and humor is a good thing, but when you laugh at everything, you value nothing, and your life goes from angel to mammal in about a generation.
So, Ayn Rand was doing with her novels what novels used to do, which is to be high forms of moral instruction that employ drama, idealism, and pathos in order to help people avoid terrible mistakes.
So when Howard Rourke, the architect and hero of the Fountainhead, is offered a career-saving, highly lucrative contract in order to compromise mildly his vision of how a building should be.
He says, no. After great effort.
I mean, Ayn Rand doesn't say it's easy.
And it wasn't for her, of course, right?
And he said, no, I'm not going to compromise it.
And A frustrated man says, stop being so selfless.
Stop being a slave to your ideals.
And Howard Rourke turns to him and says, that was the most selfish act you'll ever see anyone do, probably.
That it is profoundly selfish to avoid compromising on a vision.
To avoid compromising on a vision.
You either do it or you don't do it.
But you don't compromise it.
Which is one reason why I'm not on political commentary at the moment.
Are people getting gunned down in Portland?
Don't think that's going to have an effect on political commentary?
Well, of course it will. If you can't do it the way you want to do it, don't do it at all.
And so it's a profound...
And there's a really good reading of it in Audible.
Which you should check out.
It's a great site for audiobooks.
And Dominique Francant is a rich bitch, basically.
A rich, spoiled, entitled, aggressive woman who is so ridiculously high-status, she is the female equivalent of Christian Grey from Fifty Shades of Grey, right?
Like, every conceivable high-status thing That a man could have is there.
And because he's so high status, high status comes innately with cruelty most times, right?
If you're single. If you're high status and you get married, then you're off the market and you don't have to have, you know, what they call the resting bitch face, right?
The resting bitch face is a woman who's highly attractive.
And high status.
She wishes to put out her greatest plumage, right?
So she's going to sit there, you know, Jennifer Garner alias style in a bikini by a pool.
She's going to dress to the nines.
She's going to put on her makeup. She's going to look fabulous.
And that's going to attract a whole bunch of men.
But she doesn't want to attract a whole bunch of men.
She wants to attract a very few, very small, very select number of men.
The high status males.
And... We're good to go.
In order to repel the 99.9% of men that she doesn't want to have anything to do with, and if they start clustering around her, then they're going to shield her from view of the alpha male that she really wants to exploit her natural given resources in order to attract, right? To bond with, to gain access to his resources, right?
And so great beauty, great attractiveness, plus great cruelty tend to go hand in hand, and Howard Rourke is not attractive physically.
He's red-headed and tall and slender.
Great figure for badminton, one guy says.
You should play! And most people don't find him attractive, although those who do find him attractive find him enormously attractive.
And so, yeah, he's not physically beautiful.
But Dominique is...
What do they call her? Sally Ann or Nancy Sue or something like that, like the ultimate character in Star Trek who is perfect at everything and does everything brilliantly and all that.
And so Dominique Francon is young, absolutely beautiful, a perfect figure, great poise, great intelligence, great wit, good capacity for great charm.
So she is the ultimate alpha female in the story.
And she didn't earn, notably, she didn't earn any of this, right?
It's kind of important. I mean, you can say, well, she diets or whatever.
I mean, as Ayn Rand did, although Ayn Rand tragically dieted with the help of speed and amphetamines, which she was on for decades and did not produce the most stable or pleasant personality over time.
And I think it was a real shame.
You could say, well, she didn't really know, and it wasn't really known much about the dangers of this kind of stuff.
But, you know, I think speed combined with smoking and combined with a lack of exercise, combined with, you know, sitting constantly like Gollum hunched over a typewriter probably was not great for her general soaring of spirit lifestyle.
But Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead, she didn't earn a damn thing.
She was born beautiful. She was born to a wealthy family.
She didn't need a job.
She didn't need any of it.
And so she was in possession of just about everything that a man could want, right?
A beauty, poise, status.
And so she has in her the capacity, and it's not just the capacity, but the enactment of great cruelty, right?
Great cruelty. She's relentlessly difficult, hot-tempered, bad-tempered, you name it.
And that's, of course, exactly as you would expect.
I remember many years ago seeing, I think it was Elizabeth Hurley.
Mary Sue. Thanks, James.
See? Always helping me, right? Mary Sue.
And there's an equivalent for males as well.
That's the Star Trek character who does everything perfectly, right?
I always think it's someone on Gilligan's Island, but yeah.
Thank you. Appreciate that.
It's a good way of putting it. Wesley Crusher.
Oh, Lord. Let's not get into that debate.
Poor guy. Poor guy.
You give a character like that, it's just going to be annoying no matter what.
I mean, he was good in the Stephen King novel, a novella that was adapted with Keith Sutherland and a couple other ones, Stand By Me.
Anyway. So...
When you see great beauty, you will almost always see it co-joined with great cruelty.
I saw a video of Elizabeth Hurley.
Somebody was coming up to talk to Elizabeth Hurley when she was in her prime.
And she's still, of course, a very attractive woman.
Because, you know, you can Ukrainian up those Easter eggs to the point where they're shiny on the outside, even though they're empty on the inside.
And she just had this, you know, this look of disdain, this look of contempt, this look of hostility, this look of like...
And this is a way of testing a man's self-confidence.
It's a way of testing a man's self-confidence.
In other words, if a man goes up and doesn't fundamentally care that she is dripping with contempt and hostility towards him, then she may be interested.
Because that shows, I mean, a semi-sociopathic lack of regard to social cues and it shows an overweening confidence, right?
The odd confidence, like that George Costanza thing where, I am bald, I'm fat, I'm unemployed, and I live with my mother.
Let's go out sometime. You know, there's confidence, right?
If my evidence I have is wrong, I just do the opposite and it'll be perfect.
So yeah, she's cruel.
She's cruel because she's looking for a man who is going to be someone she can surrender to.
Now, this was one of Ayn Rand's more controversial theories, which I'll touch on here.
I'm not going to talk about how much I agree or disagree.
I just want to, you know, look at the idea for itself.
So she said that men, a woman always wants a man to surrender to.
And a man better be worth it.
And this is, of course, called the shit test by some of the men's rights or the...
MGTOW movement, guys, and so on, right?
Which is the test.
The test. Are you worthy of me surrendering to?
Now, this, of course, is pretty important.
So, if you look at the genes of the alpha female, the genes for the alpha female know that they're sitting on a goldmine.
Because all of the things that are considered attractive in the alpha female are things that bespeak of good genetic health.
So, of course... She's sitting on a goldmine.
Her ass, so to speak, right?
She's sitting on a goldmine. And so, when you're sitting on a goldmine, if you are in a seller's market, then you try and bid up as much as humanly possible.
Of course you do, right? I mean, if anyone sold a house in a hot market, you know.
You just wait for the office to pour in.
You play with people against each other.
You do all this kind of stuff, right? Kind of inevitable.
And there's nothing wrong with it. Nothing wrong with it.
Now, if you of course think that you yourself are somehow worth something because you have inherited something, Then that's a problem.
And I have this issue and I get into so much trouble from people, but I don't care.
Flurry. I either do it my way or I don't do it at all.
I either do it the right way, according to my integrity, or I don't do it at all.
And so the people who are like, yeah, Western civilization is the best.
It's like, yeah, Western civilization is pretty damn good.
Well, not so much anymore, but it was pretty damn good for a while and we had a lot of momentum, but you didn't earn that.
And people who want to talk about racial pride, it's like, no, you didn't earn the race that you were born into.
You've got to add to glory in order to experience legitimate pride.
I happened to be born with a pretty good head on my shoulders.
I happened to be born with a Relatively pleasant speaking voice and an interesting accent.
I wasn't born with it, but it went that way.
And probably a little bit more moral courage than your average bear.
And a great capacity for on-the-fly analogies and perceptive understanding of human dynamics.
Things that I've worked on some of it, but a lot of it is kind of native.
Now, none of that makes me worth a damn thing.
You know, it's like I was born with blue eyes.
Some people find that attractive.
That doesn't have a damn thing to do with value that I can take pride in.
I didn't earn any of that.
You know, that one of the stars of Black Panther just died in his 40s of colon cancer.
I mean, awful, terrible, you know, talented guy, good actor.
Looked a picture of health, as Bill Mitchell said.
And a couple of years ago, he got colon cancer.
He continued to work, and he just died a couple of days ago.
I got cancer in my 40s, and I'm fine.
I didn't earn it. It could have as easily gone.
He could have easily had what I had, so to speak, and I could have had what he had.
The fact that I'm still north of the six feet dirt nap and yammering away on a show, I didn't earn that.
I mean, yeah, I was healthy.
He was healthy. Yeah, I took treatment.
He took treatment. And he just, he rolled snake eyes and I rolled, as far as cancer goes, kind of a natural 20.
Other than some, it doesn't really matter.
Very few long-term effects from that.
His long-term effect is eternal, which is to not be around.
And, you know, heart goes out to him, goes out to his family.
Very, very sad thing. I didn't earn getting better.
Yeah, I followed instructions.
Yeah, I was pretty healthy beforehand.
But lots of people do that and don't make it.
I was just bloody lucky. And I think I had very good doctors.
Thank you, Oklahoma Surgery Center, again.
I sent them gift baskets.
So... You just inherit stuff.
It's very easy, it's very tempting to take pride in all of that.
Like all the rich Instagram kids posting on their yachts or whatever it is, like, you didn't earn that.
You didn't earn that. Kardashian kids, they didn't earn that stuff.
So, Dominique is sitting on a goldmine of obvious signs of genetic fitness.
Even features, physical beauty, good Figure, intelligence, wit, and even some of the aspects of her personality that are more caustic, some of them arise.
You know, if you have ten bars of gold, you don't leave them on your lawn.
And if you're sitting on the genetic goldmine of high-status reproductive fitness, you have to surround it with some protection, and that protection is caustic hostility.
And that's the essence of her personality.
Now, some of this was wish fulfillment on Ayn Rand's part.
Ayn Rand did not feel that she was very attractive.
She liked her legs as a feature, and when she was having this sordid affair with Nathaniel Brandon, when he was in his 30s or 40s, and she was in her 60s, I think it was, and she would lift up her legs and say, well, at least my legs are pretty.
But of course, whatever attractiveness she had when she was younger...
Was pretty skated out by, you know, years of lack of exercise and constant smoking and the other bad habits that she had.
So yeah, she did turn a bit Gollum-like later on in life.
And she had the smoky Russian voice.
You know, I remember when I first saw her being interviewed many years ago, I was actually kind of appalled.
She seemed kind of suspicious and hostile and so on.
But then, of course, as I have gone through my own particular trials and tribulations for spelling the truth, for telling the truth, sorry, and spelling, I suppose, I understand more what she was saying.
I understand a lot more what she was going through and why she had such suspicion and hostility towards being interviewed.
Dick Cavett did a pretty good interview with her.
I think she was also on with Phil Donahue and a couple other people.
Yeah, it was a pretty...
It was not... But of course, I read the novels she wrote when she still had youthful optimism, but then I saw her being interviewed when the years and decades had pounded her down to the point where she ended up pretty pissed off at the world for reasons I can...
For reasons that I can understand and perhaps even experience at times.
So I'm, you know, still working on keeping the sunshine of my positivity, but I can certainly understand that the eclipse that sits in front of the sun sometimes between you and your joy can sometimes become permanent.
And it's something you've got to keep that moon moving, man.
You've got to keep that moon moving and you've got to keep looking for the brightness on the other side of the diamond ring in the night sky.
So... Dominique...
She is mammalian.
She is not an idealized human being.
She doesn't have abstract virtues yet.
She has a purity of motive, hers being the guarding of high genetic fitness.
And, of course, also the high genetic fitness that gives women their particular value when they're young is something that fades away.
And it's pretty brutal when it does, and I'm not going to go into this in any great detail because I've talked about it a bunch of times before, but women want to keep that male attention.
Women want to keep that male attention.
I mean, imagine if you have a house, you're selling a beautiful house, you get millions and millions of dollars for it, you know, Meghan Markle kind of money, or what is it, Justin Bieber just moved into a house that's like $28 million US or something crazy like that, right? So let's say that you have a house.
It's beautiful. But it's aging incredibly rapidly.
Imagine there's some time bubble that causes it to fast forward.
And, you know, in 10 or 15 years, it's going to be a wreck.
And the value of it's going to plummet.
And let's say that also happens to the value of the land as well.
Now, you can paint it.
You can prop things up. You can get some new furniture.
You can... It gets the minor repairs done, but the whole structure is just falling apart.
Okay, so people come in and they want to offer all this money for your house.
Five million dollars, ten million dollars, the bidding's going through the roof.
You're thrilled, you're excited, you're happy getting all this attention.
But of course, you only get this attention because your house is worth so much.
And as your house begins to decay in value, and the bids become fewer and far between, fewer and further between, there we go.
It's tough. You're kind of poised on a fulcrum, on a tipping point.
Do you continue to expect as much money for your crumbling house?
Which, now you look back and you say, man, I should have sold it when I was going to get $10 million for this house.
Now. I got an offer for 7.5, but I'm sure I'm going to get another offer for 8.
And I'm thinking, I'm not thinking 7.5 is a good number.
I'm thinking that it's 2.5 less than 10, and that's really bad.
And so you keep waiting.
And then the offers get fewer and far further between.
And it goes down to 2 million, 1 million, 500,000.
And then, no bids come in at all.
And you're sitting on this wrecked house.
You can't fix it. You can't prop it up.
There's no point putting another coat of paint on it because there's holes in the wall.
And the amount of savage regret and self-recrimination that you're going to experience is almost beyond words.
Men, we don't get it.
I can get it like an abstract thing like I'm talking about here, an analogy.
I don't get it. I don't get the kind of hell-sent request.
Sorry. I don't get the kind of hell-sent regret that occurs for a woman north of 40 when she's trying to milk the fallen-over cow of her youthful sexual appeal, her romantic appeal, and then realizes that it was never about her.
It was only and forever about the eggs.
It was only and forever about the sex.
That is something that novels used to really help out with.
They used to really remind women of this.
You know, don't waste your youth.
Lock down the man, because you're going to get old, and the value of your house is going to crash.
You're born in the inheritance of a house worth $10 million.
If you're a high-status woman, I mean, the average woman is born with the equivalent of a house worth of half a million to a million dollars.
Because, you know, a lot of people over the course of their career, they might make a million dollars, they might make a little bit more, and they'll give half of it to a woman.
If she's going to raise his kids and keep his house, and maybe more than half, right?
Women control 80% of domestic spending.
Decisions, so women get a huge amount of money in return for raising the house, transmitting the culture, schooling the kids, raising the kids, and so on, right?
Huge amount of money. But only for so long, right?
Only for so long. So Dominique is sitting on this fundamental reality of That she's about as alpha a female as you can get.
Now, Ayn Rand, as I said before, she said no woman could be a good president of the United States because she wouldn't have anyone to look up to.
She wouldn't have anyone who could kind of contain her personality, and she wouldn't have anyone to worship.
And she was an unapologetic, unabashed, avowed man worshiper, male worshiper.
And the story of the women in, well, certainly the two big ones, the Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, the story of the women, it's a story of incredibly powerful and competent, I wouldn't say Dominique was particularly competent, although she was good at what she did.
She became a newspaper columnist and did a good job with, you know, training or anything, right?
So she was competent.
I mean, not as competent as Daphne Taggart, who ran a whole railroad and so on, which she had inherited but worked very hard to maintain.
So she needed a man to look up to.
And Dominique's frustration and hostility and tension arises from the fact that the house is aging and she's not getting any good bids.
Nobody can afford her house, so to speak.
So if you're sitting on a house worth $10 million and someone comes on and says, I'll give you $175,000 for it, I mean, it's like, come on, dude, give me a break, right?
Like how out of reality, how out of touch could you possibly be to think that's going to play, right?
So none of the men are worthy of her.
None of the men can make an offer on the house of Dominique.
But... She's running out of time.
She's not, as the old saying goes, as yet of a certain age, but she's running out of time.
Now, Howard Rourke comes along, and the first thing that Dominique wants to do is to try to destroy him.
Why? Why?
Because if he is worthy of her, he will not be destroyed.
He will not be destroyed.
She will try to destroy him to see if he's worthy of her.
Now, the way this used to work, of course, is that men would try to destroy each other and the last man standing got the alpha female.
But Dominique wants to try and destroy him to find out if he's got the self-confidence and strength enough to earn her genetic gifts to bid and buy her house.
So she aligns herself with his enemies.
In this particular instance, she marries one of his enemies.
Now this, of course, is highly exaggerated, and it is, you know, it's as realistic as iambic pentameter in Shakespeare.
But, of course, the point is not to be realistic.
The point is to instruct.
And nothing instructs like extremities.
Nothing instructs like extremities.
Which is why everybody goes to Nazi, white supremacists, all because, you know, those things are reprehensible and so they are extremities and if you can attach them to people, right?
A guy who just got shot in Portland last night, a Trump supporter.
I think 4chan already found the guy who shot him.
And everyone's cheering. The left who were there, a lot of people there were cheering.
Not everyone, a lot of people were cheering.
He was a prayer patriot, I think they referred to him as, which is Christianity plus patriotism, which is holy water to some of these groups.
You know, I'm not going to mourn the death of a Nazi.
Because they thought it was one of theirs.
They thought it was a Trump supporter who killed a leftist.
It turned out it was a leftist who executed a Trump supporter.
And they were, you know...
Because they've categorized people as Nazis.
And therefore their death can be celebrated.
Which is kind of exactly what Nazis did.
But anyway. So...
She wishes...
To...
Try to destroy him for two reasons.
Number one... It's the shit test, right?
Are you worthy of the house of Dominique?
And number two, what is going to win, good or evil?
Ah, now that is really fascinating stuff.
What is going to win, good or evil?
See, women as a whole, and this is all generalizations, lots of exceptions, but women as a whole are the weathervane of the battle between good and evil.
Women will tell you Very clearly, who's going to win, good or evil?
Now, if women tend to be flocking towards good guys, if they look up to good guys, if they will try and lock down good guys, that's because they believe good is going to win.
But women, as a whole, Are more geared towards security and survival than abstract values.
And there's nothing wrong with that.
It's not a criticism. It's not a negative.
It's because they have to provide for their children.
And children need the conveyor belt of continual resources.
And genetics don't care about good or evil.
Fundamentally, it only cares about reproduction.
Now, when women start idolizing the bad boy...
Then you know that bad is going to win.
Or at least that's the general perception, and it probably is there for a very good reason.
Women have very good radar as to the moral arc or the pendulum of morality in society.
So, if you look at something like, you know, sort of starting in the 70s with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, you had this whole issue of, you know, rap culture.
It was no longer...
People like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte or, of course, a little later, Denzel Washington and, like, you know, honorable—I mean, I know Harry Belafonte went totally lefty-nutsy and all that, but, you know, when he was younger and shirtless, you know, more honorable, decent black figures, black patriarchs. And A Raisin in the Sun is a play I vividly remember reading when I was in grade 10 or 11.
That money was made from my daddy's blood!
And there was a moral fight in this environment.
and the good guys won in um the sydney potter movies and uh and other sort of you know honorable black leading man movies good guys won Guys in suits, guys eloquent and passionate and committed and good guys, right?
And... That was replaced with, you know, this thug culture and so on.
And, you know, I don't actually believe it was accidentally replaced.
I think it was just part of the whole destruction.
Like, you know, there are some people who, you know, there are kids who like building houses of cards and there are kids who like knocking them down.
And the black community was building itself up and people came along and said, hey, it'd be cool if we could knock it down.
And by God, they did, to a large degree, right?
Now... In Dominique's world, right, so Dominique was written during the Second World War, like this is when Ayn Rand was, and you know, it had, the Second World War produced some great works of art, of course, right? I mean, it's impossible to process Lord of the Rings without understanding that it was written throughout the Great Depression in the Second World War, right?
Now, Dominique is poised between who's going to win.
Who's going to win? Are the good guys going to win?
Or are the bad guys going to win?
Because for a woman, this is pretty serious shit, this decision, right?
Because if the bad guys win, and she's with a good guy, she's done.
She's done. And her kids are probably done too, right?
Because the bad guys throw you in concentration camps, they'll put you in gulags, they'll shoot you, whatever, right?
So if she makes a mistake in the moral arc of society...
She aligns with the white hats.
She has kids with a white hat and the black hats win.
She's screwed. She's going to have to abandon her kids.
She's going to have to turn to a bad guy and try and align with him.
It's awful. It's gruesome.
Beyond words, really. Whereas if it's the other way around, if she aligns herself with the bad guys and the good guys win, Well, that's really bad, right?
Because then the good guys might kill the bad guys.
The good guys might throw the bad guys in prison.
And then she's got a bunch of kids with bad guys who aren't around, and the good guys don't want to support her because she aligned herself with the bad guys.
And you can think of this famous situation that occurred in France and Holland and other places where the women...
Who had shacked up with the German soldiers, with the Nazi soldiers during World War II. They were dragged out.
They were beaten up. They had their heads shaved.
They were, you know, shamed.
And it's like, oops!
Whoopsie! That Screen Rants guy is very funny, actually.
The pitch meetings are very funny online.
Whoopsie! Oh, really?
So, if she makes a mistake...
When there's moral conflicts, and we all know there are massive moral conflicts coming to the West.
The U.S. is heading that way.
Other countries not too far behind.
So who are they going to choose?
Are you going to choose, right?
So the shit test is not just, is he worthy of the House of Dominique?
The shit test is, if the bad guys win, and I am Howard Rourke's wife, I'm doomed.
And the guy faces prison.
If the good guys win and I'm Ellsworth Toohey's wife or Gail Winan's wife or whoever, right?
Peter Keating's wife, then that's bad.
And it's not just about, you know, prison or death.
It's just status and all of that, right?
So she's really got to test the living shit out of Howard Rourke.
Because if she commits to him...
Because, you know, for a woman, you sell that house, it doesn't get up for resale throughout most of human evolution, right?
Because men didn't want to raise other men's kids and all of that.
So she didn't...
It wasn't like, oh, you know, I can just put the house back on the market if I don't get all the money that I want because divorce wasn't an option throughout most, of course, Western history.
It wasn't really an option.
And so... She's like a weathervane.
And you can look at this kind of stuff, right?
It's the shirts versus suits stuff, right?
So you can pick up a magazine at the checkout counter or whatever, right?
And you can flip through and you go, okay, what kind of men are women finding attractive?
What kind of men are women finding attractive?
And it's the shirts versus suits, right?
So if women find men in suits attractive, they believe the good guys are going to win.
If men without shirts are considered attractive, then the bad guys are winning.
Because a man without shirts is showing off his muscles, usually, which is fundamental girl code for war is coming.
So I need a strong guy, not a rich guy.
I need a physically strong guy, not a rich guy.
Now, if it's suits, you know, Cary Grant style, then it's like, okay, in the 50s it was guys in suits, not guys who were shirtless.
And that's because good guys were winning.
At least that was the perception.
And so you don't need a strong guy, you need a wealthy guy.
Because if the bad guys win, there isn't going to be much wealth around, so there's not much point.
I mean, in fact, guys in suits are targets.
Guys who look intellectual, guys who have horn-frimmed glasses, guys who are like Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird, right?
I mean, guys who are smart and successful are only that way in a free society because of that freedom.
And if bad guys come along and destroy everything, as I talked about in my documentary on Poland, which you should check out at freedomain.com forward slash documentaries, it's free.
If... The bad guys get in, then the guys in suits usually go into the ground.
So that's, you know, it's what you need to look at.
What do women find attractive?
Is it guys with abs or guys with ties?
Abs versus ties, that's the deal.
Is it Matthew McConaughey or is it Gregory Peck?
Is it 50 Cent or is it Sidney Poitier?
Now, the moment women start drifting towards abs versus ties, well, you're in a bad situation as a society because that's the weathervane that says that war is coming.
Now, for Ayn Rand, the battle, she'd already seen the suits versus the abs, right?
She'd already seen that situation going on because she grew up in Soviet, well, she grew up in Russia and she was young when the revolution happened and her family lost everything and were destroyed and attacked and So she'd seen the Gail Winans, the Peter Keatings, the Ellsworth II, and she'd seen all them win.
And she was, you know, through Dominique, she was desperately terrified that Howard Rourke was going to lose.
But she was very attracted to him because she wanted him to win, but she was terrified he was going to lose, so she had to put him to the test.
And we all, like, I mean, to take a silly example, as a man, right, you want to figure this out.
Let's say that you're on a hike and you come across a pretty deep gap and there's a kind of rickety-looking bridge on it.
Do you just stride over?
No, you don't. What do you do?
You test it. You lean onto it.
You put your foot on it. You might throw a fairly heavy rock out to the middle, see if it stays, right?
Because you want to cross...
The bridge, but you don't want to fall and get injured.
So you test it. We do this all the time.
It's called kicking the tires, right?
You kick the tires. You know, every year you take your bike.
If you're sensible, you take your bike to go get checked out, make sure the brakes still work and all that.
You test things. You test things that are very important and may be unstable.
I mean, this happens to me all the time, right?
People test me. People test me all the time.
You see this on Parler, which you should...
Yeah, come join me. Join me on Parler.
That's where I'm posting these days.
P-A-R-L-E-R dot com.
Of course, it's at Stefan Molyneux.
You know how to spell that, I'm sure.
But people are all like...
Like, I posted this thing about...
Rand Paul. So recently Rand Paul came out of the RNC. There was a mob and they got him onto a bus, him and his wife and some other people, friends of theirs, I think.
And they took, they bused them 45 minutes away to safety.
But then they decided to go back to their hotel.
Why? Why would you do that?
I mean, you're already in safety.
And so they took an Uber back, but they couldn't get close to their hotel.
So they decided to walk a couple of blocks of their hotel.
It's like, what are you, crazy? You don't get out of the Jeep in the middle of the safari?
What are you, crazy? And...
You know, feared for their life.
Attacked by a mob, went from 30 to 60 to 120 to 240.
And you got policemen walking beside them, holding up bikes, trying to protect them from the mob.
Because, you know, everybody knows they can't really arrest this mob.
You know, particularly if it's white cops and black, quote, protesters.
I mean, you know, everybody knows the reality of that situation on the ground, right?
So, you know, I just said, listen, I'm not impressed with this.
I didn't say he was wrong or it was bad.
I wasn't blaming the victim or anything like that.
But look, I'm not. I'm not.
And it's not because of danger.
As you know, I went to Hong Kong and took facefuls of tear gas to march with the protesters and I didn't complain and I didn't wet myself and all of that.
I went in and I stayed safe.
And then when the Hong Kong cops came marching down the street in a big line, I'm like, yeah, I know the nature of the state.
I'm out of here. And I didn't have security there.
I had security in Australia.
And I recognized that the security guys were very serious about what they did.
I mean, I don't know if they would have taken a bullet for me, but I didn't want to find out because I don't want to put their lives at risk.
Now, I'm not saying my life was elementally at risk in Hong Kong.
You know, it could have got hit with the canisters or anything like that.
It wouldn't have been good for sure. But I assumed those risks myself.
I didn't put those risks on other people.
We say, ah, yes, well, but, you know, the security, that's their job.
It's like, yeah, but the security is, the job of security is to keep you safe from reasonable risks.
Reasonable risks. And I don't think it's fair to expose other people to unreasonable risks that they cannot avoid, cannot choose, and risks which are not necessary.
It was not necessary. Like, just get another goddamn toothbrush.
It was not necessary for them to go back to their hotel that night and say, oh, but they should be able to walk wherever they want.
Absolutely. Of course they should be.
Absolutely. Of course they should be able to walk wherever they want.
And of course the people who attacked them were in the wrong.
I get that. But it was an unnecessary danger.
Now, people could say to me, yes, well, Hong Kong was an unnecessary danger.
Yeah, I mean, it was not absolutely necessary that I go to Hong Kong or the march with the protesters or go down to where the canisters were and get tear gassed repeatedly and so on.
But still, I was not putting anyone in danger except myself.
And John, who was with me, was eager to go.
So it wasn't like I was putting him in danger against his will or preference.
And I'm, you know, I have no particular regrets about any of that.
So I just sort of wanted to point this out.
Oh, you've just destroyed your credibility.
Oh, people are mad at my stance on the dangers of COVID. Oh, you're wrecking your credibility.
You're destroying your credibility. Like, that's just a shit test, right?
Like, I am responsible for my own conscience.
I'm responsible to my own integrity.
I'm not responsible to random people on the internet who think they have magical control over my credibility.
My credibility matters.
With me, and it's not like you guys matter to me, of course, enormously.
It's not like, I mean, if a lot of people are saying you're wrong about something, I will absolutely review it and think about it and mull it over and consult and look things up and consult my conscience.
You guys, but I finally, you understand, I do finally have to answer to myself.
And I just wanted to sort of point that out, that there is this constant pressure and this threat of withholding this magical ingredient called credibility.
And some people who say, well, I just approve of you, therefore your credibility is toast or whatever, right?
And listen, again, just to be clear, I wasn't saying that Rand Paul was a bad guy or he was an evil guy.
No, I just said, listen, I'm not impressed with putting other people's lives at risk for the sake of an unnecessary trip.
Everybody knows that these mobs are dangerous.
You don't need more of that.
Don't need more details about that.
We don't need more facts about that.
So, Dominique is terrified.
That the good guys are going to lose.
She's very much drawn.
Because in a world of honor and integrity, Howard Rourke is the ultimate alpha male.
Just like John Galt.
Howard Rourke is the ultimate alpha male in a world of honor, virtue, freedom, markets, and integrity.
But she doesn't know Which way the world is going to go?
And at this point in her life, Ayn Rand did not know which way the world was going to go.
Post-Atlas Shrugged, she had a pretty good idea, which is why, even though the protagonist in Atlas Shrugged win, Ayn Rand never wrote another novel.
First of all, it's kind of tough to top, but she knew.
She knew based upon the reaction, and she said this openly.
She said after the reaction to Atlas Shrugged, she was like, I had no idea the culture was in this bad a shape, which is another way of saying she didn't know just how much the left had infiltrated the major institutions of the West.
Now, again, this is before Venona.
This is before the decrypting of the Soviet cables, of course.
This is before the end of the Soviet Union.
So, this is when McCarthyism was still considered to be a fantasy, when, of course, it was not.
It was even worse than McCarthy thought.
So, yeah, she herself was torn between this.
Are the good guys going to win, or are the bad guys going to win?
Are the good guys going to win, or are the bad guys going to win?
And if you want to know what's most likely...
It's abs versus ties.
Shirtless versus shirts.
Jacked versus jackets.
I could keep doing this all day, but I think you get the idea, right?
So that's why Dominique goes and fraternizes and even marries Howard Rock's enemies.
She's testing. Is he going to win?
Now, in The Fountainhead, not really a big spoiler to the ending, it's a draw.
You know, he's hammered down, he's beaten down, he's broke, he's economically broke and all that.
And he ends up working in a mine, and that's where she first sees him.
A quarry, sorry, a quarry.
And he's a lowly worker in a quarry, and she's on a horse.
And she stares at him.
She finds him attractive. And he stares at her insouciantly, like with no regard to her high status or high station.
She's on a horse. She's at leisure.
She's beautiful. She's wealthy.
And he's a manual laborer.
And he just looks at her. And of course, there's a certain kind of fantasy about that for women.
That's a man who looks at her and is unafraid of her beauty.
It's deeply exciting to women.
Very exciting to women.
But alarming. And so she lures him to her house under false pretenses.
And it's a whole variety of things that she does.
And she's tortured by this.
She wants good guys to win.
But she's desperately afraid they're going to lose, and she doesn't know who to commit to, so she attacks and undermines him to test him, the way that you would try and figure out whether a bridge was safe to cross before you crossed it.
Or if you've ever, to take a sort of slightly less dramatic example, if you've ever been crossing a river or a stream on, you know, the rock stepping stones, right?
Well, what do you do? Well, very few people are just going to run across because one of the rocks could be wobbly or unstable, right?
So what you do is you take your step, you balance yourself on your heel, you touch forward with your toe, you put a little bit more weight on it, you make sure that the rock is solid and stable before you take your next step.
Well, that's women navigating the moral future of society.
The moral future of society.
And for men, we can sort of talk about it a bit more differently.
You know, the thought versus the nice girl, right, that the woman who puts out crazy extended sexual signals, you know, big butt, big boobs, and so on.
Somebody posted the other day, said, boob guys are capitalists, ass guys are socialists.
Don't ask me why, it just is.
It's kind of interesting. I don't know if that's true or not.
Let me know what you think. But the more, you know, is it Hedy Lamarr or is it Cardi B? Right?
Is it... A classy woman with facial beauty but reserved dress and so on because she's confident enough in the attractions of her personality to not have to advertise her literal assets, so to speak.
Or is it someone like Cardi B or Nicki Minaj or Anna Nicole Smith or whatever it is, right?
Is it someone who...
Is it someone you like for their personality or is it someone who tries to bypass your conscious mind to go for your lizard brain mammal lust?
The more curvaceous and slutty and thoughty the women are, the more the bad guys are going to win.
Because the bad guys lack impulse control And therefore, are more susceptible to lust, right?
Because a smart guy looks at a woman who's adorned herself as some sort of Sofia Vergara, playboy, cutout figure.
And she's not this way, hugely, although, of course, she probably was when she was younger, when she was a model and all of that.
But a smart guy looks at a woman like that, not Sofia Vergara herself, but, you know, looks at somebody who's really pushing their physical assets front and center.
A smart guy looks at that and says, well, you know, that could be fun, but, man, it's kind of dangerous.
This is kind of unstable, and that doesn't mean she'll be a good mom to the kids, and she might sleep around, and, right, it's risky and all of that.
And also he would sense, as I believe is almost always the case, that...
A woman who presents herself in that kind of way probably has a history of significant sexual abuse, like Madonna, right?
Madonna, I think a black guy forced her to give him oral sex on a rooftop or something like that.
It was pretty violent. And I think pretty bad things happen to a lot of these other women that I'm talking about.
And so it's like...
It's got danger written all over it, right?
In terms of long-term happiness and stability and good partner, good friend, good companion, good mother, good wife, that kind of stuff, right?
So if women are turning more towards overt, you know, ass-shaking, twerking sexual displays, it's because they're trying to, they recognize that the power is flowing towards men with no impulse control and not much capacity to defer gratification.
And so they'll shake their butt in his face because that's where the power is.
But if they are dressing more modestly and if they're putting forward their virtues and their personality, it's because they believe that the good guys are going to win and that's where the most resources are going to be.
Because, of course, in a situation of violence, you know, less intelligence, less capacity to defer gratification, less impulse control, more acting out, more externalization, more projection, all of these things become massive pluses.
in a violent situation.
And all of those coincide with responding to hyper signals of fertility from a mostly exposed female form.
I remember, gosh, it was an old movie, I guess now, Private Parts.
Howard Stern played, I think, himself, and he had some woman on in just very little who was very sexy, and he was just like growling at her, you know, like how attractive she was and how much he wanted to have sex with her or something like that, right?
I think he said similar things about the Olsen twins, which was not good at all.
And... That is this kind of provocation to extreme lust is a sign that society is crumbling and that violence is coming and women need to shake their butts rather than develop their qualities of personality because the guys who respond to that are the ones gaining the most power in the situation of increasing violence.
So it's a snapshot of the post-war The war period, so to speak.
And Ayn Rand felt, to some degree, poised between, are the good guys going to win or are the bad guys going to win?
And that came out in the character of Dominique.
So, I hope that helps.
I know that it was a long explanation, but it's a pretty deep and complex topic, and I wanted to try and do it justice without...
I think I only had two tangents.
Yay! Personal best. All right.
James, do we have another cue, or...
I guess there's no follow-up to that one, right?
Because the person's not online? Right, yeah.
So, there's no follow-up to that one immediately.
We do have another caller who has a personal question, if we should go forward with that.
All right. It'll probably be a little shorter, but I'm certainly happy to help if I can.
All right. Well, we'll see.
And I'll read off now.
So the caller writes, I found a way to come to my senses at the age of 30 and realize my entire previous self, perception, and life decisions has been based on false pretenses, parents, and other powers that be, etc.
Where can I go from here?
For a little background, he writes, I had myself diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome as my parents were too self-absorbed to notice me.
My biggest challenge has been to overcome the experience of both my parents' treatment of me in combination with the way I treated myself while under the influence of Asperger's, though I'm still living with one of my parents, which is better than it used to be, but far from ideal.
Well, that's very interesting. I appreciate that.
Is there more that you wanted to fill me in on?
I'm sure there is. It's your life, right?
Yeah. Basically, I started off in a fairly sort of weak state.
Had a herniated gut at the age of six.
Had six inches of my large intestine removed.
Sorry, just herniated, that's when part of your intestine breaks through the wall, is that right?
It sort of goes out of place and gets all twisted and circulation gets cut off and inflamed and so on.
My God, that must have been painful.
I didn't remember it, but I'd imagine that and the result of actually having the surgery had some sort of effect on my development as well.
And normally it's like some middle-aged affliction where the weekend warriors think they can just go out and sprint around a baseball diamond, though they haven't run in 10 years.
That's normally when that happens.
Do you know what was causing it when you were that age?
Just, I think, a general lack of stuff.
To prevent my guts from slipping out of place.
Yeah, I think my mum...
No, but why were they slipping out of place in the first place, so to speak?
Weak abdominal muscles.
Really? Were you confined to bed?
Were you ill with something else? Is there a reason why you didn't have much core strength?
I think of a Victorian woman in a corset or something.
I think I just generally wasn't made of much, really.
I mean, my nervous system was doing most of the work and the rest of me just sort of atrophied, really.
What do you mean by the nervous system was doing most of the work?
Well, I... I also had a jaundice as well when I was born.
So that's indicative of a weak liver.
So there's some sort of metabolic imbalance that affected my development in that aspect.
And it seems that my brain was too busy trying to cope with stress that the rest of me just didn't grow very well.
And was the stress around health issues?
I assume the general not-presentness of your family had something to do with that as well?
My mum had an abortion before I was born.
Boy, that's not a sentence you hear too often.
I assume somewhat prior to, like the previous baby?
From what I recognize is that if a woman is traumatized before or during birth, A pregnancy can affect the development of the children thereafter.
Right, okay. In terms of how they end up, but obviously there was some genetic sort of determination as how I must have come out, but I got some combination of both of my parents' sort of predisposition to react somehow to different circumstances particularly like stress involving being treated badly by other people I guess being abused and then I'd end up being stressed by the same sort of abuse Sorry to interrupt.
Do you know anything else about your mom's history about why stress might have hit her so hard?
She was sort of the bottom of the pecking order.
Her siblings would basically vent all their stress onto her because she was probably the least capable of deflecting it back.
The shit rolls downhill stuff, right?
Yeah, and I sort of inherited that And yeah, it always ends up being dumped on the lowest common denominator, so to speak, unless they've got some great coping strategy.
But I don't think anyone would really want to plan for that sort of thing, so one does one's best, I guess.
And what's the story with your dad?
He was adopted.
He had to take care of another adopted female child who was badly behaved.
And the man who adopted him, his wife died and basically ended up sort of venting his stress onto my dad as well.
And then it took...
Something that I did to make my dad release his pent-up whatever, and it wasn't something that I was aware of.
When I was four years old, for instance, my dad would get home from work.
He used to be stressed because money was difficult back then, apparently, like a recession of some sort.
Well, also, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I would imagine, in my experience, the adoption issue always comes from the female.
Like, in other words, to adopt is generally the woman's idea.
And if your dad kind of went along with the adoption of your mom and then she died, it's like, oh man, it's stuck with, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's that experience, I think, because I never seem to get the impression that my dad really sort of had a I don't think he really meant for me to be, as it were.
And I think he didn't put a great deal of thought into whatever happens before the conception thing.
So I think he was basically just being impulsive and being a complete R strategist.
Right. Well, also, I suppose, generally, if there are reproductive issues, it's on the woman.
It's not like it's a fault or anything, right?
But it's on the woman because a woman's reproductive organs are much more complex than a man's, and, of course, what needs to happen is much more complex.
So it could be also the case that...
Your dad wanted his own kids, married an infertile woman who convinced him to adopt two kids and then died.
And now he can't get another woman because he's already got two kids and money's tight.
And so he ends up not being able to have his own kids and takes it out on you.
Not that I know of.
Uh, No, hang on. The child that my mum aborted was with a different man.
I don't know if that Oh, that seems important.
Yeah. So she was able to get pregnant, right?
Yeah. So was she married to your dad?
What's the story? The man my mum slept with before was...
I have no idea how that relationship went, but basically the guy wasn't willing to Have the child after having done the deed, which inevitably ended up with that.
And yeah, she basically said, tell my mum to get an abortion.
And that's as far as it got.
No, no, what was the relationship with, like, were they married?
Was this an affair or was this someone before your dad or what?
It was outside of marriage relationships.
And then my parents managed to stay married for 25 years until they both realised that they had had it with each other.
Basically, they'd had enough.
Yeah, so both my parents have been damaged to the extent that they're both unaware of the effect it's had on them.
And the way that they behave is as an emotional...
Reaction to the similar sort of experience that they had when they were younger.
It's entirely subconscious on their part.
Right, okay. So, how can I help you best?
I've managed to clear up most of the mess that they made.
They basically treated me like A defective person, not even a child, but someone that is lacking in mental capacity, which was true, because I was basically doing things without really thinking about it.
I used to lie about things.
I used to steal things because the concept of ownership was Or the concept of another person's mind couldn't really cross my mind.
And yeah, I couldn't really imagine how other people feel because my own feelings were suppressed, sort of misplaced.
I used to feel… Sorry, but did you have that kind of behavior modeled towards you?
My dad would basically lose his temper over really insignificant things and my mum would do the same except in sort of I guess in a manic sort of more emotional way.
And the things she'd say wouldn't sort of line up with the things that she'd do.
It's sort of, I guess, a cognitive dissonance.
Couldn't be sure what was going through their minds at the time because they wouldn't explain it to me.
They'd just sort of expect things and demand things and They wouldn't slow down to give me directions, basically.
Right. I mean, because, like, empathy is a complex language that is taught by parents to children.
I mean, I would assume if you'd never been exposed to Mandarin, you wouldn't expect to be able to speak Mandarin, right?
And so, I don't know, obviously this is all nonsense in my own thought, but I do occasionally have the thought that Asperger's is more like...
Sorry, Asperger's is more like just ass parents.
You know, just like the parents who are asses.
It's a combination of parents being...
Stress to the point where they don't have the resources for their child's mind to have the resources to change effectively.
I mean... Well, hang on.
That's a... I mean, you're talking to a free will guy here and you're stripping free will out of your parents' equation here.
The free will thing...
I was watching a lecture by Dr.
Robert Sapolsky and free will...
Depends on having the part of the brain that does free will has to be working, basically.
Otherwise, we're still just doing things impulsively and Out of some instinct, whether it be a healthy instinct or an unhealthy instinct, there's no instinct. And hang on, I haven't obviously watched this guy's lecture, but how does he know whether that part of the brain is working?
Is there a brain scan for that, or how does he know?
Yeah, there is the prefrontal cortex in healthy people has a higher metabolic rate as in there's more cell energy activity going on in healthy people than there are in say people who have been No, no, no. Sorry, I get all of that.
But what I mean is, how does he know that this is cause, not effect?
In other words, if a guy goes to the gym and lifts weights every day and you scan his body, he's like, wow, that's a lot of muscle mass, right?
And a guy doesn't go to the gym and doesn't lift any weights and you scan his body, you say, oh my gosh, there's no muscle mass here or very little, right?
Now, you wouldn't sit there and say, well, you know, that's got nothing to do with the choices that people are making, right?
I mean, in other words, if people have no free will part of their brain, is that because they've studiously avoided exercising free will and have allowed themselves to be dominated by impulse?
How do we know if that's cause or effect?
Well, I didn't really choose to be incredibly confused and have to overuse my brain as a result of trying to work out what my Parents' intentions are and how to avoid sort of their arbitrary sort of emotional outbursts.
Yeah, that's not, I'm sorry, that's not specific to the question that I'm asking though, right?
Of course, yeah, you don't choose your parents.
I get that. Nobody does, right?
Yeah. But it's not the environment that, because then that's going straight to pure environmentalism.
In other words, we have no free will.
We're all just a product of our environment, right?
Yeah, you've got the outside environment, then you've got the inside environment involved.
Chemistry, basically.
Well, no, both of those are outside the bounds of free will, right?
Yeah. Although, in order to go, I guess it would come down to awareness of those things, awareness of the environment, what one has within them and what one doesn't have.
See, I mean, I don't agree.
I could be wrong, obviously.
I'm just telling you I don't agree.
Because for me, the empathy thing is do unto others as you would have them do unto you has been a foundational moral commandment since the dawn of time.
Now, your parents know that they don't like being treated badly and that they're human beings.
And your parents also know that you're a human being.
And so they also know deep down that you don't like being treated badly.
And so, yeah, like with my mother, she would hit me, and then once when I hit her back, she got really, really upset and angry.
Now, that to me is purely hypocritical, because she knew I was a human being.
She knew she didn't like being hit, but she liked to hit me.
So this is not, to me, this is not some massive, you know, her brain doesn't work and the neofrontal this and the environment that.
It's just like, that's just a fundamental, I don't want to.
She knows that I'm a human being.
She knows that she's a human being.
She knows that she doesn't like being hit, but she chooses to hit me.
Now, that's not, this is not like solving quantum physics here, right?
This is like basic, yeah, you're kind of like me and you probably want the same thing.
Yeah. Well, if one has the intention of, say, spanking a child for behaving like a child because they don't know any better, then Okay, like we'll fight on this one too if you want.
What do you mean don't know any better? Have they never studied?
Have they never, you know, this is back to my analogy that if I don't know how to fly a plane, I mean, I can fly a flight simulator, but I don't know how to fly a plane.
And so if I get into a plane and try and fly it, and I say, hey, man, like, this is the best of my knowledge.
It's like, well, don't get into a plane if you've never figured out how to fly a plane.
And it's the same thing. Don't become a parent without even reading a couple of books on how to be a parent.
Like, I mean, everybody's got at least nine months warning and you can pick up a couple of books, right?
I mean, I did. I'm a pretty good parent.
You've lost me there. Well, sorry, just to be saying that you said because they don't know any better.
But not knowing any better is a choice.
If you studiously avoid knowing something that you need to know, Ignorance of the law is no excuse.
If you studiously avoid knowing something that you actually need to know, like if someone fakes being a surgeon and goes in and cuts someone open, and that person dies, and they say, well, hey, man, I didn't know any better.
It's like, but you came in to be a surgeon, you cut someone.
So people who are parents, they have an obligation to know better.
Yeah, that's what one would expect.
But the thing is, I would say my brain basically wouldn't fire up until, say, I don't know, a few hours after I wake up,
my parents would shout and create drama before bedtime and I'd wet the bed and then I'd wake up and I wouldn't be able to Probably because my motor skills weren't great and I'd get shouted at for that and then I'd do the very same thing the next day because I'd forgotten the whole thing and then my parents would treat me the same way again and the way they were treating me wasn't making any difference and they neglected to actually Take that into account.
Even though...
Sorry, take what into account?
Oh, the fact that nothing was changing?
I wasn't learning from the way that they were parenting me.
Right. It wasn't changing my behavior.
Right. So they preferred to keep doing what they were doing rather than adjust and adapt to new information, which is that things weren't changing, right?
Yeah. And they're 100% responsible for that.
Yeah. Yeah. Unless, say, I don't know, unless they suffered some amnesia that what they hid the way that they tried to solve a problem didn't work.
Oh no, but that's easy.
So it's easy to know, sorry to interrupt, it's easy to know whether your parents know that what they're doing is wrong.
And the easy way to know that is do they do it in front of authority figures?
Right. So let's say your father has epilepsy.
If your father has epilepsy, and let's say he's on medication to control it, but it's still sometimes going to happen, or Tourette's or dyskinesia or whatever.
So if your father has epilepsy, then he can be standing in front of a policeman.
And if the epileptic attack occurs, it's purely involuntary, and he's going to have that epileptic attack and so on, right?
but if let's say your father yells you screams that you hits you and so on but he magically restrains himself from doing that every time there's a teacher or a priest perhaps or a policeman or somebody who has authority over him or could have authority over him if he magically restrains his behavior then he perfectly has the capacity to do something different and he perfectly has the capacity to not hit you he's just choosing to do it when he can get away with it and that means that it's not involuntary he's got free will
it's just that your pain you're upset your unhappiness It's not enough of an incentive for him to stop his behavior.
In other words, if the negative effects of his behavior land on you, then that's fine.
But if the negative effects of his behavior land on him, in other words, he might get in trouble, then that's really, really bad and he won't do it at all.
So he has a chance to restrain his behavior, to change his ways, to repress his anger, to deal with you more positively.
So he's perfectly got free will.
When he can get away with it, he gets away with it.
Like a true kleptomaniac will steal with a security guard staring straight at him.
But a thief who has choice won't.
So he can perfectly restrain his desire or his willingness to steal or his action of stealing.
And that's how you know he has free will.
Is it involuntary or can it be modified by choice?
Well, with your parents, I assume it could be modified by choice.
Okay, but would someone with free will decide to have a mind that thinks like that?
No, but that's like saying, would somebody choose to have a body with no muscles?
It's like, well, yeah, if you don't go to the gym, you don't exercise, then you will have a body with no muscles.
But you don't just...
You just have a body with no muscles as a result of choice, right?
If, say, what's the...
The thing about the choice is that, say, if I have the perception that, say, I don't have any options.
Like, I haven't been sort of, I guess, no one's posed any questions to me sort of thing.
Then, that sort of...
Sorry, this is all too complicated.
It's all too complicated. Did your parents abuse you in front of others who had authority over them?
Or could have? No, because they were both sort of...
It was in their own house.
They do what they liked. Yeah, no, no, I get it.
So it's very simple.
Your parents could not abuse you, and they did so on a regular basis when you were out in public, when you were at a parent-teacher meeting, when there was a cop around, a security guard around, when other people who might have authority around them were around.
So your parents were perfectly capable of not abusing you, and therefore abusing you was a choice.
It wasn't like epilepsy. It was a choice.
Trying to work out what led to them making that choice, though.
Well, no, but that's the whole point, a choice, right?
Is that the moment you say something leads to a choice, it's not a choice.
Or rather, if it was a choice, then I don't think it's one that they really thought about or took any time to contemplate before doing.
Sure, and I understand that.
And the avoidance of choice is itself a choice.
In other words, not thinking about it.
Listen, I guarantee you, I guarantee you, because I've had lots of conversations with people about this over like 15 or 16 years.
I guarantee you that your parents felt really bad about what they were doing from time to time.
I know my mother felt really bad about what they were doing, what she was doing from time to time.
I know that. I know that for an absolute fact.
And so, those are the moments where you have a choice.
If it feels bad, then why do they keep doing the same thing?
Well, see, now you're looking for an explanation for choice, but the moment you have an explanation for choice, it's no longer a choice, right?
Again. Well, I could choose to, I don't know, hit my...
Hand with a hammer or yeah harm myself somehow and decide it was a bad idea and then do the very same thing the next day.
People do that all the time because there are immediate gains in the moment and the costs are far down the road.
road.
It's like saying, why do people smoke?
Because each cigarette is a pleasure, or at least it's the avoidance of the displeasure of withdrawal.
And the negative consequences of smoking are probably decades down the road, if ever.
So what are they trying to avoid, which would have been more difficult than what they chose to do?
Well, they were choosing to avoid confronting their own childhood abuse in themselves.
So the moment, like when they normalize their own childhood abuse by acting it out against you, they get to avoid dealing with the pain of their own childhood abuse, and they get to normalize their own parents' behavior in a similar way to what you're trying to do, but not obviously much worse than what you're trying to do.
But yeah, that's what the plus is.
That's why people do that.
Yeah, I mean, I think...
I couldn't...
I mean, I've been sectioned for psychosis before, so...
I know that that's probably not the case for my parents.
Well, I'm sorry to hear that, but of course, with regards to your parents, again, the psychosis, again, I'm no expert in this.
I'm not accredited or anything like this, just my amateur opinion.
But the psychosis is not a voluntary situation.
I mean, that is when whatever's going on in your mind is not open to your...
Like, you can't say, oh, there's a cop.
I'll stop being psychotic. You know, like, I mean, it's something that's beyond your control in the time, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean...
That's not the case with abusing your children for the most part, though, right?
The thing is, I didn't have any issues with my sort of behaviour when I was outside of home.
It would only be at home where I'd have behavioural issues because That's where I'd end up doing things unskillfully due to being stressed.
Sure. And listen, I'm not saying that you had a choice in these matters.
You were just trying to survive a situation that you never would have chosen.
But your parents had choice.
Children don't, which is why we don't generally hold children responsible for criminal activity and so on.
We hold the parents more culpable.
So you... Didn't have choice in these situations, or at least very little, but your parents did, and that's the difference between adulthood and childhood.
Yeah, I mean, I used to be addicted to video games, and I really didn't have any thoughts going through my head apart from just acting on impulse.
I'd just do sort of run on autopilot, and I didn't really have any verbal thoughts going through my head at the time.
Yeah, it's a form of self-erasure or non-existence because you're so focused on the immediate stimuli that you don't exist to yourself in a way.
Yeah, and as a result, I wouldn't do things that would be in my better interest.
And that sort of led to problems further on, but I wasn't aware of the situation.
And my parents, I guess, I don't know.
They couldn't see that I had this problem with my behavior.
Now, but you see, we're stuck in a loop here, right?
And I get that, and I appreciate that, and I'm not criticizing you for it.
But now you're saying they couldn't see.
How do you know? Because I managed to give myself, or rather I managed to find out about and then provide myself with The resources that it takes to be able to recognise things that are anything more than the five senses, basically. So, yeah, you made a choice to deal with things differently than your parents did.
But saying that they couldn't is saying that you are somehow fundamentally different from your parents.
But you're still human beings.
You're both human beings and human beings absent significant brain injury.
Human beings who are adults have free will.
I know your parents have free will.
You have free will. Because the moment you say, well, I have free will, but my parents don't, it's like you've now made two different species, right?
Okay, so how does one know when one's parents don't have some sort of brain injury whether it be sort of something that I guess allows someone to get up in the morning and make tea and I guess do everyday things but not things that involve having to deal with other people's behaviour?
Well, we went through this already, which is not to criticize you.
It's simply to point out that you're dissociated from the conversation.
And the reason we went through this is that we know your parents don't have a brain injury if they are able to restrain their behavior when in the presence of authority figures that could negatively affect their interest if that behavior shows up.
Right? So they won't scream at you or hit you in front of a teacher or a cop or a security guard or a priest or, you know, somebody who might have authority over them.
So that's how you know they don't have a brain injury because, you know, if somebody has a genuine brain injury, like some sort of brain tumor or maybe they, you know, like the famous guy from the 19th century had a railway spike through his head to change his personality or somebody who's got Alzheimer's or something like that, well, they can't change that in the presence of other people.
That's just a fact, right? Yeah.
You can't regrow an arm when a policeman comes around.
And so if you do something with your arm when there's a policeman there, then you have an arm.
You have an arm. And if you change your behavior because a policeman is there, then you have free will.
But you can't not have a brain tumor when the policeman is around.
You can't not have a big spike through your forehead if there's a policeman around.
Those are things that you can't control.
But if you can change your behavior when someone of authority is around, I know this about my mom, too.
My mom was like as sweet as sugar when other people were around and, you know, she was considered a good, fun mom, right?
So, yeah, she knew what goodness was.
She knew how to pretend to be good.
She was able to change her behavior when it suited her interests.
It's just that my pain and fear and being terrorized was not enough for her to change her behavior.
I mean, maybe the incentive was the opposite.
Maybe part of her torture of me was showing how nice she could be to other people, which made it all the worse when she was cruel to me, right?
But no, that's just basic.
I mean, I've said a basic fact, like it's obvious, and I don't want to say that it's obvious, but when you think about it, If someone is blind, they can't suddenly regain their vision when there's a policeman around.
And if somebody can change their behavior, then they have free will.
And if an authority figure causes them to change their behavior, then they have free will.
And that means everything that they do is chosen.
Like if you're on a flight, right, way back in the day, and there's still planes you can fly in that have the old ashtrays, but way back in the day, you could smoke on a plane, right?
And now people don't smoke on a plane, right?
They won't smoke on a plane because, you know, it's big fines and all that.
At least I've never seen it. Maybe it happens once in a while.
But people used to be able to smoke in movie theaters.
Now people don't smoke in movie theaters, or at least very rarely.
And so now we know that smoking is a choice.
Smoking is a choice. And yet, no, people get addicted.
I get all of that for sure.
And I'm not saying addiction is a tiny thing or you can just wheel your way out of it and all that.
But things like self-knowledge or committing to not hitting your children or terrorizing them or frightening them or making them so stressed that they wet their bed every night through yelling and screaming and drama, well, that's...
That's a choice because they didn't do that on planes.
They didn't do that on trains. They didn't do that in schools.
They didn't do that at malls. So, yeah, they're perfectly capable, like a smoker, of not doing something for a certain amount of time.
And, yeah, I get it.
Like, if a smoker then says, okay, well, I won't smoke at the airport.
I won't smoke at the cab. I won't smoke at the hotel.
And you just keep extending it, then eventually they've quit smoking.
That's an uncomfortable process to go through.
I get that. But, no, your parents...
They had choice. They had free will.
They were responsible for what they did.
Otherwise, like my mother and I are both human beings.
You say, well, we're on hopefully at least opposite sides of the moral spectrum.
Yeah, I mean, that's certainly a good case to be made for that.
But we're both human beings.
She's one possibility, and I'm another possibility of humanity.
But the only reason or the only way that I'm able to change is because I give responsibility to my mother because if I create a separate category of human beings who don't have free will then I have diminished my own capacity for free will and I've created human beings into two separate categories people who are like dangerous machines and people who are human beings And I can't do that.
I can't withdraw the responsibility of free will from my mother.
Yeah, she had a terrible childhood.
I have no doubt about that.
I have no doubt about that.
And some people who have terrible childhoods become really good human beings.
And other people end up beating up on children for 15 years.
And that's a choice.
And it's 100% a choice.
I think there's more choices I could make now than I guess my parents have the awareness that they could make.
But they knew how to not be abusive, right?
Because they weren't abusive in the presence of others.
I mean, it depends on which others there are.
No, of course it does. But there were times that they were not abusive probably for quite a long time, right?
They didn't stop abusing me in the presence of each other.
No, no, no, I get that.
Because they didn't have authority over each other, right?
But there were times when you were on a plane, or you were on a train, or you were on a bus, or you were at a mall, or they didn't abuse you for hours and hours at a time, right?
Let me just think. I'm sure there was a time when I was sort of...
I'll give you a tiny, tiny example, right?
So, I've mentioned this stuff before, but I'll just be real brief.
Just to sort of give you the kind of stuff I'm talking about, right?
So, my mother... It got violently erased and beat me up when I was, I don't know, maybe five or maybe six.
It's hard to say. It's hard to know, but I was really young.
Because I had a friend over, and we were playing Pirate Ship or something like that on a bed, as kids do, as kids do.
and I put it on a little cabinet that she liked, right?
And the water had pooled underneath the cup and had left a little white ring, and she like beat me half to death over this, right?
I didn't know.
I didn't know about coasters.
I had no idea. And as it turns out, the white ring dried and mostly vanished.
I think it almost completely...
Like, you had to know that something had happened to see it there, right?
It almost completely vanished.
Now, that's my mom at home, right?
Now, another time, when she came to visit me in boarding school, I was running around and around a fountain, and I fell into the fountain.
I got completely soaked, and was my school uniform ruined?
Probably not. I mean, it was built for kid stuff.
But, you know, she had a wet-dripping kid on her hands, right?
And she was perfectly fine.
She said, oh, not a big worry, you know, walk around, we'll get it dried, it's not going to be a big issue, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, totally fine with it.
Now... I guarantee you that if we'd been completely alone when I fell into the pond, I would have been in serious trouble.
I would have been abused, right?
So one situation, there's a little white ring of leftover water damage on a cabinet, and it fades away, but, you know, we get beaten half to death.
Now, another time, you know, but this was in public.
See, the one that was in public when I fell into the pond that was in public, there were lots of people around.
Oh, is he okay?
You know, and my mom was like, she instantly flipped into, I'm a great mom, and it's fine, and it's no big deal, and, you know, so she could have a kid plunge into a fountain, Fully clothed.
And that was no problem.
But a kid puts a cup on a cabinet and you'll beat him half to death, right?
And... I think that was the time where she came into my room at night and held my hand, kneeling beside my bed, and I knew that she was so desperately sad and upset and unhappy about what she had done, and I couldn't say anything to her.
All I could do was pretend I was asleep and that my breathing was halting and ragged to try and signify to her or communicate to her the upset that I was experiencing because of the violence she inflicted.
Now, when I fell into the fountain in public, There were people there that if she had beaten me up, they would have called the cops, right?
So she's not going to do that.
So she's perfectly capable of not inflicting violence.
And if I had put that cup down, let's say we were over at a teacher's house, or let's say that we were at someone else's house that wasn't like her.
There's absolutely no way in hell that she would have beaten me half to death because I put my cup down somewhere else.
She would have been upset and she would have said, that's the wrong thing to do.
You know, I wish you hadn't done that.
And she would have offered to do something or something, right?
I mean, another time I threw up a rock in the air while I was walking down a road and it landed on the hood of a car.
And the car owner stopped and was really angry, was really upset.
And it was fine.
I think my mom offered some money and whatever, but she didn't beat me half to death for damaging someone's car, which was much worse than what I did with the little glass and the ring and all of that, right, on the cabinet at home.
So none of this made any sense to me at the time.
Like, why is it that sometimes you can...
Sometimes, for virtually nothing, you're beaten half to death, and other times, for things that are much worse, nothing bad happens at all.
Because if my mom didn't inflict punishment at the time, it almost never happened later.
She wasn't the kind of white-lipped woman who'd walk you around, yank you around, and then you'd know you'd get it.
So her moods, they kind of came like storm clouds, and then they would pass, right?
And so if you were out in public, she wouldn't beat you up later, right?
So if it didn't happen in the moment, it usually didn't happen down the road, right?
And so, sorry, I know I said I would be brief, but I'm just sort of trying to point out these things, that my mother had the perfect capacity to not abuse me, and to be a, quote, good parent, to be kind and good-humored and understanding and peaceful, and she knew all of that.
She absolutely knew that down to the last bit, right?
I mean, like a con man knows how to be honorable.
A con man knows how to be, quote, trustworthy.
He knows how to imitate...
Good behavior. Because if he could never imitate good behavior, he'd never be able to con anyone, right?
And so, your parents knew how to not abuse you and would do it for hours and hours and hours at a time, despite you occasionally inflicting on them the kind of behavior that would have gotten you abused at home.
So they knew perfectly well how to not abuse children.
Just as my mom knew perfectly well how to not be abusive.
Although one of the sort of arguments I'd hear the music, that's the way that they were pairing.
And they'd use that as an excuse to treat me in the same way in spite of what they're actually feeling.
They'll do the thing that actually contradicts what they want.
I mean, that's perfectly fair.
The perfectly fair argument to start with, right?
Well, this is how I was parented, right?
Well, the answer for that is, did they ever get a new television?
A better television? Did they ever get new or better phones or cell phones?
Did they ever upgrade their house?
Did they ever improve anything else in their life based upon what was around in their parents' day?
And the answer, of course, Well, of course they did.
Of course they got a color TV and then they got a flat screen TV and of course they upgraded their house and of course they got from a rotary dial phone, they went to a push button phone, they went to a phone with a long cord, they went to a wireless phone, they went to a cell phone, they went to a BlackBerry.
Like, of course they've upgraded.
They continually upgrade.
I'm sorry? It took them a while to do that.
Yeah, yeah, but they did, right?
So, nobody sits there and says, well, I'm absolutely, completely and totally fucking forced to use this cell phone or this rotary dial phone to be more...
I have to use a rotary dial phone because that's what my parents used.
People don't say that. They don't sit there and say, well, I have to live in the house my parents lived in because that's the house that my parents lived in.
What they do is they say, oh, good, something better has come along.
I'm going to upgrade. It's only mysteriously when it comes to parenting that they refuse to upgrade, though they will upgrade everything else.
You know, I grew up, no air conditioning.
No air conditioning. And we had to put coins in the heater to get heat, and it was bloody cold sometimes, right?
And I remember the first time I got an air conditioner.
I was a baby... 17 years old.
And a friend of mine had a summer job with an HVAC place.
And the HVAC place had an old air conditioner that they were going to throw out.
And my friend said, oh, I'll take that.
And we put it in. We were all living together as roommates.
And we put it in the window.
And he decorated it with this weird drippy corking, which I thought was kind of dumb.
But anyway, we put it in the window. And I remember, because heat was a big issue, you know, in Toronto, like the summers can be pretty damn hot.
And it's tough to sleep, and you're just sweating the whole time, and you're drinking like a fish, and it's just unpleasant.
It's like an old Henry James novel, and it's sort of sitting in New York, and it's too hot to sleep, or Robbie Robertson songs.
And I remember walking down, like coming off the elevator, walking down the hallway towards my place.
The first day I'd been out, this thing was installed and running.
And I could feel these little tendrils of cool air.
I was like, wait, is that? And I opened the door, and this wash of cooler air just in the apartment, it was glorious.
It was like paradise.
It was like stepping into heaven itself.
Because you could just sit there without sweating into your stomach, without sweating into your couch, without just...
Having oog all over under your eyes and wiping your face because, you know, sweat on your face in particular mixes with kind of oil and it's like, you feel like the ass end of a Castrol GT40 can.
And I didn't sit there and say, well, my mom didn't grow up with air conditioning.
I can't possibly have air conditioning.
I'm like, this is great.
This is great. And so when your parents say, well, I couldn't possibly upgrade my parenting, it's like, well, why did you upgrade everything else in your life?
I mean, they did at one point decide to stop the smacking, but the shouting carried on and my body reacted like they were going to smack me still.
And let me guess, let me guess, that they decided to stop hitting you when you hit puberty?
I can't remember exactly when that...
But it had something to do with you getting bigger, right?
I don't even know if that was the case.
I mean, they used to force me to go to church and that stopped when I was 16 for some reason.
And they went to church again after that.
So they're Christians, obviously, right?
They were pretending to be anyway.
Right, right, right. Yeah, so they know how to fake it, right?
But when Jesus says, whatever you do to the least among you, so also do you do to me, they didn't...
I mean, they wouldn't scream at Jesus, right?
They wouldn't abuse Jesus. They wouldn't hit Jesus.
Well, they never mentioned anything from church outside of church.
I mean, they were Christians for about one hour a week.
Right, right, right.
And the rest of the time, just...
Well, faithless, basically.
Yeah, it's a form of camouflage, I suppose.
Yeah. Right. I mean...
No, I mean, so I just really want to pound on this free will thing.
The free will thing is really important.
Your parents had choices.
My parents had choices.
Well, my dad doesn't anymore because he's dead.
And I don't know whether my mom has functional choice anymore.
I doubt it.
I strongly doubt it.
But I would say that the reason why she doesn't have choice now is because she avoided choice in the past.
You know, like... I'll never be a ballet dancer because, you know, I mean, I don't think I ever could have been.
I'm not flexible enough. But the reason why I can't be a ballet dancer now is because I never studied ballet when I was younger.
I mean, you know, like I never could have been a ballet dancer, right?
Or whatever it's going to be, right?
So if somebody studiously avoids exercise and eating well, then sure, they don't really have the choice to run a marathon.
At a certain point in their life, and maybe they could get back into it if they haven't been a heavy smoker or whatever, right?
So their diminished choice in the present is the result of them choosing different things in the past.
So, if at some point, like, if you meet your parents now and say, well, they don't really have any functional choices now, okay, well, yeah, I get that.
I get that. But that's like saying that a guy in prison doesn't have any choice because he's in prison.
It's like, yeah, but he's only in prison, we assume, because he made a choice in the past that got him in prison.
So, maybe there is a kind of prison of the South where people don't have any choice, but they're still responsible for being there.
If you harm your children enough, it's going to have a really bad effect on your conscience and your capacity for empathy and growth and self-knowledge becomes your enemy.
Then you end up living this weird life of defensiveness and avoidance and manipulation.
It's like, yeah, but that's because you made the choice to abuse your kids when you could have not done it.
We know you couldn't have done it or you could have avoided it because you did avoid it for hours at a time in public.
So, yeah, it could be you look at your parents now and you say, oh, well, you know, of course they don't seem to have much choice now.
It's like, well, yeah, but that's because of the choices they made earlier.
I think in order to abuse children, you'd have to basically disconnect from them empathically, so not, I guess, make the effort, or they'd have to not have what it takes to resonate with what the child is experiencing emotionally.
Oh, no, no, no. That's not true. Sorry.
I hate to be really annoying.
I'll be pretty strong on this one.
Again, I could be wrong. But I am disconnected empathically from just about everybody in the world.
Yeah. Right? Because I don't know them.
Right? I mean, there could be a neighbor somewhere, there could be someone in my neighborhood who's currently having appendicitis right now.
Now, if I'm that person's family member, I feel terrible, but this could be happening.
I have no idea. Now, you could say I'm disconnected from them empathically, for sure, but I mean, that's the state of just about everybody in the world.
You know, like India just had the largest rise in corona cases, I think, in the history of the world, sorry, of COVID cases, coronavirus cases.
Yeah, and I get that.
But each individual, I mean, I'm disconnected from them at each individual level empathically, right?
And empathetically.
So saying that parents, like, to abuse a child, no.
To abuse a child, you have to be sadistic.
Now, that is not being disconnected empathetically.
That's being very connected empathetically, but using it for evil.
Like, to be a really good torturer, you have to know what hurts human beings the most, right?
So you have to have a great knowledge of the human body and human responses in order to be a very good torturer, right?
And it's the same thing with child abuse.
Your parents know you very well.
They know what hurts you.
They know what harms you. They know what upsets you.
And they do it. So it's not being disconnected empathetically.
It's actually being very empathetic without being sympathetic.
Sympathy is when you understand what other people feel and want to help them.
Sadism is when you understand what people feel and use that to hurt them.
It's not the same as being disconnected.
I mean, no torturer says, I don't care what you feel.
Torturers do care what you feel.
They just want you to feel as bad as possible, right?
Although there's different ways to feel based on what the nervous system is.
The limbic system is part of the brain that does emotions.
What happens is if the emotions are too strong, as in if there's some emotional distress, the cells become inflamed and then you get a layer of calcium desensitizes it and that way it makes someone tolerant to their environment.
Yeah, it's a self-protection mechanism.
I assume this is something related to the psychological phenomenon of dissociation, where you just kind of leave your own body.
This happens to abuse victims, particularly sexual abuse victims, fairly regularly, where they're just kind of outside their own body, observing themselves and so on.
Yeah, for sure. And these things are very damaging, and I have massive sympathy for you.
I have massive sympathy for your parents.
Absolutely. I mean, what they went through was probably pretty terrible, and what you went through from what you're saying is pretty terrible.
And what my mother went through is pretty terrible, and I get all of that for sure.
But there's this wonderful thing called brain plasticity, which is where your brain can adopt and adapt to very new and different things.
And being able to do that is important.
Sorry, go ahead. If it has the resources to be plastic, it tends to lose that ability over time through aging.
Sure. Absolutely.
Just as my ability to be a ballet dancer tends to deteriorate, which is why you better focus on it and better.
But you understand, you're 30, right?
So, I mean, your parents are...
You know, probably 60, 65 and so on.
So all of this stuff, self-knowledge, it's all been around for well over 100 years.
And it was in the 1970s, 1960s, 1970s, the self-help movement, the introspection movement, the understand your childhood movement.
You know, the child is the father of the man goes back to the poet Wordsworth hundreds of years ago.
And so the belief or the understanding that self-knowledge is really important to avoid abuse, I mean, that's King Lear.
Was that 500 years ago, right?
And so this is not something like they have to have an anti-gravity jetpack that's not been invented yet.
This is all stuff that's been fairly common knowledge throughout human history.
And really, certainly since Nietzsche and Freud and Jung and Adler and so on, this is all stuff that is so available and is so...
It's in the library. It's on TV. Dr.
Phil's been running for, I don't know how many decades now, 20 years or something like that, right?
And the idea that the childhood has an influence, that your self-knowledge is important, that you've got to work to avoid repeating patterns.
I mean, this is all... They can't claim that this was just not part of anything in the environment, right?
I mean, the environment is only one aspect.
But nobody's asking them for the impossible.
No, I mean, there has to be, say if there was a child that wasn't spoken to, or at least in a reasonable way, would that child then not be able to think using reason?
As in verbal, the use of Linking words which are attached to concepts and then attaching them to other things.
Yeah, that's a known issue.
I mean, you've probably heard of these.
There are studies of infants abandoned in the wild.
They end up being raised by wolves?
Mm-hmm. And there is a language window.
It's like 3 to 8 or 4 to 10 or something like this.
It's a language window. And if you don't get exposed to language during that time, it's very hard to learn it later and it's very hard to become fluid and fluent in language, right?
And so there are certain brain development mechanisms, particularly in language.
But nonetheless, brain plasticity is important, and your parents were exposed to language.
They were exposed to the culture that valued self-knowledge, at least to some degree.
And they knew how to not be abusive.
They were just lazy.
It's all laziness.
Laziness is, you say, well, I should go to the gym.
I haven't been in a couple of days.
Or I should exercise. I haven't in a couple of days.
Or I should call this person who was unwell.
And you just kind of put it off because there's something that's easier or more fun for you to do in the moment.
And, you know, we all do that from time to time.
But if you keep that up and that becomes a consistent thing in your life, then it's just laziness.
And so with your parents, like with my mother, yeah, she knew how to be a better mom.
She felt bad about it.
And I've talked to people who've harmed me in the past.
And they've all said, I hated what I was doing.
I tried to stop it.
I just couldn't.
Now, they say couldn't when the reality is didn't, right?
I mean, there's no smoker who says it was physically impossible for me to quit smoking.
There's no alcoholic who says it was physically impossible for me to quit alcohol.
Now, of course, if you're a really heavy drinker and you quit, you can go into seizures.
You should have medical help and all of that.
I've been in a very nice recovery.
I'm sorry, you're cutting out a little bit from me here.
You've been in a recovery unit? Yeah, and basically the alcohol depletes B vitamins that the brain needs to work properly and also damages the liver, which the brain also needs to.
I know, it's bad.
The DT is really bad, yeah.
And, I mean, one could almost achieve the same thing by just having a high enough blood sugar for long enough.
Right, right, right.
Something called a non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.
Right, right. Yeah, or diabetes, right?
If it's the lifestyle kind, it's type 2, right?
So, yeah, I mean, there's nobody – I mean, there's very few people who are obese who said, well, it was physically impossible for me to eat less or it was physically impossible for me to exercise.
Right. Right?
It's just, it's, you know, laziness, sloth, they used to call it, right?
Sloth. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One of the seven deadly sins, and there's a good reason why.
You know, as the old Britney Spears song says, you've got to work, bitch.
You know, there's work in life.
And people who take the easy road, who just say, well, you know, this is more comfortable for me in the moment.
Who cares if it's traumatizing my kid and making him wet his bed and giving him real emotional challenges?
It's like, yeah, this is what I'm familiar with.
This is what I'm comfortable with.
It's easier for me.
It's easier for me to just act out this way rather than confront anything that might actually change things for the better for my life.
So, you know, if your parents were smokers, smoking was the choice.
They'd say, yes, well, they got addicted.
It's like, yeah, I know, and addiction is a big deal for sure.
Addiction is a big deal.
It's important, but it's still a choice.
Nobody is going to say it was physically impossible for me to quit smoking.
Yeah, although they might need some reminders, perhaps.
Oh, they might need help, and self-knowledge is really important when it comes to dealing with addiction, in my opinion, anyway.
Because, yeah, here's the thing.
I mean, you just think, think, you know, we'll close this off in a sec, but just, you know, I'm sure you have, but just think briefly about what happens if we assign a lack of free will to entire sections of the population.
Yes. A lack of free will.
There's no such thing as virtue.
There's no such thing as good, as evil, as vice.
There's no such thing as laziness.
There's no such thing as just rewards.
There can't be any such thing as prison.
And there's no such thing as love.
Because why would you love someone?
It's like loving someone for being tall.
They didn't earn that. It's just genetics, right?
It's not a choice. So you can't love.
You can't hate.
You become numb.
You become dead.
And society collapses.
I mean, it's a pretty high price to pay to defend your parents' abuse.
I mean, I'm not defending them, but...
Excusing. Yeah, I'm not letting them off lightly.
I mean... When, I guess, making life decisions is a matter of choosing the carrot over the stick, if someone's had too many sticks, then the only thing they can tolerate to do is whatever the carrot is.
And choosing the easier option that might involve...
Wait, are you referring to your parents?
No, no, but your parents weren't receiving the stick.
They were hitting with the stick. So you're putting your parents into the situation they were in when they were children, which is when they were receiving the stick.
But there's a big difference between being a victim and being a victimizer, between a victim of abuse and being an abuser.
There's a huge difference, right?
I mean, the opposite moral category is in many ways, right?
It's like saying that self-defense is the same as murder.
It's like, no, opposites. So, if you are going to say to your parents, well, you know, stick and carrot and they were on the receiving end and blah, blah, blah, it's like, no, no, no, they were beating a child.
You! That's not being on the receiving end.
I mean, if they could have thought their way to deal with me in a less abusive way, I'm sure that would have been too much effort for them.
See, we don't know. This is the thing.
Trying to ascribe causality to these things is denying free will.
You know, if they had met this person, if they'd read this book, if they'd had these different motivations, then you're saying, well, if these dominoes had been in place, then they would have chosen differently at the end.
It's like, but there is no dominoes.
There's that, you know, it could be three o'clock in the morning.
It could be the middle of the afternoon.
There's that bit where you look, you know, everybody who's gaining weight, they look down and they say, holy shit, can't see my balls.
You know, can't see my penis, can't see my toes, can't fit into this clothes.
And everybody sits there and says, oh man, I've got to eat less.
I've got to exercise more.
It's the same thing with abusive parents.
They're like, oh man, this is bad.
I've got to do better. I've got to do different.
I've got to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
And then they either focus on that and work to change or they fade out and go on autopilot and then end up reproducing the behavior.
Everybody, everybody who's got a bad habit wrestles with that bad habit.
And there is no causality as to why they make one decision or another, because if there's causality, it's not free will.
It's just a matter of free will.
You could say it's magic, because it is, to all intents, it's magic.
Your parents made that choice repeatedly to continue to abuse you, and there is no causality to that choice.
Because the moment we assign causality it's not a choice.
Because if you say, oh, well, they abused me because of their bad childhood, then what you're saying is that you are guaranteed to abuse your children because you had a bad childhood, and I'm guaranteed to abuse my children.
Well, screw that. Screw that metronome.
Screw that pendulum. Screw that physics.
Screw that house of cards. I'm not an atom.
You're not an atom. We're not subject to the blind laws of nature.
We can make some goddamn choices because we're human beings, and we have a spark of anti-material divinity within us that allows us to transcend history.
You have it, I have it, your parents had it.
Now, they may have pissed all over theirs and put the fire out, but even that pissing was a choice.
There is no causality for their bad decisions.
That's the magic of free will.
They just fucked up repeatedly and hurt you, and I'm so sorry that they did, and they're 100% to blame, and you're 100% responsible for how it plays out in your life.
You choose the cigarettes, you choose the cancer.
I mean, it took a bit longer for me to, I guess, become mentally mature, I guess.
As in, I was still making childish, sort of, impulsive living-in-the-moment decisions when I was sort of...
When I was at least 18, 20, I guess I was still sort of not really aware of myself.
Absolutely, I've been there.
And because you started off so far behind, you probably ended up further ahead.
There wasn't anyone who could see me to sort of recognize my state of being because I guess no one was really, I guess...
Looking out for anyone who, I guess, who behaves in a particular way, or at least if someone does behave in a particular way, it might not have crossed their mind to figure out why.
I mean, I was bullied at school and this other kid would tell me that I was sick and one of the others said that I lived in a dustbin Or something to that.
I didn't know what he meant by that.
Obviously not an actual gas bin, but something along the lines of having a shitty household.
And I only just got it recently.
Right. Yeah, so I mean, I don't know how much we've actually dealt with the original issue, but to me there's this big rock of...
Avoidance of parental responsibility doesn't come from you.
It comes from your parents. I mean, I've talked a little bit to you, but I've talked a whole lot to the parents inside your head who are constantly making excuses and deflecting.
And I would say that, you know, your real identity lies on the other side of being hijacked by parental alter egos in order to excuse their own bad behavior, thus dumping more of the causality on you for a bad childhood.
And I would really, really focus on that.
Your life is improving because you're taking 100% responsibility.
And their lives would have improved as well.
Now it's too late for them. But it's not too late for you.
And ascribing, you know, again, absent significant brain damage or, you know, maybe very low IQ or whatever, it is...
We all get this 100% responsibility thing, and we can fight and kick and try and dislodge it from ourselves, but that's like saying we're not warm-blooded and we don't give birth to life young.
It's just a characteristic of humanity, and I won't give it up for anyone, to anyone, and I would suggest that you don't either.
All right, thanks very much, everyone, for a great, long, challenging, exciting show.
And please keep those questions coming in.
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