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Sept. 22, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:11:04
Left vs Right - A Childhood History!
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The evolutionary purpose of various personality structures has been quite fascinating to me.
So I remember way, way back in the day when I was thinking about, that's probably my teens or whatever, I was thinking about traumatic childhoods.
Why would they produce, say, addictive personalities?
Why would they produce heightened aggression?
There would be no particular reason why it would have to turn out that way.
And this sort of set me down this journey of trying to figure out The evolutionary value of particular Personality structures.
Now, there is this traditional divide in society, left and right, conservative, liberal, you could say equality of opportunity versus equality of outcome, and so on. And this does seem to have some genetic components.
I talked about this in the R versus K, the gene wars, and so on.
So why would so much of society tend to divide itself along these liberal and conservative lines?
Now conservative is a recognition of the passage of time.
So conservative is things have evolved a particular way for a reason and we shouldn't just throw out What has been sort of painfully developed throughout society, throughout thousands of years,
we should not just toss it all out and assume that we can start with day one or year zero or we can rewrite human nature by changing the environment, right? It says that there is a fixed aspect to human nature which is somewhat adjustable but not fundamentally transformable.
And so human beings have tried a variety of things.
Like think over the 150,000 years, for sure a variety of human configurations have been tried.
So people have tried having a matriarchy.
And having a matriarchy...
Didn't work. The men were emasculated, they were conquered, the women were in fighters.
I mean, I don't know exactly why, and we probably never know, certainly would never know throughout history.
But all of these configurations have been tried, and they have produced a particular configuration of human society and a particular configuration of human personalities.
Now, To be too conservative, of course, is to not admit for progress, growth, change, all that kind of stuff, right?
And so you don't want to be overly conservative.
Then I think you end up with what I talked about in Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, the documentary that I did.
Gosh, I can't even believe it wasn't even a year ago.
Ten months ago, I guess. Oh, how much can change.
But then you end up with a pretty stagnant society.
And that's not particularly great either.
So you do need that.
Throw out the old. You do need that.
Understand what you're throwing out and why it may have developed.
And these two aspects where one says human nature has developed out of tens of thousands of years in conjunction with the environment...
And while the environment is going to have some effect on human nature or human habits, you cannot assume that simply changing the environment is going to change human nature.
So you have the bosses and you have the employees in the traditional environment.
Quasi-capitalist setup.
You have the workers and you have the managers, right?
And so the idea is that if the workers become the managers, then they gain all the attributes of the managers.
Now that is a pretty wild notion when you think about it.
I mean, it does become as silly as if you put a kid on the basketball team, he's going to be over six feet tall, no matter what, right?
Because all the kids on the basketball team are over six foot, so you move him from the stall From the stalls to the court, and you know, bingo, bingo, bongo, his height stretches up.
Yay, because all the kids on the bus, you understand, go from the seats to the squeaks, so to speak, and next thing you know, he's really, really tall.
Or, let's grab a kid from the choir, make him the lead singer, and he's going to have a great voice and great stage presence.
Well... That's complicated.
Now, it isn't always, of course, the best singer who ends up as the lead singer, lead vocalist, because you do have to have that spark, that, you know, this whole bunch of stuff where your charisma, even your desire for it, some people do kind of like to hang out in the third row of the alto section and all that, right?
So it's this idea that one's position in the world determines one's capacities.
That to have someone climb Mount Everest is going to make them very healthy.
Because only healthy people climb Mount Everest.
You understand, right? You take the worker, you take out the broom, and you give him the keyboard of the boss, and next thing you know...
He's a boss. So that malleability of human nature is really quite something.
And that's where the left is coming from with this equality of outcome.
That all inequalities of outcome must arise from prejudice, from structural whatever.
Like if you just put the kid on the football team, he's just going to be big.
He's going to be like a walking fridge, right?
That's a pretty wild concept.
Now, and if you remember the movie, gosh, it's an old Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy movie where this guy's homeless and he decides to trade places with the guy who's the rich guy, the stock trader and so on.
And the stock trader goes crazy and the Homeless guy becomes a brilliant stock market analyst because they just trade places.
They just traded places.
It's a very Marxist movie in a way, right?
Because it's just saying, well, you take the rich guy, you put him on the street, and he's going to be just like the homeless guy.
You take the homeless guy, you put him in a suit, put him in an office, he's going to be just like the rich guy.
And, I mean, I think everyone's had these thoughts.
I'm sure you have. I know I have had these thoughts, you know, intermittently over the years.
When someone is homeless, you look at them and you say, gosh, could that have been me?
Could that have been me?
Could I have ended up with that Thousand yard stare like what would happen to me if I had to sleep on the streets for a couple of nights and was smelly and didn't have a home and didn't have a shower and like how would I pull myself out now I've thought about these things over time and there's a couple of things that have crossed my mind let me know what you think of course in the comments a couple of things that have crossed my mind over the years Which is,
okay, if I were homeless for some reason...
Well, first of all, you want to keep people in your life who can help you out in times of need and who you will also help out in times of need.
So, if you are homeless, then it probably would be a good idea if you've got friends to...
Go over to your friend's house and say, sorry, I've really messed up.
I'm homeless. Can I have a place to stay?
And then you've got a couch to sleep on.
You've got a shower. You've got some food.
You've got someone who will take you in.
And if it's a decent friendship, then at least you will be there for a month or two.
So what can you do in a month or two?
What can you do in a month or two to get yourself back on your feet?
Well, of course, what you would do is you would work very hard to get a job.
And let's say it was a recession, let's say things were slow, whatever, right?
You'd still have to work pretty hard to get a job.
And I mean, I've said this before, like I did this one, I think it was the early 90s, I think.
And it was really, really bad when I got out of university, like my old standby jobs of waitering and so on, they just weren't available.
And so I weeded gardens.
I cleaned people's cars.
I took an old woman around to show her the sights and sounds of Toronto.
I just did all these funny things, right?
Just make a buck, right?
Just hustle and make a buck, hustle and make a buck.
That's what you do.
So you just find a way, right?
You find a way to make it work.
Now, if for some reason...
If you can't find a job, then you need to do as much as you can to make the person who's putting you up as happy as possible with what you do.
So, you know, let's say that you've been looking for a month, you don't want to get kicked out on the street.
So, you will say, hey, you know, listen, it's thanks for putting me up.
I'll do your laundry, I'll clean your place, I'll cook, I'll run your errands, like I'll just make your life.
I'll be your personal assistant and make your life a whole lot.
Better, right? And that can be very helpful for a lot of people.
It can be very useful for a lot of people.
So that's something else that you can do to give yourself, you know, buy yourself another month or two, right?
And you want to make yourself as unobtrusive as possible and, you know, maybe you go for long walks in the evening and give them some privacy, whatever it is, right?
There's things that you can do. And of course, your other friends, you would canvas and do you know anyone who can get me a job or give me a job?
And maybe you've got to go.
I mean, I took a job on an island.
It was a hunting and fishing large island.
And, I mean, that job was brutal.
I mean, it was non-stop.
And I remember I was saying to the woman who hired me, oh, I want to work on a book.
Oh, yeah, you know, you can work on a book this summer.
And, you know, when I got up there, it was like 12, 14-hour days.
And it was just horrible.
And I quit.
I just, like, I'm not...
The pay per hour turned out to be really, really sad.
And there was no time to enjoy anything.
Anyway, so...
But... Maybe you've got to move.
Maybe you've got to go work somewhere else.
You just go to where the labor is in demand and short supply and you do whatever you can.
And once you've got something stable, then you can apply yourself in the evenings to improving your education, learning new things, whatever it is.
There's things that you can do to sort of pull yourself up.
Now, even if you don't have any kind of friend, well, you can maybe move to where your friends are or my family or whatever, but even if none of that occurs, well, you can go to a shelter, right?
You can go to a shelter and you can avail yourself of various charities, even government programs and so on.
I mean, you're paying the taxes for those things anyway.
So you can do a whole bunch of stuff.
To make sure you get your toehold in, right?
I mean, I've certainly lived pretty lean.
I have twice in my life, once for almost a year and another time for a couple months.
I lived in a room with someone else, like not, oh, we're roommates in the apartment, but I shared a room with someone else.
I remember sharing a room with a guy who worked for a government office and he had nothing to do.
He was so bored all day.
He was driving him crazy. He had nothing to do.
So you can live pretty lean.
I mean, I had a rent once was...
Well, I think living two in a room, my rent was like $160, $170 a month.
And I had another place, $275 a month.
That was a fairly decent sized room and a big house.
And you can live pretty cheap.
And, you know, I got my first professional job when I was a roommate in someone's house.
And I just biked to work and, you know, you know how it goes, right?
It's just the stuff that you do to get yourself going.
It's going to claw your way back up, climb your way back up, right?
Now, what interferes with this process, a lot of times, is addiction, right?
I mean, addiction is maybe why you end up homeless, and then addiction, by the time you end up homeless, you've kind of burned through all of your friendships, and you've exhausted people, maybe you've stolen from people, maybe you've been mean or abusive to people who've been trying to help you.
Like, there's a bunch of stuff that's happened, probably, and Over the course of your addiction.
Now the addiction is usually alcohol, drugs, something like that.
But the addiction could also be just to, you know, one of the most potent addictions in the world is self-righteousness.
You know, you just can't do anything wrong and everyone else is always at fault and all this, that and the other, right?
And so all of that is just terrible stuff.
So then by the time you're homeless, you don't have any Social relations.
And you also have, you know, damaged your health, damaged your brain, damaged your liver, whatever it is, right?
Through the addiction, right?
And you may owe money to criminals as a result of them fronting you cash for the drugs or whatever.
Like, you just may be in a very, very bad situation as a whole, right?
Very bad situation as a whole.
And, you know, you really don't, if you can at all avoid it, you don't want to end up in those situations.
I mean, you think of people like Marvin Gaye or Whitney Houston and man, that is an exhausting and debilitating life.
I mean, you are an addict.
Whitney Houston died at the age of 48.
She'd been taking drugs.
I think her brothers were saying they started taking drugs when they were 10.
And she herself had taken drugs pretty early.
And, you know, she was such a pretty and fresh-faced and talented woman.
A glorious voice. You've got to listen to her singing the Star-Spangled Banner at one of the Super Bowls, and it's just glorious.
And with almost no breath.
But you just get tired.
You just get burned out.
And you can't get clean.
And you can't get sober.
And you can't get that monkey off your back.
And then eventually it's like, oh, just...
Jesus, take me.
Take me. Plus, if I remember rightly, I think Whitney Houston had been sexually abused as a child.
And this is maybe where the bisexuality came from and all that.
And just...
Just a tragic, tragic life.
So... If you have burned all your bridges, so to speak, and you just don't have anyone who's willing to put you up, who's willing to take you in because they've just been burned so many times, and you've become kind of unbearable to them, and they just can't have a life that is at all calm or peaceful or productive when you're around, so then you really do fall, right?
And then... Where do you go?
Well, of course, that is a big problem.
And by the time, of course, that you've ended up in this kind of situation, and I think the Eddie Murphy movie, The Trading Places, at the beginning, he's just pretending to be disabled and scamming everyone and all that kind of stuff, which is, you know, pretty terrible stuff.
He's pretending to be a vet, I think.
Sorry, a veteran, not a veterinarian.
So, yeah, he's a scammy con artist, liar, and reminding people's sympathy for rats to get money.
And that's, you know, it's pretty wretched, right?
So, I mean, these are just things that I've sort of thought of over the years.
There's usually a way to get back up on your feet.
Unless, again, you've burned all your bridges, you've got addiction problems, you've got rage issues and so on.
Or you have this entitlement.
You know, one of the best ways to destroy a human being is to pretend to him that work is an imposition from people, not from nature, right?
So, we need a certain number of calories a day.
Mine varies between 50 and 5,000.
We need a certain amount of calories a day.
And that's not because people are mean to us.
That's not because the restaurant industry is conspiring against us.
That is because to consume, somebody has to produce.
It's just the way it is.
In order for us to consume, somebody or something has to produce.
So, that basic reality.
If you can convince someone that the reality...
Of consumption and production.
That that somehow is a system imposed by people that is unnecessary.
If you can get someone to believe that, then they will forever be chafing at the necessary industry required to keep body and soul together.
Life and its requirements will become a horrifying, horrible imposition to him.
Or her. I shouldn't have to do this.
I shouldn't have to work.
I shouldn't, right? I should pool my labor with others.
Money is a scam. I mean, it's the endless skeletal finger crooking back towards infancy that characterizes so much of sophistry, right?
That you never need to grow up.
Other people will always provide.
You just have to whine and complain or hold your breath or have a tantrum and things will be provided.
You know, all the toddler years that, I mean, it's just so enticing for so many people.
It's so enticing for so many people.
And once people have that perspective, Then there's a downward drag on their very existence.
So when I was a kid, I guess like most kids, and I think I changed around the age of five or so, but...
Like most kids, I didn't want to brush my teeth.
It was sometimes uncomfortable.
It was kind of unpleasant. And so, you know, my mom would have to check if the toothbrush was wet.
She'd have to smell my breath. And so what I would do is I would just...
Get some toothpaste and rub it around my teeth with my tongue.
All that kind of stuff, right? Just the usual trying to get away with stuff.
Because I did not recognize or value or appreciate or had internalized the basic fact that you need to keep your teeth clean, particularly with the modern diet.
You need to keep your teeth clean, otherwise you will become a very unhappy camper indeed.
Because tooth pain, I've only had it once in my life.
But tooth pain is...
It's like the only time that I've ever groaned.
Like, oh, I just groaned with pain.
And being just desperate to get painkillers, right?
It was... That was bad.
It was bad. It had nothing to do with oral hygiene, and it doesn't really matter what it was.
But anyway. So...
That...
And I don't remember how or why this changed, but I just remember very distinctly, we had a kind of a half wooden, half canvas box that had Legos in it.
And it's funny, like most kids, I don't ever remember buying Lego, but I just ended up with Lego.
Right, I just, it accumulated, you know, like an asteroid belt around the sun.
It just kind of accumulated. I guess kids got too old, they left their Lego with me, maybe they came over and played and left their Lego behind, or I don't know exactly what happened, but, like, I don't ever remember us buying cards, but we always had cards.
I don't ever remember us buying Lego, but we had Lego.
And of course it was all that, you know.
Vomitorium mixed diversity Lego that nothing ever quite hangs together in any particular way, right?
I remember buying a little Lego house for my daughter and we sort of put it together based on instructions.
This was, I don't know, five or six years ago.
And I just remember being amazed.
Wow, it does all go together, you know?
It's not just like bits of, you know, the glass that opens and closes.
This house was always cracked and one of them was missing.
You just put together these Jackson Pollock, Franken houses of many colors.
Joseph's house of many colors.
So I was... Anyway, and sometimes I would sit in that box and just sort of jump around the room and, you know...
And I remember being in the bathroom there.
And I remember looking at the toothpaste, maybe five years old.
And I remember thinking, hmm...
Come to think of it, they are my teeth.
And I'm going to need to keep them around.
And... If they go bad, you know, if I manage to fool my mother, you know, if they go bad, then I'm the one who's going to suffer, right?
Not my mom, but me, right?
So I can't win, in a sense, by...
I can't win. I can't win by fooling my mother that I brushed my teeth when I haven't, because all that will happen is my teeth will go bad.
Anyway, so I just sort of got that realization, and ever since then, I've had pretty good oral hygiene.
But if you go through your whole life and you just think, oh man, I can't believe I have to brush my teeth.
I can't believe I have to exercise.
I can't believe I have to eat salad, not steak, or whatever it is that's your particularly good and healthy food.
I can't believe, I can't believe, it's terrible, terrible, terrible.
Then you spend your entire existence chafing against the absolute, the necessary, and the inevitable.
I can't believe that I'm getting creaky as I get older.
I can't believe I need glasses.
I can't believe... Stuff would drive you nuts.
To set people against the necessities and vicissitudes of material reality is to set them on a course for slow or sometimes not so slow self-destruction.
I should...
In a better system, I should not have to work.
I should be able to smoke weed, play video games, and have stuff materialized for me to use.
It is, of course, a form of self-isolation, because if you wish to consume what others produce because you believe that production is Somehow vaguely unnecessary and exploitive.
Well, you know, you want to play video games, other people got to program those video games, right?
Which is, these days in particular, a hell of a lot of work.
You want to eat, somebody else has to produce and usually cook the food and all that.
You want electricity for your video games, so you understand, right?
It's an aristocratic mindset.
I should not have to.
Now, it's funny because I do have some real sympathy for that aristocratic mindset.
You know, my favorite movie, Room with a View.
Freddy, I think it is, the young man with the great hair.
He... There's a wealthy family.
Who's letting books out to spoil?
There's a wealthy family, and the source of their wealth is probably aristocratic in nature, because the father is gone, and there's not a huge amount of work that's being done, and so on.
But the young man is studying bones, geology, something like that, and he is supported, I suppose, Downton Abbey style.
He is supported by The servants, the land ownership, the rents that he gets and all that.
And so I really do get that, that there can be great value in that, that a lot of the...
You know, the aristocracy, a lot of them did produce, you know, some fairly decent science and some advances in this, that or the other.
So, you know, having a leisured class is not necessarily the worst thing in the world.
Again, I mean, I get, you know, generally it's a murderocracy and, you know, the land was often pillaged and I get all of that.
But I'm just talking about in terms of having people who don't have to work 10 hours a day to produce the 2,000 calories they need to survive for another five minutes, right?
Having those people, having a group of people who don't have to work directly, I mean, it's kind of the idea behind universities when they were much more private and all of that, this idea that it was worth having, it was important to have a class of people who didn't have to Scrabble or scrounge for their daily bread who could look a little bit beyond the parapets of the immediate need and get something further and better going on in society,
right? I mean, it is really conservative to just spend all of your time getting food and eating food and having sex and raising babies.
It's, you know, half an animal's existence, right?
It's half an animal's existence, so...
So I do...
I just want to sort of point out, like, I do have a little bit of sympathy for the leisured classes, so to speak, because they will often produce some good things.
It doesn't justify aristocracy, understandably.
I'm just saying that that is certainly sort of being honest about the value of just having people sit and read and think and study and not have to be consumed by the daily bread stuff, right?
But... If you believe that work is unnecessary and an imposition from a bad system, then you will chafe against the reality of the necessity of production and you will feel that everyone who was involved in the work of production...
I mean, it's funny because it's kind of a contradiction because they're unnecessary, right?
I mean, Marx needed his angles to fund himself.
But... What happens is you have an ambivalent relationship to production.
You need it because you're not producing yourself, so somebody has to.
But at the same time, you consider it immoral and wrong and bad and exploitive and all that kind of stuff.
And it's so funny too because, I mean, in Marxism, the phrase, he who does not toil shall not eat.
It's kind of repeated, and yet the aristocratic class in socialism tends to not really produce much except misery and all of that.
There's a great line, or a memorable line, from O'Brien in 1984, where Winston Smith finally gets some decent coffee, and O'Brien says, not much of this gets to the outer party, I'm afraid. I'm afraid, yeah.
They're keeping all the good stuff for themselves, right?
That's kind of what power is for, right?
That's what the whole purpose of it is.
I also remember in the movie how the pencils are just so terrible.
They barely mark anything, right?
So, who is susceptible to the idea that you shouldn't have to produce in order to consume?
Well, When children first encounter chores, they do so with a great inner and often outer groan of, you know, I don't want to.
I don't want to do homework.
I don't want to do chores. I don't want to go to work.
I don't want to, like, all that kind of stuff, right?
And so the idea that vague others should produce and that somehow...
Consumption requiring production is sort of a scam.
That, to me, is a pretty early childhood mindset.
Sort of reminds me of Jane Campion's movie, The Piano, which I guess I liked a lot more when I was younger than I do now, where the lead guy, the Christian guy, says, we all have to make sacrifices.
We all have to make sacrifices.
And then she goes off and has an affair with Harvey Keitel's Painted Butt.
I know, it doesn't make much sense, but it's a feminist movie, right?
And we all have to make sacrifices.
Well, that's kind of true.
And children, of course, go from not making any sacrifices...
And I don't mean this in the objectivist sense, like sacrificing a higher value for lower.
I just mean postponement of gratitude and all that kind of stuff.
Sorry, postponement of gratification.
And all of the deferral of gratification.
Make sacrifices, right?
Right now, I'm driving to get my teeth cleaned.
Do I want to? No?
Is it important? Yeah.
It's been a little while because of the pandemic, but it's time.
So yeah, I'd rather be doing other things.
So it's great to be having this chat, but I'd rather be doing other things.
So eventually, you know, we all do have to make sacrifices.
And another way to sort of And the culture is to preach hedonism to people because having children is an enormous amount of sacrifice.
It's well worth it in my experience and opinion, but it certainly is, without a doubt, a rather large amount of sacrifice.
Of sacrifice, right?
Because sleeplessness and money and time and energy and conflict and so on.
And again, you know, I went for lunch with my daughter today.
We had a delightful time chatting and she's great, great company and all that.
And so, yeah, it's well worth it.
But yeah, there's a lot of, you know, I mean, other than philosophy and maybe being an entrepreneur early on, like that's the most work I've done.
Is parenting. And again, a lot of it's fun.
A lot of it's great. A lot of it isn't.
But on the balance, it's just a huge, huge positive.
But if you can get people to feel that any kind of labor is an imposition, then they will Not have kids.
Or if they have kids, they will almost certainly completely ignore them.
And then the hedonism at the moment bounces back from them pretty hard into what happens down the road, what happens in the future.
And it's pretty bad.
It's pretty bad indeed.
So I think that there's a certain amount of this sort of early childhood stuff in there.
I mean, I'm sure you guys, we all had the same sort of thoughts and feelings, right?
That when you first start having to do chores, and you first start having to do dishes, and for me, actually I quite enjoyed beating the rugs, but you know, when you start having to do all of this stuff, it's a drag!
You know, that Garden of Eden stuff that goes on early on in your life, you know, that's...
That's pretty fun stuff, you know, where you don't really have any responsibilities and it's, you know, play, play, play.
Or I write about this in one of my novels that the young aristocrat, his life, his early life was composed of bidding and lazing, which I was kind of like that description.
It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's quite, quite vivid and compact.
And that early childhood bit where you're like, oh man, I don't, you know, I don't want to be a cowboy.
I want to be a pirate. Where you really do feel that it shouldn't have to happen that you go from, you know, rolling on a blanket and playing with a mobile to, you know, having to help your dad trim the hedges or, you know, have to do the dishes or...
Clean or, you know, all that can get involved in laundry or whatever it is that's happening.
Like, it's just, it feels like a drag.
And it is a certain transition that is around the end of childhood.
And it is, you know, once you understand that the price of adulthood is production and consumption, right?
So childhood is consumption without production, and adulthood is production and consumption, and then...
You go full circle when you're old and you consume without producing.
Or I guess you consume, hopefully, the stored value that you produced over the course of your life in the form of your savings and so on.
But this growing up aspect of things is really tough.
And I think for people who, for whatever reason, and we can hypothetical that, and we'll do that maybe on the way back, but for all of the people who Retain the childhood resentment at chores and work and labor and who don't feel complete in their infancy or their toddlerhood and retain that resentment of the basic cause and effect of life,
production and consumption, who retain that resentment as they get older, that to me is a really, really fascinating phenomenon.
I want to sort of take a short break here and...
I guess I'll return with squeaky teeth, but we'll talk about what could interfere with that, what could get in the way of people's production and consumption, what could interrupt the general flow of people Getting into that adult mindset.
Why would they hold that resentment all the way forward?
So, yeah, we'll take a break here. We'll talk about that.
Freedemand.com forward slash late.
I'll talk to you in a sec.
Hey, just remember that the Parable of the Apple was one of the earliest podcasts I did.
I also did that on the way to a dentist once.
All right. Talk to you in a sec.
Yo, yo, it's me.
Yes, turns out my teeth are so clean, they've just decided to keep them there and put them on the shelf in display.
Actually, no, see, I normally get my teeth cleaned every couple months, but it's been a while longer because of COVID. So, anyway, things are good.
And we continue with the question.
See, work...
Can be a reasonable pleasure.
And I never hugely minded work.
And this is even before.
There was one job I didn't like.
I think I did it for one night.
A grand total of one night.
And that was being an Orwell-style plongeur.
A dishwasher in a restaurant.
That was gross.
That was gross. I didn't do that.
Other jobs I had.
I worked in a bookstore, putting the New York Times together on Sundays.
I was a good worker, so they would bring me in for other jobs and all that.
I painted Jubilee.
I cleaned offices.
I helped install offices and stuff like that, which was seriously not fun as a whole.
You always end up getting your fingers pinched somewhere.
I worked in a hardware store.
I worked as a waiter in a variety of places.
It was fun.
Never got that job that I wanted to get at the record store, though.
The devil take your stereo and your record collection.
So... But I never really minded going to work.
I had a paper route, of course, for a while.
And I never minded it too much.
I didn't love it. I didn't hate it.
Oh, I also worked as a carnival barker at the Canadian National Exhibition.
Spin the wheel! Two bucks will get you six more!
And I remember getting swarmed after a Springsteen concert with everyone trying to bet on a spin-the-wheel game.
And I was the caller-outer guy, which was kind of fun.
I got to, I guess, refine my patter for the family.
And some of these jobs are kind of across the street in the mall.
Paper route was near my home.
But, yeah, some of them were, you know, the old, the maid from Two and a Half Men, Three Bus Rides Away.
And it was a... A real hassle.
The one I did Sunday mornings for the New York Times, I remember I used to go to, oh gosh, Harvey's.
And I really liked their onion rings back when I could have onion rings.
I remember my professor of literature, Skip Shand, when I ordered a hot dog.
And just ate it.
And I used to, because I was living lean, I used to order a hot dog from the hot dog cart and pile it so high with like tomatoes and cheese and onions and olives and so on that it was basically like there was more calories in the toppings than there was in the actual hot dog.
And I just wolf that thing down, right?
And that would keep me going for like half a day easy.
I remember Skip Shand, he directed me in the Harold Pinter play, A Slight Egg.
I remember Skip Shand saying to me, wow, enjoy that while you can.
You know, because when you're young, you never think, oh, well, there may be a time where I do have trouble wolfing down without water an entire hot dog with massive amounts of spicy toppings.
But anyway... I never minded work, but what I used to do was I would go to Harvey's, I'd get the onion rings, and I would put the onion rings at the end, and I remember every five papers or every ten papers, I would have a bite of onion ring.
And it was so good. It was so good.
I guess I once ordered a burger.
I guess not too long ago I came with an onion ring on top, and I'm like, oh fine, I'm over 50, but I'll have an onion ring.
It was so good. Oh, they're good.
I mean, batter is...
Well, there's not a lot of foods that I would classify as morally evil in their seductive nature, but batter, I would say, is definitely one of them.
I don't know if you have one of those particularly sadistic foods that you love a lot more than it loves you back, or I guess a lot more than your belly loves it back, but yeah, that was kind of rough.
That was so good, though. And they then had me come in on Saturdays to that bookstore, and what was great about that, of course, was...
I could get any book I wanted.
They would just tear the covers off and return them as unsold.
You return the covers, right?
And then you can get the price of the book back, and so basically I'd walk out of there with a bunch of Ray Bradbury books and other, I guess, Marion Zimmerman Bradley, the creep that she was, those books, and a bunch of non-fictions and all that.
And I got some great reading in.
It's sort of interesting. I was looking at a map the other day and I saw Bracebridge.
Bracebridge, a good friend of mine who later died, a good friend of mine, his mother was dating a baker up in Bracebridge when I was in my early mid-teens.
The baker was the one...
Well, first of all, he had a really cool train set in his basement.
And secondly, he got up at, like, you know, the ungodly baker.
I was like three or four in the morning or whatever.
And I remember him saying...
And I always remember this. Sorry for the ramble tangents, but what the heck?
Get this stuff down before it vanishes when I do eventually.
But he introduced me to the concept of...
He's like, if the bread is two days old, it's called two-day fresh.
So naturally, being a budding philosopher, I decided to push the...
Definition, if not the envelope, and I would say, okay, what if it's five days?
It's five day fresh. Twelve days?
It's twelve days fresh.
And I just remember thinking, okay, so you can just put the word fresh on, and because it's the last word in the sentence, it makes you think that twelve-day-old bread can be fresh.
And I remember like, wow, interesting.
Interesting. But it's interesting because that guy's house, where I lay in front, He had one of these big halogen lights out front of his kind of half cottage, half house thing.
I remember lying on the snow looking up at the lights blowing in from the sky down over me through the halogen light and I literally could convince myself to a fairly vivid degree that I was flying through space and that the snowflakes flying through the blinding light from the great dark were stars.
And it was a really cool It was a really cool memory.
It was a really cool memory. And it reminds me of a time, I think I mentioned this years ago, but a time when I was working up north with a friend of mine and He was driving the snowmobile.
I was sitting on the back with all of the drill bits on the sled, and we were going along, we were going along, and the trees were swinging by overhead.
It was a perfectly blue day, and I began to talk myself into the perspective, just for sort of fun and idle amusement.
I began to talk myself into the perspective that we were upside down, driving along the bottom of the world, or the bottom of some sort of planet, and...
Below us was the blue sky, and the trees that were going up were actually tree roots that were coming down below the edge of this planet, or this ring world, or whatever I imagined it was going to be.
And, you know, if you kind of relax yourself into letting that stuff happen, like you can just relax yourself into those kinds of perspectives, I... I did get the perspective that we were driving upside down on the bottom of the world, and these were tree roots, not tree branches, and below us was either the ocean or the sky itself or something like that, until he drove onto a lake, and of course all of the tree, quote, roots vanished, and I literally had...
Not a panic attack, but I had like a freakout because it really felt like we were about to fall into the ocean forever.
Like we'd come to the edge of that world and we were going to fall.
So be careful.
Be careful if you talk yourself into these.
I don't know if you ever can talk yourself into the perspective that you have, like everything around you seems strange and unusual and you remember that you're a brain in the case of skull and everything is coming into you through the senses but you're not touching anything directly.
It's just electrical impulses and everything that you see and hear is kind of an organized electrical storm coming in through nerve endings and you can really start to freak yourself out after a while and you know, I don't pursue that one too much because it just seems like a bad place to get stuck.
A pretty bad place to get stuck, so...
So, sorry, that was a bit of a tangent.
Tangents, let's be plural. But my reality was that, yeah, work was fine.
And I liked the money, and it was certainly necessary for me if I wanted to have anything nice, if I wanted to, you know, scrape together.
Back in the day, I would go to see, I remember going to see the movie Rocky with a friend of mine, the same friend.
Oh yeah, sorry, I forgot the guy whose house I was at, the baker in Bracebridge.
He had a copy of Crime and Punishment, which is when I first started reading it, when I was about 13 or so.
I got about 50 pages into it, but it's a slow start, and I didn't end up reading it again until later.
But I just thought it was kind of cool that the guy with the half house, half cottage, who got up at 3 o'clock in the morning and talked about 12-day fresh bread and had a train set in his basement, also had a copy of Crime and Punishment.
Anyway, just kind of strange, but true.
So, I didn't particularly...
See, I didn't like doing chores at home.
So, here's the question.
So, why is it that people end up resenting work?
Well, I don't think that we're particularly hardwired to resent reality itself.
I mean, I guess that resenting reality can...
Be somewhat helpful.
Like, I resent the reality that I have to wait for lightning to strike a dry log in order to get some fire, so I'm going to figure out how to get fire myself, right?
How to make it spinning a point of wood on another big piece of wood or something like that, right?
So I can kind of get that...
Being kind of frustrated and annoyed with reality can give you some pretty great innovations.
I'm tired of doing this, and I'm tired of having to wait for rain, so I'm going to irrigate the field.
I'm annoyed at the fact that I can't lift this thing, so I'm going to create a lever big enough to move the world.
And so I can understand, but that's not frustration with reality itself.
That's frustration with a limitation that you overcome With reference to reality itself, right?
So if your field's constantly dry, it's not enough rain, but there's a lake nearby, maybe you can dig irrigation, right?
So you get frustrated at the dry crops, but you're not frustrated at reality.
You're frustrated at a particular condition within reality, and then you use reality, right?
The weight of water and whatever it is, the need for a ditch, in order to irrigate your field, right?
So that's...
The really important aspect of this stuff.
You don't resent reality. You resent your limitations.
If you find it hard to dig with your bare hands, then I guess you'll invent a spade or a shovel, or maybe you'll just use a rock to dig for something, but you'll use a tool or an implement.
If you're tired of missing because your javelin throws go skewy, then maybe what you'll do is invent the bow and arrow, or you understand something like this.
You get... The general idea.
So that's being frustrated at a limitation within your reality, but you then use reality to overcome that limitation, right?
You use the physical properties of a lever to move something you can't otherwise move, right?
But to be upset with reality itself, which is, I think, where this work is Work is something you resent fundamentally, which is to say reality is something you resent fundamentally.
Life requires calories and effort and shelter and all that.
So why would you dislike reality?
Well, I just tell you from my own experience, and I want to hear what you guys have to say about this as well, but from my own experience, it's not that I disliked reality, it's that I disliked people.
So if you have an inconsistent parent who kind of yanks these rules out and just clubs you with them and then doesn't apply the rules to themselves or, you know, my mother would be like, you're grounded!
And then she'd get bored later that night and say, let's go to see a movie!
Whatever it is, right? And so if you have someone who doesn't seem to have any standards of organization, But instead uses those rules to kind of control you, then you end up presenting the person.
Now, you end up presenting the rules because they're a weapon used by that person.
So, a tiny example.
It was kind of vivid at the time.
The example is a woman I dated, and she was constantly nagging me to be more tidy.
That was a fairly standard Complaint, I suppose.
So we broke up and then I had to go back to get something from the place we lived in that I gave to her.
And it was a...
Well, the common area, she had a roommate.
The common area was not so bad, but her room was a complete pigsty.
Total pigsty.
Clothes on the floor.
Just gross, right?
And so after all, and I remember just thinking like, my gosh, was it good to get out of that relationship, right?
Because after nagging me endlessly for not being, and I'm not a particularly messy person, I can let things slide a little, but I have a fairly low tolerance for that kind of clutter and mess, so I'll get things tidy or whatever it is.
And I think certainly when you're living with other people, it's important to have the personal Roomba that follows you.
It's something I'm kind of working on with my daughter.
You know, when you leave a room, turn around and look and see, have you left things behind?
If you have left things behind, then please go and tidy them up, right?
I mean, you know, if you just had a snack, then go pick up the plates and wipe down the counter or the table or whatever, right?
Just have that little personal Roomba behind you that tidies up where you go.
Because I remember a friend of mine telling me about his wife once saying that, you know, I can tell exactly where my wife...
If I've been gone for the day...
This is when his wife raised the kids at home and he was gone for the day.
He said, man, I get home, I can tell exactly what my family's done all day because there's just this trail.
This trail that gets left behind of everything that they did.
And it's, you know, it was kind of frustrating for him because, you know, it's the old complaint that the man has.
I go to work all day, then I come home and the wife's like, oh, here are the kids, I need to take a break.
And, you know, by the way, do you mind making some food?
Because I've been parenting all day and stuff.
It's like, well, yeah, but I've been working all day, so...
Why do you get a break and I don't?
Whatever, right? But yeah, this woman who was...
You know, constantly nagging me to be more tidy, like this sort of lord it over kind of person.
Like, I'm tidy and you're not, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, then, when she wasn't living with me, she didn't have any standards of tidiness whatsoever.
And that's the kind of stuff that drives you a little batty, right?
In fact, it drives you a lot batty.
Because it is to use these rules, not because you value the rules in particular or the effects of the rules, but simply because you want to bully someone.
You want to bully someone. It's the same thing.
Like, my mom was a little bit this way, and of course it's no shock that when I was younger I had a girlfriend not similar to this.
But my mother was like, you know, things got to be tidy, things got to be tidy, right?
But then what happened, of course, was when she was living alone, she lived like, you know, if you can imagine a homeless person in an apartment, it's kind of like that.
Like, just crazy messy, right?
So, it wasn't that my mother cared about tidiness.
It's that my mother needed an excuse to discharge her venom, so to speak, or her hostility, or her anxiety, or her whatever, right?
Like, some people, they get...
I mean, I think we've all had this.
Like, I understand this to some degree.
And I'm sort of not putting my mom in a different category of human being or anything like that.
You know, if you're stressed or you're tense or whatever it is, then it can be a little bit easier to be snappy.
And sometimes that's not a bad thing, you know, if you've let things slide for a while and being not snappy like mean or anything, but just, you know, pushing back on things that are kind of annoying.
It can be a good thing. But yeah, my mother would be like, things gotta be tidy, gotta be tidy, tidy, tidy, tidy.
But then when she didn't have kids to boss or bully, then she...
I mean, she didn't have a shred of tidiness, right?
But then, you know, I also...
When she was institutionalized, I don't know what they did in terms of rewiring her brain with psychotropics or unwiring her brain.
I mean, who knows, right? So...
I have a... I doubt I'll ever see the file.
I doubt I'll ever see the file. Probably long gone by now.
It's been 40 years. Yeah.
I think you only have to keep them for...
I don't. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. But...
So if you have someone who doesn't inhabit the rules, so to speak, right?
Who inhabits the rules, values the rules, and follows the rules herself.
My wife likes things to be tidy, and she's a very tidy person.
And I've got no problem with her because she lives those rules, and those rules have great advantage.
I need a piece of paper.
Oh, it's right here, as opposed to I need my passport.
Oh, let me check the last three places I lived.
So, when you're a toddler and you're sort of growing into your early childhood, I'm thinking sort of, I don't know, four, five, six, those sort of span of years, then what happens is you start to get introduced to rules, right? Introduced to rules.
I mean, there are rules earlier, you know, like, please go to the washroom or the toilet, that kind of stuff, right?
But in terms of, like, I guess chores is probably what I'm talking about, but the chores certainly do have rules involved in them, right?
And, you know, then you get the sort of typical conflict where the kid wants to do something and the parent, usually the mom says, but you're not doing it properly.
And the kid's like, well, if I can't do it right, then you should do it yourself.
No, that's not the point. All that kind of stuff, right?
Fairly typical, head-butting.
But if the kid...
Is introduced to chores.
But the child gets a sense that the chores are used as leverage to control the child rather than for the inherent value they themselves have, that the chore is not the child.
Then there is going to be a resentment of the rules.
I resented being told to be tidy By someone who was not herself particularly tidy, and then when I wasn't around to boss or bully with tidiness, turned into a complete slob, or maybe always was a slob, I don't know, right?
But... that...
is the...
It's the great challenge.
I didn't like my mother telling me to be clean and to be tidy knowing that she was a very chaotic and messy individual herself.
And that sort of brings me to the point that it's also personality-based as well.
So if somebody is like...
I remember a friend of mine's mother was very, was hyper-focused on cleanliness, right?
So if you put a cup down, she would put a piece of cardboard on top of it to make sure that no fly ever got in.
And, you know, wash your hands and wash the counter and don't drop any crumbs and just keep things tidy, keep things neat, keep things healthy.
She was, I don't know if it was a germophobe, it's probably too strong a phrase, but, you know, really fastidious when it comes to tidiness and good health and keeping people...
But she also smoked, right?
She also smoked. And that was a bit of a contradiction.
If you're really, really interested in keeping things tidy and healthy and make sure you don't get any germs from bugs flying into your water or something, then maybe the smoking is not the most ideal way to maintain health.
If you don't mind me saying so, which of course I never did.
But I did note it to my friend, and there was this long pause where he was like, oh, I really wish you hadn't told me that because now I'm going to think about that, right?
That's not great.
So, if you run into somebody whose personality is chaotic and random, but they want their environment to be really organized, then they're using...
We should be internally organized before we necessarily organize the world.
Organize your thoughts, organize your environment.
I know that Jordan Peterson is a little bit the other way.
Start by at least tidying your room.
Oh yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad.
But organize your thoughts and then your life will organize from there.
Whereas... You know, it's sort of like if you have a vegetable patch, right?
And you put a sprayer out to spray water on your vegetable patch.
It matters where you put the sprayer, right?
If your sprayer is pointed at the wrong place and it's missing, then you going over there and hitting the water and trying to move it over is kind of pointless, right?
It matters where you point the water sprayer first and foremost, right?
To me, it's the same thing.
If you organize your thoughts, then your life hopefully will be organized from there.
What I would say is that if you're a toddler and you start running into these rules that are put forward as more than just, I have a preference for...
If you're sitting as a family and you're discussing what color to paint the living room, Nobody's sitting there saying it's a moral decision or it's a quality of character decision or something like that.
Nobody really says that, right?
Now, people might bring in, oh, you know, well, compromise is important and you got to blah, blah, blah.
But fundamentally, that's not a moral decision or maybe where you go to vacation.
Now, it can be. People say, well, I gave you the vacation choice last year and so now it's my turn and it's reciprocal and it's fair and like there may be that kind of stuff.
But nobody would say that the decision where you go, like, oh sorry, where you end up going, that it's a moral decision any more than the color of the living room or whatever, right?
So, but there are some rules that are put forward to kids that are really moral, moral rules.
Or... You know, respect.
It's immoral to respect your elders.
Or, you know, cleanliness is next to godliness.
Or, you know, how can you expect to take on the world and conquer the world if you can't even make your bed?
You know, like there's this, you know, you make your bed like a soldier makes his bed so you can bounce a quarter on it.
And, you know, I won't see any creases, all that kind of stuff, right?
So, if you encounter, as a toddler, somebody who starts inflicting rules upon you, but you get a sense that the rules are being inflicted upon you as part of a power grab or a power play, I don't know why people think I can shorten these shows.
Actually, I've got to do. But I enjoy the way that I present them, and I hope you find them interesting too, right?
But yes, if somebody's imposing these rules upon you, and it's a form of one-upmanship, it's a form of control, it's a form of bullying, it's a form of you have to do things my way.
In other words, if somebody imposes rules upon you because they experience an extraordinary amount of stress and tension, if they don't impose these rules upon you or if these rules are broken, usually because of their own punishments from their own parents when they were little and all that, then what happens is you resent the rules.
Now, the reality is you resent the person because the rules are fake.
The rules are portrayed as moral.
This is how you live together.
It's respectful. You've got to do things properly.
It's good training for whatever adult excellence you want to achieve.
But you just don't respect the person who's giving you the rules.
Now, if it's just one person...
I think you end up much more likely to resent that person rather than resent the rules as a whole.
But if it's an entire community, if you have to do this for, I don't know, some sort of religious reason, if you have to do it for some sort of cultural reason or nationalistic reason or whatever it is,
if all of these things have to occur and it's very widespread, it's kind of universalized in a way, Then you have a real problem because the rules themselves, like how do we, we tunnel through society to get to reality, right? Especially when we're kids, right?
Because our first exposure is not to the elements, but to people, right?
To mothers and fathers and siblings and aunts, right?
So we connect to people long before we connect to reality.
And so if your social circle is has has sort of controlling rules that go beyond or go counter to reality or consistency on the part of the people giving the rules then I think it it's that lingering sense of resentment towards reality right like that old sergeant major I am reality right so parents like they are reality the parents are reality The parents are reality.
And if the parents and the society as a whole resent, like if you resent the rules, then it's very easy to end up resenting reality as a whole because that is how you experience objective reality.
Is through parents, rules, community.
Like, we learn customs before we learn physics.
We learn religion before we learn physics.
Before we learn objective empirical reality.
And if it's widening...
And, you know, I can't sort of help but think of Marx here and his rage against Jews and his rage against all of this kind of stuff.
And, you know, maybe there was part of that in his upbringing that he really, really resented.
People don't particularly like to be controlled.
They don't like to be bullied. And if the bullying is going to happen, it's better for the bullying to occur at a personal power level rather than a pretend moral level.
You know, like when I was a kid and walking in the woods with a friend of mine and we were like 12, And these older kids who were 16 or 17 sat upon us and forced us to build a fire, and then they scared my friend who was smaller than me, and I remember they called him a sucky fag, and he cried, and I said, I turned and said, well, why don't you just pick on someone your own size?
And the guy punched me in the stomach.
It didn't really hurt. I'm so glad I said it.
Not that it matters much to me anymore so many years after the fact, but...
That wasn't a moral thing.
That was just, hey man, we're bigger than you.
So we're going to make you do what we want.
We're going to keep you here.
We're going to threaten you.
But there wasn't some moral thing there.
When I got caned in boarding school, that was a different matter, right?
There was a moral... We broke the rules and there must be consequences and discipline and blah, right?
There was all of this maintain the empire bullshit, right?
I mean, so... There are times when the exercise of power is not a moral thing.
You get mugged or whatever.
I mean, nobody's sitting there saying, well, you owe this money to me because whatever, right?
But... When you get controlled or bullied based upon morality, and morality is the physics of children, then it's kind of easy to slip into resenting reality because you haven't separated the tribe from the truth.
You haven't separated the rules imposed by the tribe from the rules of reality that often go counter to the rules of the tribe, right?
So, I think that people end up resenting adulthood reality and feel that something must be given to them because they're unable to outgrow the often hypocritical moral bullying that characterizes their childhood Particularly, how do you get kids to do chores?
Everybody has to make sacrifices.
How do you get kids to do chores?
It's an age-old parenting question.
My answer has been... Well, chores are a kind of work, right?
And it's fine for me if a child gets paid a small amount of money for doing chores because, you know, it prepares them for working and getting paid and, you know, a maid would do it and blah, blah, blah.
So, I mean, I get. That's sort of one way to do it.
And the other is to commiserate.
Yeah, chores suck, you know?
I mean, chores suck.
And, but you know, they're part of life.
Talk about the consequences. Yeah, going to the dentist sucks, but it beats the alternative.
Yeah, tidying up sucks, but it beats having insects in the house.
You know, you get all this sort of stuff, right?
Vacuuming is, it sucks, but it's better than having, you know, dust in your eyes all day.
So, you know, there's, you know, just commiserate and it sucks, but, you know, it's important to do and consequences are negative if you don't do it.
And, you know, there's ways to make it more enjoyable.
You can You can chat, you can listen to music, you can have a phone call, whatever it is that you can do to make it right.
So if, on the other hand, it's like, you know, everybody has to pull together, everyone has to make sacrifices, and maybe the parent who's saying that is personally chaotic or lazy or, you know, maybe he's having an affair or drinking too much or is overweight or whatever, and it's like, you've got to make sacrifices, but I'm not willing to sacrifice my affair, my cigarettes, my alcohol, my food, my whatever it is, right?
So, if the rules that are hypocritical are imposed in a way that is pretty negative and destructive, then I think you end up, you're at great risk, I suppose, of ending up resenting reality itself as a way of protecting your relationship with the parents, right? You protect the relationship with the parents by pretending that it's somehow reality that's at fault, not the parents, right?
So I would say that probably has a lot to do with why this transition doesn't occur very well to people.
My situation was productively chaotic to the point where I didn't...
You know, my mother was outside the fold of general society.
She was tolerated, I suppose, but she was outside the fold of general society.
She was not welcomed by normal, stable, healthy people and so on.
And so for me, it was not that...
I was able to differentiate between the local rules and the objective reality.
And that was, I mean, very, very important for me.
It was very important for me. And I think it had a lot to do with how I was able to develop a philosophy that goes to some degree against, or to a large degree sometimes, against contemporary social morals and teachings, right?
It's very... Very helpful.
Very helpful. So, anyway, I hope this has been helpful to you.
It certainly helps me to puzzle through these things, and I think we get someplace productive.
Of course, as always, I look forward to your feedback.
I look forward to your support at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Lots of love from up here. I can't stop licking my teeth.
Have a great day.
Bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
Please like, subscribe, and share, and all of that good stuff to get philosophy out into the world.
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