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Jan. 31, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

08:57

When to NOT Trust!

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	Okay, question from a listener.
	Could you possibly be any better of a person?
	Well, that's a fine question.
	I appreciate that. I'm always working on it.
	Thank you so much, she said.
	My sister and I have a pretty decent relationship since we were kids.
	She was two years younger. I'm now 51.
	About two years ago, I had a very personal problem come up in my life.
	Nothing to do with my health, nothing that would put me at risk of harm, but it was deeply troubling for me.
	And I just felt the need to confide in family.
	With that being said, I've never gone to my sister for any help.
	This was the first time, and I'm sure she was shocked I actually came to her.
	But on this occasion, it just felt right to speak with her.
	At the onset of our conversation, I specifically told her not to share this with anyone, and it was only between her and myself.
	The conversation went well, and she listened.
	Great. About three days later, I get a call from my grandmother, and as soon as I said hello, my grandmother starts asking me about everything I shared with my sister.
	Now, the only way my grandmother could possibly have known is if my sister first spoke with our mother.
	My sister and grandmother don't speak.
	To make matters worse...
	My grandmother shared it with my uncle.
	Secret is out! I felt so betrayed.
	Trust is so sacred in my world.
	Once broken, it's very rare I give it back because the onus is on them to prove they can be trusted again.
	And most people aren't willing to put in the effort to gain it back.
	I, personally, would take a secret to my grave.
	I know and realize how fragile trust is and never take that for granted.
	After the call from my grandmother, I immediately texted my sister because if I had called, it would have been me just shouting and that's not who I am.
	I said, why you felt the need to tell mom about what I talked about is beyond me.
	Now I have grandma calling me and she also said all this stuff to Uncle Jim.
	It really wasn't anyone else's business until I decided to speak with mom, if need be.
	To which she replied, I was trying to help you.
	That was the last time we spoke.
	No apologies. Nothing.
	Recently I learned my nephew, my sister's kid, who I was very close with his whole life, had been married.
	I was there for him at every birthday, graduation, family outing, when he had severe anxiety, etc.
	Obviously I wasn't invited to his wedding or even informed.
	I'm at a loss for words in all of this.
	I'm not sure what the actual question is that I have.
	Maybe how would you handle family betrayal?
	Do you have any words of wisdom? Am I wrong here?
	The thought of trying to resolve this on my end by reaching out makes me sick to my stomach and because of all this I now have anger and resentment towards my nephew to whom I don't really wish to speak with again.
	Thank you, name. Oof, man, that is tough.
	That is tough. That is cold.
	That is brutal to not even be given word of your nephew's marriage.
	That's, I mean, just so harsh.
	That's so cruel. That's so cold.
	So here are a couple of tips.
	I don't know, obviously, how you should resolve this in any particular detail, but here's a couple of tips that I've learned over the years about trust.
	Well, first of all, of course, you can't trust anybody who has hidden resentments towards you.
	Because you trust that person, those hidden resentments are going to come out, and they're going to betray you.
	So... I assume if you sort of look back in your history that there may be some hidden resentment.
	So, of course, your nephew had severe anxiety.
	Why? Because he's raised by a manipulative, betraying, untrustworthy mother, so he's got severe anxiety.
	And that's going to be a real problem for him over the course of his life, and it may not be something that you overly wish to be involved in.
	I know that sounds cold, but when you see this stuff play out, it's pretty clear sometimes it's not a good plan.
	So if somebody has hidden resentment towards you, don't trust them with anything, because they will betray you.
	Somebody who feels that they're in an inferior position to you, in any way, shape, or form, right?
	Maybe they make less money than you, and they envy it, right?
	Making less money, and there's tons of people, almost the whole world, right?
	We make less money than them in particular spheres.
	But whether you resent it, I make less money than Brad Pitt, obviously, but I don't resent Brad Pitt for that, right?
	I wouldn't want his life anyway.
	So, if somebody has value that you share and you're doing better, they can either come to you for advice, like, oh, you seem to have a really good marriage.
	My marriage is in trouble. What's your secret, right?
	They can get you help. Or, if things go badly for them, they will often resent you.
	And feel in a lower position than you, right?
	To feel like they're a lower status, they're negative relative to your status.
	Now, most people, when they feel negative relative to you, they will not try and raise themselves to your level.
	That may not in fact be possible, right?
	If the person's divorced or something like that, or the marriage is beyond hope for repair, or it's just terrible, then they can't get your happy marriage.
	So they won't try to raise themselves to your level.
	They will try to undermine and harm you.
	It's a sad fact of humans.
	It's called leveling, right? Leveling is when you feel inferior to someone.
	And so, rather than try and raise themselves to your level, you will try to claw them down, usually by reputational betrayal, right?
	This is a reputational betrayal, right?
	So, some very personal problem came up in your life.
	You wanted to keep it private.
	Obviously, you wanted to keep it private because you were afraid of some damage to your reputation or people's perception of you.
	And so, a reputational attack.
	So, women will often go for a reputational attack, right?
	This is why the more gynocentric society becomes, the more you get this cancel culture, you get a reputational attack.
	So the typical example would be that the overweight woman will spread rumors that the attractive woman has some negative personal quality, some negative personal characteristic, and she's just a bitch, or she's got herpes, or she's a slut, or whatever it is, right? So it's just reputational damage in an attempt to compete by harming others, right?
	You can call this the Tonya Harding thing.
	She hires her boyfriend, if I remember rightly, to attack some skater, Nancy Kerrigan, and hurt her legs so she couldn't skate.
	Rather than improve her own skills, she attempted to harm somebody else.
	So, number one, if somebody has any hidden resentments to you, if they're jealous, if they feel lesser than you, then it's foolish to trust them with anything, because then we'll most likely use it to harm your reputation and to level up.
	The other thing, if somebody's low status in general, Being in possession of gossip, particularly in the female world, is high status.
	Oh, you'll never know, and then you get all this attention.
	Oh, you'll never know what I heard.
	So you will get higher status if you're in possession of a secret.
	I don't quite understand it because I'm not a female, and again, lots of honorable, trustworthy women, but this is a bit of a coinage in some female circles, that if you're in possession of a secret, then that makes you higher status, if you reveal that secret.
	So to be in possession of a secret that you don't share in some female circles is like being in possession of a winning lottery ticket that you refuse to cash in, like it just doesn't make any sense.
	And so if somebody is low status as a whole, then if you give them a secret, you're giving them the potential to be high status by revealing your secret.
	And since everybody strives towards high status in one form or another, you are really dangling something in front of them that they're going to have a very tough time resisting.
	It's literally like giving a winning lottery ticket to somebody who's really broke and saying, don't cash it, right?
	I mean, again, sort of an amoral standpoint.
	Most people don't function in terms of ethics.
	They function in terms of status and social climbing and getting attention.
	And it's very sort of base mammalian stuff.
	But that's where a lot of people, men and women, operate.
	So that would be something.
	If somebody's not successful in their life and they consider you to be more successful, they're going to try and drag you down.
	If somebody has hidden resentments, and in particular, if somebody's low status as a whole, trusting people who are low status with your secrets is really a negative idea as a whole.
	So I just wanted to, these are sort of ways in which I review these kinds of things.
	And, you know, this might be why it's a good idea to, you pay a therapist and talk to a therapist because the therapist is bound to secrecy by convention and convention.
	Sometimes even by law. So, yeah, I hope that helps, and again, I'm really, really sorry you're in this situation, but you can either get mad at toxic people rejecting you, or you can thank your lucky stars that you didn't stay on for the rest of your life's ride with such destructive people.

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