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July 13, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:03:59

5221 Why Parents Abuse

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	Well, shall we get straight to it?
	Thank you very much for a tip.
	Thank you very much.
	Henri?
	Henri!
	Henri!
	Thank you very much, I appreciate that.
	And very kind.
	Somebody says, I recently listened to your breaking up with self-destructive girlfriend.
	Call and show and found it enlightening and uncannily insightful.
	Both shedding further light into my life and upbringing.
	At some point during the show, you say that very often when the child is going through puberty, abusive parents collapse because they cannot keep their own demons at bay by physically brutalizing the child.
	I wonder, do you think sometimes it could be the internal parents that collapses and go suicidal when physical child abuse is no longer a viable option for the external parent?
	Thanks in advance for your kind consideration.
	Well, Joe, that's a great question.
	Shall we just jump into the deep end?
	Should we just jump straight into the deep end and get to that?
	Yeah, I appreciate that.
	If you could hold off on the $1 tips, I'd appreciate that.
	I really hate the idea that I'm taking your last dollar.
	So if you're really low on money and you can't afford more than a $1 tip, I'm begging you, please keep it for yourself.
	That's very kind.
	But, you know, you might need a bus fare home, you might need to pick up a coffee or put a down payment on a candy bar or something like that.
	So if you could hold off on the dollar tips, I would appreciate that.
	It's just more paperwork for me and doesn't really help too much.
	All right.
	So, um, welcome.
	Good evening and welcome to our Wednesday night live on the 12th of July already.
	Wow.
	All future donations should be in pieces of eight.
	That's right.
	You can see, you can just take your pieces of eight.
	You can put them sideways and you get the infinity symbol.
	Uh, here's a tip for your piece of parenting book.
	Can't wait.
	Author, thanks for bringing endless value to my life.
	Thank you very much, my friend.
	That is incredibly kind.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	And, uh, I am, I am inspired by the tips and I will do my absolute best to give you the greatest possible show.
	Should we start with the demons that abusive parents are facing?
	Should we start with that right on deep into the deep end?
	Should we?
	And yes, deep dive.
	All right.
	I will tell you what goes on with abusive parents and why they often collapse into depression or self-attack or complacency or inertness or whatever when the children hit puberty, right?
	Okay, hit me.
	Minus one to minus 10.
	How deep do you want me to go?
	Minus one to just, you know, a little quick explanation moving on.
	Minus ten.
	Don't give me a plus ten.
	A good day, a good day.
	Listen, listen, listen.
	Minus ten.
	Minus ten to the bedrock.
	Mariana Trench depth.
	There was some tweet from a while ago.
	It was some woman saying, you know, a nine-inch penis?
	Who thinks that's big?
	Who thinks a nine-inch penis is big?
	And somebody was like, we got Miss Deep Dish Pussy over here.
	Okay, so let's get to the mechanics of what goes on in a child abuser.
	A child abuser is sacrificing, I'm gonna say her, could be him.
	No, you know what?
	I pick enough on women, let's make it a him, right?
	Let's make it a him to the vanquished, right?
	A child abuser is sacrificing his children to his inner demon god of his abuser, right?
	So that's how the guy gets through the day, that's how he doesn't have to deal with his own anger, that's how he doesn't have to deal with his own fear and his rage, is he continues, right?
	And so, if you have
	dad and his boy Bobby right and so let's let's make it let's make it a generational thing right I'm just gonna make notes cuz I only had coffee in a bit today so let's make the granddad Sam then we've got the dad and we've got Bobby as the kid right so Sam abused the dad dad now abuses Bobby why does dad abuse Bobby because
	When Sam was raising the dad, when the dad was a boy, when Sam was raising a dad, the Sam blamed the dad for Sam's anger, right?
	This is sort of foundational abuse 101, is that you have the desire to harm someone, but it appalls your conscience to harm that person, right?
	You don't want to look in the mirror and see an evil guy, do you?
	So, you abuse your child
	And then you say to your child, I'm trying to improve you, you resist, you don't listen, this is your fault, you earned this, you did this to yourself, like the old thing, God doesn't send people to hell, people send themselves to hell by disobeying God, right?
	So you say to the child, it's your fault.
	And understand, this is why I say that the verbal abuse is almost infinitely worse than the physical abuse, assuming the physical abuse doesn't permanently impair or kill you.
	Because it's not the physical abuse.
	You know, people say, oh, well, Sam beat the dad and therefore the dad beats Bobby.
	Nope!
	That's not even close to the truth.
	In fact, it's kind of the opposite direction from the truth.
	Because it obscures more than it shows.
	And the obscurity is where the real lie is, right?
	The parent attacks the child and says that it's the child's fault that the parent is trying to help, that this is love.
	It's the child's fault he's being beaten, right?
	Now, in order to survive the abuse from the father,
	The child internalizes that standard, right?
	I mean, can you imagine?
	And this is a straight-up death threat.
	It's a straight-up murder threat.
	All child abuse is a death threat.
	All child abuse is a murder threat, right?
	Just as every law is an opinion with a gun, right?
	They escalate until you comply or you die.
	That's the nature of political power.
	So can you imagine
	That if you are the kid looking up at your dad and your dad says, I'm beating you for your own good.
	I'm beating you to keep you safe.
	You brought this on yourself.
	You didn't listen.
	It's your fault.
	You're bad.
	I'm just trying to rescue you from your badness.
	And if you were to turn at that dad, holding the belt, and you were to say, Dad, no, you're just a fucking asshole who likes hitting children.
	You're just a coward and a bully who likes hitting children because you're a pathetic, powerless person in your own life.
	So you like to exercise power.
	over those who are helpless and small, and you get to beat up children and call yourself a moral hero, wow, you are really the Superman of evil, right?
	Now, if you were to say something like that, if you were to say something like that, quick question, my friends, what would happen?
	Oh, what would happen if you accurately identified the sadism and cowardice of a man who beats a child?
	What would happen?
	Right.
	If you hit that sore spot, what you're doing is you're loosing the restraining bolt on his evil, and it absolutely could be game over for the child.
	And I guarantee you, countless millions of children over the course of human history have tried just that approach, and they ended up in some very shallow graves.
	I'm not kidding about that.
	They ended up in some very fucking shallow graves.
	And if you were being beaten, and you continued to say, oh, you like this, don't you, Dad?
	You like beating a helpless, defenseless little child.
	You're just a big, tough guy, and you're not a moral man, you're just a sadist who enjoys beating children.
	Because you're pathetic.
	And because you're angry at your dad, you're angry at your mom, but they're too tough, so you take it out on a little six-year-old little kid, you fucking coward.
	Right?
	You understand?
	It's just going to escalate.
	To the point where, like, the reason we comply is our survival instincts kick in and say, well, I can't do much good for the planet if I die or am murdered at the age of six or seven or eight, right?
	So the survival mechanism is to comply.
	Violence works!
	Violence works because it's a death threat.
	All violence is a death threat.
	All violence is a death threat.
	The only way that we're here is that our ancestors survived, as children, intense child abuse.
	Abandonment is a death threat as well.
	Yeah, that's a very good point.
	Thank you, my friend.
	You're absolutely right.
	You're absolutely right.
	Well, and there's lots of different death threats, right?
	There's I'm going to choose another kid.
	If a bunch of my kids are in danger, I'm going to rescue you last.
	I'm going to give you the least amount of food.
	I'm going to have you sleep a little bit closer to the outside.
	of the camp where there are predators at night.
	Like there's lots of different ways that you can get a child killed over the course of human evolution, right?
	Over the course of human evolution.
	So, how do you survive a child abuser?
	You internalize the child abuser.
	How do you survive a child abuser?
	You internalize the abuser.
	See, the abuser has triggers.
	Now, if you were abused, hit me with a why if you were able to uncover triggers that lower the odds of getting abused, of being beaten or attacked or something like that.
	Right?
	You figured out the triggers if you want to tell me what they are.
	Yeah, of course, everyone's here.
	We're all we're all and and for some people, it doesn't work.
	Right?
	For some kids, it really doesn't work.
	You can't figure out the triggers.
	Because the triggers
	Are outside of your knowledge, right?
	So if it's like, like generally abusive parents need some excuse to go off on their kids, right?
	They don't just come home, you know, kick in the door and start beating the kids, right?
	So those of us who've been abused, we know how the place, how the play goes.
	What happens is your parent comes home or your parents come home and they sort of stalk around the place kind of stomping.
	And you know, they're looking for an excuse.
	They're looking for an excuse.
	to beat you, to scream at you, to abuse you, or whatever it is.
	They're looking for something, right?
	And, you know, it's a pretty nerve-wracking situation as a kid, because most times there's something that you can be gotten for.
	I always remember, like, you know, I'd had the flashlight last, or I had misplaced the deck of cards, or, you know, if my mom moved that couch for whatever reason, she'd find a hole in the carpet because I'd spilled some paint and cut, like, whatever it is, right?
	There's always something, right?
	Something you could be gotten for.
	Or candles, or whatever it is.
	Who had the matches last, or whatever it is, right?
	So when the parent is in a bad mood, there's some things you can do.
	There are some things you can do proactively.
	Like if your parent is constantly complaining about the place being messy, then you can tidy the place up.
	But that also feels kind of humiliating too, particularly, I think, for the boys, right?
	Let me just get your comments here, make sure we stay this as a conversation.
	Become a world-class sleeping actor.
	Oh yeah, I've been there for sure.
	Yeah, justify their outbursts.
	Kids would rather be beaten than neglected.
	Too sad.
	Yeah, of course, because if you provide value to your parent as a punching bag, that's better than providing no value at all, right?
	We understand that.
	If you provide value to your parent as a poison container, right?
	Like to allow them to expel their negative emotions onto you, then you have some value.
	Your parent's going to keep you around, you know, just to beat on you.
	And that's better than when the parent runs out of any utility for you at all.
	And
	Always look like you're doing busy work and keep the place nice and tidy.
	Yeah, hit me with a why if you had a parent that was allergic to you in a state of relaxation and repose.
	Like if you were just sitting there reading a comic book and, you know, maybe you had some headphones on or you were just, you know, whatever, chilling and relaxed and so on.
	And this would be like, apparently, apparently this is really offensive to people as a whole.
	I don't know why, but it was really offensive to people as a whole.
	Somebody says, mine was making any face or emotion when being yelled at.
	Crying was, give you something to cry about.
	Laughing at the absurdity of how angry they were also made things worse.
	I learned to stare them in the eye and make my face dead.
	Yeah, and this is of course what happens in prisons and concentration camps and gulags is you just get that sloped shoulder, dead-eyed stare at the floor, don't make any eye contact and so on, right?
	Sometimes my dad would randomly
	Hit me, this person says.
	Sorry, let me just see here.
	My dad would randomly hit me and when I asked why, he'd say, he would say I was going to mess up the future.
	I was going to mess up in the future?
	Oh yeah, yeah.
	This is for what's coming, right?
	To avoid one main trigger, says Chris, don't question my parents or don't reason through their negative actions, right?
	Right.
	Let me just get this question for later because it's a question about women.
	I see that one.
	Absolute hostility and sociopathic behaviors, avoidance, rudeness in people.
	Okay, we'll get to that.
	We'll get to that.
	Somebody says, my parents were neglectful, not physically or verbally abusive in any way.
	There was just nothing.
	My mom left the family and was out of my life from eight to 18.
	My dad remarried and five more children.
	I have a lot of feelings of loss and sadness within that extended family.
	I'm glad I noticed this, but what are some blind spots I should be aware of, especially in regards to my own parenting?
	That is also a great question and I will get to that after we deal with the sort of the violence and the abuse.
	Somebody says, acting dumb, childish, silly and naive usually worked.
	Same thing about my parents or their parents.
	Yes, so there is a defense mechanism against violent parents, which is to pretend to be younger than you are.
	That's certainly it.
	Somebody says, you just described my entire childhood.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Yes, had a parent scream at me for being sick.
	And relaxing, and relaxing, right?
	Yes, yes, for sure.
	An abusive parent, because they feel no inner peace.
	Like, we don't know what it's like to have harmed children, to have brutalized children, to have been violent towards children, to have crapped all over the bond of parent-child and so on.
	And
	Because you are in a state of relaxation and repose, it reminds them of just how uneasy and angry and tense and self-hating they are, right?
	So when you're relaxing, it reminds them how fundamentally tense and weird they are.
	And then, see, here's the thing.
	Anytime, this is Immaturity 101, right?
	So anytime the abusive parent feels negative, it's someone's fault and that person must be punished.
	Anytime!
	Anytime!
	Because they can't handle self-criticism.
	They can't handle self-evaluation.
	All they can do is self-attack.
	And so, let's say that a parent is late for work, right?
	Well, they can't blame themselves for getting up too late.
	They can't blame themselves for staying up too late watching a show.
	They can't blame themselves for failing to set the alarm or doing that AM-PM switcheroo that used to happen with digital alarm clocks and so on.
	They can't blame themselves.
	It's got to be somebody else's fault, right?
	And so, when the parent comes home, if he's been chewed out by his boss for being late, it's got to be somebody else's fault.
	It's got to be the goddamn clock manufacturer, or it's got to be the kid, or it's got to be the wife, or it's got to be traffic, or it's got to be the stupid slow bus system.
	You can't take ownership.
	You can't criticize yourself.
	Can't.
	Can't criticize yourself, because you were raised with verbal abuse, the parent was raised with verbal abuse, and therefore there is only self-attack, there is no self-evaluation.
	This is why people can't progress, because they've been traumatized to the point where they can't criticize themselves, therefore they can't get better at anything, they can't be coached, they can't take any feedback, because all feedback is attack.
	So, abusive parenting 101 is anytime you as a parent feels bad, it's somebody else's fault, they've attacked you, they've done it to you, and they have to be punished.
	Because you're completely out of control, right?
	You can't manage your own feelings, you can't reason yourself in and out of particular emotional states.
	So, you know, if someone in your life could push a button and give you a migraine anytime they wanted, I mean, you'd really need to control that person's behavior.
	Because they'd have so much power over you.
	Literally, they're so vulnerable and thin-skinned that any behavior of the child that causes any kind of upset in the parent is an attack.
	It's a violation of the non-aggression principle.
	It's a home invasion.
	It's punching them in the face.
	They're shocked.
	They're startled.
	They feel out of control.
	And because they're out of control, if you as a child make them feel bad,
	Then you as a child must be damn well punished so that you don't do that because they're the victim and you're the aggressor.
	So to take a silly example, if you have a, this is more on a mom's side, if you're at a mall or a family gathering or whatever, and you as a five or six year old kid say, why is that woman so fat?
	Right, your mother feels the shame, and oh, it just wounds her, and now she feels judged, and it's gonna be a family story forever.
	Now she can't criticize herself, right?
	She can't sit there and say to everyone, you know, I really should have talked about this, a little bit more politeness stuff, maybe a little bit more sensitivity stuff, and so on.
	I mean, okay, she is kind of fat, but you know, you shouldn't be blurting it out like that.
	I'll work on it, blah, blah, blah, right?
	She can't say that.
	So she feels
	Incredibly crushed.
	If she had said that as a child, she would have been beaten.
	So the whole amygdala, the fight or flight gets activated.
	She feels like she's fallen down a hole.
	She feels like the earth.
	What did they say?
	I just want the earth to open up and swallow me up.
	That's what people say when they're ashamed in that kind of way.
	And so the child says something honest and open and curious, and the mother feels such intense shame.
	And she perceives the child as doing that to her.
	She perceives the child as an adult actor doing that to her.
	I mean, if... I remember a family member once when I was... Oh, it was my brother, who's... So, when I went to go and eat
	Sushi!
	With my brother.
	Foolishly forgetting all the lessons of my early childhood, I did not take my food with me to the bathroom, because what happened was, when I came back and took a bite of my sushi, it turns out that my brother had wedged a, you know, a finger-end's worth of wasabi in there, and I literally felt like somebody was pounding a driveway spike up into my sinuses.
	Like, I really, I'm not a big spice guy, and it was just appalling.
	It was really painful.
	So if somebody does something like that to your food, or, you know, knowingly feeds you something, that's God.
	We're good to go.
	It better be decaf because if it's not decaf, I will find you and you will have to play hacky sack with me at four in the morning because I will not be going to sleep.
	Right.
	So, and it's kind of a joke obviously, but so you blurt out something as a kid.
	Why is that woman so fat?
	Your mom was like, Oh, you know, she's so hurt.
	She's so upset.
	And she views you as having done that to her.
	And so you have to be punished for assaulting her with bad feelings.
	And I know it sounds crazy, but this is how it works.
	You have to be punished because you have pushed that button that gives her a shamegasm, or whatever you want to call it, a migraine, right?
	So they view themselves as needing to control your behavior because your behavior directly leads to them feeling angry or ashamed or enraged or helpless or something like that.
	You are in control of their feelings.
	And therefore the effort that a sane person puts into controlling his own feelings, your parents put into punishing you because you attack, you attack them.
	Remember you attacked them.
	You disobeyed.
	You got a bad grade.
	You stole.
	You blurted something out.
	You attacked them.
	They're just correcting your behavior so that you damn well don't make them feel bad.
	Through no fault of their own, right?
	Somebody says, chewing gum peacefully annoyed my mom.
	Yeah, a lot of people have this chewing or drinking sound, right?
	All right, I'm getting this question about ruminates over a past betrayal or exploitation.
	I will get to that.
	I'm just going to finish this one up.
	Hit me with a why if you find this helpful.
	I always want to make sure I'm providing value, right?
	I'm providing value.
	Hit me with a why if this is helpful.
	Somebody says, being called lazy, stupid for what I know was caused by their abuse.
	Yeah, for sure.
	For sure.
	Anytime I needed something inconvenient, I learned to not need anything.
	Didn't stop the attacks, but I got ignored, which was better than being noticed a lot of the time.
	What you're saying about relaxing even extended to me and my sister sleeping.
	My dad would wake us up at 3 to 4 a.m.
	by hitting a pan with a wooden spoon and making us do chores.
	Bus is 10 minutes late, so I was late.
	My fault for not leaving earlier.
	Or find a cheap bike.
	Options and choices exist.
	Well sure, yeah, but
	Abuse, verbal abuse, short-circuits the capacity for self-criticism in most people.
	They can't criticize themselves.
	If something goes wrong, someone else must be blamed, must be punished.
	I mean, we all know this, right?
	If you had abusive parents and you got a sibling, hit me with a why if this ever happened to you, right?
	You're playing around in some way and
	You knock the vase over and the vase breaks, right?
	Your parent comes storming in, who the hell did that?
	Right?
	You all point at each other, right?
	You all point at each other.
	I didn't do it.
	I was over there.
	I wasn't even in the room.
	I just came in with when you did.
	I told him not to do that.
	I told him not to throw the ball.
	I told him, right, whatever, right?
	Why are we all doing that?
	There's no need.
	My daughter breaks things, drops things, it happens, right?
	I remember hearing the story from a woman once about, it was a mom, she's a really nice mom, and she said at one point her kids were young, she had a bad headache, and she went to go and lie down, and she said to the kids, just don't leave the room, don't leave the room.
	And there was a pile of laundry in the middle of the room that they were playing with or whatever and she came out and they had peed in the pile of laundry because they didn't want to leave the room and she just burst out laughing at how funny it was.
	Well, of course, if you have an abusive parent then, you know, they feel like you've attacked them with your urine and this kind of stuff, right?
	It's like in the movie City of God where Patrick Swayze was changing the diaper of some kid and the kid peed in his face and he just laughed and said, hey, he's gonna grow up to be a fireman.
	I mean, as opposed to
	Or do you pee into my face?
	Like this kind of stuff, right?
	Just having a good-natured, relaxed, enjoying of your own particular
	You know, the ebb and flow of parenthood and all of the little silly accidents and fun things that happen and, you know, if you're playing with kids, physically, you play wrestling or whatever it is, I mean, yeah, every now and then you're gonna get an elbow in the nads and it's gonna hurt like hell, right?
	Or, you know, my daughter once, we have this sort of big fuzzy ball we used to throw around a lot in the house and she thought it'd be really funny to throw it at my face but it kind of cushioned, went into my eyeball and stuff and felt kind of scratchy and
	Yeah, so you get mad at that stuff, but not mad at her, like she was obviously really upset that she'd hurt me and I wasn't mad at her, I was just, you know, a little bit of judgment is not the end of the world, as far as that stuff goes, right?
	But that's natural, that's, you know, this stuff is going to happen.
	So, with the parent, if the parent feels a rising sense of self-attack, right, if the parent feels bad for whatever reason,
	Either the parent is abused again, which they can't handle, or they abuse their child.
	Right, so they're really more siblings than they are parents, right?
	So if you have a really abusive parent, you've got a brother and a sister, the lamp falls and breaks, the brother and the sister will blame each other, right?
	Hit her, hit her, right?
	This is the Winston Smith thing in 1984, right?
	Do it to Julia, do it to Julia, don't do it to me.
	Don't put the rats on my head, right?
	Do it to her.
	And then they, that's fine, right?
	So the moment they can get you to break faith with your siblings, the moment they can get you to turn on each other, they're happy, right?
	Their black deeds, their black work is done.
	So, the parent, it's like, I can't criticize myself, because...
	I was verbally abused too harshly and I haven't dealt with it.
	So all I can do is attack myself.
	I'm not going to attack myself.
	Why?
	Because it's not my fault.
	And so you have to attack someone.
	Someone's responsible for you having a migraine, for you getting up late.
	And we all have this impulse.
	I mean, we all have this impulse, right?
	You're just supposed to outgrow it about the age of, I don't know, 10 or 12 or whatever.
	So, the children are the ones who have to be sacrificed in order to appease the self-attack of the parent.
	Does it make sense?
	The children have to be beaten to appease the dark god of self-attack that comes from the parent's parent on the part of the parent.
	It's either I get destroyed or I harm my children.
	And a lot of parents are fighting suicidal impulses by attacking their children.
	I know this sounds kind of bizarre, but a lot of parents are fighting suicidal impulses by attacking their children.
	Because to the parent,
	To the parent, that level of self-attack feels like they're going to die.
	Because they haven't dealt with it.
	They haven't outgrown it.
	They haven't reasoned with it.
	They haven't gotten angry about it.
	So there is a twisted kind of attachment and love in abusing your children.
	I know this sounds completely bizarre, but just bear with me for a second.
	And if I'm wrong, obviously tell me and we'll re-evaluate.
	Or if it doesn't match any of your own experiences, tell me and we'll re-evaluate.
	So if you're a parent, if you die, your children die.
	Especially if you're a single mom, right?
	If you die, your children die.
	Now, if self-attack feels like you're going to die, then it's better to beat your children and stay alive.
	Do you follow where I'm going?
	I don't necessarily mean do you agree with me 100%, but does it sort of make sense that they're trying to survive
	They're trying to survive their own self attack, which literally feels like they're going to die.
	And so it's like, it's like a criminal is saying to them, hit your children or I'm going to shoot you and then you and your children will die.
	Does this, right?
	You follow where I'm going with this?
	Like a criminal has just materialized in the house, puts a gun to the temple of the single mother and says, you hit your children or I shoot you and your children starve to death.
	So it is a twisted form of, this is the only way my family can survive is for me to beat my children.
	Right.
	Someone says, I imagine abusive parents hurting their kids to quiet their internalized abusive parents the way a Jew would harshly tell another Jew to shut up while hiding under the floorboards from Nazis.
	Right.
	Right.
	Right.
	Yeah, when you're in a situation of, like, injury is preferable to death, right?
	We all accept that, right?
	Evolutionarily speaking, injury is preferable to death, right?
	And so they feel like they're going to die.
	If they're forced to take responsibility, then they're going to die, right?
	And so the reason why they, and why can they not take responsibility, why does it feel like, as a parent, them taking responsibility is going to cause their death?
	Because in the speech I gave earlier, you're just a coward who likes to beat children, which you would say to an abusive parent, which would be an honest thing to say to an abusive parent, if the parent is given the responsibility
	The child dies, right?
	I mean, at least that's the fear, right?
	The fear is the death, it's the murderous attack of the parent who's goaded by the truth, right?
	Like you're just a coward who bullies children, you're pathetic, you're weak, right?
	You're just a bully and it's really horrible, right?
	So the reason why the parent beats the child is because if the principle is the parent takes responsibility, then the parent who's beating the child, or right before the parent beats the child, the parent feels like he's going to die if the parent takes responsibility.
	Because if he'd given responsibility to his abusive parent, his abusive parent would have killed him.
	For a parent to take responsibility is to die.
	And therefore, since the children need the parent, it's better to beat the children than it is for the parent to take responsibility, because if the parent takes responsibility, the parent dies, and then the children die.
	Hit me with a why if this makes sense to you.
	I really want to make sure I'm providing as much value as possible, of course, right?
	I really appreciate everyone coming by tonight.
	So this is when
	When parents say, I did my best, I did my best, you understand there's a truth and energy to it in their mind.
	Right?
	This was the best I could do.
	I did my very best.
	I did the best I could with the knowledge I had.
	They're right!
	Because if someone, God forbid, right, but if somebody says to a parent, um, hit your children or I'm going to shoot you and then your children will die, then the kids later, like when the kids become adults and the kids go to the parent and say, why did you hit us that time?
	I say, well, listen, you know, it was really, there was a home invader.
	He told me like he was going to shoot me.
	Like, I'm really sorry.
	Blah, blah, blah.
	Right.
	So you're better because I hit you.
	Well, yeah, because if the alternative to hitting you is for the parent to die, then the child dies anyway, right?
	The parent has to live in order for the child to live.
	And if self-attack kills the parent, then beat the kids.
	And right.
	Uh, somebody says yes.
	And it goes so deep where they justify it and often say they're better for being hit as a kid.
	Well, that's what they had to say, right?
	Yes, Dad, it was great that you beat me.
	I'm a better person for it.
	And look what happens to those kids who aren't beaten.
	My God, they turn into total brats and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yeah, you see this, of course, all the time.
	That's just conformity, right?
	Like you have to kiss the fist, right?
	You have to kiss the fist.
	Otherwise the fist becomes a strangled noose, right?
	Somebody says, does the resistance to self-criticism cause the bad behavior or is it to cover a guilty conscience for past behavior?
	I think false virtues create the framework to justify exercising sadistic power, i.e.
	you get pleasure and goodness.
	These false virtues bolstered by helplessness perpetuate the abusive cycle.
	Let me just make sure I understand that.
	That's quite a, quite a mouthful.
	Resistance to self-criticism caused bad behavior.
	So again, the equation is hit your children or you and your children die.
	Because, now, why do some people, like I was verbally abused as a child, I think I'm fairly good with criticism and fairly good with self-criticism.
	I'm always asking for feedback and, you know, I say when I'm wrong about something and don't hold onto positions if they can't be supported by reason and evidence and so on.
	I think, you know, am I perfect?
	I don't know what that means.
	I think I'm fairly good at that.
	But that's because I've confronted the past, right?
	I can smell the future troll coming, armed with a snippet from this dream.
	Your parents did the best they could with the knowledge they had, and they were right!
	Well, of course, that wouldn't be a troll for the vast majority of humanity, right?
	Does not shift blame in that scenario to parents, unlike real life.
	But yes, my paternal granddad was a violent alcoholic, kept away from my brother and I, at least.
	I don't know what that means, sorry.
	In this formula, is this formula why I hear abusive parents say, I would die for my kids.
	I would, yeah, I would do anything for my children.
	I would do, and they say this and they believe it.
	I will hit my children if the alternative is for them and I to die.
	Yeah.
	I will abuse my children if the alternative is right.
	So if someone's going to beat you, it should be somebody who's your parent, right?
	Someone's going to beat you because a stranger won't have any particular
	What was the last philosophical position that you changed your mind on?
	Oh, I mean, there's been a lot.
	You could just go to FDR Podcasts and type in, I was wrong about, and there's a whole series of things that I changed my mind on.
	The last philosophical position I changed my mind on, that I can think of, was giving up hope for the vast majority of humanity because people turned into vicious tyrants over COVID.
	After all the evidence of the 20th century, people are just like, shit let's just do this again, let's do it again, let's just be told who to hate and we'll just go and hate them and we'll take away their rights and we'll
	Rage against them and we'll blame them and we'll ostracize them and we'll kiss the rings of people who say we can't visit our aging grandmothers but meanwhile they're shipping COVID patients into old age homes!
	So yeah, that was the last thing.
	Maybe it saves just one life, you know.
	Well, and of course the other thing that was embittering to me, of course, was after 40 years of arguing that, you know, we should privatize healthcare, we should privatize education, and people saying, you can't take away people's government healthcare, and then, hey, look, for two or three years, pretty much the government healthcare was taken away, and everyone was like, okay, because it's a bad flu.
	Nobody cares, they just do what they're told.
	So, cast not pearls before swine.
	So then what happens, of course, is, particularly for single moms, when the boys become teenagers, then the moms can't beat them up anymore.
	So what do you do?
	Because then the self-criticism, now the self-criticism is not just the ghosts of the past being activated, the alter egos of the abusive parents being activated in the mind and threatening death to the parents.
	Now it's also the shame, guilt, and moral horror of having beaten your children for
	Years.
	Right now, you are genuinely an abuser and not a victim.
	Right?
	So with the kids who are appeasing their parents, oh yes, no, I deserve that, you're right dad, whatever, right?
	Yeah, absolutely.
	I mean, in not a great movie, but American Beauty, there's that guy who's got the abusive dad.
	And of course, they can't say that the abusive dad is because of his own father and cycles.
	They've got to say, oh, it's because he's a repressed homosexual.
	That's why he's abusive and all this kind of crap, right?
	So, now, in the past, when you were a kid, you just appeased your parents, but you didn't really believe you were a bad person, you just said that, and then you internalize it after a while, because it's just more efficient, right?
	And also, if the abusive parents are very perceptive, and they know that you're lying,
	Then you have to truly believe it.
	Like you have to truly commit to it.
	You have to really, like it's real, totally real.
	Because if they get any sense that you're faking it or appeasing them, they'll just escalate.
	So they're demanding that you genuinely act as if it's 100% true.
	No hesitation, no doubt, no gap between the thought, the reaction, and the action.
	None of that, right?
	It's got to be 100%.
	You've got to be like Marlon Brando levels of acting, right?
	So,
	When you're a kid, yeah, genuine victim, right?
	However, again, to go back to the single mom, because the single mom and the sons is the most vivid example of this, because the single moms are aging out of physical beauty and youthful energy and the single sons, or sons could be more than one, are coming into their sort of physical prime and strength and health and the testosterone is pouring out and aggression is rising and so on.
	What happens is the children, I don't know if this happened to you when you were a teenager, it happened to me for sure, the children simply say, fuck off.
	I'm not going to be your poison container anymore.
	Like, no, right?
	Like with me, with like, just no, it's not going to happen anymore.
	Right?
	Yeah.
	You didn't say you love me fast enough.
	Right?
	So
	You basically say no.
	You say no to the hitting, right?
	You say no to the hitting, right?
	I mean it's one thing for your parent to do this, it's another thing for your mom to do that, right?
	Look up your nose, right?
	So you say no.
	So then what happens is
	The justification for beating the children is stymied.
	It's stopped.
	There's no relief or release from the negative feelings.
	And either there's a really acute mental health crisis, could be a nervous breakdown, could be any number of things, or there's a mental collapse, such as a breakdown or my mom stayed in bed for months at a time and then she ended up being institutionalized.
	There's just a mental collapse.
	Because there's no, you can't hot potato your feelings to your kids, right?
	Hot, hot, hot, you take it, right?
	And so, and now, because you're no longer a victim, but you are in fact a victimizer, you're not just a victim, you're now an abuser, and have been for many years, there's a complete collapse.
	You know, if you can't vomit your poison into somebody else, then the poison overtakes you and takes you down, right?
	In one form or another.
	Useful.
	Helpful.
	Hit me with a why.
	I don't want to overdo this.
	You know, we've gone, you know, 40 minutes on the topic.
	I don't want to overdo it, but I just want you to really
	Understand where this is and this is why people can say I did it for your own good I did it was the best for you and so on right and in a way there's because they're held hostage by their own internal parental alter egos their own internal abusers are holding them hostage and They beat you or they completely collapse, right?
	They completely collapse
	Somebody says, yes, human child abuse is where I think you're at your best and the most radical work you've done.
	Well, thank you.
	I appreciate that.
	I appreciate that.
	Yeah, I mean people think the IQ stuff is like, it's just me talking to experts, right?
	Well, I'm glad it's, um, and this is not, this is not to say have sympathy, right?
	This is just to, you know, understand the mechanics.
	This is what happens when you give up self responsibility and free will and moral responsibility.
	You end up beating your children because it feels like you're going to die if you accept any responsibility.
	Somebody says, my dad scared the heck out of me.
	He wants me to move back in when it's convenient for him to help take care of him when he's older and unable because I don't own a house at 25.
	Wanting me to stay in a ratty apartment until then.
	We got Steffi the pirate today.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	It's pretty funny.
	Could you speak for a few minutes on the neglected child?
	Yes, yes, yes, yes.
	Thank you for reminding me.
	Thank you for reminding me.
	Let me get to these questions.
	And thank you again if you find this stuff helpful.
	Tips are gratefully appreciated.
	All right.
	So, it says, my parents were neglectful, not physically or verbally abusive in any way.
	There was just nothing.
	My mom left the family and was out of my life from 8 to 18.
	My dad remarried and had five more children.
	I have a lot of feelings of loss and sadness within that extended family.
	I'm glad I noticed this, but what are some blind spots I should be aware of, especially in regards to my own parenting?
	So, no, there's no such thing as neglect from parents.
	I don't know if you use the term, but just to break it apart.
	There's no such thing as neglect from parents.
	No such thing.
	And is this the person who said, I'm here, was this your question?
	I don't want to scroll up and lose where I am.
	This is your, your question.
	Okay, good.
	No, somebody else said yes.
	No, not your question.
	Pope, that's your question.
	Sorry, just hit me with a why.
	Yes.
	Okay.
	Yeah.
	So there's no such thing as parental neglect, right?
	There is only parental rejection.
	No such thing as parental neglect, there is only parental rejection.
	So, for instance, how many times last week did you guys ask me to play a game of cards with you?
	How many times, huh?
	How many times last week did you guys ask me
	And the answer is zero.
	Because you don't call me up.
	You're just ostracizing me, man.
	You don't call me up to play cards because we don't have that kind of relationship, right?
	We have a philosophical conversation relationship and so on.
	Oh, I love cards.
	A good game of cheat is fantastic.
	I also do love me some UNO as well.
	So.
	So.
	Am I neglecting you?
	No.
	Are you neglecting me?
	I'm sure you guys have played some cards, maybe even with each other, you haven't invited me at all.
	But you're not neglecting me.
	Right?
	I mean, we neglect everyone.
	Except for a very small number of people, right?
	We neglect everyone.
	It's all these people starving in China or India or Sierra Leone.
	I don't... Oh, ping pong.
	I do love me some ping pong too.
	Although I'm a big pickleball guy these days.
	I'm terrible at poker.
	I cannot get that game.
	My daughter's like this amazing half-autistic card counter.
	And she's just amazing.
	She knows what everyone has.
	She knows what everyone has in Catan.
	She knows what everyone has in Cheat.
	She knows what everyone has in Uno.
	It's wild.
	It's wild.
	It's like she's like Matt Damon on steroids as far as that goes.
	But yeah, I don't.
	I play cards in the moment.
	I really don't.
	I don't have some big plan.
	I don't remember what's going on.
	I'm just like, hey, here's a little blurb now.
	Let's see if I win by accident.
	Yeah, so you want attention from your parents, you want to feel valuable, and without a doubt, right, this is to the person who asked the question, do you have memories of trying to get your parents' attention?
	Do you have memories of trying to get your parents' attention?
	Yes, right.
	What happened when you tried to get your parents' attention?
	Would they not express irritation, or anger, or annoyance, or dismissal, or rejection of some kind?
	You were trained away from asking for your parents' attention, because they would get angry, and hostile, or annoyed, or impatient, or whatever, right?
	As my mom would say, when I would stand in front of the TV, she was trying to watch me.
	You might be a pain, but you're not a windowpane!
	Oh, I'll answer the question about COVID if people are, are interested.
	Let me just, uh, the question about people's responsibility for their COVID response.
	I'll, I'll hang on to that if you're interested.
	Yes to COVID.
	All right.
	So, uh, let me get back to your, you make a better door than a window.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Or my mom was like, uh, I'd say, um,
	Uh, can I get a glass of water?
	She said, well I, I know that you may, but I don't know if you can, because can indicates that it's possible and may is, is it, is it allowable?
	I just, you know, because, you know, when you're an absolutely shitty and violent parent, it's really, really important to teach anal little Nazi grammar rules.
	So, yeah, so when you say, my parents were neglectful, not physically or verbally abusive in any way.
	Yes, they were verbally abusive.
	Of course, you can't have neglect without verbal abuse because children cleave to their parents.
	Children cleave to their parents.
	Children cleave to their parents.
	I can't usually be working in here unless I'm doing something really concentrated for more than 20 minutes.
	My daughter comes in and says, do you want to do X?
	Do you want to do Y?
	Do you want to do Z?
	Or whatever, right?
	Yeah, they were absolutely verbally abusive.
	And you try to talk to your parents, you ask them to play a game, you try to get their attention, you try to engage them in conversation because you're lonely, you're isolated, and they attack you, they reject you, they scorn you, they're annoyed, they're negative or whatever, right?
	So yeah, yeah, they were verbally abusive.
	It's impossible for parents to be neglectful without being verbally abusive.
	And the verbal abuse has to have it, has to have within it a component
	A physical danger as well.
	So you say there was just nothing.
	No, no, no, no.
	There's not.
	Okay.
	So me and some guy, I don't know, Pajit in India, we have nothing between us.
	I don't even know he exists.
	He doesn't know I exist.
	We have nothing.
	No, no, no.
	It's not a case of nothing.
	I mean, you have a tortured and rejected relationship and your parents held a sustenance of social contact that was absolutely essential for you.
	And withheld it.
	Like, you're not responsible for feeding me, but if some guy kidnaps me, locks me in his basement, he's gotta feed me.
	Right?
	So I can say to you, well, I mean, there's just nothing between us as far as feeding me goes.
	That's true.
	But if a guy has locked you in and there's nothing, then he's starving you.
	He's killing you.
	Right?
	Had a substitute teacher who used the May Can game for using the bathroom, then declined the request even when worded correctly.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, that's really sad.
	That's really sad.
	Yeah, I told this story before.
	I was so desperate to get out of high school, I just did summer school.
	Like, I was working two jobs and doing summer school because I was just like, I gotta get out of this hellhole.
	And so I had a teacher.
	He was a short guy.
	with a rather Austrian mustache and really a really bad toupee like the toupee that's you know hovering above the scalp in some horrible way and like maybe like it looks like a Ken post-radiation treatment or something and he was really boring like it was really it's American history or something like that it's really boring and I would sometimes
	You know, I wouldn't doze off exactly, but you know how you sit.
	You sit and you listen.
	You put that little frown on like you're so intently listening that you have to close your eyes.
	But yeah, I would get a little bored.
	And again, I wouldn't fall asleep, but I would, right?
	And anyway, so I went up to give a presentation and he turned and screamed at the class, put your heads down on the desk, close your eyes, pretend to be asleep!
	And then he turned and said, how do you like it?
	Steph, how do you like it?
	People pretending to sleep when you're trying to talk, right?
	Just... fucking psycho, man.
	Like, Jesus.
	He's getting mad at me.
	Because he's boring.
	Right?
	I mean, listen, of all the people in the world, I love knowledge, right?
	I love learning.
	I love facts.
	I love truth.
	Just did the truth about pirates.
	Gonna do the truth about the Wild West next.
	And if you can't interest me in learning something, it ain't on me.
	Because I was reading Aristotle.
	I was reading economics.
	I was reading Atheism, the Case Against God.
	I was reading Ayn Rand.
	I was like, all of this stuff, right?
	So I love to learn.
	You know, I was the guy, as soon as I get an essay, I'm starting to work on it, man.
	I love that stuff, right?
	So it's not my fault if you're boring.
	But of course, you know, it's apparently I was abusive because I was boring him, right?
	And therefore he had to be abusive, right?
	See, the difference was I wasn't getting paid to interest people, right?
	He was supposed to be getting paid to interest people, but teachers view interesting students as a form of humiliation, right?
	Like an aristocrat says, begging, it feels like begging for someone or whatever is a form of humiliation, right?
	So what you're missing is you think that nothing happened, right?
	Right?
	So this is the person who said, my parents were neglectful, not physically or verbally abusive.
	There was just nothing.
	So you have given them an out and you're saying there was nothing between us.
	No, no, no.
	There was everything between you, my friend.
	There was absolutely everything between you.
	And I don't expect you to give, give me a hat, right?
	I don't expect you to give me a hat.
	However, if you've taken my hat and you're dangling it over me, then I expect you to give that hat to me, right?
	And so you're... what I would watch out for on your side is you've given... you've whitewashed everything.
	You've given a blank, right?
	A parent's... I mean, I don't know how to put this.
	I don't want to put this overly forcefully, but I feel I could not say it almost too forcefully at all.
	Parents owe children interest, playing, focus, conversation, instruction, tenderness.
	You owe that to your children like you owe them food.
	Right?
	You've created them and they're trapped in your house.
	Right?
	The children are trapped in your house.
	They are A.B.C.
	Accidental Biological Cage.
	They are prisoners of nature.
	Right?
	You follow me, right?
	As a parent, you don't have the right to withhold attention from your children any more than you have the right to withhold food.
	Shelter, water, medicine from your children.
	You have no right to withhold attention from your children.
	So, do people whitewash their abusive childhoods to avoid the pain and difficulty of grieving?
	Not primarily.
	No, people whitewash... Okay, let's put this out here, right?
	Let's put this out there.
	Why do people whitewash their abusive childhoods?
	Why do people whitewash their abusive childhoods?
	Mmm, smart group of people.
	I'm getting a nice tan.
	No, because they're still in contact, that's putting the cart before the horse, right?
	To hold on to their bond with their parents?
	They don't have a bond with their parents.
	You can't have a bond with an abuser.
	Yeah, it's a survival technique.
	So the reason why people whitewash their abusive childhoods is because the childhoods are not over.
	So when you're a child, you can't morally condemn your parent when you're a child.
	You know this, right?
	Why can you not morally condemn your parent when you're a child?
	Why can you not morally condemn your parent as a child?
	Because it'll get you killed.
	No, not resources.
	It'll get you killed.
	I mean, evolutionary, right?
	Because the abuse will intensify and you... where does it stop?
	You don't want to find out where it stops, right?
	And even if your parent doesn't intend to kill you... I mean, violence is a genie that comes out with a big load of fangs and whips, right?
	You could just die by accident.
	The parent could reach to hit you, you flinch back, you fall down the stairs, you break your neck, you're dead.
	Right?
	You're dead.
	Yeah, it brings out more abuse on the child.
	So you whitewash your parent's abuse when you're a child, because otherwise you're gonna die.
	Like, that's what your gut is telling you.
	You're gonna die.
	Right?
	It's almost like saying, why would you run from a hungry tiger?
	Because otherwise you're going to die, because tigers have those veins on their teeth that can tell where your jugular is, right?
	They have those scents on there, and they'll just kill you.
	Why are people leaving the water when there's a great white shark 20 feet offshore?
	Because they don't want to die, right?
	So they whitewash.
	And to me, the purpose of philosophy is to give you the capacity to morally judge your parents so that you don't re-inflict it on your children.
	Whatever you define as the good, you will do.
	Somebody says, Dad was over 300 pounds.
	If he let loose, he could have damn well killed me at 60 to 80 pounds.
	Yeah, absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Somebody says, there was a time, maybe seven or eight, my dad was going to beat me and I kicked him while I laid on my back as hard as I could.
	In that moment, I hated him so intensely and I wanted to kill him.
	I wanted the abuse and terror to be over.
	What happened?
	What happened?
	And it could be the case, of course, that the child simply doesn't want to live and will attack the parent out of a sense of, like, I'd rather be dead, right?
	I'd rather be dead.
	Somebody says, my father was extremely violent, was in and out of prison.
	Right.
	So I would imagine that you grew up with a constant sword of Damocles, like a constant guillotine over your head.
	Yeah, my mother was violent and knew some very violent people.
	Very violent people.
	I want to make sure I track this story about you.
	You kicked him, right?
	You didn't beat me, but somehow I vaguely remember it was de-escalated.
	I had moments of vivid memories and then moments after it turns into a gray fog.
	I don't recall everything.
	Right.
	Now, he also liked to take a demonic analogy, right?
	So the demon that controlled your dad might have said, ah, we have successfully implanted the demon in you.
	I'm not saying they did, but it could be that if your parents get you to be violent, it might satisfy them that they've corrupted you, right?
	Somebody says, I was in such a bad place when I was a teen, I almost ended my life.
	I'm so glad you didn't, and I'm so glad you made it through, and I'm so, so sorry for what you went through as a teenager, my friend.
	I'm so sorry.
	That's just appalling.
	And, you know, how do you denormalize it?
	Well, you get angry at it.
	Anger is the immune system of the soul.
	How do you stop the cycle of abuse?
	You get angry at the abusers.
	It doesn't mean you abuse them back, it just means that you have that clear moral judgment that what they did was bottomlessly evil.
	Because if you define something as bottomlessly evil, or evil as a whole, you just won't do it.
	This is why people try to control the moral narrative.
	Moral narratives are train tracks for people.
	Whatever you define as the good, you will do.
	Whatever you define as the evil, you will avoid.
	And so if you don't define the child abuse that was done to you as evil, you're very likely to replicate it.
	Somebody says, that demon makes perfect sense.
	My dad used to try to get me to beat people up for him when I was 13, then shame me for being a pussy if I didn't want to.
	What makes a child fight abusers back, both verbally and physically?
	Usually it's a loss of the will to live.
	Somebody says, I've listened closely to you, Steph.
	Raised my boys very peacefully.
	Magnificent, man!
	Magnificent!
	I bow down towards you, except that the lights off my forehead might blind you.
	But yes, congratulations.
	You are an absolute moral hero of the very, very first order.
	Blinders!
	I bow down before you.
	I bow down before you.
	I'm not worthy to be in the presence of such greatness.
	I am, but you know, it's just out of a, what is that, out of some Burns World movie with Aerosmith.
	We're not worthy.
	We're not worthy.
	So yeah, you've got to get angry at the, at the,
	At the evils that were done to you, right?
	In Wayne's world, yeah, thank you.
	Somebody says, I think you're right.
	That makes sense about the guy who beat back on his dad.
	Also, when I was 11 or 12, I mistook his 7-11 Big Gulp for mine.
	His was filled with beer and I accidentally sipped it from it.
	I almost puked.
	Beer tasted like piss.
	My dad actually said, I could have the beer if I wanted to.
	So I think you're right.
	Yeah, of course.
	I mean, we've, we've talked to, I've talked to parents who introduced their kids.
	Sorry.
	I've talked to adult children whose parents introduced them to porn, to pot, to drinking, to corruption of just about any, any kind.
	And, uh,
	Yeah, the demons, once they've corrupted you, they're satisfied and they move on, right?
	Or silence you, at least for now.
	All right, let me, to the person who was talking about neglect.
	I started smoking pot when I was 11, sadly.
	I'm sorry about that.
	Yeah, that's very tough.
	And that's a lot of self-medication for, I assume, a very difficult environment.
	Somebody says, have you experienced staying up at night as a child because it was the only time you felt safe?
	Has that continued into your adulthood, being unable to sleep at night?
	My sleep is pretty good.
	I get seven and a half plus, maybe eight hours a night, usually.
	I mean, I'm over 50, so I get up to pee usually once, but I don't get up to pee.
	I get up and I have to pee.
	I kind of have to pee.
	And it's like, you know, if I get back to sleep fine, but if it just, I end up staying awake a little bit and then I lose my window and all of that.
	So, um,
	So yes, I absolutely remember as a kid in boarding school, I was in a dormitory with like, I don't know, 30 other kids or whatever.
	I still remember all of these pictures of animals on the walls and so on.
	I also remember that we had a matron who was actually very cold-hearted, a real nurse ratchet.
	But the one thing she did, this was our big entertainment in boarding school, was she would hold the light
	Half on, half off, to the point where the lights flickered and everyone all shrieked with glee.
	And then occasionally they'd play movies, most of which was like, oh it's The Incredible Journey.
	One night they played an absolutely horrifying film called The Omega Man with Charlton Heston.
	Which, you know, a bunch of six-year-olds away from home and they're playing this absolute monstrous movie about zombies and explosions and people getting their heads bitten and off.
	It's just
	Absolutely appalling stuff.
	But I do remember staying awake in boarding school.
	I remember, I remember sitting, I was like six or whatever, I remember sitting on my back and raising my knees and then in the very dim light of the moon coming through, spraying my hands out like a volcano.
	I also remember I would, we had these wood beds with these sort of wooden rungs at the bottom, like real, you know, World War One mash beds.
	And I remember I would reverse myself and I'd go down to the bottom end of the bed and kind of hide under the bar and I would pretend that I was hiding from like German soldiers that were coming in to grab kids or whatever, right?
	So.
	Yeah.
	And so I remember staying up late because, uh, it was peaceful and quiet and nobody was going to bother me and nobody was going to cane me or, or yell at me or whatever it was.
	Right.
	All right.
	Uh, do you think your mother would be happy to have seen you succeed?
	Well, you know, like most narcissistic parents, my mother would be happy if she could brag about my success.
	And my mother, you know, not a dumb woman.
	You know, when people are heavily defensive, it looks the same stupidity a lot of times.
	But, you know, she helped me edit my books and she was not a dumb woman.
	And she said, you know, I remember her saying like, I can't believe Ayn Rand became your mother.
	And I was really angry.
	I was like, well, somebody had to help raise me, right?
	But she would always tell me, like, you raised yourself, you did it all by yourself, you raised yourself.
	And that's one of these really sort of, you know, people do ever have this where people just drop these weird truth bombs into your life, like, sometimes repetitively, sometimes a one time thing.
	And you can sit there and puzzle it over for six months if you want.
	So my mother would have been happy to see me succeed.
	If it was beneficial to her vanity, but the way that I have succeeded, of course, would not be beneficial to her vanity, so she wouldn't like it, I'm sure.
	Somebody says, was put away into a government boarding school for a few years, got raped and beaten daily.
	Oh my gosh, I'm so sorry.
	Then when I eventually came home, I got more beatings.
	Yeah, I was listening to a biography of Queen and Freddie Mercury and of course he was sent from Zanzibar to India for years into a boarding school where I have no doubt that he was sexually abused, sexually assaulted and that probably had something to do with his hyper-compulsive sexuality later on in life that of course led to his death from AIDS.
	The Omega Man was so traumatic.
	There's a police song.
	I'm the Omega Man.
	And I'm like, oh, I can't even listen to that song.
	Neglect is way worse than abusive attention.
	I was exposed to porn at age five or seven by accident.
	My dad would forget to change the channel.
	I never could have a clear conscience growing up because it was not clear whose fault it was.
	A clear conscience?
	What do you mean?
	Why would it be your fault at five or seven?
	Somebody says, I was frightened to sleep at boarding school.
	Queers climb in the bed, beat and rape me.
	Gosh, that's so terrible.
	That's so terrible.
	I mean, maybe I was just too young for anything like that.
	There weren't any older kids around.
	It was all, all little kids.
	Well, I mean, I was the youngest kid in the school, but, um, I don't remember anyone being over older than, I don't remember anyone being in, having puberty.
	Like we didn't have the older prefects and all that kind of stuff that George Orwell writes about.
	Instead of, I love you, my mom would assert, you love me.
	Weird and narcissistic.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Ah, yes.
	Okay.
	Um, Steph, did you know you were raising yourself or rather what age?
	Well, I knew once I discovered philosophy and self-knowledge that I was raising myself for sure.
	I, as I've said before, I, I didn't really exist as an ontological entity prior to philosophy.
	Philosophy didn't just save me.
	It manifested me.
	It created me.
	Yeah, my mom used to watch some very, very strange stuff on late night British TV and have me up watching it with her.
	I remember guys with their heads pressed against each other's butts, naked shuffling in a line.
	Call me a cannibal, I can't die.
	Kill me if you can, I'll never lay down dead.
	But this is partly, I had this whole rant recently about the 70s and just what a corrupt and vile and vicious and decadent and horrifying decade it was.
	Alright, let me just see here.
	Oh, so the person who kicked his dad.
	He said, it's coming back to me.
	My father de-escalated and then told my mother and grandparents.
	They criticized me for kicking my dad.
	As if I was the bad person.
	As if I was the abuser.
	As if I was the bad actor.
	Just insanity.
	I can't believe these people.
	My parents and grandparents are adults.
	Or they are just idiots.
	Just unthinkable logic.
	Anti-rationals.
	Well, see, there's rationality like UPP and morality, and then there's rationality like Darwinian survival rationality, right?
	So, I mean, we all know this pattern.
	It's depressingly familiar for every one of us who does good in the world, right?
	Which is
	When there's a conflict, what do people do?
	When there's a conflict, they instantly evaluate the two parties to the conflict.
	They evaluate who has the more power.
	In other words, who has more power to do them harm, or harm their reputation, or attack them, or ostracize them, or set up whisper campaigns against them.
	So there's a conflict between Bob and Alice.
	They will instantly evaluate who is the least mature and most dangerous person in that situation, and they will side with that person against whoever has less power or more morality, right?
	Because more morality generally has less, like the more moral you are, the less you're going to mess up people's lives, right?
	Because you wouldn't want to, well, you've got other things to do and all that kind of stuff.
	So this is what people do.
	And you see this all over the place in families, right?
	So if some kid is having a conflict with an aunt, well, the aunt is less rational.
	The aunt is obviously hardened in her anti-maturity and is more unstable and is bigger and more independent and so on.
	And so they will side with the aunt, right?
	Why did they side with
	With your dad, because your dad is bigger, more violent, and can do them harm, right?
	So most people, they're saying, okay, who can benefit me or do me harm?
	That's the person I'll side with, and I'll bullshit that it's morality.
	They just, they cleave to the strongest, least rational, least moral, most dangerous person, which is all sides of the same cube, right?
	They side with the most destructive person, and they attack the weakest person, or the person who's less able to bribe or bully them, and they think that they're being moral.
	But no, they're just, it's just Darwinian self-interest, right?
	It's just Darwinian self-interest.
	It says I was 13 through to 15 years old.
	Yeah, so that's the puberty thing and all of that, right?
	My mom guilts me for not watching an R-rated horror movie at the age of 7 or 8.
	I was exposed to so many inappropriate movies at a young age.
	Right!
	Right, right, right.
	Right.
	So, do you know why?
	Do you know why parents expose their children to such appalling stuff?
	Do you know?
	I mean, hit me with a why if you know why they do that.
	Or an and if you don't know why.
	No?
	Right.
	So the reason why, well, destroy innocence.
	Yeah.
	I mean, that's the effect.
	So the reason why you are exposed to hyper-sexual or hyper-violent or hyper-terrifying or whatever, the reason you're exposed to that is to provoke a fight or flight response in you, which is designed to activate your R-selected genealogy, right?
	So you can think of the R-selected genes on the part of those in authority who have power over you, are programming you to become more R-selected by exposing you to trauma.
	Because prey species experience far more trauma than predator species, right?
	The rabbit is much more frightened than the wolf.
	So the more that they can make you afraid, the more they can program you to become more R-selected, to become more hypersexual, to plan less, to be more reactive, to be less stable, to be less capable of a bond, and so on, right?
	So yeah, they're just trying to scare the common sense out of you, and it generally works quite well.
	Not in this crew, of course, but yeah, it generally works quite well.
	Somebody says, by not having a clean conscience, I mean that my parents shamed me for sexual interests.
	They were also mute about sex altogether and apparently relied exclusively on school and peers to educate me.
	Right.
	Yeah, so I mean throwing you to the walls, right?
	I mean, if you don't have rational, sensible, healthy conversations with your kids about, you know, birds and bees and all that kind of stuff, then they will be schooled by the least mature person, you know, showing, I assume, horrifying stuff on their cell phone these days, right?
	Somebody says, Steph I mean I knew I was a better person parent to myself at a very young age.
	At the age four or five I knew my mother was not guiding me well and had to take over.
	Yeah yeah for sure.
	I think the last time I asked my mom for any advice was when we first moved to Canada and I had a little racetrack toy and I got really frustrated because I couldn't put the two together and I twisted and broke it and I remember saying well that doesn't seem right I got to talk to my mom that doesn't seem like I just broke my own toy and that does not that can't be a good way to approach being frustrated.
	And I asked her about this and she said nothing of any value whatsoever and that was really, I was 11, it was the last time I ever asked my mom for any advice about anything because it just didn't make any sense, right?
	Public school teachers would do this with bullies.
	Yeah, of course, of course.
	So if you are the victim of a bully, you have no parental bond.
	If you're a bully, it means that your parents are bullying you, usually.
	And so the teacher scans the bully and the victim and says, well, the victim's parents aren't going to cause me any trouble, but the bully's parents will probably cause me trouble.
	So you side with the bully and you tell the victim, oh, just avoid him and blah, blah, blah, right?
	Somebody says, movies from the 70s were appalling.
	Porn was harder to access, so they would shoehorn it into mainstream films, i.e.
	rape porn films like Last House on the Left, I Spit Under Grave, and the like.
	I don't know those movies, but yes, I agree with you.
	Porn, sorry, 70s movies were absolutely appalling.
	I worked as a helper on a youth opportunity scheme when I was 16.
	It was for a geriatric slash mentally ill institution.
	I remember the hospitals all closing their psychiatric wards.
	They just let out the patients into society.
	This happened all over the UK.
	Yeah, I have an entire presentation, you should absolutely watch it, called The Destruction of America's Mental Health Care System.
	Yeah, it was very much a leftist, just turn everyone loose to destabilize society and terrorize the population.
	And again, more R-selection, more trauma, and all of that.
	All right.
	What do you think on letting young boys be exposed to Andrew Tate?
	Well, I mean, shouldn't you have a father to teach you about manhood and masculinity?
	Are there tests to know if one was neglected as a baby, like less than 18 months?
	I don't know.
	I don't know about that.
	If there's like a formal test for that, I don't know.
	Somebody says, my parents slash grandparents knowingly kept my abuser in the family and have never acknowledged it or apologized.
	Even though I recently told them I still think about it.
	Now I'm going to therapy and disconnecting from them and they've been asking me to do tasks for them like work on their car for them.
	And when I say no, I'm met with negativity.
	Hard situation.
	I've been conflicted about creating distance between that portion of the family.
	So,
	Why would they admit fault?
	Right?
	This is a fundamental question.
	People in your life who've done you wrong.
	And I've still got the list of questions, right?
	And it's a fundamental question.
	Like, why would somebody admit fault?
	Why would they admit that they did wrong?
	Why would they admit that they harmed you?
	Why would they admit that they did something immoral?
	Why would they do that?
	I mean, obviously they have no internal standard of morality that would compel them to do that, right?
	There's no, thou shalt not bear false witness, and so on, right?
	So they have no internal standard.
	I mean, if your child abusers have no internal standard of morality, so why would they admit fault?
	Why would they?
	I mean, the reason you become an abuser is because you can't handle self-criticism.
	So if you criticize them, why would they?
	Accept it.
	I mean, I've talked to thousands of people about their lives.
	I mean, I have this incredible window into the human psyche, right?
	Which is like, even before this show, I was always talking to people.
	I didn't come and start doing call-in shows out of nowhere.
	I've always been asking people about their lives and their histories and what happened with them and all of that, right?
	This didn't, I just didn't pop out of this out of nowhere.
	I was doing this for decades before I did call-in shows.
	And I don't know how to put this in a way that communicates what I want.
	So hit me with a why if you're a meat eater.
	I'll type as well.
	Yes, I'm a meat eater too.
	All right.
	Now, you know that you eat meat because animals aren't human, right?
	Obviously, you would not be a cannibal, right?
	Oh, right now you're eating beef tamale right now.
	Okay, good.
	Now I'm hungry.
	So, you eat animals because they're not human to you, right?
	Obviously, obviously, right?
	This is not any kind of
	Big insight.
	The insight is coming in just a sec, right?
	You were a vegan for five years?
	Yeah, I tried vegetarianism for a couple years.
	It just didn't give me the energy that I really needed.
	So, you eat animals because animals aren't people.
	Now, of course, the animal rights activists say that animals are sensitive and they bond and we should give them full rights and it's abusive and destructive, right?
	But you eat animals because they're not human, right?
	And you understand this, right?
	Whoever we abuse, we have them in the classification not human.
	Whoever we abuse, we have them in the classification called not human, enemy, not human, not worthy of moral protection, right?
	I mean, this is back to COVID, right?
	The people who don't take the vaccine, or whatever they're calling it now, the people who don't take the vaccine, well, they're endangering everyone, they're selfish, they're mean, they're bad, and we can take away their rights, and we can lock them in their homes, and we can force them to quarantine, and we can stop them from traveling, and you know, whatever, right?
	Well, pets, okay, pets, pets you put in the category of family.
	So your, your parents, this is my view, right?
	And I'm happy to hear correction on this.
	And if your experience is different from mine, obviously let me know.
	Cause this is an empirical examination.
	This is a human examination.
	So can you imagine?
	Beating a child that you fully put into the category of dependent human worthy of protection.
	Can you think of that?
	Can you imagine beating a child when that child simultaneously enjoys the category fully human dependent on you worthy of protection?
	You can't, right?
	You can't!
	You can't do it, right?
	To beat a child is to put that child in a category other than human.
	Right?
	To be the child.
	Yeah, in order to... It's perfect, Tim.
	Absolutely brilliant.
	Absolutely brilliant.
	In order to violate UPB with someone and not feel guilty, you have to put them in a different universal.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	So we will eat a cow.
	We wouldn't eat a dog.
	We wouldn't eat a child.
	We wouldn't eat an adult.
	Right?
	So, because they're in a different UPB.
	They're not in the protection of UPB.
	Right?
	Yeah, Tim is like a volcano of insight.
	It's brilliant.
	It's beautiful.
	Tim, you know what?
	Just take over, man.
	I'm gonna go.
	I'm gonna go have some food.
	I want a tamale now!
	Yeah.
	I did a call-in show two days ago.
	A man, tell me if you think I should release this or not.
	So I did a call-in show with a young man who as a teenager tried to kill two other teens and then also was in the process of drowning his cat as an adult when he heard basically me or his conscience telling him to stop.
	Yeah, he dehumanized the cat.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It's rough, man.
	It's a rough story.
	I mean, he started off with, I said, what can I help you with?
	He says, well, I'm, I was evil.
	I attempted murder on two people.
	A content warning.
	Oh, maybe I'll put it out to donors.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	Anyway, he's, um, he's, uh, seems to be, seems to have turned it around.
	So, yeah, see here's the thing.
	Oh, you just realized that your dad killed all your pets?
	What do you mean?
	What do you mean he killed all your pets?
	What are you talking about?
	Same.
	I mean, I had asthma apparently as a kid and I had all my teddy bears burned, but not my pets.
	I'm so sorry to hear about that.
	That's appalling.
	And that's using your.
	Oh, yeah.
	He said they went away as a kid, but just five years ago, he shot my dog.
	What?
	He shot your dog?
	Well, there's two ways that parents will often, abusive parents will treat your pets.
	Either they'll harm their pets and torture you thereby and say you don't even get a bond with an animal.
	Or what they do is they treat their, they treat your pets or the family pet way better than they treat you, saying that you're of lower status and less human than a dog.
	He claimed it was aggressive towards him.
	Yeah, my mom inherited a cat from someone and literally drove it, I think, completely mad.
	I mean, it was like, would claw and scream and you couldn't pick it up and it was just crazy.
	I really like cats.
	They're very relaxing to pet, don't you think?
	Relaxing to pet.
	I'm sorry about that with your... Somebody says, my mother puts our or my cats and dogs down without notice.
	Yeah.
	Well, that's to show, of course, that there's no bond, that you won't get any protection.
	So, again, massive sympathies for all of this stuff, but let's be clear, right?
	So this is the person who is going and saying, you know, I'm trying to get my parents to understand they did wrong.
	It's like, but you're already in the category of not human.
	Right?
	Dehumanization.
	This is, again, this is not a big insight of mine, although I tie it more into child abuse than most, but dehumanization is when
	You withdraw personhood from other people because they're enemies, they're bad, they're wrong, they're evil, they're, you know, Russians or Ukrainians for that conflict or whatever, right?
	You just completely dehumanize because you can't shoot someone you recognize as human.
	You can't abuse someone you recognize as human.
	So you have to dehumanize people.
	So why would parents admit that they're wrong?
	I mean, honestly, this is the analogy.
	Would you go and apologize to a cow?
	I don't think so.
	I don't think so.
	Somebody says, my friend's father used to drag a dog outside for simply jumping up on his wife and you'd execute it on a whim?
	God.
	I have a huge German Shepherd and a cat.
	They sleep with the boys.
	Lovely animals.
	German Shepherds can be a little high strung.
	Maybe it's just my sort of experience.
	Somebody says, I brought home a stray cat and my dad made me go with him to drop it in another neighborhood and I cried my eyes out.
	Plot twist, he became a cat dude and mourned each one as a person when they died.
	Yeah, I mean, Freddie Mercury used people as masturbatory devices for years.
	He was at like vile sex pit clubs in Munich and in New York and other places.
	And he wrote an entire cheesy song about his cats.
	But then you make me slightly mad when you pee all over my Chippendale suite.
	I mean, it's really not a great song, but his only really passionate love song was towards his cats because that's all he could handle, right?
	He'd used people in that way and dehumanized them.
	Yeah, soldiers use the uniform to help the dehumanization process.
	Yeah, for sure.
	Well, you put children in a moral category that you'd never put an adult in, right?
	Having more than one moral category is foundational to dehumanization, right?
	There's us versus them.
	There's the good guys and the bad guys.
	There's my tribe and the bad tribe.
	And there's the adults and then there's the children who are not fully human.
	They're barely formed.
	They need to be shaped.
	They need to be controlled.
	They need to be hit to turn them into decent people.
	So you dehumanize children, right?
	They withdraw.
	Or really, the never-granting, right?
	I've been reading the history of childhood in preparation for the book that Jared and I are working on, on peaceful parenting.
	I mean, the idea that personhood
	Starts with childhood, right?
	That children are the most deserving of personhood.
	That if you're going to extend rights to anyone in society, you've got to extend them to children.
	That's the first place, because they're the dependent ones.
	They are the helpless ones.
	They are the ones without any liberties.
	They're the ones who don't choose their parents, right?
	Yeah, pirate equals bad, licensed pirate is a privateer, and good, right?
	Yeah.
	Let's see here.
	I've been having a recurring nightmare recently about a Saint Bernard that jumped on me when I was six.
	I just realized why I'm skittish around rowdy dogs.
	Yeah, I mean, I've had experiences of the Great Dane when I was about that age.
	It cornered me up against a tree and every time I moved it growled.
	I literally thought I was going to, like it was, I was looking up at this thing drooling on this, just horrifying.
	I really thought I was, I thought I was dead.
	Everything, every year after that's been a bonus.
	Is this the same dehumanization that is needed in competition?
	No.
	No, I don't think so.
	Because competition is, like, in terms of, like, competing for a mate, or, that's not war, and it's a war, it's dehumanizing by nature.
	And this is why all beliefs, without true universality of ethics, are prone to dehumanization, right?
	It's natural, right?
	So competition is for the benefit, right?
	So if you're the best hunter, you should get the spear.
	If you're the guy who can get closest to the deer and is the best spear thrower, you should get the spear.
	And that way everybody benefits because everyone gets food, right?
	So, no, I don't think it's dehumanization in terms of competition, right?
	I mean, everything's a competition.
	That would be everything.
	I mean, am I dehumanizing other podcasters by doing what I'm doing?
	Because if you're listening to me, you're not listening to them.
	I'm not dehumanizing them.
	I'm trying to connect with you, right?
	I'm trying to provide as much value as I can to you and to me, right?
	So, no, I don't think competition is dehumanizing in that way.
	Zero sum versus positive sum games, yeah.
	What do you think will happen with the Ukraine-Russia conflict?
	I mean that's kind of politics but I mean like most of these things it will it will last until they bled the money dry and then it'll just kind of fade away and it will never be mentioned again.
	I mean like Vietnam, like Korea, like well Korea a little bit more because of the 48th parallel thing but yeah like Iraq, you hear about that a lot, Afghanistan.
	As soon as they've bled the power value dry, they just move on and they'll make up some other new thing to fool people into giving up resources and rights.
	All right, so let me get back to your questions.
	Steph, explain to me the absolute hostility and sociopathic behavior slash avoidance slash rudeness in women nowadays.
	They all act like I'm Jeffrey Dahmer about to rape them.
	They all just ran away.
	It's not like I'm... It's like I'm not allowed to approach them.
	In 99% of places, I'll be a healthy human being in the paranoid psychotic world.
	I'm moving out of this blue hellhole.
	So, frightening women is a form of depopulation, right?
	I mean, this is the lens you can see everything through, right?
	So, yeah, frightening women about how dangerous men are, and how brutal men are, and how blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all of this kind of stuff, right?
	Well, it happens to men too, right?
	So, hit me with a why if you've heard that 50% of marriages end in divorce.
	You've heard this one?
	Yeah, you've heard this, right?
	It's a lie.
	It's a complete and total lie, of course, right?
	It's a total lie.
	What are the odds?
	Let's just happen to know these statistics.
	A white man and a white woman get married.
	What's their chance of divorce?
	What's their chance of divorce?
	Nope.
	It's not 33%.
	It's not 20%.
	It's not 60.
	It's not 20.
	It's not 5.
	No.
	1-5% is if she's a virgin.
	Yeah, it's 13%.
	If you marry an intelligent, maybe educated, although that's a proxy for intelligent, if you marry an intelligent woman and you talk about values before you get married, your chance of divorce is virtually zero.
	So the 50% number, and that number has been coming down, but the 50% number is all of the people who have two or three or four or five marriages, right?
	They're just bringing... So, yeah, but you don't marry people who've had four marriages, right?
	You're just setting yourself up.
	So, women have been trained to be frightened of men, and these are all the damsel in distress, sleeping with the enemy nonsense, right?
	And so, but you've been trained to be frightened of women.
	I mean, am I right?
	Divorce, rape, and false accusations.
	And look, those things happen, absolutely.
	But, you know, I mean, there's lots of ways, you know, people get hit by lightning, but there's ways that you can avoid that, right?
	Yeah, parents clearly never discuss values, yeah.
	So, I got married over 20 years ago.
	How certain was I that the marriage was going to work?
	How certain was I?
	Yeah.
	A hundred percent.
	Yeah.
	Because we said, look, when we get divorced, when we get married, that's it.
	Like we're sticking with each other.
	We don't, there's no divorce.
	It's not on the table.
	Whatever happens, we're going to work it out no matter what.
	Right.
	And then we really haven't had much to work out.
	Right.
	So yeah.
	A hundred percent.
	And so, yeah.
	So you've been told that, and this is, you know, the MGTOW stuff is almost like it's funded by China or the WEF or something like that.
	But yeah, it's, so yeah, women are taught to be frightened of men and men are taught to be frightened of women and so on, right?
	What age were you when you married?
	Uh, 34, 33, something like that.
	How early in the dating phase did you talk values?
	Um, I mean our first date, of course.
	We're in our thirties, right?
	Of course we're going to talk values.
	First date, right?
	I mean, we ended up going out.
	We were supposed to go out with the whole volleyball team we were on, but everyone else cancelled, so we ended up just going out on our own, which was a fantastic night.
	After that, the next day, we talked values right away.
	Yeah, I mean, yeah, of course, right?
	I mean, how long would you be, how many job interviews would you take before you talk salary, right?
	I have a real question.
	I'm going to have to write up in an email for a call-in.
	Long chat, I expect.
	I am thrilled and happy.
	Call-in at freedomain.com.
	I'll just type it here at freedomain.com.
	And yeah, I'm very happy to chat with you.
	Uh, but you know, the, the women who've been trained into fear of men, I mean, would you, you wouldn't want to marry them anyway, would you?
	I mean, would you want to marry somebody who was that subject to propaganda?
	I mean, immunity to social pressure is essential for a happy marriage.
	Hit me with a why if you've had a great relationship and it troubled or bothered people in your life.
	Hit me with a why if you've had a great relationship or have it and it troubles or bothers the people in your life.
	Yeah, of course.
	Hey, you've got to hide your love away.
	Yeah, for sure, for sure.
	Yeah, you gotta hide.
	You gotta hide out, yeah.
	Oh, there's this great early Queen song.
	And anyway, I've got to hide away.
	Yeah, you gotta hide.
	Yeah, you gotta hide.
	I mean, don't you have to hide?
	Am I wrong about this?
	Do you have to hide your happiness in the world?
	Do you have to hide the love that you have?
	Do you have to
	Keep your lights on a dimmer switch, I mean, as you navigate through the world as a whole?
	Am I wrong?
	I mean, maybe I'm just the only one who feels that, and I mean, honestly, the friends that I have, I mean, I express my love for my wife on a continual basis, and if somebody's bothered by that, I don't bother with them, right?
	So, but don't you feel that?
	That you have to, like, if you're really happy, or when something great happens to you, that you gotta downplay it, or you gotta, you know, well, but, you know, and so, yeah, so if,
	You date someone who's subject to peer pressure or propaganda, then someone is just going to talk them out of your marriage, right?
	Someone's going to get divorced and they're going to sew those earworms into people's... I read that bit from my book the other day.
	Yeah.
	So someone's going to get divorced and they're going to talk your wife into leaving you or try to, right?
	So you don't want to have that, right?
	Somebody says, my mom literally tried to set me up with my sister's friend while my girlfriend, now wife, was in the room.
	It was awful, embarrassing, and wildly inappropriate, not to mention immoral.
	Yeah, so early on when my wife and I were dating, we would go occasionally to karaoke with some friends, and another friend came along who was not such a great friend, and she brought a woman for me to meet, knowing that I was going to be there with my future wife.
	Let's see here.
	Steph, those people don't praise me for doing good, they're committed to my failure.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	Okay, let me ask you this.
	What percentage of the people in your life are unhappy?
	What percentage of the people in your life are unhappy?
	And I don't mean like occasionally they have their travels or they got a health scare.
	I mean, they're just miserable as a whole.
	Oh yeah, express enthusiasm.
	It's a great way to root out the negative people.
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	65%, 25%, 10%, 10%.
	It's probably 80%?
	None?
	Fantastic.
	Fantastic.
	Why do you have miserable people in your life?
	My wife, oh gosh, sorry to hear that.
	Maybe you can cheer her up.
	Including suicides, 15%.
	I think suicides, don't they bring the number down a little?
	I hate to be harsh, but...
	So why, if I'm happy to hear this, like, why would you, why would you have unhappy, I mean, miserable people, like negative, miserable, like, why would you, why would you have them in your life?
	Do you feel like you're going to be lived forever?
	You get a do-over, you get a mulligan later?
	Or like, why would you have negative, destructive, miserable people in your life?
	And again, I don't mean to sound like, why?
	I'm harsh.
	I mean, I'm just, I'm genuinely curious.
	Like why?
	I mean, you don't make them happy.
	Don't they just make you unhappy?
	Close friends, 0%?
	Oh yeah.
	Yeah.
	I don't have negative people in my life.
	My God.
	Most are based at my work, not much I can do about it.
	Oh, that's fair.
	Okay.
	Yeah, that's fair.
	That's fair.
	It's not really a chosen situation as much, right?
	I mean, you still have choices, but it's not, right?
	Also work related, right?
	But do you avoid the conversations where they're negative in your work environment?
	Just avoid those situations and conversations.
	Somebody says, I know I need to get out of this environment.
	Mostly coworkers.
	My friend has an awfully cold wife, et cetera.
	Deep down, most people I know are unhappy.
	Yeah, they make me so unhappy, especially overweight coworkers who self-soothe by eating all the time.
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	You keep it professional?
	Yeah, yeah, for sure.
	You dodge them?
	Oh yeah, absolutely.
	See, I was usually in a position where I could fire them, so I just fired them.
	Focus on working with more positive people in the company.
	Yes.
	Yeah, or you can start your own company, or you can move to a company where things are more positive, or whatever it is, right?
	You all could just start a business together.
	Maybe.
	Don't forget to tip.
	I don't want to sound too greedy.
	I don't want to sound too greedy.
	But it's gonna take some going to get this book done.
	I mean, I can't even tell you how many books I've ordered and all of that.
	So if you would like to tip,
	Of course, if you're listening to this later, freedomain.com slash donate.
	If you're here now, you can tip on the app.
	You can tip here and it helps.
	It helps me to remember how much value I'm providing.
	So if you could tip, I would appreciate that.
	I did today.
	What did I do today?
	I had a lot of work today.
	Today I recorded episode 23 of the History of Philosophers.
	I did George Berkeley, and I just finished the one, the only, my nemesis in many ways, David Hume.
	I would be tipping on the app.
	Thank you so much, Steph.
	I appreciate that.
	freedomain.com slash donate if you'd like to do it that way as well.
	I would love to tip, however, my bank has other ideas.
	Well, maybe you've got some crypto.
	freedomain.com slash donate.
	You can donate crypto there as well.
	How many philosophers remaining in the series?
	Oh, I think probably 15 or so.
	I'll probably do another 15.
	I'm going to do like a half a day on, well, it's going to be half a day on Immanuel Kant and it's going to be half a day on Charles Darwin.
	What are your thoughts on Peter Kreeft?
	I do not know Peter Kreeft, I'm afraid.
	Is Camus on the list?
	I haven't figured out whether to do the artistic existentialists or not.
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I probably will.
	But doing anything philosophical in French is...
	Vile.
	Vile as a whole.
	Is Stéphane Molyneux in the list?
	I've thought of that, and maybe, maybe, maybe.
	Some privates get to do the history of you.
	Yeah, yeah.
	Do all the French pedos in one group?
	Oof.
	Oof.
	Well, hit me with a why.
	Should I include myself?
	Should I?
	I found my...
	I started an autobiography a couple years ago, and I found it, and I may put that out to donors.
	Hume sucks?
	Well, Hume is in the trough, right?
	So we've got religion, we've got nihilism, and then we have Darwinism.
	So religion is the worship of virtue based upon God's law.
	Nihilism is there's no virtue in reality, and Darwin reshaped that the purpose of life is power over others, right?
	So that's where I am.
	C'est difficile.
	Yeah, that's where I am.
	So, let's see here.
	What do we got here?
	Oh, any advice for a person who constantly ruminates over a past betrayal or exploitation with no acknowledgement or apology from the perpetrator?
	Ah, but what's the best way to safely spread your work?
	Well, just talk about the ideas, don't talk about me.
	Or say, you know, Steff, there's two Steffs.
	There's Virtuous Steff and then there's Wicky Steff.
	Wicky Steff is a total jerk, but Virtuous Steff is a nice guy.
	He's just, you know, he's twins.
	There's a good twin and a bad twin.
	So if you constantly ruminate over past betrayal or exploitation with no acknowledgement or apology from the perpetrator, that's because the exploitation is not over.
	Listen.
	You want a big life tip?
	Freedom, freedom, nothing is better than the freedom.
	Yeah, you want this?
	Gonna liberate you.
	Spread your wings, baby.
	Sammy was low, just watching the show.
	Alright, here we go, here we go.
	Tell me the number of years you've waited for virtuous behavior from bad people.
	How many years have you, I've wasted some, oh yeah.
	How many years have you wasted waiting for good behavior from bad people?
	Too many.
	All my life.
	Decades.
	Ten.
	Four.
	All of them.
	More than I should have.
	Oof.
	Too dang long.
	They don't change.
	Waited decades on a sister.
	Probably close to 20 years.
	All my mother.
	Well, that's like a time frame.
	25.
	Eight.
	Right.
	All 30 years committed to stopping this year.
	So do you know how long I wait for virtuous behavior from someone?
	Let's say someone does something untoward, right?
	Something negative, something... I'm not saying like totally evil, but you know, something negative, right?
	How long do I wait?
	Manuel, he's a listener.
	Yeah, very good.
	Yeah, 24 hours.
	Yeah, 24 hours.
	I'll give them 24 hours.
	I'll say something, and after 24 hours I'll say something, then I might give them 24 more.
	Maybe.
	Depends on how they receive that.
	But yeah, it's about a day.
	It's about a day now.
	Again, I've wasted time in the past waiting for good behavior from bad people.
	So the reason, my friends, that you're still ruminating on exploitation is because you are waiting for good behavior from bad people.
	Let me ask you something.
	You speak Japanese.
	Your brother does not speak Japanese, tells you he has no interest in learning Japanese, doesn't even believe Japanese exists as a language, will never study it.
	How long do you wait for him to speak Japanese with you?
	Oh, is he judges people honestly in about 10 to 20 seconds?
	Virtue is not something that just burrows out of your chest like that alien out of John Hurt, right?
	Virtue is not something you get struck by lightning and you just exude virtue.
	It's not like a volcano.
	It's not a natural force.
	Virtue is the result of strongly willed, dedicated, lacerating behavior.
	Knowledge, striving, effort, survival.
	It's a high, hard, thorny, bloody road, is it not?
	Am I wrong?
	Isn't it fucking horrible as a whole?
	I mean, when you get there, yes.
	But it's like if you're some lard butt and you decide to start working out, it's pretty tough and horrible and difficult for a while, right?
	Embrace the suck.
	Yeah, that's the military thing that's more around drop your judgment.
	Okay, so isn't virtue really hard?
	Even if you really, really want it and you're the one who benefits from it, right?
	We are Olympians, not just in terms of Greek gods of virtue, but in terms of the amount that we've suffered and strained and coached into virtue, right?
	Right?
	So we're like people who've trained for 15 years straight
	Trained and bled and broken, reformed and reshaped to be a ballerina, a dancer, a ballet dancer.
	And we're just dragging people in from the audience.
	Come dance with us!
	They can't.
	They won't.
	And you're like, you know, I'll just, I'll just, I'm going to stand here on the stage.
	I'm just going to, I'm going to wait for them.
	I'm going to wait for them.
	I'm going to wait for them to, uh, to be a dancer.
	I'm just going to wait for them to be a dancer.
	It'll come.
	Dancing will erupt from them.
	Like, old age and goiters.
	Like, dancing will just erupt from them.
	Now, I had to work for 15 years, 4 hours a day, to become a dancer.
	But that's just gonna happen to them.
	It's just gonna happen.
	You understand how humiliating that is for you?
	That virtue can just manifest from other people.
	Like, you have to struggle and work... You know, like... You've got abs!
	And it's like all these people who never exercise and eat like pigs, you're like, I'm just going to wait for them to manifest abs.
	They're not going to.
	They're not going to.
	Their abs are getting further and further away from you because they're being buried under the Lord.
	That which we work hard to achieve and attain and maintain, it is an insult to ourselves to imagine other people can just flash manifest it based on our need.
	I don't want you to be a dancer.
	Yeah, I don't care about dancing.
	I can't even touch my toes and have no interest in learning it.
	Well, I'll just wait.
	I'll just be waiting here on the stage until you just come up and dance like I do.
	No, I told you, I don't, like, I don't want to be a dancer.
	I don't care about it.
	I think it's actually kind of gross.
	I find ballet very boring.
	The music is annoying.
	The people are annoying.
	I can't smoke that much.
	And I just don't, I'm never going to be a dancer.
	I have no interest in it.
	Plus I'm like 45.
	I couldn't, even if I was desperate to be a dancer, I'm too old to do it.
	Fuck.
	We get mad because we think people, people don't listen to us.
	Right?
	Okay.
	Are you listening to people?
	When they tell you they don't want to be virtuous, they don't want to be good, they don't care about what you say, they don't care about your arguments, they don't care about your facts, they hate your happiness.
	And we're like, no, I'll just wait till you become good.
	No, I'm sure it's imminent.
	Yeah, you're going to get there.
	It's imminent.
	No, it's not imminent.
	If they're fat,
	Lazy in 70, waiting for abs is like waiting for time to reverse.
	You loved dancing as a child?
	I spent a good number of years in my youth in discos.
	Fantastic.
	So what you do is you drag in people and you're trying to move their legs, you're trying to move their arms.
	It's annoying as shit for other people and it's a waste of time for you.
	Stop trying to live other people's lives for them.
	Stop trying to possess them and inhabit them and have them love virtue the way you love virtue.
	Stop doing it!
	Leave them be.
	I'd say let them rot, but it's not up to you.
	Leave them be.
	They don't want it.
	It's annoying.
	Right?
	Don't try and teach chess to a duck.
	Waste your time and annoy the duck.
	You'll never get any chess going.
	Accept.
	Accept that people are telling you what they're telling you.
	You know, when I was young and I tried to talk to my friends about reason, evidence, virtue, philosophy, rolled their eyes, made bitter jokes.
	I was like, okay, well, good luck everybody.
	And luck did not happen, right?
	Luck did not follow them.
	No acknowledgement or apology from the perpetrator.
	Right.
	So they're telling you.
	You're not getting an apology.
	No, no, no, but I need that apology.
	Yeah, they're not going to give you the apology.
	No, but I really want the apology.
	But they're not going to give you the apology because they've dehumanized you and they've dehumanized themselves and they've been hollowed out and they're currently possessed by a kind of historical demon that they never chose to evict.
	How much culpability, someone says, do you credit the media for people becoming polarized over topics like COVID?
	If the news were information essential for our worldview, similar to food necessity for nutrition, the media poisons the well and destroys the message promoting false worldviews and beliefs.
	Interested?
	Hit me with a why if you're interested in this topic.
	I guess the hope is for your relatives to get started on that journey.
	But if they're too far gone, that hope is tantamount to self abuse.
	Alright, so you're interested in that topic, I'll do that for a minute or two.
	Okay, but let me ask you this, how many times have you been really resistant to something and then fallen in love with it later?
	Alright, so the question with the media, is it a push economy or a pull economy?
	Does the media control people?
	Or does the media put out feelers, see what people respond to, and then do that?
	Philosophy is one I used to follow Sam Harris.
	Well, but that was still idealism and virtue and so on, right?
	Is the media a push economy or is it a pull economy?
	The media does not control.
	You're not a free will person.
	The media is just information.
	I mean, I think bad information for the most part.
	No.
	There is no push economy.
	I mean, listen, there's push economy in government schools, of course, right?
	Because they're trapped and so on, and to some degree in university, although that's more optional.
	But no, there's no push economy.
	In communism, when you're forced to go to these meetings, and you're forced to do these struggle sessions, and if you don't, you get thrown in a gulag, now that's a push economy!
	Have to push the narrative the audience wants.
	Right.
	Push economies only exist without voluntarism.
	Yeah, I mean, where you have a choice, you have a choice.
	Where you don't have a choice, you don't have a choice.
	Right?
	We're there, right?
	People becoming polarized over topics like COVID?
	And this is the ultimate satanic bargain.
	Agree with those in authority and you're a good person.
	Hate people who doubt authority?
	You're a good person.
	Attack people who doubt authority?
	You're a good person.
	Nobody after the 20th century has a single fucking excuse to believe that in any way, shape, or form.
	Nobody.
	I mean, anybody at this point, I mean, there's so many contradictions in the COVID nonsense, but anybody at this point, the science is settled.
	Trust the science.
	Questioning the science is pushing misinformation.
	Oh, but the science changed.
	It's an absolute.
	Oh no, it totally changed.
	Like anybody who hasn't noticed that double think is just too far gone to have any kind of rational conversation with, right?
	Yeah, Fauci's I Am Science, right?
	You're anti-vax.
	So that's just a label, right?
	It's just a label.
	Well, you're anti-vax, right?
	You're a climate denier, right?
	I don't deny climate.
	It's a very real thing.
	That's why I have an umbrella.
	So yeah, I mean, anybody who says, oh yeah, you know, the people who, who were in charge are, are telling me if I obey them, that's really good.
	And if I really hate and ostracize and reject these people who were labeled as bad by those in charge,
	Then I'm good.
	Yeah.
	La science, c'est moi!
	Yeah.
	I don't blame the media.
	You know, it's the question of why do women buy things that thicken their eyebrows or whatever nonsense, right?
	Why do they do that?
	Well, the media.
	No, it's not the media.
	The media is saying, oh, you can have value through appearance rather than virtue.
	You can have value through appearance rather than virtue.
	You can have value by conformity.
	You can have value by hating people we tell you to hate.
	You could be a good person through compliance and hatred.
	Because apparently history doesn't exist at all.
	Yeah.
	And of course, if you were to say to people, should you hate, should you hate people who question authority?
	People would say, well, no, of course you shouldn't hate people who question authority.
	Right?
	So I'm not, I don't judge the COVID people by anything other than their own standards at all.
	I don't judge them by my standards.
	I don't judge them by UPB or abstract.
	I just judge them by their own standards.
	If you were to go to people and you were going to say, should you hate people who question authority, who question these statements of authority, when authority has a huge amount to gain from lying to you.
	Right?
	Should you, should you hate people who question authority?
	No, of course not.
	These are all the people who shouldn't laugh.
	These are all the people who lecture their children.
	Well, you know, you got to really resist peer pressure.
	And you know, you can't, if somebody is telling you to do something you don't feel comfortable with, you should absolutely don't.
	You shouldn't put drugs in your body if you don't feel comfortable.
	That's totally wrong.
	Even if you do feel comfortable, you shouldn't do it.
	You shouldn't do it because of peer pressure.
	Absolutely resist peer pressure.
	Think for yourself.
	If everyone else is judging off, jumping off the Boston Bridge, would you jump off the, right?
	Right?
	I don't judge them by anything but their own standards.
	Say, does history say that it's a good thing to blindly do what those in authority tell you to do?
	And they'd say, well, no, history is very clear.
	You should never blindly do what people in authority tell you to do.
	You should be skeptical.
	You should ask questions.
	Right?
	Yeah, it's funny.
	People say peer pressure is bad, but peer review is good.
	Like, fuck off.
	That's a load of nonsense.
	So no, I don't, I don't blame the media because people betrayed their own values.
	Right?
	They betrayed their own values.
	They didn't betray my values or your values or UPBF.
	They betrayed their own values.
	All the people screaming for 50 years, my body, my choice, gave that up completely.
	So, it was a pull economy.
	It was a pull economy.
	Would you have taken the jab to save your job?
	No.
	I would have given up philosophy before doing that.
	That's just, like, that's just a thing.
	That's just a basic thing.
	And, yeah, that was just a basic thing.
	So, no, I don't blame the media.
	People always tell their children don't, you know, question authority and don't just blindly go along with the crowd and, you know, you can't hate people just because other people say that they're bad.
	I mean, can you think of some racial group?
	They say, oh, this racial group is bad!
	You gotta hate them if people say that's terrible.
	Well, this other group is questioning authority.
	They're bad and you gotta hate them!
	Right, so, no, I don't blame the media.
	People were offered, well, we'll say you're a good person if you just obey us.
	Yeah, especially the leftists, right?
	Apparently multinational corporations are just everyone's friend now.
	I don't mean to laugh, but it's just wild.
	It's just wild.
	And I'm sorry, for the person who sent me the question, let me just look here.
	I'm 34 and feel like I'm still a bit stunted in the sense that I almost feel childish.
	In the sense that I had this sense of inferiority, which I guess is a reflection of low self-esteem.
	How can I integrate this child in my mind to become a man?
	I'm extreme emotionally mature, but it's the sense of child in my mind that impacts my self-esteem.
	I told my fiancee and she was shocked as she said to all appearances, I don't present like this to others.
	Listen, I'm just not a complaint about the money or anything like that.
	But you're asking me to save your life and you sent me $5 if this is the person, right?
	You're worth more than five dollars, I assume, right?
	You're kind of asking me to save your life, right?
	And you're saying it's five bucks.
	So that's what you're saying your life is worth to yourself and to me, I suppose.
	Now, I get that that's part of the issue that you're dealing with, right?
	A sense of inferiority, which I guess is a reflection of low self-esteem.
	No, we're all born powerful.
	You were crushed, right?
	Like if somebody t-boned your car and crushed it like Godzilla on an eggshell, you wouldn't say, you know, I just, I have this weirdly broken car.
	I guess my car just doesn't have any get up and go in it.
	It doesn't seem to want to do anything.
	It's like, no, it was broken.
	It was broken.
	It was broken.
	It was smashed.
	You were broken.
	You were smashed.
	That's fine.
	I mean, it's terrible that it happened, but it doesn't mean you're doomed, right?
	But you don't blame yourself, right?
	If somebody smashes, like, let's say you're watching a movie and your car's in the parking lot.
	Someone smashes your car in the parking lot.
	You don't sit there and say, oh, I should have parked someplace different.
	It's like, well, who smashed your car?
	The person who hit the car.
	And they're at fault, right?
	You weren't even in the car.
	So you had no control over what happened to you as a child and you were smashed and repressed and put down?
	I mean, all children aim to play big, right?
	The boys are dinosaurs, the girls are queens and princesses.
	Everyone plays big as a kid.
	It takes a lot of smashing and crushing to take that largeness and crush it down to like you take all our dreams and you turn them into like a black hole, right?
	Because large imaginations, large goals, large lives, large thoughts threaten authority, right?
	So...
	Yeah, you're not.
	Sense of inferiority?
	No, you were just told you were inferior.
	Low self-esteem?
	No, you were just told you were worthless.
	And it's your parents who sent me the tip, not you, right?
	You're worth more than five bucks, I assume, right?
	So no, I mean, you were just... Like, if you were taught Japanese, you wouldn't sit there and say, well, you know, I really should have learned English.
	I guess I'm just bad at English and I really made a mistake.
	No, that's just what you were taught.
	So you were taught that you're small.
	You were taught that you were worthless.
	You were taught that you were... And people do that so that you don't demand anything from them.
	They make you feel insecure and unstable and worthless so that you don't...
	Demand anything off them, right?
	So, I mean, but it sounds to me like just do a, yeah, you were Evel Knievel as a kid.
	Absolutely.
	Yeah.
	I was a king.
	I was a, you know, I played Dungeons and Dragons and I ended up as a demigod.
	Sure.
	Absolutely.
	Absolutely.
	Stefan, I'm so sorry, but did you say we can find topics you've changed your mind on?
	Yeah.
	I was wrong about.
	Just do a search.
	FDRpodcast.com.
	Hey, Stefan, I've got to admit something.
	I finished The Present, your novel The Present, the other day.
	I've never cried so intensely during a book before.
	This is a masterpiece.
	Officially in my top five novels.
	Well, I will take that with great pleasure and great gratitude.
	Thank you very much.
	I really, really appreciate that.
	All right.
	My daughter has set up something that I am supposed to play.
	Never taught how to talk to people.
	Is that my fault?
	I suck at making friends.
	Well.
	I find it interesting that about half your call is the person apologizes for swearing.
	Is that probably because of nerves?
	Well no, I mean people are used to public things being no swearing and so on.
	Any interest in writing more plays?
	No.
	I wouldn't write any more plays because they're never gonna... I mean my artistic side never had a chance because I was just free market and positive and happy and empowering and all of the lefties control the media so...
	Alright, I don't think I would be writing any more plays.
	I got to produce one which was fantastic and I was very excited about that, but I don't think I would write more plays.
	Yes, so for the person who sent in the five bucks, call in at freedomain.com, send that in.
	And all of that.
	So, alright, well thanks everyone so much, I appreciate that.
	If you're listening to this later or you want to tip me right at the end here, freedomain.com slash donate would be really, really appreciated.
	Thank you for listening.
	Thank you for...
	Your support, your presence, your attention, and really, really thank you so much for your openness and your honesty.
	And please, please, I mean, I know we heard some very dark tales tonight, and my heart goes out to you.
	I love you for the progress that you've made in
	The horrors that you faced.
	Like, you are magnificent bastards.
	Every one of you.
	Man, woman, and anything else.
	You have done incredible things with your life.
	To have found philosophy, to have found truth and reason, to have peacefully parented.
	You are
	Superheroes in smashing the chain and cycle of abuse and I am absolutely honored to share this world and to share this conversation with you.
	I am deeply honored to be in your presence and you should just be proud beyond death.
	You should be immortally proud and I am incredibly grateful for you sharing this information with me and for bringing philosophy to bear in your life and improving
	So much.
	It's just absolutely magnificent.
	And again, the honor is intense on my side.
	I thank you so much for sharing this journey with me.
	It means the absolute world to me and the good we have done can never be overstated.
	Thank you, my friends, so much.
	Take care.
	I'll talk to you soon.
	Bye.

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