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Sept. 26, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
44:10
5268 How to Survive Betrayal!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
Time for a walkabout.
And we start with questions from freedomain.locals.com.
That's freedomain.locals.com.
Don't be afraid.
In general, and also don't be afraid to use the promo code ORCAPSUPB. 2022.
To make sure that you can try it out for a month, see what you think.
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And I hope that you will check it out.
All right.
Is there a place for competitiveness in close relationships or do these terms exclude each other?
Our listener says, I've begun to question the quality of my relationships, particularly those with some of my friends and siblings.
I find it annoying and unproductive.
I don't mind competition at work or in hobbies, music, sports, etc.
It's where you'd expect it.
Yeah, that's a very interesting question.
Face full of spider webs, as usual.
So, yeah, it's a great question.
Now,
A competition is pretty ferocious in sibling relationships, for the most part.
It's pretty ferocious, and it's really pathetic.
Pathetic, as the British would say.
It's really sad and tragic and pitiful for people to have competition in sibling relationships.
I guess, maybe, unless you're twins, right?
So, the typical pattern goes something like this, and it does tend to last a lifetime without intervention.
Typical pattern goes something like this.
Older brother performs the God-given heroic moral task of dropping out of mom's for JJ a couple of years earlier than, say, younger brother.
Oh!
Heroic!
Magnificent!
What a well-earned feat of excellence.
Now, said older brother then
Ends up being taller, sooner, faster, gets more allowance, gets to stay up later, because they're older, right?
This is sort of natural and it makes sense.
They are quicker with language, they're better at sports, because they're a couple of years older.
We all get and understand this, I'm sure.
Now, then what happens is
This does go the younger sibling into trying to do better, and there's obviously a certain amount of frustration.
But what happens generally is the older sibling then gets destroyed by unearned superiority.
Boy, unearned superiority is a real rat's nest of dysfunction.
You really, really don't want to be in a situation where you view that which you did not earn as that which gives you value.
That's just terrible.
So the older sibling ends up with a degree of precarious and dominating vanity.
And as a result, because they have this unearned cocaine of automatic betterness, so to speak, then what happens is they don't strive to improve as much, and they certainly don't strive for virtue.
Virtue, as I said recently, is what gives you value, what should give you value,
If you have value by virtue of being older, which is not the same as having value because you are in fact virtuous, then what happens is you don't look for the actual real honest goodness virtue.
Sorry, I'm just going to pause here for a tiny split second.
I don't really want to edit this too much, but what I'm going to do is just... You ever do this when you're hiking?
I have tied my shoe too tight and it's hurting my poor little ankle.
There we go.
Look at that.
He's got legs.
He knows how to use them.
That's why he's walking in the woods.
So competition with regards to siblings is just one of these completely unfair situations where the older sibling generally ends up superior in some fashion because of the automatic time advantage.
And a said sibling then feels superior, doesn't strive for virtue, and the competition then tends to be along the lines of
The younger sibling struggling to improve, which then ends up with the younger sibling often outpacing or passing the older sibling, particularly in perhaps excellence, right?
Whether it's moral excellence or physical excellence or whatever.
So then, and of course, the younger sibling gains an advantage much later in life, in the 50s and 60s, by virtue of being a couple of years younger.
But it's not like you think about that all too much when you are in your
Early teens or your single digits.
So then what happens is because the younger sibling has to struggle quite a bit.
To catch up, the younger sibling often then ends up exceeding the skills and abilities of the elder sibling.
I'm basically just on a steady diet of spiders and spiderweb today.
That's all right.
I'm sure there's some nutrition in there somewhere.
Do we have a dead end?
I think we do.
Yes.
All right.
Then what happens is, because the younger sibling started off further back, and therefore has to run faster, the younger sibling often ends up overtaking the elder sibling in some various pursuit or another.
And then what happens is, because the elder sibling has defined his, it could be her of course, but because the elder sibling has defined his value as better than, stronger than, taller than, faster than,
The Younger Sibling, what happens is when the Younger Sibling begins to pass the Elder Sibling, the Elder Sibling ends up really striving and flailing to continue establishing dominance over the Younger Sibling because the false self-benefit of being better than is evaporating and there's no fallback excellence or virtue to rely on.
So, then what happens is... No, I've not finished it.
So, there's a sort of flailing for dominance that the elder sibling has over the younger sibling, and the younger sibling either slots back into the family hierarchy, or there's a massive break in the relationship.
I mean, I've seen this play out a bunch of times.
It seems to be fairly consistent.
And that, of course, is it occurs in the absence of quality parenting, right?
So in the presence of quality parenting, what happens is the elder sibling's potential vanity for being better than the younger sibling is put in its place.
Right?
I mean, the elder sibling is reminded repeatedly
You're not better, you're just earlier.
You don't have higher quality, you just happen to be older.
And your job is not to gain the vanity of being better than your younger sibling who is inferior physically and mentally through no fault of his own and through no virtue of yours.
The point is to nurture and bring along your younger siblings.
To encourage them, to teach them, to be a wise mentor, and to take the accidental advantage you have in the birth order and use it to transfer excellence to your younger siblings so that they can reap the fruits of your wisdom and all of that, right?
However impossible this may seem to some of us, this is, I've actually seen this occurring
In families I know with multiple siblings, I'm thinking of three brothers in particular, where the older brother learned chess and then immediately enjoyed teaching his younger siblings chess.
And all of that.
And this is a dad who built an obstacle course in the backyard.
And the older siblings are teaching the younger siblings and encouraging them to achieve physical excellence.
All this kind of good stuff.
I mean, it absolutely happens.
It's a beautiful thing to see.
And it's a lovely fruit of peaceful parenting.
So, yes, it may seem improbable, but it certainly can happen.
There's some sunlight.
So competition is a pretty toxic among most.
Now, I mean, there are siblings of the sisters and sisters.
That's often a big problem as well.
And we can leave that topic for another time.
It's not a topic I'm much of an expert in, although I've certainly written about sisters.
I wrote about sisters in
My Novel of Revolutions, which you can get at freedomain.com slash books.
And I've certainly seen some pretty dysfunctional sister stuff.
But it seems to follow a similar pattern, that the elder sibling feels superior because they're older, taller, stronger, and smarter.
That superiority is pathetic.
And ridiculous.
This is like me debating a five-year-old and feeling like, oh my gosh, I'm just, I'm so smart.
Look, I won the argument with a five-year-old.
I mean, that's just, I don't know what to say about that.
Measuring yourself against automatic and involuntary weakness is just about the most pathetic form of self-esteem that God, man, or the devil himself could conceive of.
Probably stimulated by the devil himself.
So,
So yeah, that kind of competition is pretty bad.
There's a competition that's often engaged into by married couples, which is who's more right.
And you want to be more right than your partner.
And so what you do is you wander into the grove of Christmas trees.
So what you do is you make predictions and your partner makes predictions.
And then what you do is you measure the results against those predictions and see who's more right.
And you hold it and lord it over your partner when you are more right.
And you gather this evidence and you accumulate your rightness and you use your rightness
As a big sack full of self-indignant rocks to beat your partner down with, and just to be right, and to get your way, and have your partner listen.
I mean, it's complete madness.
It's utter and complete madness.
I don't mean to laugh, but it's so beyond tragic.
To have this fantasy that you can win
At the expense of someone you claim to love?
Are you mad?
Are you mental?
What is the matter?
What is your major malfunction, son?
It's madness.
The idea that you can win, you can conquer, you can emerge victorious by winning against and at the expense of someone you claim to love.
Oh my God.
Because what spells love better than sociopathic denigration of the other person's cognitive abilities and wisdom and rightness?
The best you can... Let's say that you do win in that sort of competition in married or dating couples.
Let's say you do, quote, win in some fashion.
No, bird, I'm not going to trip and die, so go eat somewhere else.
Let's say you do win.
Yay!
What have you won?
I mean, literally, what have you won?
I am now married to someone who's always wrong.
I chose someone who has no more sense than God gave a goose.
Actually, no, geese are right quite consistently.
So, what's that winning look like?
What is that winning?
My husband is such an idiot that I consider myself truly wise and virtuous to have married him.
My husband is always wrong.
My wife is foolish.
I mean, what kind of weird, creepy, reversal kind of social circles are you moving in where people don't slowly back away from you when you claim to be infinitely wiser and more virtuous than the person you claim to love?
I'm so wise that I married someone who's always wrong.
That's the depth, breadth, and extent of my wisdom, let me tell you people.
That's just about infinity wisdom right there.
I decided to go into business with a guy who has no idea what business is.
I married my fortunes to a guy
Who is kind of an idiot kleptomaniac, and that makes me a great businessman.
I'm such a fantastic musician.
Let me tell you what a fantastic musician I am.
I'm such a fantastic musician that I have tied and married my fortunes.
I did the one thing I always tried to remember to do, which I may not have remembered to do at this point.
Clean the old lens.
Oh, no.
No, I'm just old.
Look at this.
This is the kind of view where I look, I have half a head.
The sunlight has shaved off the top of my head.
Yeah, I'm such an excellent musician that I have signed up for a lifelong jazz tour with someone who doesn't even know which end of the instrument to hold.
He blows into the frets of the violin and thinks he's producing music.
He tries to make armpit farts into the recorder and think that he's Kenny G. That's what an incredible musician I am.
I am so great at life, I've chosen incompetent people to tie my fortunes to.
I mean, the idea that you can torpedo your partner and not be on the same boat
I mean, again, it's an old analogy, but it's like being in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean and saying, well, I'm mad at my partner, so I'm going to drill a hole in the bottom of the rowboat and just watch him sink.
It's like, no, the sharks are happy that you're fighting.
Let's put it that way, right?
So, competition is kind of pathetic in many circumstances.
Now, I mean, I play sports with my wife.
We play a bunch of sports together.
And I mean, we both like to win.
But it's not about winning.
It's about sort of having fun and exercise and all of that.
So I think that's fine.
But the real competition that you want to get into with people is the kindness.
It's kindness.
You know, I gotta confess, you know, only confession I'll ever make at this show.
But I have to confess that my wife is, in many ways, a nicer and more thoughtful person than me.
Now, I bring other strengths to the relationship, which I plan to reveal to her in the coming decades, slowly and with great fanfare.
No, like, I bring particular strengths to the relationship, but she is
As a whole, and it's not a huge difference, but if I had to sort of say who's slightly better at the sort of more thoughtful stuff, the thoughtful stuff for her comes naturally, involuntarily, which is not to say that she's not virtuous because of it.
I mean, that's the result of, I think, some innate preferences and also lifelong habits.
So her thoughtfulness comes to her naturally.
To be honest, I have to
I don't know how to put this exactly.
I have to concentrate on it just a little bit.
You know, like when you're learning a language, if you've grown up with that language, everything just kind of happens automatically.
But when you're learning a language, you have to... Something's on the way in the path here.
Let me step under it.
Poor Mr. Spider's worked all night.
So it comes more naturally to her than it does to me, although I'm certainly improving and all of that in this in this area.
So that's a little now.
Some things come a little bit more naturally to me than to her.
So it's a good it's a good combo.
But I do strive
To reach her level of consideration and thoughtfulness.
I think it's a wonderful trait.
Is that my rock eye?
Dwayne Thee Jones and I. Yeah, so that's a good competition to have, I think.
She's trying to excel in areas that come a little bit more naturally to me.
Or that I've worked on more and I try to excel in areas that come a little bit more naturally to her.
And it's, I mean, that's a great thing.
It's a competition for virtue, competition for honesty, competition for openness and all of that.
So I think that if you compete on the basis of virtue, I mean, isn't that just about as good a life as you can get?
All right.
What are your thoughts on Montessori education versus homeschooling?
Well, I mentioned this on the live stream, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
Which way?
Well, so with regards to Montessori, there's the theory and then there's the practice.
So people read books on Montessori and then they assume that that's how the Montessori school is operating.
Doubts.
Doubts.
Because
It's all about the teachers.
It's sort of like reading the mission statement of a government program to some degree, and then assuming that's how it works.
So there's all these theories in Montessori about how children learn and all of that.
And, you know, that's fine, but it's only as good as the teachers themselves.
And I certainly wouldn't say, ah, well, that's the school that claims to be Montessori.
I'm sure it's 100% Montessori.
And even if it is 100% Montessori, you have the slight and not inconsiderable problem
That they still have to teach very often, or maybe always in some places, the government-mandated curricula.
So they're really good at teaching really bad things.
I don't know that that's much of a plus, but that is a sort of significant issue.
So I don't think it's a magic bullet.
Oh, Montessori!
So we're fine.
No, not so much.
All right.
Hi Steph, do you have any advice on how to stop painful rumination of bad events in the past?
Especially with regards to friendships and relationships such as betrayal and disrespect that can keep going around in your mind and keep re-triggering your emotions even after dealing with them in therapy and doing everything to try and process the event.
That's a big, big question.
Betrayal is the hidden language of the modern world.
It's the hidden physics of the modern world.
Betrayal is
So common and so foundational to our relationships, or at least most of our relationships, particularly those historically accidental or environmental, like school or university, accidental.
You're just in proximity to people for institutional reasons rather than personal choice.
Betrayal is... And you know, there's a lot of people... I'll be perfectly blunt about this.
It doesn't mean I'm right.
It just means I'm telling you what I think.
But there's a lot of people
Who take a great pleasure in betraying others.
They take a deep, visceral, sadistic satisfaction in betraying others.
And I talked about this before with regards to parents, though it's not always parents, of course.
But I've talked about this with regards to people in the past.
And, switch arms here, make sure I don't end up with my almost 57 kink.
Kinky!
So,
When you need someone's loyalty and you're desperate for someone's loyalty, you know, like that meme of the guy sinking and drowning and reaching up for help and the hand coming down and then just giving him a high five rather than giving him any actual help.
When you are desperately reaching for someone and desperately need their support and their
loyalty to stand with you in the face of what sometimes feels like overwhelming animosity and enemies.
When you really need someone like that, in that way, then you're in a situation of desperate need and they're in a situation of either providing that need or withdrawing.
Now, when we are not motivated by virtue, we are inevitably drawn to power.
Let me repeat that because it gives me goosebumps.
When we are not motivated by virtue, we are inevitably drawn to power.
Now power can be achieved in one of two ways.
Either by being in a position to give other people
Gifts, jobs, resources, and so on, a platform or whatever, right?
So that's one way you get power, is the provision of a positive.
And the other way you get power is the infliction of a negative.
Power is bribes and threats.
Bribes and threats, for the most part.
Now,
When you are in a situation where you desperately need people to support you, you're flailing and being buried alive by endless syllable predators that stalk the mind space of the modern world, then look at this.
Let me show you something.
I'm going to ford a river.
It's not super fast flowing, but there's no, well, no, there is a bridge, but I'm not going to use it.
Still bugs.
Still bugs.
All right.
Now, if you are not motivated by virtue, then you are drawn to power.
And one way that you experience a flash of power is when somebody desperately needs you to be virtuous and you betray them.
Then you get to see their flailing need for you.
You feel like you have value because their need for you intensifies.
And it is a short-term dopamine hit.
And to my, not eternal, but transitory shame, when I was a kid, the only thing I can say is it wasn't my idea, which doesn't excuse me for much, but when I was a kid, sometimes we'd be out with some kid who wasn't as popular,
Who was just kind of there and had shown up and found us or whatever.
We didn't have the heart to boot him off the reservation, so to speak.
And what we would do is somebody, some kid would come up with the idea, the kid would go to, I don't know, we'd be in the woods, the kid would go to pee or something like that.
Or at the mall, he'd go to pee or he'd go get a drink or something like that.
And what would we say?
Well, I think most people have gone through this at one time or another.
So, what we would say is, or what some kid would come up with is, well, let's just take off on him.
Let's take off on him, man!
And there would be this kind of hysterical hyper-giggliness that would come out of that situation.
Let's take off on him, man!
And we would take off, and then we would maybe watch when he came out, looking around, confused and disoriented and so on, right?
And I mean, again, I don't want to whitewash my past.
It's not exactly some moral crime.
It wasn't particularly nice, of course.
A little cruel.
Make sure the cable comes with me.
But I only did this a couple of times.
And then I was just like, I didn't like watching the kid just come out and be confused and feel rejected.
And then what?
Right.
And then it was kind of awkward.
Because then you've got to lie later on.
Hey, where were you, man?
Oh, we thought you were with us, and by the time we realized you weren't, you know, we turned back, you were gone.
You know, you just fogged the whole thing, right?
But yeah, you would spy on the kid coming out and looking for his supposed friends.
And you would... It's possible, of course, right?
Again, I don't want to make myself out to be overly virtuous, but I was not particularly comfortable with that.
It was kind of hysterical to run away.
I thought we would just hide, but then, you know... And again, it's up to me.
I could have absolutely gone back and said something, but... I understand how you see the kid coming out, looking around,
And the discomfort and the sort of slowly dueling realization that he's been yeeted and abandoned.
Yeah, I mean some kids were giggly about that.
So yeah, betraying someone in that way can give people a real high.
Give them a real high.
And so betrayal
Is kind of inevitable.
And again, because when you don't seek, when you're not motivated by virtue, you seek power.
So that means that in a situation where loyalty is demanded or required or would be virtuous, then what happens is you don't have any particular moral virtues that are motivating you to embrace the discomfort of loyalty in the face of significant and dangerous opposition.
See, the more significant and dangerous the opposition,
The more you need your friend's loyalty, the more significant and dangerous the opposition, the more you need it.
But because of that, the more dangerous it is for them to support you.
We can follow that.
I mean, sorry, of course we can follow that, right?
So the more dangerous it is for them to support you, the more you need their support.
And so when you really are sort of flailing and reaching desperately for people's support,
The more it is going to be difficult and uncomfortable for them to support you, and so the more they are in fact in need of virtue, right?
They really need virtue, because virtue gives you the reasons to embrace the discomfort of acting morally in dangerous situations.
Acting morally is almost always dangerous, except among truly moral people.
So if they don't have morality,
They won't embrace the difficulty of supporting a moral person who's under attack by evildoers.
Right?
The more guys who jump you, the more you need your friends, but the more guys who jump you, the more your friends are in danger from helping you.
And again, they do take... there's a certain amount of power when people need things from you and you don't provide them.
You can see this, of course, in the typical
Schoolyard bully tactic of taking a kid's hat, tossing it back and forth, the kid has to run and get it, and the kid is in need of his hat, you're in possession of his hat, he needs things from you, you're withholding them from him, and it gives you a flushing sense of power.
To be needed is to be powerful, and therefore I don't expect loyalty from people who aren't in pursuit of virtue.
I don't expect loyalty.
I don't expect loyalty from that.
That would be irrational.
I mean, anti-rational, frankly, to be clear.
It would be anti-rational to expect loyalty from people who are focusing on the animal pursuit of dopamine-laced immediate power, any more than you would expect loyalty from some random monkey on a trail in Malaysia.
And if people are operating at the level of animal, loyalty in terms of morals is a human attribute.
And if people have, if people are not in pursuit of virtue, objective virtue, universal virtue, reciprocal virtues, if people are not in pursuit of virtue, they're living at the level of the animal.
So why would you expect virtues from animals?
I mean, animals have sort of biologically programmed loyalties and so on, like you can see.
I saw a video of some guy who raised a bunch of wolf pups, and then they got reunited, and they hugged him, and they were happy to see him.
But that's not moral loyalty or virtue.
It's like when you see these incredibly sentimental videos of a puppy and a duckling, they're best friends, and they sort of waddle along together.
It's like, they're not friends.
They're just biologically programmed to bond with the closest life form.
You know, I remember when my daughters, ducks, when they're very little, they would trail after us, of course, like the tail of a kite.
And then, when they got older, they became more independent.
And of course, it's almost possible, you can feel vague hints of this in your reptile brain, it's almost possible to feel like they have rejected you.
They just rejected me.
They used to love me.
Now they don't love me.
No, they're bonding hormones.
They're bonding, what is it?
Dopamine or oxytocin or something.
It's just run out.
Right?
So they're off doing their thing.
And they don't need you anymore.
Or rather, the biological mechanisms that
Bonded them to you have dissipated and gone and that's not there.
Them bonding with you in the past was not love and them not bonding with you in the present is not betrayal or a lack of love or anything like that.
So yeah, it's really easy to mistake all these things.
So generally our minds tend to know what things until
We've learned.
We've learned the most fundamental lessons.
I'm sure everyone has had this like a thought just keep niggling at your brain, niggling at your brain, and then what happens is you finally figure out the root of whatever that thing is that's niggling at your brain, and it stops.
It leaves you alone.
I had a sort of shoulder thing on my right shoulder and this is sort of a repetitive thing in my life where I'm like, well, this hurts.
I massage it and I can't, it doesn't get better.
And then I find something that's completely, it feels like it's completely unrelated.
I massage that and it all gets better, right?
So the pain continues until the massage hits the right spot.
It turns out that what was the top of my shoulder turned out to be a problem deep in my clavicle.
Who would have guessed?
Who knew?
Not I!
At least until...
I randomly experimented and figured it out.
So, why are you, why is your brain still chewing and worrying over all of this stuff?
Because some fundamental lesson has not been learned, right?
Some fundamental lesson has not been learned.
If you
are in expectation of loyalty from people who have abandoned morality and are thus in pursuit of power, then if somebody's in pursuit of power, then they will betray you.
They will betray you.
Because power is the pursuit of dominance, and if you are facing innumerable foes,
who are dangerous to you and you need someone's loyalty, then you are asking them to join you in a state of vulnerability when what they're really after is pursuit of power.
So relativists, subjectivists, people who mouth moral, religious, or Christian platitudes but don't actually act upon them in any meaningful way, they will betray you.
They will betray you.
Guaranteed, 100%.
I mean, that's natural.
That's like asking, well, will a starving lion eat the meat you throw in front of it?
Yeah.
Yes.
Like not even a doubt, not even a question, right?
Of course, the starving lion is going to eat the meat that you throw in front of the lion.
It's not even a matter of free will.
That's just automatically what's going to happen.
And somebody who's not in pursuit of morality is going to betray you.
They're in pursuit of power.
Power is dominance.
And standing firm with somebody under attack is putting yourself in a state of vulnerability, whereas rejecting someone who desperately needs you to support them when they're under attack puts you in a state of power.
Right?
So people in pursuit of power will do that, which maximizes their sense of power.
We can't be too baffled by all of this, right?
And somebody who's in pursuit of morality will have
The intellectual and emotional strength to embrace the discomfort of supporting somebody under attack.
So, and most people, I mean, this can't be that much of a shock, right?
Most people, the mic's down here, most people are not actually in hot pursuit of morality.
Most people are just surviving the power, lust, and dominance impulses of the moment.
We lust, most of our higher selves,
When we lost religion and philosophy did not work every muscle in its moral fiber to take the place of Christian ethics.
We lost our soul.
We lost our higher humanity.
We now operate at the level of cunning animals, for the most part, and you cannot expect loyalty from cunning animals.
I mean, animals are only loyal insofar as that loyalty serves their genetics.
It's right why the ducklings trail after the mother, because that serves their genetics, right?
It makes it slightly harder for them to be eaten.
So that's why that happens, not loyalty, it's just survival.
And without morals, without a higher calling, without conceptual reason and virtue, we just run and hide and survive.
It's not even really betrayal.
Right?
It's not even really betrayal.
There are storks, not the corn, but the bird.
There are storks who take the weakest and toss it out of the nest.
It's betrayal.
It's like, nope, it's just survival.
They don't want to expend calories keeping a baby alive, a baby stork alive, that is almost certain not to survive.
Right?
It's not a lack of love.
It's not a lack of loyalty.
It's not cruelty.
It's not meanness.
It's just rational energy calculations, which is the basis of a lot of animal behavior, most animal behavior.
When the lion's chasing a zebra, the zebra is pulling away and the lion ceases to chase.
It's not because the lion has discovered compassion and love for the zebra.
It's because
The lion has done the rational energy calculation and said, hmm, I am expending too much here and it's not profitable.
I can't run much faster, the zebra's getting away, and so I'll stop running.
Just a rational calculation of energy expenditure and expectation.
So yeah, my guess is that the reason why you're still ruminating over being betrayed is that you are ascribing moral terms to people who are not motivated by morality.
So, to sort of, I guess, minorly amend what I said, amoral people don't betray you.
Because betrayal is a moral term.
Betrayal is a moral term.
I mean, if you have a hunting dog, you send it out to get a duck, but it eats the duck on the way back.
Has the hunting dog betrayed you?
No, it's just hungry, maybe badly trained or whatever, right?
It's not betrayal.
So if you apply moral terms to amoral people, you will always be vulnerable to exploitation.
Because you're angry that amoral people
When what you should do is be somewhat frustrated with yourself in order to be safe, right?
You should be somewhat frustrated with yourself that you expected moral behavior from amoral or immoral people.
I mean, in a sense, you're no better than the woman who dates the drug addict and then complains that he's unstable and emotionally unavailable.
Right?
The woman who dates the guy who beat up his last three girlfriends and then is shocked and appalled that he's violent, right?
So, safety occurs in this realm.
Safety occurs when you identify the amoral people in your environment and you no longer expect or anticipate moral behavior.
From amoral people.
And it's not that hard to find the amoral people in your environment.
They tend to be pretty clear about it, right?
Anybody who tells you to just relax when you have moral concerns is an amoral person.
People who aren't in any way in their lives accepting discomfort in the pursuit of truth and virtue, well, they're amoral people.
And we can sort of go through the list.
Maybe I'll do that on Friday.
But amoral people are pitifully easy to identify.
And once you identify them, what you should do is... Sorry, it sounds kind of obvious.
I try not to expect a conversation in English with people who don't speak English.
Or rather, the only English they know is the phrase, I don't speak English.
Right?
You're trying to have a moral conversation with people who don't speak morality.
And so the reason you're still ruminating over it is you're angry at them for betraying you, but that's irrational.
If people, and I'm sure that they did, openly proclaim, as they generally do, their amorality or immorality,
And you are then shocked or surprised or upset or angry that they betray you, then the problem is you.
So imagine that you're continuing to ruminate on these moral betrayals or these betrayals because you haven't understood that you don't rationally expect moral behavior from amoral people.
And amoral people don't have any capacity to betray you because they're not
Like, do I have the capacity to be wrong in a language I do not speak?
No.
I don't.
I mean, there's some comedians who pretend to speak foreign languages, sort of made-up language or whatever, but I don't have the capacity to be wrong in a language I do not speak.
And people who are amoral, they can't betray you, because there's no possibility of them doing otherwise, because they're amoral people.
So they've already announced that they have no standard higher than power or pleasure-seeking.
And so when you're asking someone who says, all I do is seek pleasure, to do something distinctly dangerous and uncomfortable for abstract moral reasons, and they don't, it's your irrational expectations, not the other person's amoral behavior, that is at fault here.
I mean, you know, the hot girl who has broken the hearts and destroyed the lives of many a man, and then you date her.
The problem fundamentally is not the hot lunatic woman.
It's you for dating her.
And this is what I mean by like 100% self-ownership.
That you are responsible, however painful it may be.
You are absolutely responsible.
for determining the moral nature of the people around you and acting in rational terms in accordance to your knowledge.
So I hope this helps.
Thanks everyone so much for these great questions.
I hope you enjoyed my spider silk stroll and I will talk to you soon.
You can of course always submit questions at freedomain.locals.com.
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