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Sept. 28, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:58
FORGIVE YOURSELF!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Time for our wee walk and talk.
Great questions. Dear Steph, how can one learn to forgive oneself and even love oneself after making some serious mistakes and bad decisions?
No excuses, though.
I could cite childhood, etc., but it's my fault.
I'm separated now because of it.
I started therapy, really working on myself, but the shame remains.
I've come out a more genuine, honest, virtuous person, But the shame remains.
Kind regards from a long-time subscriber and rare but generous donator.
Well, thank you. I appreciate your support.
And I will do my best to help you, my friend.
Because wrong, doing wrong, is endemic to the human condition.
And it's really exacerbated by sort of current forces.
So, let's go back to Socrates.
Socrates had the belief that what we call evil was a form of ignorance.
That if people who did wrong, who did evil, knew how bad evil was for them, and knew how happy virtue would make them, then they would not be evil.
And so to instruct people on morality was to make them good.
So it would sort of be analogous to no kid sort of wakes up and says, well, I just really want to be fat and wrestle with being overweight or obese my whole life.
So we just would teach children about nutrition and exercise.
And lo and behold, those children would not be fat, right?
Right, so that's the general idea.
You and I were raised in a society that
utterly failed to instruct us morally.
Thank you.
Please, please, please, I'm begging you.
I would get on my knees if I could get back up again easily, but I'm 57 now.
Tell me what moral instructions Do you recall getting as a child?
And I don't mean just sort of like obey, stand in line, it's a fire drill, do your homework, don't jump, don't scare, don't upset your classmates, don't talk back, don't fidget, like all of this micromanaging bullshit, hysterical OCD, semi-fascist control crap.
I'm talking about a genuine moral lesson That was inspiring, that helped you, that you remember that you're used to this day.
What were you taught morally?
I mean, I, of course, was raised a Christian child, and much though I love Christianity in so many ways, it's the whole thing, love Christianity and I wasn't so convinced of the morals of the Christians because of course I moved, particularly among sort of family members who themselves were dedicated Christians, I moved and at times even lived with staunch Christians who were trained in the identification of immorality and the combat of evil.
Right? Isn't that really what Christianity is about?
The promotion of virtue, the identification of immorality and the combat of evil.
And these Christians who took me to church to hear lectures about morality did not notice at all the deep evils being done to the children in their own midst.
Not a thing. Not a thing.
It honestly is so bizarre to me.
I work very hard to denormalize all of this stuff for people because it is so bizarre.
Oh no, that song, how bizarre?
It's a bad song. So, it's so bizarre to me.
It is literally like somebody claiming to be a deep expert on the identification of tumors who has a kid with a giant goiter sticking out of their neck, the size of a grapefruit, who has no idea what's going on, And no knowledge that the child has any affliction, ailment, tumor, or misshapen neck whatsoever.
I can't tell you, at least I try to communicate, but I simply cannot tell you how bizarre it is to me.
It was fairly bizarre at the time, though of course I was a kid and didn't consciously know it.
Hey look, a pregnant tree.
And that, Johnny, is where little baby trees come from.
So, the same thing, of course, was true of my teachers, the priests and the teachers.
See, the teachers were very focused on morality, on virtue, on integrity, honor, discipline, goodness.
To the point where they were willing to cane children, as I was caned, for minor infractions.
As I mentioned before, I climbed over a fence to get a soccer ball.
Apparently you weren't allowed to climb over that fence.
One of the boys snitched on me, and I got dragged off and caned.
So they were very much into what was virtuous, what was good, what was noble, what was true, what was right.
And such confidence that they beat children.
That's a lot of confidence, man, to put it one way or another.
But of course, no one noticed that I was being abused as a child.
I had dozens and dozens and dozens of teachers, because of course I lived in a couple of different countries and went to a whole bunch of different schools, and not one of these paragons of virtue who was really interested in making sure that children turned out well, not one of these paragons of virtue ever mentioned anything or asked me anything about child abuse.
And if you were well treated as a child, fantastic.
I love your parents. I'm very glad they did that.
Good for you. And I would not wish anything else for you.
But you don't know.
You don't know how society looks when you feel protected as opposed to how society looks when you feel exploited and neglected and lectured about morality, right?
Society looks like A neurotic anti-cruelty to animals activist lecturing you about not wearing fur while you're being mauled to death by a giant freaking lion.
That's what society looks like.
It's in collusion with the abusers and it lectures you in order to control you.
So, why am I saying all this?
Because... I mean, there's a great line...
In King Lear, he is a man more sinned against than sinning.
You, me, everyone, we cannot invent morality on our own.
We can't do it. And specifically, we can't do it because it's a conceptual feat utterly beyond the powers of a child.
I mean, philosophers have wrestled with it for...
Thousands or tens of thousands of years, children can't fix it.
They can't discover it.
That's sort of one. Now, children, I think, do have an instinctive grasp of universals.
If they didn't, we wouldn't be able to learn language.
So children cannot invent morality in any sort of objective or rational sense.
And the other aspect of that, of course, is that if children do invent or discover or extend morality in a universal sense, they will be roundly and deeply and brutally attacked by the existing system.
Come on! We all know this one, right?
You will be attacked by the existing system If you dare to bring moral objective absolutes to bear on your life as a child.
It will not be allowed.
It will not be accepted.
It will be opposed.
And you will be attacked, and bullied, and humiliated, and expelled, and ostracized.
So not only can children not invent universal morality, but even if they have an instinct for it, which I guess we all do, they can't invent it in a defensible, rational fashion any more than a child who's learning words can define and explain grammar.
The rules you learn later.
The instincts you learn first, like You learn how to throw and catch a ball long before you can write an equation on gravity and momentum and air resistance and so on.
You learn how to use a tablet before you learn how to program a computer.
you know what we get on this one.
So.
What, it's a very, very important question to ask.
What moral instruction did you receive?
As a child? What moral instruction did you receive as a child?
I want to know.
Other than sit in your place, raise your hand to go to the bathroom, write neatly.
God, the amount of crap that I got as a kid.
Remember how nice your first page of your binder was, the first page of your notebook, how neat it was.
Now it's just check and scratch and people get literally enraged at bad handwriting.
Oh my God. They don't care that I'm being abused.
But boy, did I hear endless lectures about the trick and scratch of your penmanship, Mr.
Molyneux! Unacceptable!
It is a moral asylum of sadistic cruelty.
Now, that's what's important, man.
It doesn't matter if you've been beaten and you're hungry.
What matters is that your A's around like a nice apple.
Sorry, don't be the last but it's just so darkly comedic what people focus on
They cared more about me about me being late on occasion than the actual reasons why it was late
Ah, you know, kind of boring.
We all know this stuff. The way the world works, I mean, the world wants to break you.
Let's be frank, right? The world wants to break you.
And we'll sort of get into that with the next question.
There's a pattern. There's a goal.
There's a process here, my friends.
Yeah, the world wants to break you.
Now, it doesn't usually want to break you so much that you can't be productive, although deficits and debt and unfunded liabilities have changed that to some degree.
So it wants to break you enough to be obedient, but not so much that you're too expensive to maintain.
So the world, yeah, it wants to break you.
Now, one of the ways that it breaks you is it doesn't teach you objective virtues and values and right and wrong.
And it certainly doesn't act on them, in particular to protect children.
It doesn't do any of that. And so, inevitably, you will go astray.
I mean, you have to have some hierarchy of values, and if you don't have moral ones, you'll have lizard-brained ones.
If you don't have a moral hierarchy of values, what will you have?
You will have a hierarchy of values To do with sex, survival, obedience, power, money, status, prestige, all of that monkey brain stuff, right?
Of course. I mean, you've got to figure out what to do with your day, and if it ain't about being good, it's going to be about survival and power, and sometimes the only...
Survival you can get is to give up your power, as most human beings had to do throughout history, just being serfs and slaves and whatnot, and drafted into the army, and so on.
So, the way that the world breaks you in general is it won't instruct you on any morality, it will traumatize you, and then, when you do wrong, when you do bad...
When you go astray, when you sin, after the world has taught you nothing and in fact counter-instructed you, tossing you over to your lizard brain, when the world breaks you and teaches you obedience rather than virtue, Then when you make mistakes and you do wrong, you know what the world says?
Amen! That's all on you!
I mean, can you imagine a parent?
Imagine this. Imagine a parent takes a four-year-old.
Hey, get up! Get up!
We're going to do something cool!
He takes a four-year-old and carries the four-year-old downstairs.
And then takes the four-year-old outside, puts the four-year-old on a bicycle, an adult bicycle, let's make it fun, right?
Puts the four-year-old on an adult bicycle and pushes the four-year-old down a hill.
Four-year-old inevitably wobbles and crashes because he doesn't know what he's doing.
And then the parent, what does the parent say?
God, I can't believe how clumsy you are!
I want you to focus and we're going to do it again.
You understand this would be massive, unbelievable, I guess believable, but fairly unbearable sadism, right?
We get that? Sorry, I'm going through some deep grasses here and pretty much waiting to turn an ankle.
Well, I just did a show We're Jared on how to be efficient and productive and exercise and shows together as one is a good combo.
Oh, nature. Beautiful.
Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
Right, so you get tossed on a bike with no knowledge of what to do.
You crash and then you are blamed for the crashing, right?
So you're thrown out into the world with no moral instruction or counter moral instruction.
At least the kid on the bike has no knowledge of the bike, but if the father has spent years training the kid with diagrams to pedal with his hands and steer with his feet, it would be even more ridiculous, but that's the way it is in the world that is.
Right, so we understand.
Why did you crash your bike?
Why did you do wrong? I did wrong when I was a teenager.
I wouldn't say that I became particularly virtuous until later in life.
I wasn't, like, nasty, cruel, sadistic, but I made mistakes.
I did some wrong things. I hurt some people.
And... So...
That's the way it goes.
They say to you...
Obey...
Be ground down, be beaten up, be taught nothing but abusive and aggressive irrelevancies, learn stuff that doesn't matter, be punished if you don't pay attention to everything which is boring and counter to any deep feeling of progress or virtue.
They see all of that and then they turn you loose on the world And because you lack knowledge of virtue, you have been counter-taught vice as virtue, you do bad things.
You do wrong things. And then what happens is people say, ooh, man, you're a bad person.
Ooh, you did such wrong.
You did such wrong.
And to have...
To be cast down into hell with no knowledge of virtue, with no knowledge of heaven, with no capacity to avoid hell.
I mean, that's a devilish thing, right?
To plunge you into despair because you were taught all the wrong things, you were taught all the wrong things, and then you made the inevitable mistakes of those who were taught all the wrong things.
I mean, imagine you're taught how to fly a plane with the exact opposite of what you need to know to fly a plane, right?
Let's say everything's backwards, everything's wrong, everything's weird, so you make mistakes.
How wild do you have to correct as you're going through the airplane thing, right?
You have to figure out how the joystick's actually working.
You have to do all these crazy things. The rudders are backwards.
The altimeter is in fathoms.
The artificial horizon is skewed.
It's dark. Right?
Oh, sorry. I have...
I have lost...
I have lost myself some laces.
One moment.
I'm sure a vole came out and untied them.
There we go. And, yeah, so you see, the moral instruction is all terrible.
It's all counter-moral, so you're taught evil is good.
So the moral instruction you get is all counter to what is good and true and right and virtuous and universal.
So you are forced into a situation where you're instructed in the opposite of truth.
But you see, and you don't have any choice about that, you're forced into it, it's cultural, it could be religious, it certainly is, in terms of government schools, government curricula.
So all of this is done to you, but then you see your mistakes are all your own.
Your mistakes are all your own.
We taught you, we instructed you, we caged you, and we forced our false virtues upon you, and we punished you for deviance, and we punished you for questions, and we punished you even for taking our principles of universality and trying to apply them back to us.
So we We'll tax control, compel, confine, and propagandize you.
Now, we have that right, and anybody who questions that is immoral.
So, the monopoly on instruction is forcefully taken.
Ah, but you see, it's a nice deal, right?
It's a nice deal for those in power.
We will compel you to listen.
We will instruct you for...
10,000 hours on morality and virtue and truth and righteousness and goodness and integrity and honor.
We will instruct you on everything and you can't get away from our instruction.
Ah, but!
Funny story, right?
But! The instruction is all ours, but the errors are all yours.
See how this works?
The Instruction we maintain.
The instruction is ours.
But all the errors, you see, are yours.
We are responsible for teaching you virtue, and we compel you to that.
But if you're not virtuous, that's 100% on you.
See how that works?
Heads they win, tails you lose.
If they compel you to obedience, they win, because you obey them and think that you're virtuous.
If you question and break out, you'll make mistakes, and then, though they taught you heaven, all the hell is on you.
They taught you virtue, but all the immorality is on you.
So, I'm not trying to say that you're completely exempt from morality.
I'm not trying to say any of that. Of course, right?
I'm just giving an accurate...
Analysis or evaluation of the situation.
You grok, you follow. You with me?
You with me, brothers and sisters?
You made mistakes. How could you not?
You're put on a bike with no knowledge of how to ride.
And bingo, bango, bongo.
You crash, you fall, you fail.
Oh, but deep down I knew, and in my heart I knew, and in the abstract I knew that it was bad, it was wrong.
I get all of that. And I'm not saying that you have no responsibility in your life.
I'm just saying that you did wrong compared to what?
Compared to the mass indoctrination of children?
Compared to the financial slavery of debt and deferred liabilities?
Compared to the manipulation of the currency, the starting of wars?
You did what compared to, like, were you taught by moral or immoral people?
I mean, if I'm responsible, I mean, I am to some degree, of course, but if I'm responsible, let's say, for teaching my daughter algebra, and I don't allow her to go to anyone but me, and I try to teach her algebra, I teach it badly, and then she fails a test, So if the student fails a test, who is at fault?
If the student fails a test, who is at fault?
If a child fails a spelling test, who is at fault?
Well, society takes away the choice from the child, and then society Simply blames the child.
We understand how this works, right?
Society takes away the choice from the child.
You will study what we tell you to study, when and where and how and in what social circumstances and using which methodologies.
We decide and control all of that.
You will come to school. You will bow down.
You will obey. You'll be completely under our control.
We own you!
Oh, I'm sorry, but every mistake that you make is 100% on you.
We completely control your environment and your education, but any mistakes that you make...
Are 100% you. If you're bored, well, you must have a mental disorder.
If you're uninspired, well, you're just lazy.
If you fail to see the purpose of anything that you teach, and what was it, 98% of what we learn in school, we never use again or think again, right?
So if you accurately identify the uselessness of what is being taught, Then you are a bad, lazy, disruptive kid with oppositional defiant disorder and probably you're going to get drugged.
Because school is perfect.
And if school is perfect, anybody who's bored or doesn't like it clearly has mental health issues.
I mean, this is an old Soviet thing, right?
Soviet communism is perfect if you don't like it.
We've got to drug you, because, I mean, you've got to be crazy.
Have some patience with yourself.
Bye.
For all of the lies you were told that you had to believe.
No kid can look at their environment and say, I'm being lied to in order to be controlled.
That's the world I have.
And, you know, my parents may be colluding in that as well.
That's enough.
Don't ever get out of bed again scenario, right?
And we want to survive.
And when we're force-fed lives and they're our only food, we chew, swallow with a sickly smile on our face.
I not only was not taught any valuable virtues, but children don't learn in the abstract,
children learn in the empirical.
Thank you.
Which is why you teach them words about things that they can see before concepts in the mind, right?
There's no point teaching An 18-month-old kid about the concept of logical contradiction.
Symbolic logic. Logic trees.
What you do is you point at an apple and you say, apple!
Hey, apple! Right?
That's what you do. Children learn empirically.
And so, not only were you not taught virtues, but taught often the exact opposite, because obedience to authority is not a virtue.
It is the precondition for immorality.
So, who around you, like as far as teaching goes, who around you was somebody that you morally admired who was good and virtuous and brave and strong and nice and helpful and all of that, right? Who around you modeled virtue for you Not only were you taught wrong, everything was modeled wrong, too.
Don't you follow? So you were taught wrong, the wrong behavior was almost always modeled, not just in school, but of course in the media and all of that, movies and TV shows.
So you were taught wrong, everything was modeled wrong, Oh my gosh, and you got things wrong.
Of course you did. And the reason why you're taught that all moral transcriptions are 100% new, society owns your moral instruction 100%, controls and compels you to be morally instructed, and all the good you do is the result of excellent moral instruction, but all the bad you do is 100% on you.
It's a great gig. What a great gig.
What a great gig. To say that all the successes of my students are 100% on me, and all the failures of my students are 100% on them.
even when my hundred percent of my students are failing, as in general we do morally these days.
We follow, right?
Be relatively gentle with yourself.
Now, You're going to get angry at someone.
That's an inevitability, right?
You're going to get angry at someone.
Of course you are. Because most of us were treated badly.
Either in school, or at home, or in our peers, or among our peers, or perhaps in a religious institution.
So, we're going to get mad.
Now, of course, the people in charge who misinstruct us, would they rather we get mad at ourselves or at them?
I don't even need breakfast anymore.
I just have fly carcasses from the spider webs I keep working through.
It's like an Indiana Jones movie out here.
But no snakes, so I guess that's a plus.
So, who are you going to get mad at?
Lacerate yourself, get angry at yourself, get mad at yourself.
Yeah, I mean, nobody in power gets uncomfortable if you self-attack for the effects of their bad instructions.
Again, I'm not saying you have no moral conscience.
I'm not saying you have no moral responsibility or no moral conscience.
But if you're going to get mad at yourself for failing morality, surely you should also get angry at the people who failed to teach you morality and in fact taught you the opposite of virtue.
If that makes sense. I'm just asking for a fair distribution of moral responsibility.
That your lack of moral instruction or your counter moral instruction was not your fault.
You didn't invent society.
You didn't invent the, quote, educational system.
Your lack of moral instruction, your lack of people modeling actual virtue, that's not on you.
You didn't invent that. I didn't invent the school system.
I didn't invent the power structures of the world.
I was just born into these things and try to survive.
Oh, look how pretty. Lovely.
Yeah, I was just born into these things and try to survive and do the best I can with all the counter-instruction going on.
The rabbit being hunted does not rationally blame himself for his path.
All he's trying to do is dodge the jaws of the wolf.
And if you don't see the wolf, then the wolf becomes you.
Right? If you don't see...
It's a bit tangled in there.
Yeah, if you don't see that you're being hunted, then...
I mean, by immorality, by false moral visions, by counter-programming to virtue.
If you don't see that you're being hunted in a way, like metaphorically, then you hunt yourself.
I mean, something bad has happened, and if it's not other people, then it's you.
And again, you have moral responsibility.
I get all of that.
But when I look at myself prior to learning philosophy, I was just this, I don't know, traumatized mammalian blob or something like that.
Just seeking status and trying to be funny and trying to be good at sports and playing with friends.
It's just... The bald ape, really.
Nothing elevated, nothing high, nothing that I could judge by.
And a resentment towards morality, because it turns out, funny story, morality always just meant obeying those who weren't moral.
Funny story, that's what morality always turned out to be.
It's just obeying people who weren't moral.
Subjugation, slavery...
So, you know, weep, weep, weep, wail, gnash your teeth at how badly you were taught.
And of course, you know, take some ownership for your life.
But don't blame yourself 100% for moral flaws or faults when you were taught the opposite
of morality and everyone who was immoral was put in charge of you and modeled the exact
wrong behaviors.
It's a, you know, in the old movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, one of the brothers of
the bride teaches the guy who doesn't speak Greek, teaches him words that are supposed
hello, and how was your day, and so on, but they're pretty rude phrases and sayings, right?
They're pretty rude phrases and sayings.
And there's a scene in the kitchen when the well-meaning son-in-law, who's not Greek, speaks these Greek phrases taught to him by the bride's brothers, and the mother gets really angry, and does she strike out at the son-in-law?
Nope. She immediately snarls at the Greek brothers of the bride, who taught him these bad words.
So, he's a well-meaning guy, he's just been taught the wrong words.
And how would he know, right?
This is long before the internet could give you accurate translations.
So, when the son-in-law says something rude to her, she gets angry at the false teachers.
She doesn't get angry at the son-in-law, who's well-meaning.
I'm just saying, get angry at the false teachers.
And you say, ah, but they themselves were taught.
Yeah, I get that. But someone's got to start taking the heat.
The buck's got to stop somewhere, right?
All right, let's see here.
Ah, there's another good one.
Can it be a demand if it's never made?
Is that not just a wish?
And can I demand Elon Musk give me $10 million, but without a credible threat of harm to him or someone he cares for that is not much of a demand and would be ignored?
If it is credible, it's immoral and illegal unless I am in government.
Or I make a heck of a pitch.
One for the angel, so to speak.
Appealing to logic with the real humdinger of a case as to why he would make a lot of money from it and convince his accountants.
Or lastly, an appeal to emotion, so moving and convincing that he's so moved by it to open his heart and wallet.
Then my demands might be...
Answered in the affirmative.
Or do you think Stefok would be able to script such an appeal?
But my real point is, I think, even if it could be doing so under false pretense, it is a violation of UPB and a genuine SCSI behavior, aside from that fact.
So, if you make a really convincing appeal for someone to give you $10 million, right?
So fear of sales, fear of marketing, fear of convincing others.
It's a very common phenomenon.
It comes to some degree out of British culture.
It's a little bit less in American culture.
Certainly here in Canada, it's part of the culture.
Don't be pushy.
Don't be insistent.
Give people room to make their own decisions.
And, you know, in Glengarry, Glen Ross, sort of the famous Alec Baldwin scene, the one where he doesn't shoot someone...
Always be closing. Always be closing.
That your goal is to get the money.
Always be closing. And that, of course, is he's successful.
He makes almost a million dollars a year, has a very expensive watch, and so on.
The fact that he's a really tall and good-looking, dark-haired guy, apparently that's completely irrelevant, but it is.
I mean, if you look like Jack Lemmon, it's a little bit tougher to sell someone on success than if you look like Alec Baldwin.
So, yeah, don't be insistent.
Don't be pushy. Don't be stalky.
Don't be creepy. Don't be weird.
Don't be, you know, don't be insistent.
Right. Okay, so to touch on my previous point, if not being insistent is a good thing, why do they insist you come to school?
Why do they punish you if you don't do...
I mean, it's pretty insistent to take away a year of someone's life by holding them back a year if they don't.
The monkey jumps through the silly hoops of indoctrination, right?
So, I mean... Governments are pretty...
The law is pretty insistent.
Teachers are pretty insistent.
Parents are pretty insistent.
Oh, but you, you see, shouldn't be insistent.
You shouldn't be insistent, man.
Don't be too pushy. Well...
We're going to have to really restructure society from the ground up if being pushy and insistent is a bad thing.
We're just going to have to blank slate that whiteboard and start from scratch, right?
If just being insistent is a really bad thing, then we've got to get rid of law.
Law is insistent, right? I don't think we should get rid of law.
I think we should have better laws, but...
So, I mean, the idea that there's this belief, this culture, this idea that, oh man, don't be pushy, don't be insistent.
Okay, so you always have to, since there's almost no philosophy in the world, you must, must, must ask yourself, when there's a particularly widespread belief, it doesn't come from the truth, It doesn't come from virtue.
It doesn't come from integrity.
It doesn't come from morality.
It doesn't come from philosophy.
And it sure as hell doesn't come out of a concern for the well-being of children in society.
So when you have a particularly widespread belief, the sort of general methodology that's well worth pursuing, you have a particularly widespread belief, right?
Oh, don't be pushy.
Being pushy is rude.
Being pushy is rude.
Don't be rude. Keep people to space.
Don't be insistent. Back off!
Okay, well, it's not...
This belief doesn't come out of virtue, right?
You understand that, right? This belief doesn't come out of virtue, or truth, or morality.
So, you always have to ask yourself for the cue bono question.
Who does it benefit? Who does it serve?
So, who does it serve for you to not be pushy and insistent?
Does it serve you?
No. Must serve someone, otherwise it wouldn't be promulgated to such a degree.
Ah, we have some wind.
If I had hair, it would be rustling in the breeze.
The autumn leaves.
Drift past my window.
So yeah, who does it serve?
Who does it serve that you are not allowed to be pushy and insistent?
Of course, we all know the answer to that, right?
Who does it serve for you to not be pushy and insistent?
Well, it serves pushy and insistent people because you don't compete with them.
That's all. That's all it's about.
That's all it's about. I mean, if you've got Salesperson Bob and Salesperson Susan, And Bob wants to win the contract.
They're in direct competition with each other.
And Bob can convince Susan to not be pushy while Bob is being pushy.
Bob's more likely to get the contract.
So... But he can't say to Susan, well, I want you to not be pushy so I can get the contract.
Oh, no. That's no good.
That's too obvious. And plus, it will then reaffirm how important it is to be, quote, pushy.
Oh, no, no, no. What he does is he says to Sally...
Or he tries to create a general social belief, idea, or argument that being pushy is bad, and that way, when he's pushy, he wins.
You know, the two guys who are in competition for a woman, and if she is a woman who responds to a lot of attention, then the guys who will give women a lot of attention will definitely say to the guys, Who are uncertain. Oh yeah, don't be pushing, man.
Give her room, give her space, blah, blah, blah.
So that they can move in.
It's just a... It's an economic strategy.
It's a political strategy. It's a dating and mating strategy to just convince you.
To just convince you. You know, it's kind of funny because for women, a lot of times, one of the things they're looking for Is a man who doesn't believe self-defeating nonsense.
Because for that man to win in the great competition for resources in the world, he's going to have to be...
That means it's going to have to be kind of pushy.
It's going to have to be kind of pushy.
I mean, when I was starting this show, man, I was pretty pushy.
I'm happy that I was.
I'm proud of that. Because I obviously wanted to do good in the world, still want to do good in the world, and if I don't get the show out there, then it's going to be pretty tough to do good in the world.
So, yeah, I spent 80% of my time just posting places and inviting people and promoting it and figuring out which ads to buy and all that kind of stuff.
Yes, yes, yes. That is what I did.
You know, I ask for donations and I'm trying to model.
I mean, I'm asking for what I want.
What's wrong with asking for what you want?
I'm not forcing anyone, not compelling anyone, not bribing anyone, not threatening anyone.
I'm just asking for what I want.
Yeah, I like it when you donate.
It's important to me that you donate.
It's important for the business that there are donations.
So, yeah, I'm going to ask for what I want.
You can say no. You know, frankly, most of you do.
That's on you, not me, because I'm pretty clear about what I want.
So yeah, ask for what you want.
And I don't, I mean, other than I think I took 18 months, I didn't ask for donations during the pandemic because I knew it was tough for people.
I didn't want you to feel bad and all of that through things that weren't your fault.
But yeah, ask for what you want.
Now, people who have been sort of kind of shattered and had all their boundaries violated to the point where they can't say no, will definitely try to establish their own boundaries by controlling your behavior.
By controlling your behavior.
So, if there was some word that set me on fire...
I would be pretty insistent that people around me not speak that word.
Because I couldn't control whether the word set me on fire, some fireball spell or something.
I couldn't control whether the word set me on fire, so I'd have to control the language of people around me.
So people who can't say no will tell people who ask stuff that they're being pushy.
And it's like, no, no, no, it's not.
The fact that you can't say no is no reason why I shouldn't ask for things.
Because then your dysfunction...
And again, I have sympathy for it.
I understand where it comes from. So I'm not blaming everyone.
I'm just saying... But your dysfunction means that I can't...
I don't get free speech because you can't handle words.
I don't get free speech because you can't handle words?
What does that mean? I can't have a tablet because you dropped yours.
I can't have a phone because you left yours in the rain.
I... I can't get married because you're lonely.
I can't have kids because you can't find someone to have kids with.
I can't get a job because you can't get a job.
I mean, this is really tying us all together and throwing us down a cliff is a pretty brutal
way of setting us all against each other, right?
So yeah, people who can't say no will try and control your ask.
And the reason they can't say no is that...
And it's really, really important.
Part of peaceful parenting is giving your kids full space and scope to say no and have it stick.
And to have no...
I mean, you want to model asking for what you want, but if the kid says no, you want to model that it's fine that...
It's fine that they don't...
It's fine that they ask.
It's fine that you push back.
It's fine for you to have a little tussle about it and to your friends afterwards.
Parents who completely smash any sort of boundaries or integrity or independence from their kids will raise kids who can't say no, and then because they can't say no, rather than getting mad at their parents, they will get mad at people who ask them because it reveals the broken boundaries and Jellyfish borderlessness of their personalities.
And I know that sounds harsh, and I really do.
I have sympathy with that.
I really do. But indulging the effects of abuse is just covering up for the abusers, right?
Indulging the effects of abuse is just covering up the crimes of the abusers.
It's like someone stealing from the bank and you take out your personal savings to put the money back.
You know, just covering up the theft, right?
Losing your resources to cover up theft does not seem to be a particularly moral approach to the world, to life, to society as a whole.
So... Ask.
Ask for what you want and let people say no.
And you can ask more than once.
That's fine. But the only reason you're taught to not ask for what you want is so that other people can slide in and get what they want at your expense.
Oh, don't ask that girl out.
You know, she's really raw from her last breakup or whatever, right?
Well, maybe she is. And you can judge that for yourself.
But a lot of times the people who are like, don't ask that girl out, are doing so because they want to ask the girl out.
Be polite means don't compete, right?
Be polite. Be overly solicitous and considerate of other people's feelings.
I want to get in there and get what I want at your expense, so don't compete with me.
Because, I mean, there's tons of people in the world who are incredibly insistent, to the point of aggression or violence even.
Of course, I always oppose violence, except in an extremity of self-defense.
But, yeah, they're incredibly insistent, aggressive, and violent, often in their approaches.
And, yeah, they'll tell you to be nice so that you don't get in the way.
Nothing more, nothing less.
It's just a strategy. It's not a virtue.
I mean, almost everything that you're taught is good.
It's just a strategy to win.
It's a manipulation for victory.
It's not a call to universal virtues.
That having been said, freedomain.com slash donate.
If you could help out the show, I'd really, really super appreciate it.
I hope that you are enjoying particularly the northern climates.
I hope that you are really enjoying this beautiful fall weather and getting out there for walks, communing with nature.
I mean, my gosh, look at this.
I mean, you really can't do much better than this.
The stuff man makes is cool.
The stuff nature makes is eternal and beautiful.
So I hope you're enjoying it. Freedomman.com slash donate.
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