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Oct. 12, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:54
LOCALS QUESTIONS ANSWERED - 5 OCT 2023!
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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain. Hope you're doing well.
These are some great questions I've got from listeners at freedomain.locals.com.
It's a great community. I hope you will join it and chat philosophy with us.
First question, what do you think it means to believe in God?
I'm going to expand this question.
I know it sounds a bit odd. I'm going to expand this question to what does it mean to believe in an ideal?
God is an ideal.
Jesus is an ideal. Jesus is perfect.
We are not. What does it mean to believe in an ideal?
So people basically have ideals for three purposes.
Or they use ideals in three different kinds of ways.
So let's take a silly example of somebody with a great physique, you know, like Brad Pitt and Fight Club, or somebody with a really great physique.
So either you look at that and you feel despair, in other words, the ideal is a way of keeping yourself small, or you look at it as a form of inspiration, right?
You look at it as, ah, I can achieve that, I can get, maybe I don't achieve that exactly, but I get close to it, and so on.
And so it either keeps you small or it elevates you.
Now, there is another way that ideals are used, which is to punish others or to humiliate others or to dominate others.
This is sort of the woke purity test and the virtue signaling, I'm better than you, I'm more woke than you, I'm more moral than you, and so on, right?
So... That is another way that people do it.
In the realm of God, people either say, like, I'm a humble nothing, I'll never achieve any kind of Godhood, and they use it to kind of crush themselves or their potential.
Or, of course, what also happens is that people use it to aspire to virtue, to holiness, to
goodness, and so on. Or, they use these ideals to humiliate and control others. So, when
you say what it means to believe in God, that's to say that there's one outcome of believing
in God, and also that people's claims that they believe in God are true.
Like, I've really been hammering this point.
There's no omniscient third eye that allows you to scan people And know the truth.
They always could be lying.
And because they always could be lying, self-protestations without empirical evidence are...
Unless the person is really trusted in your life, self-protestations without empirical evidence are not particularly compelling or important or anything like that.
Oh, I wanted to mention something too.
I mentioned the other day of the show that I did not...
Ask for donations during the pandemic.
Someone found an exception. Very important.
I appreciate that. You guys keep me honest, obviously, if I've misremembered something.
And I was unclear.
I was unclear. It was on me.
What I meant was that I did not have dedicated donation request shows.
I did occasionally ask for donations over the course of a show, but I didn't have dedicated request shows over the course of the pandemic.
So, again, I appreciate people finding that.
Always work to keep me as accurate as possible, and I appreciate that.
All right. The past several months, writes someone every night, I have the fear of intrusion.
Every single night before I sleep, it passes from my mind that I might be robbed in my home while sleeping.
Context, I live in a very safe area in Australia.
It is in suburbia, just near the end of the city.
People are either well off with some nice mansions and the regular houses are just above median price.
I live on the low-end housing within the suburb.
There are zero homeless people around and I have not heard from anyone that I know that they have been robbed.
I'm in my early 30s and I have two kids.
Never have been robbed.
Financially stable.
So, intrusion, right?
Intrusion is something that men in particular are programmed to scan for.
Are there dangerous elements in the environment?
Is there a physical danger?
Is there risk? And so on.
So we patrol the borders and scan the horizons.
So one of two things is happening.
Either there is an environmental threat in your area that you are concerned about.
Or there's an intrusion in your personal life that you're not consciously aware of, like somebody's exploiting you or somebody is angling to exploit you or getting ready to exploit you or harm your interests.
It could be happening at work, but in general, the more unacceptable it is for you to believe something, the more analogous your concerns will get, the more metaphorical your concerns will get.
I mean, If a rhinoceros is charging at you, you will have fears of a rhinoceros charging at you because there's nothing that is unacceptable to you about being afraid of a rhinoceros charging at you.
If, let's say, you have a mother or a father or some other family member or trusted friend who's actually maneuvering against you and that's unacceptable to you, your brain will still try to warn you, but your brain will be aware of The repression.
The brain will be aware of, this is unacceptable.
And once your brain knows that something is unacceptable, it will try and instruct you through analogy.
So if somebody is harming your interests, or going to harm your interests, or angling to harm your interests, then your brain will either give you that direct information, but if the information your brain is giving you is unacceptable to you, Then it will tend to become more metaphorical or analogous in the hope that the unease will provoke you to lower your defenses and accept the unacceptable.
So again, I can't give you any more detail based upon what you've said, but that's my thoughts and my experience.
Hi, Steph. Recently, I visited some family with my wife and almost two-year-old son.
And at some point, without provocation, his cousin...
Who is about my son's age, lightly hit him in the head with his palm.
Having raised my son peacefully, this was his first time experiencing violence, so he just stared at me, shocked, not knowing how to react.
After a minute, he started crying, and we tried not to exaggerate and make peace between them.
And we tried not to exaggerate.
Oh, and you tried not to exaggerate the upset and then make peace between the kids?
After this visit, I felt puzzled and incompetent as a father.
How I and my son should properly respond to this type of event and how my son should react when he is bullied or attacked by some other kids.
This is excluding the obvious violent self-defense.
This also raised up memories from when I was bullied in middle and high school and I was equally unprepared to handle the situation and just took the abuse and We had similar situations at the playgrounds, but unlike with family and public schooling, there was an easy way out.
I live in an Eastern European country where public schooling is mandatory and homeschooling almost impossible, so the topic of handling bullies-slash-violent adults weighs heavily on my mind.
Just recently there was a news from my town with a preschooler who violently beat up some classmates and the modern-type school didn't do much about it.
I was also left wondering how seemingly normal and well-off children become violent, especially in the case of my nephew, that is, from my knowledge, also raised peacefully.
The only problem I see is his household, in that the father is blue-collar and leaves for extended periods of time as he works in a different country.
Thanks. Yes, very interesting, very interesting question.
Right, so...
If your son isn't going to be a hunter, do you never have to tell him that animals can be dangerous?
Right? Of course you do.
So with regards to your two-year-old, I don't, I mean, I'm sure his language skills are good.
Your language skills are excellent. So I'm sure his language skills are good.
So do you teach him?
Have you taught him that some people use aggression or violence to get their way?
I mean, I assume that you've talked to him to some degree or helped him to understand or prepared him.
Other kids might bonk you.
Other kids may bonk you.
They may have aggressive parents.
So other kids may bonk you.
Because I think it's the shock of being unprepared for the inevitable.
Like, it's inevitable that some kid is going to aggress against him.
It's just going to happen.
It's the way of the world.
It's the way of life. We live in a coercively parented world.
So, are you preparing him for these things, right?
So there's one of two options.
Either A, he's too young to understand that other children can be aggressive, in which case you really have to be very close and manage other children.
Like you have to be with him and playing with the other child at all times if he's too young.
In the same way that you don't leave a, you know, crawling one-year-old unattended around the house because they can do dangerous things.
You always have to be attentive.
So if he's too young to understand that other children can be aggressive, then you just have to give up your socializing and you just have to, wherever your son is, that's who you play with and that's what you deal with.
If he is old enough to understand, then you have to have a strategy so that he's not baffled and confused when the inevitable happens.
Because I think you're right to feel bad as a parent.
And I'm sorry, I don't mean to say like really bad.
But you haven't prepared him for something that is inevitable.
And therefore, he's shocked and surprised and doesn't know how to react.
And that's going to draw more bullying.
So what do you do?
You say, other kids can be aggressive.
Other kids can bop you, they can hit you, they can push you, they can grab things from you.
Other kids can be aggressive and they can be dangerous a little bit.
Don't oversell it because it's not like you've got kids with flamethrowers all around.
And you say, so then what do you do when a child is aggressive?
What do you do? Well, I mean, you're allowed to hit back.
If some kid hits you, you're allowed to hit back.
Now, in general, that's not the ideal, but it's certainly fine with me.
Like, if some kid hits you and you hit him back, and that kid goes running to his mom, I will always take your side.
Like, just know that.
Like, we're blood. We're family.
I trust you and I love you.
And if you tell me the other kid hit first, I'm going to believe you.
Obviously, don't lie about these things.
I know you won't, but... So if another kid hits you and you hit the kid back, I don't care who's telling me, the teacher, I don't care who, I'm taking your side.
So just know you can hit the other kid back, but in general, it's better to move away from that situation because if you have a kid who's violent, they have way more experience with violence than you do, and you try not to get involved in competitions with people much more skilled than you, especially when the stakes are very high.
I mean, the stakes of violence can be quite high.
Again, I'm not saying you'd put it to him in this way, but this is a general idea or argument, right?
So, you need to prepare him for these things, right?
You need to prepare him for these things.
Like, you know, if you're going to take your kid into a goat enclosure...
You have to tell him, you know, if you pull the horns of the goats, the goats will probably knock you over and be gentle and keep your wits about you.
The goats are fun, but they can be a little aggressive, and that can be part of the fun, but just be aware.
You don't have to drop your kid in there and let him learn by experience, right?
And that's not good.
In the same way you need to teach your children about the dangers around the home and so on, you need to teach your children about the dangers of other people because they're very real dangers and they can escalate.
So you can say, listen, if it's an extremity, you're cornered or whatever, you can hit the kid back, you can push him and run.
And I will take your side.
However, it's better as a whole to move away, come talk to me, and then I'll go and talk with the kid and leave it with me to handle, right?
So the best thing to do when you're aggressed against, in my opinion, the best thing to do when you're aggressed against as a kid, move away, get the father, get the mother.
And let them deal with the situation.
Now, if it's at school, that's a whole different matter, right?
So, I don't really know what to say about that other than you have to try and avoid bullies as much as possible.
You know, there is this general fantasy that, you know, like I attack the bully back and I beat him up and everything's great.
I mean, maybe that happens.
You hear this anecdotally, but...
Maybe you'll win the bully's respect and he won't.
But also, maybe he's got bigger brothers who will attack you.
Maybe he'll plot. Maybe he'll do something on social media to try and destroy your reputation.
There could be any number of things that can happen.
So, in my experience, avoiding the bullies is really important.
But yeah, don't try and reason with them.
Just avoid them as much as possible.
But be aware that this is going to happen.
And give him strategies. I mean, you know.
You know that kids can hit other kids.
So it's on you to prepare your child for that situation so your child knows what to do.
Because you're setting your child up for failure and being bullied.
If he gets hit, he's totally unprepared, has no experience, no knowledge of what to do, and he's just shocked.
And then the bully is like, oh, this is a kid who doesn't know what to do and is kind of undefended.
So, yeah, you have to let your kids know about this kind of stuff, right?
What do you think of the data that shows that parenting seems to have minimal long-term impact on values transfer?
Is it just parents doing a very poor job with their children, leading to a backfire effect of rebellion, or values not taking?
Or is there something to sociologists' conclusions that the median level of parenting, i.e.
not abuse, doesn't affect behavior as much as we think?
Yeah, I mean, the data is pretty clear that parental values don't particularly transfer to kids.
In other words, culture, education, and peers have a greater effect than parents on a transfer of values.
I mean, if you put your children in daycare, you put your children in school for six hours a day, and then they have an hour or two of homework, right?
So if your kids have a full-time job receiving values from others...
See, Education used to be about knowledge and skills.
Like when I was a kid, education was about knowledge and skills.
And the teachers relied on the parents and the church to transfer moral values.
And then the teachers would enforce the moral values.
But there was no programming of moral values on the part of the teachers when I was growing up.
I mean, there'd be a little bit like share be nice and don't hit and all that stuff that we would in general agree with.
You know the old thing, you come into the school, you come into the class with Gallen, did you bring enough for everyone else?
Like all this nonsense. Only from the female teachers.
Only in forever from the female teachers did you get that.
So now, education is not like it was when you were a kid.
Like if you're a parent, education is not like it was when you were a kid.
Education now is relentless value indoctrination.
And so when you've got teachers...
Grinding values and, quote, morals into your children's heads for eight hours a day, and you're just working and busy and, you know, giving them some vague moral statements, who's going to win?
The teachers, the culture, the media, the peers, who are all programmed by the same people.
So, yeah, education is not education anymore in the way that I would understand it when I was growing up.
When I was growing up, you were taught, you know, grammar, history.
I mean, I was taught morals in the church and so on.
But school was about reading, writing, and arithmetic.
It's not that way anymore.
It is programming children in a particular ideology.
We all know what it is, so it's going to have a big effect.
If you're working, I mean, how do you get kids to accept your values?
You have to live them first yourself.
You have to live your values first yourself.
Children will always rebel against values that are preached, not practiced.
Because, I mean, it's a realistic thing, right?
So, if you're fat, then your kids will rebel against your dieting advice.
If you're out of shape, your kids will rebel against your exercise advice.
And if you say that you're a good person and you enjoy being a parent and you love your children, but then you go to work for 10 hours a day and dump your children with other people, those other people We'll raise your children and we'll program your children with their own values.
And so your children will rebel against your protestations of virtue if you're not loving them.
So, yeah, you're handing them over to other people to raise and those other people are going to raise them as, you know, little mini-me's of the revolution, right?
So, let's see here.
What is willpower? Why is it some people are able to do things they don't like, such as exercising or sticking with something unpleasant and others are not?
Yeah, I try to stay away from things that involve excessive willpower because it's just kind of exhausting.
It doesn't last. You know, willpower is like holding a weight above your head.
Like you can do it for so long and then you can't, right?
Then it becomes unproductive.
I try and wait. I mean, for me, if I have a particular issue or problem, I'll try and get to the root of it and then understand it and deal with it.
And then I don't need the willpower.
I noticed that I was overeating in the evening and I sort of went back, okay, well in the evening my mom was home, it was more stressful, so it's just a leftover habit.
I haven't eaten at all today and I usually don't eat, if I'm just sort of following my body, I don't usually eat until sort of mid-afternoon, but I can overeat at night.
And I also have this belief because, you know, a couple of times I've woken up hungry and then you're like, oh man, I've got to go get something to eat because I can't get back to sleep and you want to avoid that.
Also because my exercise levels vary widely, my food requirements also vary widely.
So, you know, just little things, try and figure out what's going on, figure out the source and then you don't need willpower.
But willpower is an utterly unsustainable, like white knuckling things is an utterly unsustainable model in life.
You might need it at times, like you've got something you have to do, just get it over with, get it done with and so on.
So, there will be times where willpower is important, but sustained willpower is not a thing.
It's not a thing. So, I think one of the big things is just cost-benefit, just cost-benefit analysis.
If I get this thing done now, I am then free and clear for, you know, the old thing that you always had as a kid.
You get your homework. You come home Friday and you're like, well, if I get my homework done Friday afternoon, I've got the whole weekend without having to worry about it.
But you resent the homework.
You don't like the homework.
It's boring. It's pointless. It's useless.
And so what do you do? You postpone it.
You put it off and all of that, right?
So if you...
If you focus on the long-term gain then It's a lot easier to do the short-term difficulties.
If you ignore the long-term gain, then you're just being told what to do.
And being told what to do is having somebody else substitute their willpower or their aggression for your choice and perspective.
So, if you feel free, everything you choose is your own.
If you're bullied, then everything you do is controlled by someone else.
So, of course, remember that you're an adult and you're not being bullied.
and you have your choice in what to do.
Alright.
In light of your recent call-in show, I'm sorry I called you evil,
how does it feel when listeners project their issues with their fathers onto you,
whether for good or ill?
How do you feel if a listener feels something akin to a familial bond with you?
That you embody the virtuous qualities of a wise, empathetic, and engaged father figure
that her own father did not manifest?
Perhaps this is merely the mark of a parasocial dynamic.
But in my mind, at least, you have forced your own path through the wreckage of generational abuse and trauma and transcended to the level of peaceful parent philosopher archetype.
You've become the best example of the father I wish I had.
Thank you for being you and for sharing your gifts with the world.
I appreciate that. That's very kind and moving me.
It's very moving to me. And I thank you for the kind words.
And of course, if I've done good that way, beautiful.
You know, I went through a whole series of father figures when I was a kid.
You know, as a kid you just kind of latch on to these things with both great desire and also great fear.
So if I've been helpful in that to people as a whole, I really, really appreciate that.
And that certainly is, you know, provide what you were denied.
There just weren't really father figures around when I was a kid.
You'd try and latch on to people, but they'd always end up really, really disappointing.
I mean, I mentioned I did some tech work at some guy's house.
He was older, kind of like a semi-father figure.
And I admired his house.
He had a beautiful house. He says, yes, yes, the Lord has been good to me.
Yeah, that was a little rough to hear, right?
The Lord's been good to you, but I grew up where I grew up.
So the Lord was, what, just mean to me?
It's good to you, but mean...
Like, I don't know. So, I mean, I get that he was being humble and all of that, but, you know, people say stuff, and I don't...
I really don't know if they understand how they land for other people, because there is kind of a vainglorious...
It's faux humble, right?
It's faux humble, because it's like, well, the Lord is going to be good to me.
It's like, well, clearly the Lord likes me a lot, and obviously not you by implication or whatever, right?
So... I don't take...
I don't take it personally because it's nothing to do with me.
Now, how do you end up not taking things personally?
And I've been mentioning this in calling shows over the years.
So how do you not take things personally?
Well, you recognize such a childhood wasn't about you.
My mother and my father's interactions with me when I was a child had nothing to do with me.
I mean, it's the same thing with the media or the lies about me and so on.
It's nothing to do with me. It's to do with maybe power or a lust for control or something like that.
But it's nothing to do with me.
I will go to my grave knowing deep in my heart that I'm a nice person who wants the best for the world and the best for people.
I'm really a nice person and there's nothing sinister about me.
There's nothing malevolent or anything like that.
I mean, I can be a bit harsh at times, but if it's any consolation, I'm harsh with myself as well when needed.
So, I mean, I'm just a very nice person.
And so when people react against me as if I'm some really dangerous, nasty, evil person,
it's nothing to do with me.
And I know that as a kid, my mom wasn't hitting me.
She wasn't yelling at me.
It had nothing to do with me.
She had her own disappointments and losses in life, and she was...
A single mother, which is a desperately difficult and stressful situation.
And I mean, yes, she'd chosen that and she chose the wrong guys and she refused to submit to reason and logic and morality and evidence.
I get all of that. And she spiraled off into mysticism rather than ground herself in reality.
But she, of course, also was, I'm sure, brutally assaulted in the most horrible ways imaginable by the Russian soldiers that invaded Germany from the East.
Basically, they went for everyone 8 to 80.
And so, I mean, I don't know.
I don't know, obviously, how I would have responded over the course of my life in that kind of situation.
Can you be violated to the point where you can never put yourself back together again?
I think so. And maybe that happened, and I'll never know for sure.
But, yeah, it's not about me.
It was not about me. Like, when I was punished in boarding school, when I came to boarding school, it wasn't about me.
It wasn't like somebody evaluated me.
It was just, oh, you're disobeying, and this is the punishment, and there's something kind of creepy about all of that stuff as well, which I think we're all fairly aware of.
But it's not about me.
Like, people who are mad at me, it's not about me.
And so if I understand and sort of have deeply accepted that the suffering that I experienced as a child had nothing to do with any moral judgments of me or any objective evaluation of me or anything like that, you know, like if I didn't do well in school in particular, as I did not at times, I just did the bare minimum to get through because I had no respect for the teachers and no respect for the subject matter.
So you just do the bare minimum and instead of working on homework, I worked on learning how to program computers, which ended up being a career for me for quite some time and my technical knowledge has been very important in setting this show up as a whole.
So, when I didn't do well in school or didn't get great marks, it wasn't like people were just sort of objectively judging my abilities as a scholar, I mean, or my desire to pursue knowledge.
It's like, I don't know, this is the curriculum, you're not checking these boxes, so we're going to mark you down.
I mean, they're just like train tracks.
Trains don't choose where to go, they just follow the tracks.
It's not a choice. If the train goes to the right, it's not a free-will thing, it's just following its tracks.
And people without self-knowledge will act out, and teachers with the curricula will just see if you check the boxes.
It's not any fundamental evaluation of you as a human being or anything like that.
I mean, there's nothing like that going on when you're young.
I'm sorry for me to laugh, but there's nothing about that.
Going on when you're young.
People are just acting out with a lack of self-knowledge.
They're checking off the boxes in educational requirements.
But, I mean, I love learning.
I love knowledge. And so, I mean, a lot of my career has both the pursuit of and the creation of knowledge and arguments.
So the idea that I was judged for my desire for knowledge or my capacities as a scholar when I was younger, nope, just a bunch of checkboxes.
It had nothing to do with me. They weren't judging me.
They just had to Check boxes and that's it.
So none of that stuff was personal to me.
Very few people have the ability to actually evaluate you as a person because they have to get through to reality in order to evaluate you as a person.
To get through to reality, what they have to do is overcome their own trauma, prejudice, bias and avoidance.
So that's tough for people to do and very few people make it.
Have you ever witnessed someone who had done evil become humble, make restitution, and truly turn their life around and embrace virtue?
No. I never have seen that.
I never have seen that.
There are people who find God.
There are people who go to AA or Narcotics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous or whatever.
And they do stitch together some Franken life that can shamble around and get things done.
And clearly it's better for them to be in those situations or those programs rather than it is to be alcoholics or drug addicts or gambling addicts or sex addicts or whatever.
So I have seen people pull the pieces of their life back together and stitch them together into a Franken life.
I mean, I call it a Franken life because it's kind of back together but it's not organic and it's not whole and it is kind of lurchy and all of that.
But if they have done wrong that they cannot make restitution for, if they've done wrong that they cannot make restitution for, all they get is a Franken life afterwards.
I mean, they can put themselves back together but they can't be joyful, they can't be virtuous.
Love is very tough.
I mean, I'm sure you've known people who've overcome addictions, addictions where they've
done great harm to others.
They just get trapped in this whole addictive lifestyle, in this enabling, disenabling lifestyle,
and they end up coaching other addicts.
And yeah, again, it's better.
It's better than still being an addict, for sure.
But I've not seen somebody who's done sort of deep immoralities, particularly to children.
I mean, I've never been a perfect person, but I've never done bad things to children.
I mean, I was really...
I liked the daycare, and I did great things with the kids in daycare when I was a daycare assistant there.
So... No, I've not seen it.
And it's kind of like, you know, people who quit smoking in their 50s, yeah, it's better that they quit smoking.
But, you know, the damage is done to a significant degree, and they're probably never going to be marathon runners.
But it's better that they quit. Hey Steph, I hope you're doing well.
In a previous live stream you mentioned about 60-70% of call and requests are young guys who can't get their life together.
I would love it if you could give me some general advice in regards to that because I'm one of them.
I'm 28 years old, I have an okay job, no girlfriend, no friends, lots of savings.
I live with my parents and I hate it all.
It's unbelievably enraging at times.
I see no path forward, yet I do next to nothing to find one, as well with the exception of my work with my therapist.
The work I do with my therapist helps a lot.
I do believe in time I'll get my life sorted out with her.
With her. However, there's got to be something more I can do.
I feel like I'm going insane.
Thanks in advance. Yeah.
I mean, I sympathize.
I really do. And it's almost like the mirror image.
I took on way too much responsibility kind of too early, you know, like 15 paying my own bills and working three jobs and bringing in roommates to pay the rent and so on.
So I sort of took that stuff on too early.
But you're 28 years old and you're still at home.
You know, maybe home life is too comfortable.
Maybe you get your sexual gratification from the internet and that drains you of will and desire to go out and get an actual life, human, female.
So there could be any number of things, but you need to change your habits.
Whatever you're doing that makes it okay to be where you are, stop doing it.
Stop doing it.
So if you're getting a sexual satisfaction from the internet, then stop doing that so that you will...
Get your drive to go out and get a girlfriend.
If you are getting artificial income boosting from living with your parents, then stop doing that.
Go and move out and get your own place.
So you've got things that make things feel okay in the moment, but they're undermining and wrecking your life in the long run.
So your parents' subsidies.
Why is it that you lack ambition to get a better job?
It's because your parents are paying most of your bills.
Why are your parents keeping you at home?
I mean, they should have kicked you out like, you know, years ago, right?
Why are they keeping you home?
It could be because your parents often will cling to children because the parents aren't getting along and they fear the empty nest.
There's a lot of sort of gray divorces, right?
So they fear the empty nest. So they keep their kids at home so that they have someone to interact with other than their spouse.
So you're subsidizing your parents' marriage as well.
Everything that you take that feels free costs you your soul in the long run.
Everything you take that feels free costs you your soul in the long run.
Your parents' money, whatever sexual gratification you're getting, all of this is going to cost you enormously in the long run.
And, of course, the devil gives you instant gratification and gratitude.
It suppresses your worry about your life as a whole, and then you get these occasional panics, which are overwhelming, and so it feels overwhelming, and so you just avoid that panic, and then things just get worse and worse and worse over time.
So, if you don't mind me being blunt, no fap, move the fuck out.
See, let's say you move out and it's kind of tough for you to make it, you know, you have access to your parents' car and a nice house and it's all very comfortable and they pay your internet or they pay your cell phone bills or whatever they're doing.
I'm sure you chip in and all of that.
So you move out and maybe you're short of money, right?
So then if you're short of money, you get hustled.
You start working harder, right?
So, you're drugging yourself with something, or more than one thing, so, you know, you've got to stop drugging yourself, and if your parents really cared about you, they would have confronted these issues and given you better advice, and maybe kicked your ass to the curb years ago, but they're not doing that, which means that they're part of the sabotage that is occurring in your life.
What is the truth about polygamy?
What happens when you have six wives and they make you choose dinner?
Oh, clearly you starve to death or you end up with cannibalizing the first wife who dies.
All right. Which is more dangerous, negligence or intent?
Is this question worth asking?
Are they not equally malicious?
Context. Are medical regulators apparent lack of due diligence or abundant corruption?
The most dangerous thing is false virtue.
Like before, the most dangerous thing in the world is false virtue.
A virtue that aims to look good and feel good rather than to do good.
That is the great danger.
Imagine you are scouting out locations to construct a physical place for hosting discussions on philosophy, debates, and or dispute resolution, either as a single multi-purpose space or as different spaces for each activity.
What design features do you include and which style elements do you select?
Yeah, I mean, I did Theatre in the Round many years ago.
And I played Cornwall in King Lear, the guy who gouges the other guy he's at.
It was one of the few evil characters I ever played.
And we did Theatre in the Round.
Everyone sat all around. It was great.
So I like the Round, as far as debates and all that goes.
I don't like the elevated stage with people in the audience, so I think Theatre in the Round is great.
I love the sort of modern, well-lit, grey-shaded stuff with lights under the rims and so on.
I think that's really, really...
Cool. And I think that either having microphones overhead or wireless mics so that people can easily hear others, I think would be great as well.
All right. I'm a full-time engineer.
My wife homeschools the kids.
I desperately want to leave the nine-to-five.
I feel anxious about losing my loan source of income, and I hate the feeling of being controlled that comes with a regular job.
What is a good small first step towards entrepreneurship?
Well, Frankly, it's probably the wrong time.
I mean, you've got little kids at home.
Why didn't you start a business before you decided to become a parent?
When you become a parent, you've got to spend time with your kids.
So either you quit your job and you do the entrepreneurial thing, which means your mind is going to be consumed by your business.
I know this for sure. Your mind is going to be consumed by your business.
Or you keep your job and you try and do a side hustle, in which case you're going to be much less available to your kids.
So why have you put yourself in a situation where you're unhappy with what is, but changing it is negative to your kids?
That's a really important question.
Have you been in situations where you've been trapped before?
Have you seen people who've been trapped before?
Have you seen people who've been helpless before?
Were your parents helpless? Were they trapped?
Were they in excessive debt?
Because you're in a situation now where to become an entrepreneur is very risky for your family and it's almost certainly going to be negative for your children.
To be an entrepreneur is to be everything.
Right now, you can just do the engineering, but you become an entrepreneur, you've got to be sales, marketing, accounting, engineering, office manager, you've got to order office supplies, whatever it is you're going to do.
You've got to do it all, and that's going to take time away from your kids.
So... It may be one of these situations where at least until your kids are older, I don't know what age because I don't know what's happening with your kids or how advanced they are, but it's probably going to be something that you're going to have to wait until you're older in order to pursue this.
Because right now, you're going to end up working the typical 12 to 14 hour days that entrepreneurs do and that's unfair to your kids.
Like you have to do what's best for your kids.
And if this gives you the most time with your children, Okay.
If this gives you the most time with your children, that's what they need.
That's what they deserve. That's what they have to have.
That's not an option.
That's not a negotiable item.
Your children need as much time with you as they can possibly get.
And it may be entirely the wrong time to do some entrepreneur stuff.
So then what you need to do is figure out in your life, so you don't reproduce it with your children, what you do need is figure out in your life how you ended up cornering yourself in this kind of way to the point where your wife doesn't have an income, which is fine, obviously.
Your wife doesn't have an income, you're the sole provider, and you're unhappy with your work.
This did not come about by accident.
So you need to figure out How you end up trapped and cornered in these kinds of situations so that you don't reproduce it in the future and also you don't reproduce that mindset in your kids, call in at freedomain.com.
I'd be happy to talk you through it.
That would be fine.
What advice do you have for someone who frequently replays previous conversations in their imagination?
I answered this recently, so I'll just make this brief.
I think this stems from my desire to find the right thing to say that would have gotten me what I wanted, which is in essence a desire to control people.
And yet my thoughts still drift back to those moments.
What also scares me is that often they play out where the situation escalates to a violent confrontation where I enthusiastically use disproportionate force to simply dominate the aggressor.
And it sort of comes back to reality of like, who the hell was that monster?
That's not me. That's more like my father.
A strategy I've tried to employ is saying, hi dad slash mom, when I hear my parents in my own voice, which usually kills the stream of thought.
Like I unmask the demon inside and they retreat.
But it feels like I'm treating the symptom and not the problem.
How do I stop this for good? Well, stop blaming yourself.
When you're in a situation where people don't listen to reason, you can't win.
You can't win. When you're in a situation where people are willing to escalate and use abuse to get their way, you can't win.
Now, the way that you blame yourself is you say, well, if I'd found this magic key to unlock their reasonable side or to get what I want in the face of people who are willing to be violent, abusive, and aggressive, if I just found that magic key, so you replay hoping to find that magic key, I'm here to tell you, Ben, my friend, my brother and sister, this key does not exist.
There's no key. There's no magic spell.
So what is magic? Magic is you speak words and magical things happen in the world, like supernatural things happen in the world.
And there are Dungeons and Dragons spells and a whole person or charm monster where you say words and you manage the other person.
These words don't exist.
There was nothing I could ever say That would have made my mother reasonable.
There's nothing I ever could have said that would make my father reasonable.
It's not a thing. There's no magic words.
There's no magic spells. There's no philosophy.
There's no mindset. There's no approach.
So you think, oh, I've got to get through this door.
And you keep, I should have tried this key.
I should have tried that key. I should have jiggled the handle.
I should have, like, whatever it is.
I should have maybe take the hinges off.
I've got to get through this door.
And it's like, there's not a door.
It's a blank wall.
There's no key. There's no door.
There's no hinges. There's no push or pull.
There's no emergency exit. You can't get through to irrational people.
You cannot get through to...
People who are willing to escalate and use force can't be reasoned with.
And trying to reason with them will only destroy you.
And so the reason that you're replaying all of these things is you're taking the onus on that you didn't get what you wanted out of an aggressive or irrational person.
And you're thinking, well, if I'd said this or I'd done that or...
Release yourself from that guilt.
Release yourself from that guilt.
That fantasy that you have magic words that can reshape a human brain.
Trying to talk people into being reasonable is like trying to talk them into being taller or changing their eye color.
It's like trying to talk yourself into regrowing a tooth.
It's not a thing.
I'm sorry to mean to laugh because it's very serious stuff, but it's not a thing.
People who are committed to aggression and anti-rationality, you can't reason with them.
I mean, there was this old comedian who used to make this joke about how, you know, if somebody doesn't understand you in a foreign language, you just say it again but louder.
And it's like, no, they don't understand the language.
They're saying it again but louder or slowing it down or, you know, gesturing and so on, right?
And he would be like, well, imagine some foreigner comes up and is like, and you're like, I'm sorry, I don't...
No. Louder and louder, right?
With gestures, it's like, no, no, if you don't understand the language, it doesn't matter what you do.
So, yeah, release yourself from any obligation to have ever gotten reasonably what you want or need from an anti-rational person, an aggressive person, a violent person, an abusive person, a dominating person.
You can't get what you want.
They'll never be reasonable.
Because the closer you get, say, the reason why...
People who dominate you aggressively have erased you personally.
People who dominate you aggressively have already erased your personality.
You're an object. You're a thing to them.
So when you try to get what you want from them, you're trying to manifest your will and personality to them, which is only going to make them more aggressive.
Because as you manifest your will and personality towards aggressive people, you risk provoking their conscience and their guilt about having manipulate you and dehumanized you.
And so they escalation.
If you ever genuinely get something across, something real, something honest, something true across to an aggressive or violent person, they will explode because you're pushing them closer and closer to the fiery abyss Chasm edge of their conscience, of their potential for empathy.
So the more successful you are in negotiating with an aggressive person, the more aggressive that person will become, particularly if you have a history of them being aggressive towards you, because you're attempting to re-humanize that which they've dehumanized, and if you succeed or get anywhere close to that, their conscience will rebel, and they will just go insane.
Set yourself free, my friend.
What is going on with the bug catchers?
People who have sex intentionally looking for partners who have illnesses to catch a bug like HIV or STDs.
I have a co-worker with a stepson in that category.
There seemed to be a lot of rejection from the biological mother.
I honestly don't know what to say.
I mean, just when you think the level of hell is at its bottom, it apparently opens up to something even lower.
So, people who have sex intentionally trying to get illnesses...
I don't know what level of self-contempt, self-hatred, or a bad conscience would have you try to get ill in this kind of way.
How do you like David Icke as a researcher?
And can we get some book recommendations?
Book recommendations, if you look back at my interviews, the people I interviewed usually had books that were very interesting.
So you can go through fdrpodcast.com, look for interviews, and there's usually a link to the book.
Those books are usually interesting.
David Icke is a researcher.
Well, I mean, I don't know much about him.
He's been doing stuff since the 80s.
I know he's got, like, the lizard people thing, which I don't obviously think is very empirical.
But, you know, he's obviously very skeptical of government power.
He's skeptical of oligarchical hierarchies and...
Corruption and so on, so I'm sure he does some good work there, but I don't know that you need to go the Lizardman route.
I think it's more of an analogy, but he seems to take it quite seriously, and again, I'm sorry if I've mischaracterized that, but I don't really have much knowledge of him.
All right, let's see here.
That's a really long question.
Let's do that one. Let's not do that one.
We'll do that one later, maybe. What are the origins of the imposter syndrome and how can it be cured?
I recently got a new job in software development and I'd be waking up with anxiety every morning, also while working, which makes my performance worse.
I'm feeling out of place and like people are out to get me, just waiting for the time while I scrub or perform below expectations.
Of course, I know it's rooted in childhood and the way my father raised me especially.
He used to stand by my side while I was doing chores, e.g.
washing the dishes, waiting for me to leave a small speck and to jump in telling me I can't do it and that I'm not living up to his standards.
I've been going to therapy trying to address this, but it's hard, especially when the anxiety is just there and I can't logic my way out of it.
Yes, I really sympathize with that, and I understand that.
I mean, I jumped from a history degree to a chief technical officer.
I mean, admittedly, with a dozen years of programming experience, but nonetheless, it's easy to feel that way.
Yeah, I don't get this sort of obsessive parental control thing, right?
I mean, I remember watching a woman I knew once try to make some toast and her mother was like literally criticizing every single thing she did, like just making toast.
I mean, it's really pathetic to use the vulnerability of children to raise...
Your own feeling of virtue and value.
Oh, you did something wrong.
You loaded the dishwasher wrong.
You didn't vacuum the right way.
I mean, it's exhausting.
It's debilitating. It's vampiric.
It's parasitical. And it's a way for the parent to feel better by denigrating the child.
Which is completely fucking up as a parent.
One of the central purposes of parenting is to instill rational standards in your kids.
So if they're not good at something, you say you're not good at something.
And here's how to become better if you want, if you know, or you hire someone if you don't.
If they are good at something, you want to be honest about that and tell them that, right?
But you don't want to just obsessively micromanage every single aspect of your kid's experience to the point where they don't have a self or they don't have an identity because it's putting the kids in an impossible situation, right?
So one of the ways that parents paralyze children, and this happens in other situations as well because there was a question about passive aggression, is you constantly impose your will upon someone else and then when they inevitably get angry at you, you You humiliate them or aggress against them or express contempt towards them for getting angry.
It's a common and predictable and horrible scenario.
So in this situation, Yudair's micromanaging and he's trying to substitute his will for yours.
He's trying to, in a sense, push you out or expel you from your own body.
By having you constantly focus on him rather than yourself and the task at hand.
Having someone stare over you while you're trying to do something and constantly nagging and criticizing you.
It's a form of driving you out of your own body and having you focus on them rather than your competence and the task at hand.
It's very aggressive. And so eventually you just get really angry and you push back and then the person's like, hey, I'm just trying to help.
There's no need to get so angry, right?
Or as somebody I knew when I was younger, they'd constantly poke and push and poke and nag and then you'd get angry and say, hey, hey, hey, no reason to get so defensive.
Oh, my, aren't we getting mighty defensive?
You know, just kind of stuff like that.
It's just normal manipulation. You poke people, you nag people, you Humiliate people a little bit.
You micromanage people.
You try and control people. And then when those people get angry, you then say, well, you know, you getting angry is a grave emotional.
Like, I'm just trying to help, and you getting angry is a grave emotional problem, and you're really kind of crazy.
You can't win. You can't win.
So that's sort of the micro thing.
Now, the macro thing is...
That the imposter syndrome is inflicted on the lower classes by the higher classes to reduce competition.
You've got to remember this. It's a very, very important thing when it comes to the economy.
The churn rate in a free market is very high.
The churn rate in a non-free market is very low.
Aristocrats tend to be aristocrats for centuries.
They tend to own land and keep land because there's no competition.
When you get a free market, the churn between the classes is very high.
It can be 30%, 40%, 50%, 60% per generation.
Like rags to riches to rags, shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations.
So the churn rate... For the classes is very high.
So if you're wealthy, you want to retain your wealth.
You want your kids to retain your wealth.
And so you want to interfere in the free market so that you reduce competition.
One of the ways that the poor can outcompete the rich, of course, is that the poor have much lower cash flow requirements, right?
So when I was an entrepreneur, I could outcompete.
When I started being an entrepreneur, I was living in a room in a house with five other people.
I was paying $275 a month all in for everything.
I had no car and no debt.
I got everywhere around on bikes, buses and subways.
So I could just out-compete people because I had such a low overhead, right?
And so the problem of the low overhead, so if I'm competing with some guy who's got a car and kids and a house and a mortgage, he's going to have to pay for all of that.
So I can just charge less and make more money because my overhead is much lower.
So poor people have much lower overhead, and so the talented poor are the great threat to the To the wealthy.
The talented poor can outcompete, can outbid, can underbid, and they're hungrier and so on, right?
To inflict the imposter syndrome is very, very important.
So that poor people must think of themselves as lesser, as outsiders, as incompetent, and so on.
Because that way they don't end up competing with wealthy people.
So the imposter syndrome is a large degree a psyop, a psychological operation run by the upper classes to keep the lower classes in their place.
I mean, if you want to look at...
I mean, God, I mean, if you look at the imposter syndrome, I mean, just look at Bill Gates.
He's not a doctor waxing on all about that.
Look at central bankers who don't understand the economy, waxing all about how all the
levers they're going to pull and all the politicians who don't understand public choice theory
and blowback all talking about how competent they are and all the things they want to do
and all the teachers who don't have any basis for their knowledge, instructing children
and punishing them when they deviate.
I mean, why would you have the imposter syndrome when actual imposters are everywhere?
Like, if anyone should be subject to the imposter syndrome, it's just about everybody in power.
Just about everybody in power should be subject to the imposter syndrome, but they're not.
Now, they should be, right?
And so, if you actually know how to program, recognize that there's just this giant money bag's thumb keeping you down so that you don't churn over and replace the rich.
I mean, there's parental stuff and I get all of that, but fundamentally the imposter syndrome is just a way of keeping the poor down so that they don't out-compete the wealthy and take their place.
It's just because they don't control as much of the free market as they used to.
Oh, they don't control as much of the market as they used to when they were aristocrats.
So, what they do...
And this happens a lot in England as well.
Like, you set up all of these barriers where you've got this kind of action, then you can't really get ahead because, you know, like, my accent's kind of fruity, but if I had a Cockney accent, that'd be kind of different, like with Roman in my novel The Future.
So, yeah, they set up all these barriers so that you are excluding people from competing with you, right?
Like, a raw meritocracy...
It's incredibly beneficial for society as a whole, but a raw meritocracy is not at all beneficial for those at the top.
Those at the top always want to oppose a raw meritocracy.
And obviously they can't pass laws keeping poor people out of the market, but what they can do is create all of these barriers within the minds of the poor so that...
They stay down. They don't compete.
They feel lesser. They feel excluded.
They feel dumber.
They feel whatever, right?
I mean, I remember when I was first starting, I mean, I'm a welfare kid and all of that.
So when I was first starting out in the business world, it was kind of tough.
I didn't know what to do. I didn't know, you know, I'd go to sort of elite business functions at private clubs and so on.
And I wouldn't exactly know really what to do, what to say.
Just kind of feel your way forward.
And of course, recognize that If you feel the imposter syndrome, it's because you feel like you really do need to earn your value.
And most other people haven't really earned their value, they've just done what they're told.
And so they feel competent.
And most people who don't have the imposter syndrome also were just raised that way.
They're just raised in upper middle class environments where success is kind of taken for granted and so on.
And this is how they usually end up losing is overconfidence is part of the churn.
So having an imposter syndrome is not bad.
It simply means that you may have to work harder but also recognize that yeah, it comes from your dad.
He got it from somewhere too.
And the attack on the underclass is to make them feel inferior and broken
and wrong and trashy.
That psyop is very powerful.
It's very strong. It happens all the time.
So that the elites can...
Avoid competition from the poor.
So, anyway, great questions.
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