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Oct. 13, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:32
5282 NOTHING ABOUT YOU IS WRONG!

What is the EGO, and does it help or hinder us?Philosopher Stefan Molyneux provides a deep insight into the nature and purpose of the ego - truly life-changing information!Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!Get access to StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, my new book and the History of Philosophers series!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022

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Good morning, everybody.
Stefan Molyneux, Free Domain.
Hope you're doing well.
Let's do a nice posture-improving portrait walk today.
And we are talking about a great question that came in on freedomain.locals.com.
I hope you will check out that platform, freedomain.locals.com.
And the question was, what is the ego and why does it matter?
What is the ego and why does it matter?
Now, the ego gets a very bad rap.
Egoism is considered to be a kind of predatory selfishness.
And you say, ah, you must overthrow the ego.
You must overcome the ego.
And I don't agree.
That's a foundational principle that I've worked with since the very beginning of certainly this show and even many years before that.
I think it really came about over the course of therapy when I had the most outrageous dreams that were truly shocking to me morally and metaphysically and so on.
And it turned out, lo and behold, that those dreams contained great wisdom, truth, virtue, and value about my life and saved my semi-scrawny ass.
There's an old statement from a philosopher, I think he was French, which makes him suspect, but nonetheless we get our wisdom where we can, which said, nothing human is alien to me.
So I want you to try an idea.
I want you to try a thought.
Because this could be one of these thoughts that really totally and deeply changes your
Life changes your mind.
And the thought goes something like this.
What if nothing within you was bad for you?
What if nothing within you was bad for you?
Isn't that an interesting thought?
Because to say that something that is within you is bad for you, innately, no matter what, must be overthrown, like a devilish impulse or something like that.
If we say that something within us is bad for us, then what we're saying is that evolution has made massive mistakes
In the process of propelling one particular organism, i.e.
human beings, to the very summit, top, and peak of the food chain, of the power chain, that evolution has completely effed up, despite the fact that we are beyond
Almost beyond any evolutionary precedent, the ultimate alphas of the planet.
You understand?
Now that's a kind of vanity that's a little crazy, right?
Because that vanity is to say that the guy who wins the running race by five times his closest competitor, that that guy is just bad at training, man.
There's something really wrong with his training.
Now, this is not a moral thing, because I understand that being at the top of the food chain from an evolutionary standpoint is not a moral thing.
I get all of that.
But I'm saying that the mind, if you look at our success as a species, is without a doubt the greatest creation of nature that we know of in the entire universe.
Supernumbers mean nothing.
Galaxies mean nothing.
Nebulae and clusters mean nothing.
The human mind is the greatest glory in the entire universe of a hundred billion galaxies, each containing a hundred billion stars.
It's the greatest thing that we know of.
And there's not even a close second.
It's not like we're just smarter than monkeys.
I mean, it's a whole different thing, right?
It's a whole different thing.
So,
That level of success.
Oh, and you, by the way, happen to be in possession of the greatest gift in the universe, a human mind.
Lucky you.
Lucky me.
Let's enjoy it.
And let's also be grateful.
I think it's worth it, isn't it?
I mean, I mean, the glories and beauties of nature are wonderful.
But the glory of you, beyond compare.
It's pretty out here, for sure.
There's no genius out there.
Or out here.
And there's genius in you, and there's genius in me.
So, we have the greatest peak of evolution that can possibly be conceived of.
And yet, we so often fight against that which is within us.
We've become like one of those, I don't know, really precious supermodels who's, you know, some supermodel like Linda Evangelista or Cindy Crawford or Naomi Campbell, was it?
I'm not proud that I know these names, but I have a wife.
And it's like one of those supermodels who complains about
A tiny flaw in her complexion or something minorly not perfect on her body.
Everyone else kind of rolls their eyes, right?
Imagine being a field mouse and listening to a human being complain about the contents of his mind.
What would the field mouse say?
What would the tsetse fly say?
What would the ringworm say, listening to us complain about the contents of our incredibly glorious minds and brains?
Be like, bro, shut up.
You have inherited a billion dollars and you're complaining about the price of milk.
Please.
I'm out here trying to
Milk, you're a wombat and you're complaining about the price of milk with a billion dollars in the bank.
It's pretty embarrassing.
It's pretty sad.
So again, we're talking about contents of your mind.
What if, what if, just put it out there as a possibility.
It's certainly been really great for me, which, you know, is not proof.
I'm just telling you my personal experience.
But what if nothing in your mind is bad for you?
What if nothing in your mind is negative?
What if nothing in your mind needs to be fought and overthrown and combatted and so on?
You say, ah, yes, well, but I have some bad habits.
Well, as a possibility, what if your bad habits are the result of you fighting yourself?
I mean, what if your bad habits are the result of you not accepting yourself?
What if your bad habits are a form of punishment inflicted by others who wish to do you harm, and because you haven't overthrown the alien consciousnesses in your mind that wish to do you harm, you end up with bad habits?
What if?
What if the solution to bad habits is self-acceptance, not self-hatred?
What if the entire purpose of bad habits
Is self-hatred.
And that by attacking yourself for having bad habits, you're simply putting reinforced girder scaffold structures around your bad habits to make sure they can never be overthrown.
What if the entire purpose of having bad habits is to set you against yourself so that you're easier to rule?
It's not the craziest thesis in the known universe, is it?
Ooh, look at that.
So nice.
I should actually just show you guys where I'm walking next time.
Not me.
Look at the beauty of the woods.
Not my 57-year-old increasingly cryptkeeper head.
All right.
So, what are we told is bad?
We're told the ego is bad.
Well, what is the ego?
Well, we're told that the ego is a vanity, exploitation, refusing to admit that you're wrong, thinking that you're
The greatest gift to the universe and putting other people down.
We're told that the ego, you see, is just, it's just bad.
It's just bad.
Okay, so listen, given that the structure of the world is the way that it is, and all of the negative things that occur in the world, and all of the exploitations and degradations and war and enslavement and debt that occurs in the world, I think it's important, to put it mildly, to be highly suspicious
Of anyone or any traditional moral judgment or any traditional even aesthetic judgment.
So given how bad the world is, I think it's pretty important to be kind of suspicious of every traditional thought that's out there.
So every traditional thought that's out there
Or every widespread belief that's out there serves the powers that be.
So we don't have any kind of organic culture.
This is really important to understand.
We don't have any kind of organic culture.
We have cultivated culture.
We have curated culture.
We have programming disguised as morality.
And the reason we don't have any kind of organic culture is that culture
It's transmitted through the instruction of the young, and in the West, for 150 years or so, the young, the instruction of the young, has been controlled almost exclusively, or in many countries exclusively, by the state.
We don't have any kind of organic culture.
We have curated culture.
We have programming disguised as morality.
So, every belief that is widespread, that is deeply rooted in the modern world, is the result of propaganda that has passed through the gatekeepers of the rulers and found to be good.
Yep, works for us, serves us, go right ahead.
Now,
When you have something like a hostility towards the ego, oh, you're so full of yourself.
Oh, he can never admit that he's wrong.
Oh, he's so vain.
There's no humility in that guy.
Well, whatever it is, right?
There's a lot of anti-ego stuff.
Of course, nobody really defines the ego and just gives it negative characteristics designed to
Push you away from that which gives you the most power.
Your ego is the most powerful magic that you possess.
And I'll sort of, let me get into definitions in a sec, but let me sort of tell you why this is important.
Your ego is the most powerful magic that you possess, and your ego is your only chance for freedom.
Ah, but the ego, like all great powers,
It's easy to misuse.
It's easy to turn from liberty to exploitation.
You know, like the old argument, a knife can be used to cut bread for your children or stab a guy in the leg.
Right?
I mean, the knife gives you power.
Fire gives you power.
You can use it to cook food.
You can use it to burn down the huts of your enemies.
Right?
So the ego is the wildest
Thomas Covenant white magic power that we possess and the reason you're told to reject it is so that you don't use it to free yourself.
So let me tell you what the ego is and why I make this distinction in this definition.
The ego is our capacity to deny
Empirical, sensual, quote, reality.
Can you feel that?
You feel that ripple through the innards of the guts of the brain?
The ego is our capacity to reject immediate sense data.
The ego is something that we don't talk about a cat's ego other than in humor.
Human beings have the capacity to deny immediate sense data, which is fantastic.
I mean, science is
required or has power because science shows us the value of denying immediate sense data.
You know, the obvious one being that the sun and the moon are the same size, that the earth is flat, and so on, right?
So our capacity to deny immediate sense data is the root of both our power
And our degradation.
Our capacity to deny immediate sense data is the root of our power and our degradation.
Because denying that the world is flat, denying that the sun and the moon are the same size, denying that the earth is hurtling through space at high velocity,
Denying that the earth is the center of the universe all gives us modern science and an understanding and appreciation of how the world actually is rather than how it looks from our perspective.
That's great.
That's powerful.
However,
Allowing ourselves to overcome immediate sense data also gives us great concepts and true concepts and valid concepts, but saying that we have the capacity or our capacity to reject immediate sense data also has us believe in all kinds of non-empirical concepts that enslave us.
I mean, such as collectivism and other forms of
Aggregations that have moral qualities separate or opposed to each individual member.
The collective can do X, Y, and Z. The individual cannot.
And so our capacity to deny the evidence of our senses is a great strength in truth and a great weakness in ethics.
It's a great strength in science.
It's a great weakness in collectivism.
The world
is not flat, although it looks and feels flat.
We can deny that and we can get to the truth of the world thereby.
Collectives, concepts, collectivism, aggregations do not exist and do not have separate moral qualities than any individual within.
Right?
Any more than if you have an aggregation of animals called a mammal that any mammal
And you define it to say, I don't know, what is it, warm-blooded, has hair, gives birth to live young, that kind of stuff.
So you can't create, logically, right, scientifically, you can't create an aggregation called mammals, say warm-blooded, and then include a rock and a snake.
Snakes are cold-blooded and rocks have no blood at all.
As you can find out if you ask a false friend for your money back.
Can't get blood from a stone, man!
So our capacity to deny empirical sense data is our greatest strength and our greatest weakness.
So the ego is the part of our minds that gets to override immediate sense data.
And, of course, concepts don't exist in the senses.
Concepts don't exist in the realm of the senses, but we're defined by our capacity for conceptual thinking.
That's what makes us human, is our capacity for conceptual thinking.
But concepts don't exist.
Here I am.
What am I always talking about?
Forests!
Am I in a forest?
Yes.
Do the trees exist?
They do.
Do the leaves exist?
Yes.
Does the undergrowth exist?
Do the little clumps of grass exist?
Yes.
I am in a forest.
Every atom, every organism, every piece of matter exists.
Does the concept forest exist?
No.
It does not exist.
It does not exist.
It is our conceptual label.
To describe aggregations of things that exist.
Things that exist, exist.
Aggregations exist in the mind.
And, of course, we understand that their accuracy is not subjective, right?
If I looked at a bunch of ducks on a lake and said, oh, that's a forest, I would be incorrect, because a forest is an aggregation of trees in, obviously, often a root-intertwined ecosystem or connected system.
Where does the forest end?
Well, sometimes like, I guess, Fangorn, it's like a line, like a slice in the ground, and sometimes it's a fading out.
When I worked up north, the trees got progressively smaller and smaller, and then you were north of the tree line.
Where does the tree line end?
Well, we know when it doesn't end, which is, there's a tree line here, and we know when it does end, like the North Pole, or it's not there, and it fades out somewhere in there.
Now, our capacity to deny reality is why we have the concept forest.
We have the concept forest.
Which is great.
Meet you in the forest.
Let's go hunting in the forest.
I want to sell you the forest.
Or whatever, right?
Let's go and examine.
As a biologist, I want to examine the forest.
Like, having these concepts is great.
So the concepts do not exist in the real world, but they're derived from things in the real world.
You can't arbitrarily label everything a forest.
And they often have fuzzy edges, right?
What does it mean to be competent in the sense of the rule of law?
What does that mean?
Well, somebody who's brain dead and hooked up to machines is clearly not competent in the rule of law.
Somebody with an average IQ clearly is.
And there's fuzzy boundaries somewhere, right?
So, our ego, that which is specifically human about us, is our capacity to deny immediate sense data.
There's no forest impacting itself on my senses.
The forest does not exist, but the concept forest can be accurate and useful and powerful.
Now, our capacity to deny our senses.
To say the world looks flat but it's not.
Our capacity to deny our senses is a great strength because through embracing what seems false we can get to the actual truth.
Right?
Again, I hate to overuse this one but it's so obvious, right?
Embracing
What feels false or what seems false can get you to the truth, right?
The world seems flat, but it is a sphere.
Boy, I miss the days when a statement like that would get you endless rebuttals and links on YouTube comments.
So you deny what seems true in order to get to what is true.
So our capacity to deny sense evidence, sense data,
is essential.
I mean, x-rays, ultraviolet, infrared, all of these things don't show up on our vision, but they're real forces in the universe.
And it's very important for us to study them and learn about them.
So even though they appear invisible, they do in fact exist.
And yet, our senses, particularly our eyesight,
are designed to serve our survival, and infrared and ultraviolet was not essential to our survival, so we don't see them.
In the same way we don't have sonar because we don't hunt at night.
So, our capacity to deny what seems true is the root of our capacity for actual truth.
Right, seems true is you just look around at things and so on, right?
Actual truth.
Seems versus is.
And of course, the purpose of philosophy is to substitute what seems true for what is true.
Because what seems true is our greatest red herring and our greatest risk and our greatest danger.
So, I mean, you've heard me a million times in my call-in shows, someone says, oh, I love my girlfriend, right?
All right, that's a statement of claim.
I don't know if it's true or not.
That's a statement of claim.
And the person might actually feel that they love their girlfriend.
But of course, the definition of love is our involuntary response to virtue if we ourselves are virtuous.
So, when somebody says, I feel love for my girlfriend, or I love my girlfriend, that's a claim, I don't know if it's true or not.
I don't know if it's something that they say because they want to get laid.
I don't know if it's something they say because they don't want to go through the humiliation of admitting that they're with someone they don't love, because then you have to say, well, what are you with that person for?
Of course, a lot of it has to do with sexual access.
And again, I don't say this with any pride or, oh gosh, I've never, I've never ever done anything like that.
We were all kind of in the same boat, particularly men, but it happens to women as well.
So I say, somebody says, I love my girlfriend.
Okay.
So then I say, what is it that you love about your girlfriend?
Right?
What is it that you love about your girlfriend?
That's kind of an important question.
Because love is not arbitrary.
Love is not random.
Love is not purely subjective.
Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
So it's a perfectly fair thing to ask, what do you love about your girlfriend?
What is the empirical evidence for the feeling that you claim to have?
And of course, everybody who's listened to this show for more than five minutes knows about that sickening, soul-crunching pause that occurs when someone says, but I love my girlfriend!
And then I say, what do you love about your girlfriend?
And what happens?
Pause, pause, pause.
Boobs!
Whatever it's going to be, it ain't particularly pretty, right?
They're looking for evidence.
You say, what is?
Seams?
No, not seams.
Tis Horatio!
The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.
So,
We can deny reality.
That's a great strength for us.
It's a great weakness.
Because sophistry, con men and women, politicians, liars, cult leaders of every shape and hue, they all rely on our capacity to deny reality.
Right?
So, if we all have the capacity to deny reality, and people can use that to lead us to the truth, or they can use our capacity to deny reality to exploit and harm us, to rob from us, to tell us that we owe them something, to tell us that they will give us something for free when we know deep down there's nothing for free.
So, our capacity
Or our... Wow, this is how forests change so quickly, eh?
Now we're in the land of the pines and the soft underfoot.
I was back here with my daughter many years ago, playing hide-and-go-seek with a whole bunch of friends, and man, you had to watch for the scratchy pine eyeball tearing lower branches, let me tell you that.
Well, enough reminiscing.
When your kids get to your mid-teeds, you get some reminiscences going on.
So our ego allows us to deny reality.
Now that's kind of important.
I mean, any of the success that I've accumulated in life, and it's been fairly considerable I think, for me at least, at least based on where I came from, the success that I have accumulated in life occurred because I denied the reality of most people and most things around me when I was growing up.
Like I grew up in, you know, a really trashy welfare lower class
Yuckity yuck environment and you wouldn't look at my childhood and you wouldn't look at my environment and my circumstances and you wouldn't look and say, ah, this guy has the potential to be a pretty influential intellectual.
You wouldn't say that at all.
And it does, you know, there's a certain amount of willpower where you just have to
Overcome your environment, overcome your circumstances and say, although for 99.9% of human history, environment and circumstances utterly defined the person and their potential and their future, because it was a class or caste based system as a whole, even though throughout almost all of human history, circumstances and origin determined future and possibility, which is usually very little and very low.
And we are programmed to stay within our class, right?
Because to wander outside of our class is highly risky from a reproductive standpoint.
Like if you're born in the trash heap of the lower classes, or the lowest classes, there wasn't many below me other than people who lived on the streets.
If you're born into the lower classes and you try to get out of the lower classes, well, I write about this in my novel, The Future, that you might make it, you might make it,
But you might not.
And if you leave behind the females that you grew up with, and you try to woo and win the females who grew up with higher caste or higher class males, that's really risky.
A lot of people lose their lineage in that kind of pursuit.
It's tough to change classes, is what I'm saying, and there's evolutionary reasons why we would have resistance and hesitation towards changing classes.
So I had to deny my origin story.
My origin story, my origin reality, was very empirical, to put it mildly, was very empirical.
Very vivid, very real, very factual, very true.
My origin story was brutal.
And I had to deny that my origin story was my inevitable future.
Because I wouldn't have wanted that future.
And I would have felt kind of ashamed to stay in that rotten, poisonous, caustic, venomous, acidic underworld.
Where everybody pulls each other down for the sake of inevitable childhood repetition through the avoidance of self-knowledge and the pursuit of domination rather than virtue.
So I had to deny the empirical reality and therefore future inevitability of my origin story.
So how did I achieve some success?
How did I achieve a good marriage?
By saying, F you to all the evidence of my senses.
I know this sounds kind of odd.
I'm telling you, for me at least, the absolute truth.
And that's why when people on my call-in shows or whatever they say, X, Y, and Z, I say, oh, what's the evidence, right?
What's the evidence?
Now, of course,
The evidence of my origin story was that was where I was going to be.
This is more so true.
This may not be quite as clear in other countries, but in England in particular, it's a real thing.
Your origin story, your accent, your class history has a lot to do with where you end up.
That was part of my whole life was just saying, I will not, I will reject the empirical evidence of where I came from and find for myself where I'm going to go.
And that's tough.
I'm sure if you've made this journey, you feel a lot of resistance.
I certainly did.
I felt like an outsider.
I didn't know what to do or what to say at elite country clubs when I was negotiating investments and business deals.
I mean, I knew econ, of course, economics, because of my studying from mid-teens, but you really do feel like a wee bit of an outsider.
Although I suppose the accent helped a little bit.
So that which held me back in England probably propelled me forward in Canada and America and other places where I did business.
And they were certainly quite fascinated by me in China.
So yeah, denying reality, denying empirical, I don't say denying reality by that.
I just mean sort of sense data.
So denying empirical reality is key.
So the ego allows you to deny the evidence of your senses.
It gives you potential.
It gives you mastery over the universe and its physical facts.
And it gives you virtue.
So if you were raised in an immoral environment, you can become virtuous.
It allows you to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Because the ego
Allows you to navigate not by what is, but what could be.
It allows you to navigate the world according to your potential.
Right?
It allows you to navigate the world according to your potential, not according to empirical evidence.
So it allows you to navigate the world by what could be in the future rather than what empirically was in the past.
I mean, my life, I say this not because I'm particularly fascinating, but because hopefully it's an example that resonates with you, but my life has been, like I didn't just say, oh I can do anything I want, I can overturn historical errors in ethics and define a whole new system of philosophy, although I do remember reading
There was this book.
I think it was called 21 Up or something like that.
I know that there was a documentary about it.
But there was a book I read in my teens.
And if anybody knows it, just let me know.
But in it, there was
They followed people from sort of high school into, I think it was a middle age at that point.
And one guy was like, I'm going to define an entire new system of epistemology.
And I remember thinking like, yeah, that would be fun.
That would be, I wonder if I could do that.
That would be, that would be interesting.
Maybe I could.
So I didn't just leap to sort of the pinnacle or whatever it is, wherever it is that I am or was.
I was constantly testing.
Am I a good storyteller?
Okay, I'll try telling stories to people.
Am I funny?
Okay, I'll try making jokes.
Can I keep people's attention for a long period of time?
Well, let me try a Dungeons & Dragons campaign that lasts for a year and see if I can keep people interested and involved.
Yes.
Yes.
Can I act?
Well, in high school I was in Thornton Wilder's Our Town and did a pretty good job.
So,
Can I be creative?
Well, let me try writing a book.
Let me try writing a novel.
Let me try writing a story.
So you just try.
And, you know, the first try is like, I don't know, it's one step in the journey of a thousand miles, but you make that step.
Right?
So once you take that first step, you say, Oh, I wonder if I can take the next step.
And then you keep waiting to run up against your limitations.
You keep waiting to run up against your limitations.
And, of course, I have run up against limitations, both positive and negative.
I had some limitations in my ability to accept a certain level of what I viewed as corruption in the business world, so I did not.
And when I was in theater school, I could absolutely, completely, and totally see that there were people who were better actors than I was.
Now, some of that has to do with the material.
I was given some pretty trashy material to work with in theater school.
I remember once I was a, I think, a homeless fisherman trying to woo a woman who was 300 pounds.
And it just wasn't, you know, whereas when I played Martin Luther in university, I think it was John Osborne's play about Martin Luther, the theologian.
I mean, I did fantastically because it was very sort of elevated and intellectual material.
So, but nonetheless, I remember going to Stratford and seeing an actor, his name was Brian.
Was it Brian Bedford?
I think it was.
Not Brian Blast, he's the guy from the Branagh films.
Brian Bedford, and he played...
A very foppish 19th century character in The Afternoon.
I remember his sort of catchphrase, and he was like hilariously funny.
And then he played Shylock in The Merchant of Venice in the evening and was like incredible, deep, powerful, like filled up the hole.
Uh, main stage with his presence, and you basically just waited for him to come back on.
And I was like, yeah, I don't think that's me.
So there were some limitations, to put it mildly.
I think when I work with my own material, when reading my novels as audiobooks, I can really throw myself into the material and all of that.
But, you know, they were better actors, obviously.
Obviously, you watch on the waterfront, you go like, okay, well, that's been done.
So, yeah, I did.
I ran up against limitations.
I've run up against limitations in my capacity to network.
I've never been a fan of networking and you know the sort of making of alliances and the trading of allegiances and all that kind of stuff.
I didn't really do that in the business world sometimes to my strength and sometimes to my detriment.
Obviously I didn't do that in
The intellectual world, because otherwise I might have ended up with even one or two allies during my deplatforming, which is, you know, strengths and weaknesses.
You run up against your limitations.
In some areas, I really feel I have yet to run up against my limitations.
In the realm of philosophy, I still feel like I'm in hot pursuit of better communications.
Every time I do a show, I'm like, yeah, that was good.
I can do better.
I can do better.
I can do better.
And hopefully I'm still in pursuit of that.
That's what keeps it interesting that I'm not repeating the same things but trying to find new ways to communicate, such as this great question about the ego, which I hope is helpful to you.
And it will be more helpful to you as I finish up here.
So, look at this.
I debated with a guy who said women can have sex with trees and get pregnant.
I guess this tree is pregnant.
Because why not?
Just throw everything out the window.
So yeah, the process of testing and rejecting reality is important, right?
Perceived reality.
So, the ego allows us to reject what seems obvious in favor of that which is true.
Is it true that I was limited
By my upbringing.
It is not true.
It feels true, and the world wants to tell you that it's true, because the upper classes don't want the lower classes competing with them, so they do everything in their power to keep the lower classes low.
So, but it's not true.
Is it true that the cycle of abuse has to repeat?
Well, it feels true, but it's not true.
So,
Moving away from what feels true to what is true is the operation of the ego.
Now, denying reality is essential for ambition because the reality is you haven't achieved what you want to achieve, and so you have to deny your lack of achievement in order to achieve.
And again, I know people are going to snip that, oh, he wants you to deny reality.
It's like, no, no, no.
But I don't want you to fake knowledge you don't have.
That's essential to philosophy.
I mean, this is the whole Socratic argument, Socratic reasoning, is don't deny.
Don't claim to have knowledge you don't have.
You say you know what justice is?
Okay, let's ask what justice is.
You don't know?
Okay, so stop claiming that you know what justice is.
Stop claiming to have knowledge you don't have.
It's pretty important to life and virtue and integrity, not fake stuff.
So, you don't know your potential.
If you try to measure your potential by your past, you're working with an empirical set of knowledge that's based on things that you didn't choose.
Right?
I mean, you didn't choose... I didn't choose where I was born, I didn't choose the family, the class, the country, the sex... I didn't choose any of this stuff!
Just work with what... So, if you try to judge your potential by your past, then you are trying
You're pretending to have knowledge you don't have, and you're also saying that you can judge what you can choose by what you can't choose.
Right?
I've never... It's never, ever clicked with me, the idea of being ashamed of something I never chose.
Right?
So, I just... It's just embarrassing when people try that stuff.
So, when you have choice,
The sky's the limit.
That which you didn't choose, like I didn't choose to be born in this trashy welfare class back there in the UK and live in a fairly trashy welfare class for most of my childhood and youth in Canada, I didn't choose.
I didn't even choose to come to Canada!
So, I'm not going to be defined by any of the things I didn't choose, because to be defined by things you didn't choose is a contradiction in terms.
You are defined by the things that you did choose.
You're defined by the things you do choose and you didn't choose your childhood, you didn't choose your parents, you didn't choose your culture, your environment, your country, your race, your sex.
You didn't choose any of that.
It just kind of happened to you and therefore it doesn't define you.
It doesn't define you.
Everybody wants to be defined by the past because when you get defined by the past you can exploit the present.
Ah, because of past injustice, you owe us money now.
Gain control over the present by pretending that the past is responsible for, that people have chosen the past somehow.
So, to deny empiricism as the basis of your potential is to accept that the future you choose is different from the past you didn't.
Right?
The future you choose is different from the past you didn't choose.
And that's why I want to make everything in the present a choice.
Everything in the present is a choice.
Should be a choice.
That way you can be defined, you can be actualized, you can be real, you can have pride for that which you chose rather than that which you deferred to that you didn't choose, like your history.
So, yeah, how did I achieve?
By saying empiricism can never
Because my potential lies in the future and empiricism is always about the past.
So to deny the evidence of the senses is to unleash your potential.
Why on earth should you be bound by that which you never chose and use it to crush your capacity for glory and success?
By what?
You do choose.
Right, because if we allow ourselves to be defined by our history, we cut off endless avenues of possibility or opportunity in our future.
It doesn't bring our past to life, it simply kills our future.
I'm sure you follow.
I'm sure this all makes sense to you.
So when I say there's nothing within you that's bad, there's nothing within you that's wrong, yeah, your capacity to deny
Empirical reality, your capacity to deny history, your capacity to deny the evidence of your senses.
I mean, it's funny because denying the evidence of your senses is also how you... I mean, we watch movies.
Movies aren't real, right?
Denying the evidence of our senses and getting involved in stories that aren't real with people who are only faking it.
But we get involved.
We get involved in these dramas and so on.
So, denying the evidence of our senses is why there's art, in many ways, right?
Why is there stories?
Why do we cry at the end of a movie when people aren't real?
Cry at the end of an animated movie, like Tangled.
It's not real.
I mean, even the images aren't real, but we get involved nonetheless.
Denying the evidence of our senses.
Nothing wrong with that.
Denying of the evidence of our senses, which is all about the past, unleashes our potential in the future.
So, your ego is not bad.
And people who tell you they want you to kill the ego,
are telling you that they want you to be enslaved.
People who tell you they want you to kill your ego, that your ego is your enemy, that your ego is vanity and narcissism and so on, right?
Because we can believe in things that aren't true.
I could believe that I'm a better singer than Freddie Mercury.
Not even remotely true, right?
So we can believe in things that aren't true and that can give us great success
But we can also believe in things that aren't true, and that leads us to great failure, to waste our resources.
So of course we need to check, right?
We need to check.
I mean, I remember when I was in my mid-teens, I half put together a band and we practiced in a basement and so on.
And I was like trying to sing Roxanne by Sting, which is way too high for me.
And I was like, yeah, that's not good.
That's just empirically terrible.
So that's not good.
I wrote a couple of songs and sang them, did multi-track and all of that, and it was like it was okay.
It was okay, but not good enough for me.
Anyway, my strengths lie obviously elsewhere.
I hope.
I believe.
I know.
I have evidence.
Denying the evidence of your senses is important for ambition.
There's a million people who everyone says they're going to fail, they end up succeeding.
They denied the evidence of their senses, everyone telling them they're going to fail, their own thoughts that they were going to fail.
So yeah, denying the evidence that's around you is essential for success, but it's a double-edged sword, like all these sorts of things.
Anger is a double-edged sword.
Anger can be used to protect you.
Anger can be used to endanger you.
So if you're an angry guy, or if you have the capacity for anger, if you're comfortable with your anger, it can keep you safe.
Because bullies will sense that and steer clear, so it actually prevents fights.
Like having guns in the neighborhood prevents break-ins.
Even if you don't have one, the thief doesn't know whether you have one or don't, and therefore, it prevents break-ins.
So, being in touch with your anger is healthy and helpful, can keep you safe, and can prevent conflicts.
However, that Aristotelian mean, too little anger means you're exploited, too much anger means you're in danger, because then you get too pissed off at every little slight, and you push people in the chest, and you poke people
And get into fights and, you know, this can give you significant injuries or death, right?
So anger is not good or bad.
Ego is not good or bad.
Fear is not good or bad.
The people who say, well, fear is bad.
Don't be a coward.
It's like, no, no.
Caution is essential.
Why do we, why do we, why did we develop something?
Again, being at the very top of the evolutionary chain, like far beyond everything else that could possibly be conceived of.
As real.
Why would we have developed fear if fear wasn't an essential survival mechanism?
Fear is not bad.
An excess of fear can make you a coward.
A deficiency of fear can make you foolhardy.
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
And I certainly, I understand that one probably deeper than your average bear.
So.
Oh, no ice yet, but it is cold.
It is cold, but I like the bracing cold.
Sorry about the portrait.
I forgot my gimbal.
So, Gimbel.
Why does that make me think of Harrison Ford?
Wasn't that some character in a movie he played?
Ah, the random thoughts.
Reign them in, reign them in.
Get your ducks in a row, get your horses in a line.
Ah, interesting.
All right, all right, just tracking.
So,
Your ego is not bad.
Your capacity to deny sense data, your capacity to deny history, as defining your future, is essential to success, is essential to progress, is essential to unleashing your potential.
And your potential is always in there, knocking and mocking, right?
Knocking at the salty ribbed
Cage of your heart.
Knocking, knocking, right?
Your potential is knocking and complaining and whining and wanting to be set free.
Always, always, always.
And how do we stifle our potential?
By saying that the past has to be the future and don't be ridiculous.
I mean, what is the great cry of the lower classes when someone improves, right?
What's the great cry of the trash classes?
Not that all lower classes are trash classes, but... And the trash classes exist everywhere, but in particular, the lower trash classes
What is the big cry of the lower classes, the trash classes, when you improve, when you do better?
They say, oh, you just think you're better than us now.
Oh, you just think you're so great.
Right.
To which the answer is, well, yeah.
Because if you succeeded, I'd never think of saying that to you.
It would never cross my mind to say that to you.
So yeah, I guess I am better than you.
Oh, look at Mr. High and Mighty.
Doesn't even drink Pabst Blue Ribbon Fridays at three o'clock in a wife beater.
So great.
I mean, it's funny because, yeah, I remember when I wrote my first novel, I gave it to friends to read.
Yeah, I wrote a novel.
It's not bad.
It's not called The Jealous War.
Did they read it?
They did not.
They gave me feedback.
They did not.
I wrote a great play called Seduction one summer, which I actually produced, and gave it to a close family member to read, give me feedback.
Every time I went over, sat by his bed the whole summer.
Never bothered to read it.
After I'd helped him move how many times?
And helped him clean up his entire house when his firstborn was due.
Ah, reciprocity.
It's such a great filter for exploitation.
So, yeah.
There's nothing within you.
What is there?
Jealousy.
No, no.
Jealousy can be good.
Jealousy can be good.
It's actually a pretty underrated Queen song, beautifully sung, of course, by the Fredster, but yeah, no.
Jealousy is good.
I, man, I was jealous of people.
Who had better homes and better families than I did.
Jealous of those people.
Yes, I envied them.
Good.
Good.
Aren't you jealous of a guy if you're fat?
Aren't you jealous of a guy who's thin or has lost weight or at least slim?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Aren't women jealous of more attractive women, which is one of the spurs to work to become more attractive?
Yeah.
Jealousy is good.
Now, if it becomes pathological, rather than something you use to lift yourself up, it becomes pathological and you use it to pull others down.
Right?
Like, what's this?
Some TV show.
Was it Glee?
There was a bunch of girls who didn't like the new girl.
And so, in the cheerleading squad, so they tried to convince her to not eat anything, and then she kept fainting, and so that's unhealthy, right?
That's pathological, when you don't use it to lift yourself up, but instead you use it to pull other people down, right?
Like the psychos who preyed upon Alanis Morissette when she was a kid, and she then produced bitter, angry music that spread that rage and discontent from them, to the singer, to the millions of people who
Bought and listened to, jagged little pill, and so on, right?
So, you tell me, tell me, what aspect of you?
Oh, pettiness.
No, well, see, pettiness is what keeps you alive when you're little, right?
You want to make sure you get equal shares to your sibling.
That keeps you alive when you're little.
Pettiness is a way of focusing on small injustices, obviously with the hope that they don't become big injustices, right?
Because if you can nip injustices in the bud when they're small, that's better than waiting until they're big, right?
So pettiness is like, well, you don't wait for the weird thing on your skin to be the size of a dinner plate before you go see the doctor.
You want to focus on small problems so that they don't become big problems.
So you tell me, is pettiness bad?
No, pettiness is just the word.
That is applied, oh, you're so petty, such a petty, petty man.
No, that's the word that's applied by people who want to exploit you and don't want you to notice the early stages of exploitation.
So we could, and I won't do this all day, but we could do this all day where we take every aspect that is supposed to be negative.
Say, ah, well, what about our capacity for evil?
Ooh.
What about our capacity for evil?
Surely, Steph, you're not saying that our capacity for evil is bad?
Well, no, but that's... that's tautological, right?
So you're saying that which is evil can't be good.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, you've just defined that which is down is not up.
That which is black is not white.
Yeah, good for you, right?
Wow, brilliant.
Evil is the capacity to do harm.
Now, evil is the capacity to do harm against the virtuous and the innocent, of course, right?
But the capacity to do harm?
Are you going to tell me that there's something fundamentally wrong with the capacity to do harm?
Good Lord.
So, yeah, I mean, the capacity to do harm can be used for good.
It can be used for ill.
I mean, when you have treatments for an illness,
Harm is done to that illness, right?
You have treatment for cancer.
Harm is done to the cancer.
Capacity to do harm.
Self-defense is the capacity to do harm.
Just ask Kyle Rittenhouse, right?
Do we have the capacity to do harm?
It's kind of why we're alive.
You don't think we do harm to animals and vegetables and fruits by picking them?
Well, I guess maybe not fruits because that's sort of the point of the fruit, but... So, but we don't do what the fruit wants and usually replant every seed.
So our capacity to do harm is why we're alive.
I mean, I've been stepping on a bunch of plants the whole time.
I can't even walk in the woods and get my exercise without stepping on a bunch of plants.
Does it do each individual plant harm?
Oh God, I've just been thinking about that.
Look at these poor plants.
The capacity to do harm is innate to life.
I scratch my nose, I kill a hundred million cells, right?
So, we can't be alive without doing harm.
So, evil is when we do harm against the virtuous and the innocent.
But the capacity to do harm is not immoral.
So, the ego.
Yeah.
Embrace the ego.
And test the ego, right?
So, the ego is about rejecting the evidence of the senses, but it's got to be circular, right?
So, if you think you're a great singer, then that's your, you know, you haven't been a great singer, you haven't been applauded, or you haven't received accolades as a great singer.
So, yeah, sing into your phone and listen back to it, and ask other people to listen to it.
What do you think, right?
Like Sammy Hagar was just singing along to the radio when he was a teenager and some guy was like, holy crap, that's fantastic!
And he has got a fantastic voice.
Alanis Morissette was singing in church.
Somebody tapped her on the shoulder and said, you have a beautiful voice.
And she does.
It's kind of a bit of a banshee shriek, but it's got some real power.
I saw her live doing that thank you song.
And it's just like, holy crap, she can belt it out like a waistline factory.
So,
Yeah, but have the feedback, right?
So, of course, I put myself forward to say, well, maybe I can achieve great things intellectually.
So, I keep pushing myself and keep rejecting the evidence of the past as a guidepost to the future.
And that works, right?
So, yeah, the ego is wonderful.
Deny reality.
Absolutely deny empirical reality.
And then test with empirical reality, right?
So I thought I could achieve great things, so I started putting out shows back in 2005, 18 years ago, and I think the evidence is that I can achieve some pretty good things with this kind of stuff.
So that's a plus, right?
I didn't just keep doing it and keep doing it and keep doing it.
I mean, I tried that with writing novels, like I kept writing novels, took time off, wrote novels, got educated, I had an agent, and I got incredible reviews on my novels, but nothing ever happened, right?
So I had to not do that because even though I thought, still think I'm a great novelist,
Of course I didn't realize the degree to which art had been infiltrated by those with a propagandistic agenda that didn't exactly ally with my promotion of free markets and hostility towards collectivism, so that's why.
I was rejected for the quality of my novels, not for the lack of quality, but because they were good and anti-ideological, they couldn't be published.
So yeah, there's nothing within you that is wrong or bad.
The measurement.
The balance, the wisdom, is all.
Embrace everything about yourself.
There's nothing bad in you.
But thinking makes it so.
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