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Nov. 20, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:20
CAN WE SURVIVE CORRUPTION?
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All right. Good morning, everybody.
It is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain.
Questions from freedomain.locals.com.
One of the greatest communities in the known universe.
freedomain.locals.com.
Come join up. What were the most frustrating jobs you had working for someone else?
And what were your experiences that were mind-boggling?
Did you develop your business plan for your own venture while working with them?
No, I was always happy to get a job.
And I was always happy to work.
I gotta tell you, I think that the major frustration in my business relationships, particularly when I was younger, was boss's frustrations with me.
Boss's frustrations with me.
See, there's a funny thing that happens when you're a man raised by women, right?
Raised by women. There's a funny thing that happens.
See women in general when they're young are value, they don't have to provide value right so women are value, men
pursue them, men want them, men ask them out, men date them, men pay for things so women are value and
therefore don't have to create or provide value, they embody value. There's nothing wrong with that perfectly
natural and healthy, but that's just the way that it is.
Now the problem is that men have to provide value whereas women are value.
And I know a lot of men get annoyed at this and women are human being, men are human doing and all of that.
Well, that's fine.
I mean, you can get mad at it if you want, but I don't know what the point is of getting mad at that evolution, which put us at the top of the food chain and gave us the most comfortable and enhanced and long life experience.
I don't know.
Oh, I'm so upset about everything that led me to becoming the richest and most successful financially, at least, man in the world.
It would be kind of churlish, wouldn't it?
And if you're mad at all the circumstances that gave you such massive success, What's everyone else supposed to feel who hasn't even had that massive success?
If you have singular success, I think it behooves you to be grateful for every circumstance that led you to that success.
Now, human beings, we glorious pillars of reason, we have achieved the greatest success of any animal species throughout history.
And you can say, well, but everything should have been different.
Men should be Human being and women should be human doing or young women have it easy and I resent all of their power and and you can do all of that but you understand that the combination of men and women have produced the most brilliant beautiful successful magnificent amazing creative and rational species that the universe has ever seen that we know of so far to date we are the richest atoms In the universe.
I mean, God is inordinately fond of two things, beetles and hydrogen.
And, what is it, 99% of matter is hydrogen or something like that.
And, you know, almost all matter is inert and unreasoning and so on.
And we happen to have aggregated, in the vomit of prior supernovas, a collection of three pounds of wetware in our brains that can reason and create and argue and debate and pursue truth and build bridges and write poems.
Like, we can do all of these amazing things.
Now that massive success, unprecedented success, we're not just a bigger ape, we're not just a balder ape, we are a different class and species entirely, which is why, of course, religion generally provides humans with souls, but not animals, and souls being the capacity To process concepts.
It's a remarkable thing.
I mean, the soul is a concept, and so granting us the power to process concepts by providing us with a concept called the soul is entirely fitting.
So you can get mad if you want and say, oh, women have it easy.
I get that.
I mean, I understand that.
It's not like... Nobody has ever talked about that before, and it's not like I've never felt that before.
I get that. I understand that.
But men have it easy, too.
No, we have to go out and battle the elements and build skyscrapers.
I get all of that.
But we get the pride...
Of reshaping the world, evolutionarily speaking, women get the pride of making life and men get the pride of making the world.
And by making life, I don't just mean giving birth, of course.
I mean like raising children.
So we both get our pride and we both have our value.
And of course, driving resentment between the sexes is the basis of depopulation.
It's the basis of frustration.
It's the basis of infantilization.
If you never fall in love, you never really have to grow up.
If you're never vulnerable to another person, you never really have to mature.
So, it's a psyop, right?
It's propaganda to resent women.
It is. Women are beautiful and wonderful.
Men are amazing and wonderful.
And we are supposed to love each other.
But one of the challenges that happened by being raised by women...
Is that because women are value when they're young and men have to create value, I didn't understand that I needed to provide value for my employer.
And I've mentioned this before, I was working in a hardware store and I was just ambling around cleaning stuff and tidying stuff and making it look nice.
And the hardware store owner was frustrated with me, which again, I completely understand.
And he said, do something that makes me money.
How do you think you're getting paid?
Do something that makes you money.
How do you think you're getting paid?
In the early...
I guess I was, what, maybe 13 or 14, maybe 15 years old.
And I'd worked in hardware stores and other stores before, but I just never had...
There were chain stores.
This was an individual thing.
So he was much more down for the...
Profit of paying me, right?
And, you know, when you are a smart person in society, as I'm sure everyone listening to this is, you kind of have to assemble some ideas and facts and principles from these scraps of comments that just kind of float by.
This guy didn't sit me down and say, you know, technically the customers are paying you.
You have to provide customers value and then they pay me and I pay you.
But Cleaning and tidying, you have to think.
It's just like, do something that makes me money.
And that sort of frustration and annoyance wasn't the most mature way to handle it, but I was still very grateful to receive the lesson.
So I think that people had frustration with me as an employee because I hadn't been raised with a male, but the male is providing value models.
That tells you how to provide value.
Whereas women are value and expect others to work to provide them value, which makes for some kind of entitled and not profit-centered and not practical employee mindset.
So I think other people had some frustration with me.
Other things, frustrating jobs I had working for someone else.
I mean, I signed up to work at a, I don't know what you'd call it, a hunting lodge, a set of hunting lodges.
It was on an island in northern Ontario, and I said I wanted to work on a book.
I was happy to work, but I just wanted to make sure it wasn't, like, working all the time, because I wanted to work on a book.
And they're like, oh yeah, you'll have time for that, no problem, right?
So... I went up to work there, and the guy was doing like, it wasn't that much pay, and he was like trying to work me 12 to 14 hours a day, and I was just like, no, that's not going to work for me.
And I remember his wife was the one who said, oh yeah, you'll have time to work on a book, and he was like, oh no, I've never got anything done, but pure work, this is all I do for like three or four months of the year.
All I do is this, and then I take the rest of the time off.
I remember he was a guy who'd been to Woodstock, and Anyway, so that was sort of annoying that the wife kind of lured me up there with it's not too much work and then the guy was just trying to work me to the bone.
And it was also funny too because he was kind of a lefty hippie and he was kind of exploiting his workers because I wasn't being paid hourly.
I was being paid a fixed rate and I did the math and it worked out to way below minimum wage.
So it's kind of funny how this lefty hippie guy who was an environmentalist and it was one of these examples where You really get that people don't live their values.
Like they have these attitudes.
They're more like attitudes. Just things you have to say to unlock social life, right?
Like, you know, for a lot of the upper middle class people, it's like, I hate Trump or whatever.
Like you just have to say that stuff.
And that way, money is unlocked.
Lying for money is the foundational attitude of most people.
Saying things you don't believe, repeating, hating who you're supposed to hate, loving who you're supposed to love, saying the words that you're supposed to say in return for access to social networks and business opportunities and maybe even keeping your job and stuff like that.
Most people are paid not for what they do, but for what they are willing to lie about.
And by that, I don't mean that they're paid directly for lying.
But, you know, if you're some, I don't know, upper middle class person and certainly in the arts and so on, if you're like really pro-capitalism, well, I mean, I've been down that road, right?
They just, they hate you.
Like they really loathe you and they'll do almost anything to I think?
And you don't have convictions.
You just have a need for survival.
And, of course, if lying is the price of survival, then you'll lie if you sort of perceive it that way.
And really, it's only internet that's allowed people to actually tell the truth and make some money.
Actually tell the truth.
That's kind of unprecedented.
The price of success has almost always been the falsification of knowledge.
Falsehoods, lying, conforming, repeating propaganda.
And, of course, once you do that, once they can get you to lie for a living or lie to get a living, then the shame of that and the humiliation of that, like you're very excited to get your first paycheck and, you know, if you've got to bend the truth a little, whatever, right?
That sort of starts off that way.
And then as you get more and more successful and get more and more of your vanity embedded in your material success...
Then what happens is you really feel the humiliation.
The pleasure of the money, the pleasure of the material success diminishes and the shame at lying increases, right?
So the benefits go down and the costs go up.
And after a certain amount of time, you just can't back out.
I mean, if you are someone who's, you know, you're some successful finance guy and you have to follow the General leftist party line, or it could be the rightist party line, but in general it's the leftist one.
Then all your social circle, your country club, your tennis membership, your marriage, your children, your children's friends, everything is embedded in falsehood.
Everything is embedded in falsehood.
And you know, I mean, I don't think anybody gets away with anything deep down.
So you know that you're lying for money, that you have traded your soul, your integrity, your virtues, your values, your honesty for stuff.
Now, again, we need stuff, and I get that, but you have lied to yourself about lying to others.
That's the problem, right?
If you have to tell a lie to get through something, you know, there's some totalitarian dictatorship or whatever, you have to swear some allegiance or they're going to shoot you or whatever, right?
Okay, so you tell a lie, but you don't lie to yourself about that.
This is the terrifying story arc of 1984, where Winston Smith knows that he's lying about his allegiance to the party, but at the end, he believes it.
He's been broken to the point where he is now lying to himself about lying.
So you don't say, person X, I have to say person X is bad, otherwise people will look at me funny and I'll lose business opportunities.
You don't say that, because that's kind of painful, right?
It's kind of humiliating. Dance, monkey dance, for your bread, right?
So, what you do is you say, oh, well, person X is bad.
I'm not lying.
Person X is bad. Because person X is bad, I'm just honestly saying how bad person X is.
I'm not lying at all.
It's moral. It's good. So then...
Once you lie to yourself, the truth-tellers become your mortal enemies because your vanity has occluded your compromise, your corruption, really.
The corruption isn't the lying.
The corruption is lying to yourself about the lying.
If somebody says, oh, you have to say person X is bad, or they imply that, or you're not going to succeed, you can say, okay, well, I want to succeed.
I need money, so I'll say that.
I don't really believe it.
It's a condition of success.
It's a condition of getting paid or having business opportunities.
I just have to say person X is bad.
But, I mean, that is kind of humiliating, and you'll try and fight free of that over time.
But that's being honest with yourself about the dishonesty necessary for certain kinds of success.
But that's a certain amount of tension, and you can't handle that for too long.
We can't consciously lie for too long, so then you have to say, as you sort of get slowly drawn into this unreality, or this bigotry, really, it's kind of bigotry, if to say, oh, a person X is bad.
A person X is bad. I'm just a moral and good person.
Everyone around me is moral and good.
But then when somebody comes along with information that counters that, well, you then have to view that person as an enemy because they're going to take your stuff, so to speak, Grant.
And somebody, let's say you get married, then somebody has chosen you in a state of falsehood, then telling the truth will almost certainly end the relationship.
And then if you tell the truth...
Let's say you've got $3 million for lying, right?
Well, you start telling the truth and you go through a divorce, you're going to lose most of that money.
Half goes to your wife, a bunch goes to legal fees, and professional success will be impaired as you battle your way through this divorce situation.
So, not only do you get money for lying, But you don't even get to keep the money often if you start telling the truth.
Or at least asking questions, right?
And you have to do the...
It's the two minutes hate, right?
Stuff like you have to not just dislike this person, but really passionately dislike them.
Roll your eyes. And that's just an NPC thing.
So I did see some of that.
Certainly in the art world, you just had to...
You just had to mouth certain stuff in the art world.
You had to like certain playwrights and you had to dislike others and you had to dislike world views and there really was no art.
It was all just propaganda.
Propaganda is when You are punished for curiosity.
You are punished for asking questions.
It's evil to ask questions.
It's evil to doubt this.
Only an immoral person would.
Like, I mean, you've heard with Ayn Rand or people like that.
It's like, oh, she's just a one-dimensional and she's such a propagandist and this and that and the other, right?
And to even question that and say, well, no, she was a...
I mean, it certainly takes a kind of genius to write one of the most influential books in English when you didn't even start learning English until your 20s.
I mean, it's quite incredible. I can't imagine in my 20s moving to Russia and then writing a very influential and powerful book in Russian.
If I didn't know it growing up, that's pretty incredible.
And it is certainly one of the Greatest books of ideas in the history of the world.
But you just have to mouth all this stuff, right?
You just have to mouth. And if you don't mouth this stuff, and if you, of course, then if you confront people and say, oh, you have this perspective or this opinion, why do you have this perspective and opinion?
The reality is that they don't have any clue.
And they're actually, by criticizing Ayn Rand in that way, without knowledge, they actually have become an Ayn Rand villain, right?
A second-hander. Bye!
Let's see here. Did I develop my business plan for your own venture while working with them?
Yeah, I did start to work on a side project.
Actually, I worked on a side project before I got my first coding job.
I had a 9-to-5 coding job.
I worked with five or six other programmers in one room.
It was actually a pretty nice place to work.
And I learned COBOL 74, learned the tandem operating system.
DQ, bang, A is the way to delete everything in a particular file.
So I did learn all of that stuff and made some pretty good friends through that process.
And we would always troop off to go and get some coffee.
At about 11 in the morning we had lunch together and we played hearts.
It was fun.
It was a nice place to work.
And in that process of working, I actually, I mean, I took work so seriously.
Like when you're poor, when you grow up really broke, you take work super seriously.
Now, these guys all came from middle-class, upper-middle-class backgrounds.
I remember one of my friends there was like, oh, yeah, you know, if I lost my bike, they just bought me a new bike, you know, and this was incomprehensible.
I had to assemble my bike from various things I found around that had been tossed down.
So, they were all, you know, pretty wealthy people, and they didn't take work that seriously, and that was kind of important.
To me. That was kind of important to me, too.
I mean, I remember I was supposed to work on some coding structures with a guy, and he just wanted to chat about my life and ask me questions and all of that.
And I'm like, shouldn't we get to...
Shouldn't we get to this? Because I'm used to being hourly and somebody's watching you and you've got to at least look busy.
And he was like, yeah, you take work too seriously.
Again, you just assemble a worldview out of these little scraps here and there.
And later on, it was that guy's girlfriend who saved me from marrying the wrong person.
It's just a funny kind of coincidence.
I did find that in the working world, the people who were the most successful did not appear to be very happy.
That was sort of an important thing for me to see.
The people who were the most, like when I worked in a trading company as a programmer and so on, I mean there were obviously people there who were super successful.
My boss was very successful and was just finishing up a divorce.
One of the guys I worked with was very successful and was in the throes of a divorce.
Now that was really interesting to me.
Because when you're poor, I mean, you think a lot about money, and then you think it would be nice not to think about money.
And these guys were wealthy enough that they didn't really have to think about money, but their lives were bad, in my view.
I would never want to go through anything like that.
It would be horrible. So, I did sort of pick up scraps from here and there.
And I remember once I had to go to a meeting for my side software hustle, and that meeting was just supposed to be over lunch, but it just went on and on and on.
And I didn't get back to work until like, I don't know, three o'clock.
I left at noon, I was supposed to get back at one.
To my programming job, I didn't get back till 3.
And I felt terrible.
Because, I mean, you try that in a restaurant, right?
Like, I'm just going for lunch, and then you just don't come back for a couple of hours.
I mean, people would be incensed.
Try that, you know, I had a punch-in-punch-out situation.
I remember I had two 15-minute breaks and a half-hour lunch when I worked all day at the hardware store, and you punched in and you punched out, and you couldn't be more than 15 minutes.
So the idea of being two hours late getting back to work was incomprehensibly terrible.
You know, it was bad, right?
And nobody cared.
It's salary. Ah, you know, work a little late, doesn't matter.
So trying to sort of de-escalate the tension about work because, you know, when you grow up poor, and I've been sort of contributing to family finances since the age of 10, keep us off the streets.
So getting fired was like a big deal.
Because you also had to provide references.
And if you get fired, people would be pretty mad at you.
So I did notice, particularly in the larger organizations, the people who were successful were tense, rigid, angry, and often quite hostile.
And that is very bad.
I remember once working at a corporation where I was in charge of mail-outs, one of sort of the many things I did.
I was in charge of mail-outs. And I just noticed the unopened and returned rate was huge.
And I said, you know, we really need to, I said to my boss, we really need to scrub this because we're just wasting a lot of time, energy, and money sending out stuff that's neither getting opened or it's getting returned or something like that, right?
And he was just, you know, no, that's not going to happen.
Just do your job. Of course, in hindsight, it's like, well, maybe if he'd pruned this down, maybe he'd been in charge of this list for a couple of years, and if it turned out that 90% of the list was nonsense, then it would have been negative for him.
So he was thinking in terms of himself and his own status rather than the good of the corporation as a whole.
So I remember that situation.
And just that tension and that alien hostility that comes from sort of high-status guys.
Yeah. All right. Sorry. I know that's a lot of rambling, but hopefully that makes some sense.
All right. I'm curious what the most frustrating experiences you had were and how you may have used them to realize that building something for yourself would be the only way you'd ever be truly happy with work.
At least that's the case for me.
And seeing your gifts and intelligence, I assume it's been true for you for a long time.
So as only when you start something and run it, you have full freedom.
So full responsibility, creative freedom, freedom, et cetera.
Yeah, I don't want to get into too many salacious details, but in the process of being involved in the sale of corporations, there was, in my view, some real corruption, some real falseness.
And some people who would just say stuff to you and then do the exact opposite without ever telling you.
So, yeah, it was not ideal at all.
And I saw the madness that collects around people, that aggregates around people, the madness that invades them when there's some significant money on the line.
And there's a kind of hysteria and a kind of like all sibling rivalries get reawakened and there's a kind of madness that happens when there's some significant coin on the line.
And this happens at all levels of the organization.
And what I was tired of was making commitments.
You know, when you're, I wasn't, you know, I wasn't CEO, right?
And I wasn't a chairman, like I wasn't, I would, I was on the board from time to time, but I wasn't like, I didn't have much power.
I was chief technical officer in a software company, which has a fair amount of authority.
Certainly within the tech realm, I had all authority.
But as far as the larger sort of business movements went, not as much, right?
That's more the CFO and CEO. Now, what would happen is my employees would ask for something.
And I would go to someone else for them to provide or not provide that or negotiate something.
And I'd sit down and sort of make my case.
And then that person, let's say they said, okay, go ahead, right?
So then I would start to implement, start to make the changes.
And then sometimes it would be like, what are you doing?
What are you doing? And where you feel like you just need to rewind and replay the conversation.
And this is when I started to I guess as a lot of people do in the business world where people seem to have pretty short memories about what they've committed to, you have a meeting and you have meeting minutes and meeting notes.
And so I would start to email that and say, okay, here's what I got out of the meeting.
Here's what's going to happen here, right?
And then it would still happen that people would not remember that I'd committed or claimed that they hadn't or something like that.
Say, oh, I didn't read that.
Oh, it went into my, it must've gone into my spam folder, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
So then you start requesting read receipts, right?
And then people say, oh, I just automatically return read receipts.
It doesn't mean I've actually read it and so on.
So it just, there's a kind of foggy, goopy stuff that happens in some organizations where I'm not in control of what can be provided.
So I go to the people who are in control of it, I get commitments, and then they seem wobbly or shaky or kind of a mirage, and they had cut.
That cut kind of annoying. All right.
Hi, Steph. Is there a connection between the increasing popularity of celebrating Halloween and trauma slash child abuse?
Many thanks. That's an interesting question.
I saw interesting question.
I don't know. I do know that horror movies have become much more visceral and there are horror movies out there that are truly psycho.
Like the Saw movies where people have to like hack off their own limbs in order to do X, Y, or Z, survive or something like that.
I mean, that is just straight up monstrous psycho.
Sadism. And I've never seen those kinds of movies.
I wouldn't watch those kinds of movies.
I think they are Appalling.
And people who are drawn to that kind of stuff, I assume, need a fair dose of self-knowledge and mental health resources because I think that stuff is just monstrous.
Is the world becoming more horrifying?
Is the world becoming more horrifying?
Well, what is horror?
What is the most horrifying?
So, to me, the most horrifying is when there's an unknown danger.
When there's a known danger, you can do something about it.
You get your fight or flight, you can take your action.
When there's an unknown danger, this is sort of the Blair Witch Project thing, that there's just kind of an unknown thing out there.
When there's an unknown danger, the anticipation is usually worse than the thing, right?
If you worry about something, we all know this, right?
To worry about it is almost certainly worse than the thing.
Because, I mean, the worst thing is death, and after that there's no worry anyway, so worrying is almost always worse than the thing itself.
So, when you have a danger that is somewhere out there, it can't be defined as like that thing, would you take 10 million dollars if it meant a snail would hunt you for eternity?
Where's the snail, right?
And when we have been talked out of our reason, When we've been propagandized out of our reason, then the world becomes terrifying.
The world becomes terrifying for two reasons.
One, we can't understand it, and two, it's full of irrational people who are dangerous and easily whipped up by a central sophist to attack whoever the sophist points at, right?
So, I think people are experiencing a lot of fear, a lot of anxiety, because post-modernism, relativism, subjectivism, we have a world which reason cannot penetrate.
We have a world that reason cannot defend.
Now, what is our primary reason? Strength.
I mean, really our only strength is reason.
That's our main thing.
You take away a lion's teeth and claws, what is the lion?
You take away the shark's ability to swim, what is the shark?
You take away a bird's wings, what is the bird?
Helpless, terrified.
So we've been stripped of our reason.
Which is our primary tool for understanding and anticipating and working around and solving danger.
Rather than the chimpanzee in the jungle who has to constantly look over his shoulder for the leopard or the puma, we can build walls to keep them out through reason, through problem solving, through planning.
Rather than hope we get food, we can grow food.
Rather than hope it doesn't get too cold, we can build a fire.
So our reason is our primary tool of survival.
And when you strip an animal of its primary tool for survival, what results is permanent anxiety.
And of course, anxious people are easier to push around, easier to rule.
So stripping people of their reason weakens them to the point where they're easily manipulated.
It's a brutal thing.
It's a brutal thing. What they used to do to slaves is hobble them, right?
And to hobble the human, you turn the human against reason.
So, I think because people have been turned against reason, and reason is our primary defense against manipulation, and reason is our primary defense against irrational fears, right?
The people say, the world's going to end.
You say, okay, well, where's the proof? Where's the evidence?
Where's the facts? Trust us, bro.
The people we paid agree with us.
Really? That's amazing.
So, I think that it's not just trauma, child abuse.
Our culture as a whole attacks reason.
Our culture as a whole attacks reason.
I mean, the unintelligent, hyper-emotional people, they want to have their say too.
And all those rational people who ask for proof and evidence, well, getting in the way, right?
So I think that the idea that there are these ill-defined dangers out there has become very common.
All right. Let's see here.
My novel of the future, I think.
Yeah, you should read the novel of the future.
I think this will be long. Question.
Do you hate the virtue of God?
Of course, God is capitalized, as is virtue.
Do you hate the virtue of God?
Do you hate the virtue of God?
I'm not entirely sure how to answer that, because it's the have you stopped beating your wife kind of closed question that you can't possibly win about.
Do you hate the virtue of God?
Again, if you could be a little bit more precise in your question, I would appreciate that.
Somebody says, why do I become a troll?
Assume it's a different person, may not be.
For reference, paranoid schizophrenic mother whose parents fled Eastern European country.
Father was Métis, born, both did drugs and alcohol.
My guess, my friend, my guess is that the world has not acknowledged the wrongs that were done to you and the pain that you're in.
Now, I'm half and half about this, to be honest, because it's not the job of unrelated adults to give you infinite comfort and sympathy for the pain that you went through.
You know, people are busy, they've got their careers, they've got their jobs, they've got their PTA meetings, they've got their elderly relatives, they've got things that they really, really need to get done and people don't have a lot of time.
However, the price of ignoring people's pain is high.
I'm sort of talking about this in the French Revolution recordings that I'm doing at the moment.
So you were cruelly and brutally treated as a child.
I am incredibly sorry for that.
It breaks my heart.
And me saying I'm sorry for it, I mean, it's nice.
I get that. It's a good thing to do.
But, of course, the idea of inhabiting your skin for 20 years in this kind of chaos and mess and brutality, my imagination can only take me so far.
I can't experience what you experienced, but I can certainly sympathize very deeply with the circumstances.
It is an interesting question why we are so reluctant to acknowledge the abuse of children.
Why are we so reluctant to acknowledge the abuse of children?
I think it's really escalated since the fall of Christianity because in Christianity there was a humility.
I'm lucky, right? There but for the grace of God go I. I could have been born in your skin.
My soul could have landed in your body.
And instead of a comfortable existence as a child and a fun existence as a child, I could have been in your hell.
And there's just luck.
Sometimes, like honestly, it's just luck.
My best friend in Canada died in his sleep at the age of 12.
My heart is going strong at 57.
I've got 45 more years than this great person.
This kind, gentle, brilliant, curious kid died at 12.
Why do I get 45 more years?
Or more? Why?
You know, poor Matthew Perry...
I was dosed with phenobarbital from one to two months as a baby.
It changed his wiring, I'm sure.
I personally think he could have been better served by the people who were trying to help him, but I wasn't dosed with phenobarbital as a baby.
How lucky am I? How lucky am I? I knew a kid who just happened to get out on the wrong side of the street, was creamed by a passing car, died, splattered everywhere.
Now, every kid has made mistakes.
Every kid has been careless.
Every kid has run across the street.
Some kids get creamed.
Some kids get warned. Lucky.
Lucky. If I had been born where you were born, I probably wouldn't be.
Hugely different. In the absence of sort of self-knowledge and philosophy and understanding and judgment and the assignation of blame and so on, you are like a kid in a running race with a 40-pound backpack on.
And you're struggling and you're sweating and you're gnashing your teeth and you're hardly getting anywhere and your knees are buckling and you're falling over and you're grazing yourself and you're cutting yourself and all the other kids are just sailing on the wings of an easier life.
And what happens?
What happens? People say to you, well, just get up and run.
Why are you so lazy? Oh, you're just faking it.
You're weird. What's wrong with you?
What's the matter with you?
Just get up and run.
And I don't know if they can see the 40-pound backpack.
I see the 40-pound backpack when I meet people.
I see the 40-pound backpack.
And I'm not going to call them lazy.
And you had it worse than I did.
What am I going to do? Say, well, I had a 20-pound backpack.
You had a 40-pound backpack or a 50-pound backpack.
So you should be just like me.
You should run as fast as me even though you have twice the weight.
That which people ignore about you very often defines you.
And it isolates you.
So, you know, people probably look at you or interact with you and say, you know, what a weirdo, what a troll, what a this, what a that.
What a bad person.
But you bowed by an incredibly heavy weight.
Now, that doesn't give you excuse to do whatever you want, but it helps me to understand why you are so intent on recreating in others the experience they deny in you.
In the Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, he talks about a guard who beat prisoners, and then at one point the guard ran afoul of the system and ended up being beaten by his fellow guards.
And after the former guard, who'd been beaten for the first time, was pulled back to the cells, he said, I had no idea it hurts this much.
I had no idea it hurts this much.
So he dealt out pain because he had no idea how much it hurt to be on the receiving end of a beating.
You follow? People deny your pain and so you want to inflict pain on them in a wild attempt to generate empathy.
Do you think that the guard, the former guard who got beaten, do you think he would ever beat someone again?
No! Because now he knows how much it hurts.
Formerly he would beat people and he would laugh at them and they would only be quote faking their death.
So before, he would be beating a prisoner, and the prisoner would be crying and screaming and begging for his mother and begging for them to stop.
And he'd be like, oh, that kid, he's just manipulating me.
That prisoner is just manipulating me.
He's not that bad. He's just faking it.
And I'm going to punish him for faking it and trying to make it like he would escalate.
Now he knows how much it hurts.
Will he do it again? So, there is sometimes the belief that only the infliction of pain can generate empathy.
So you are trying to teach people to care for you by harming them.
Now, is this productive?
No. Is it going to work?
No. Is it understandable?
Entirely. What do you have to offer people in a positive way in this world?
It's a big question. What do you have to offer people positively or in a positive way in this world?
What are your thoughts on a family constitution?
Have you ever sat down with your family and negotiated on the guiding principles and how the family should be composed?
No, I've never done that.
Any more than we taught our daughter a whole bunch of grammar when she was very little and learning English.
If you model the behavior, you don't need the constitution.
At least we haven't. So, alright.
Any tips on journaling organically?
How can one know when the subconscious is speaking directly without corruption?
Usually when it's horrible, when it feels like your skin is being flayed by images, arguments, and ideas, and perspectives arising from the unconscious.
The repressed self, which we repress in general for the cause of survival, so don't feel bad about it, but the repressed self is often quite vengeful when it comes out of prison.
So, when you are afraid of what it's going to say, at least at the beginning, that's usually when it's at its most authentic.
What are your thoughts on the Shroud of Turin?
Well, this is, of course, the goal of religion is to try and find empirical evidence for its beliefs.
And faith is its own sphere.
Reason and evidence is its own sphere.
Trying to cross them usually ends up nullifying both.
In your recent video, Steph, you said that women who return to childhood mannerisms when flirting are incredibly dangerous.
Can you please elaborate on this?
Why exactly are they dangerous and can you perhaps give us some examples?
Thank you. So, yeah, it's called coquettishness or it's a form of neoteny which is the retention of childhood characteristics into adulthood.
So, a woman who flirts in a very sort of childish manner, you know, a higher voice, and I'm not going to give you examples because it's just kind of creepy, but I think you can kind of understand it.
They're trying to put you in a much older role.
They're trying to provoke a much older alter ego in you, and they are simulating a much younger alter ego in themselves.
Which almost always would spell childhood molestation or abuse, sexual abuse in particular, that has not been processed.
So that's the danger.
All right. Let's see here.
Similar high stuff. Perhaps you have some words about this problem I have.
Since you are the description of philosophically fit human.
That's interesting. BFH, philosophically fit human.
Similar to a bodybuilder.
I know what to do. I know how to have six-pack abs.
In fact, I think most people know how to.
to. But why don't they? Becoming philosophically fit in my eyes is to
embody your values. Philosophically, morally, ethically, I know what
ethically I know what to do. I know what's right. And similar to eating fatty
foods I know how to really destroy my own progress. This is where the question
comes in. The difference between me working out is that my body is submissive.
It does not question the decision my brain makes. It follows my lead and has
given up its resistance for me going to the gym. I don't have any problems
creating scenarios around eating healthy or working out my body.
How can I apply this principle with other parts of my life?
I find a part of me can loudly resist decisions I make and I use this as my steering wheel for life.
I'd like to hear your thoughts around controlling the vessel body And why my decisions body are functioning on two different but connected, I don't know, chords?
TLTR, when I know what's right, why do I sometimes find my body makes it hard to generate energy slash feelings towards completing the task and other times it can find infinite energy.
Hopefully I've made enough sense. Thank you.
I think... I think that's a very understandable phenomenon.
Yes, it is easier to make your body do something than to become moral.
Yes, of course. Of course.
I mean, there are more athletes than moral people in the world and more people who work out than who become morally good.
So, yes, I completely and totally understand where you're coming from.
So, what you need to think of with regards to your body is if you grow up in a fat family and you start to lose weight and exercise, your fat family will probably sabotage and resist you.
The issue is not why don't we want to be moral.
The issue is why don't other people want us to be moral.
Because we want to conform to morality and Which is virtue.
But we also want to conform to survival, which is often conformity, compliance with the irrational dictates of others, as I was sort of talking about earlier with the hate person acts kind of scenario.
So we want to conform to virtue, but we also want to survive in the world.
And surviving in the world often means abandoning and rejecting virtue.
Lying. Lying.
Now, there's very little that I can add that thousands of years of Christianity has not already in great, powerful, moving, poetic, deep and moral ways has explored.
The war of the world and the war of the spirit.
That which is good for the spirit harms your interest in the world.
That which is good for the world harms your interest in the spirit.
What's the best way to corrupt people?
Well, to make corruption the price of survival.
And then all those who choose to be good, even though it means they can't survive, those genes get weeded out of the gene pool and there's very little left of that impulse except from the sort of random dice roll of genes generation to generation.
How do you get people to lie?
Well, you withhold food from them if they don't.
You withhold success.
You withhold acceptance.
You withhold goodies, rewards.
I mean, this is how people train children, right?
Punishment and reward.
So the issue isn't, why don't you want to be good?
The issue is, how much will people punish you for being good?
How much will people punish you for being good?
So I wanted to be an actor, but because of my virtues, I was not able to become an actor.
And this is not even just theory.
I was hated in the artistic world and people would never give me work because Of my morals, my virtues.
Not just the free market stuff, but in general, right?
So the price of being an artist is, in general, to be not virtuous, to lie, to be corrupt, and to not question.
Similar things in academia, similar things in The business world.
And then I finally managed to claw a bite and chew my way through to a place where I could tell the truth.
Oh my gosh. The tension, right?
The tension. I want to tell the truth.
I don't want to lose income, dating opportunities, business opportunities, networking.
I want to tell the truth.
I want to be curious. I want to find out the facts.
But facts... Virtue is death.
Virtue is death.
I mean, not direct murder usually, but like we're all in a sort of mafia gang and an attack of conscience means snitches get stitches and end up in ditches.
So it's not you just fighting some mysterious entity.
Oh, I want to be good, but I don't want to be good.
I want to be virtuous, but I don't want to say...
That's not a thing.
We're not at war with ourself.
We're at war with others.
Now, people would like to say, oh, I'm at war with myself.
They would like you to believe that you're at war with yourself so that you fight yourself and don't notice there are others out there.
If you're in a fat family and you're losing weight, and every time you lose weight, your fat family rolls their eyes, makes fun of you, attacks you, undermines you, offers you more food, stops inviting you to family gatherings, applies all the ostracism torture that occurs in the human soul, mind, heart, and society, well, why is it so hard for me to lose weight?
I must be at war with myself.
So, yeah, look around you.
Who's going to pay if you're good?
I mean, I'll tell you this, man.
Nobody from my...
Nobody from the first half of my life wanted to have anything to do with me when I actually started living my values.
Simple, basic fact.
Is it anecdotal? Yeah.
Is it also informed by the thousands of conversations I've had about philosophy over the years?
Yep. It's about as scientific as we're going to get.
All right. Let's see here.
What is your opinion on Daniel Mackler's idea that we shouldn't have children until we are, quote, fully healed of our trauma?
Is such a thing even possible?
Yeah, I like Daniel for what it's worth.
He was on the show years ago, but I fully healed of our trauma.
What does that even mean? And children help you heal from the trauma, so...
Alright. Can you share some thoughts on the human need for transcendence?
Can art replace the abstract benefits of religion?
No. No.
No, I mean, was it in Austria?
They've just unveiled this completely hideous fountain, which looks like it's a bunch of people, a bunch of monsters rolled together from bad plasticine discs.
Art is elevating the spirit.
It gives you nobility. It is the manifestation of clean lines, positive views.
It is... As close to virtue as the senses can get is to look at beauty.
I mean, you go into a cathedral and you look up at the vaulted ceilings and the stained glass and you feel elevated.
And the purpose of architecture, modern architecture, modern art, is to degrade the spirit to the point where virtue flees in disgust from the hideousness of the environment.
So, I mean, can you make love with the smell of fecal matter in your nose?
Probably not, right? Art cannot replace the abstract benefits of religion because art inspires you to virtue, but art cannot define virtue.
All right. Hi, Steph. My best friend's wife tried to murder him.
He was in a coma for over two months after she shot him five times in the head in front of the child while he was coding at his computer.
Everything indicates she did it because she didn't love him anymore and wanted money.
For example, they had $500,000 in savings, a paid-off house, and she tried to take out a new life insurance policy without him knowing that Of course, a week prior to the shooting, she's out on bond awaiting trial.
He still loves her and sometimes says he wants to have her back in his life just so she can be a mother to their child.
How do I convince him that their relationship is over and irreparable?
Well, are you saying how could you be more vivid than five bullets to the head?
How can you be more vivid than months and months in the hospital?
How can you be more vivid than incredibly lucky to survive attempted murder?
I mean, I don't understand.
How can you be, how's he going to have a relationship with this woman who's going to go to jail?
So this is, in my view, obviously I don't know the guy.
It's just my amateur outside nonsense opinion.
And that's just death wish.
I mean, if you want to go back to someone who tried to murder you, it's because you want to die.
And by want to die, it means that there's people in his head who want him dead, and that's usually parental alter egos or someone else.
So maybe try and get him into therapy, but...
All right. I will move on to the next questions later, but thank you so much for these questions.
They really do stimulate the brain juices in me, and I thank you for that.
And please keep me posted with your questions at freedomand.locals.com.
You don't have to wait for me to ask. You just post your questions, and I'll collect them as I go by.
If you find the show helpful, freedomand.com.
I would really, really appreciate that.
Have yourselves a wonderful day, my friends.
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