Nov. 25, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:51
5315 RESPECT YOUR EMOTIONS! Locals Question Answered
"Hey, Stef, would you elaborate more on success anxiety, please? When I reach a new level of success, there's a brief high followed by a lot of anxiety. Or occasionally, I will envision a new endeavor going perfectly, and when it doesn't, I berate myself for even trying, even if I was successful overall."Join the PREMIUM philosophy community on the web for free!Get access to the audiobook for my new book 'Peaceful Parenting,' StefBOT-AI, private livestreams, premium call in shows, and the 22 Part History of Philosophers series!See you soon!https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022
Sorry, I forgot to get to this question the other day.
We got.
Hey, Steph, would you elaborate more on success anxiety, please?
When I reach a new level of success, there's a brief high followed by a lot of anxiety or occasionally
I will envision a new endeavor going perfectly, and when it doesn't, I berate myself for even trying, even if I was successful.
Overall.
That's a great, great question.
And there's a lot of depth to this issue of success anxiety.
It's really, really fascinating.
So, to me, I say there's a lot of depth.
I'm going to break it into two general categories and see if this makes any sense to you.
And by making any sense to you, I don't mean that will you understand it.
I mean, I hope it makes sense.
I hope it makes sense as a whole.
So here we go.
Now, I have some experience in this, having gone from, again, sort of like welfare trash heap to, you know, some decent success over the course of my life.
This success anxiety is a big thing.
So,
There are two levels at which success anxiety kicks in.
One is the personal and the other is the political, believe it or not.
And we'll sort of do the personal, that's a little bit easier to understand.
The political might take a little bit more time.
Now, the personal, of course, we don't need to spend a huge amount of time on.
The personal is, well, how do you feel doing better
Than those who raised you?
How do you feel doing better than those who raised you?
It's really interesting.
Success does have something to do with raw intelligence, and so if you do a lot better than those who raised you, there are really two possibilities in this category of intelligence.
There's really two possibilities.
One is that those who raised you are not very smart, and you are very smart.
And that, of course, can happen.
It's just a general scattershot of genetics and so on.
Or maybe you just really got into reading, or something happened that gave you an organized worldview, or whatever it was, right?
But let's just go with sort of the raw intelligence.
It means that you're much more intelligent than your parents.
Now, it's interesting, because a lot of parents
are really excited about their kid's success from an educational and income standpoint.
In other words, if you're a kid and you become a doctor or lawyer or whatever, which your parents can brag about, a lot of times your parents will be quite excited and quite happy.
But the reason why they're happy is it serves their vanity.
It serves their ego.
Like, I raised a kid who became a doctor, therefore I am a good and or better type of person, right?
That's the general equation, right?
So it serves vanity.
So your parents often, not always of course, right?
Your parents will often want you to be successful, but they don't want you to be better than they are, right?
So if you're successful, that's a big plus.
If you're better than they are, then that does not serve their vanity, does not serve their ego, and they will often be hostile towards that.
So what I mean by this, of course, is that if your intelligence gives you high status to your parents, they're happy.
But if your intelligence creates humiliation for your parents, then they're angry.
And one of the marks of intelligence, to me, deep intelligence, is
Having a problem with contradictions.
You think of the people who figured out physics, sort of modern physics.
They had a problem with contradictions.
Why is it so complicated to figure out the motion of Mars?
Something must be wrong with the model.
It bothers them.
It's like a splinter in the mind's eye was the name of an Alan Dean Foster novel that I read when I was a teenager about Star Wars.
Like Han Solo at Star's End.
Han Solo at Star's End.
I always remember that he found a carbine rifle that had been, he said you could lay it up against a tree for 10 years and it would still be perfectly functional when you came back.
I always remembered that because that was about my brain during trauma.
Just things you remember.
And the splinter in the mind's eye.
Things bother you.
There's a contradiction.
You feel uneasy.
Your brain is sort of working to resolve contradictions.
People who said, well, why do clouds float and anvils fall down?
And they won't accept hearsay, right?
They want direct experience.
So, everybody thinks that an orange and a bowling ball would fall at different heights, and was it Galileo went to the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa?
I could be getting this totally wrong, but he dropped a bowling ball and an orange or something like that, and they both fell at the same rate.
So, or Einstein, why does the Ether calculations produce all of these
Complications, it should be simpler, right?
This is the essence of genius, is it's got to be simpler to be bothered by complication.
Midwits love complication because it allows them to feel intelligent and baffle others, but genius is passionately devoted to consummating a relationship with simplicity.
That is a simple fact, he said, obviously trying to categorize himself.
If your intelligence leads you to become a doctor or a lawyer, your parents can brag about you.
But if your intelligence leads you to find contradictions in the positions of your parents, particularly if you do so in public, then they don't like your intelligence anymore.
So your success that serves vanity is happy for them.
It's not all parents, of course, right?
And your success in reasoning that proves them to be contradictory or deficient
Well, they don't like that, right?
Because a lack of intelligence is entirely unbothered by contradiction.
So, I mean, this is all the way back to the sort of theory of the element that fire leaps up because it wants to join the fire element in the sky, and so on, which is anthropomorphizing fire, that it has a desire or a preference, and that's obviously ridiculous.
And so, I mean, lava goes down the mountain,
So, looking for simplicity and clarity.
Obviously UPB is aiming for great simplicity when it comes to ethics.
Ethics is way more complicated and complication is a sign of failure.
Complication is a sign of failure.
In philosophy, in art, often complication is a sign of great success.
A complicated deep novel, a middlemarch or
Crime and punishment or war and peace.
The deep and complicated novels is a sign of success.
But in science and in philosophy and particularly in morality, simplicity is the key.
The fewest explanations, the most simple explanations is.
And particularly with moral philosophy, of course, because we we instruct two-year-olds on moral philosophy.
So it can't be super complicated.
It's so funny, right?
When we instruct children, we pretend that morality is dead simple and two-year-olds can understand it.
When those two-year-olds grow up and question us about our morality, suddenly it's all kinds of complicated, and there are all these factors, and my childhood, and balancing this and that, and work and home, right?
We inflict morality as if it's simple.
We defend our hypocrisies as if morality is super complicated.
This is one of the... And, of course, a
An intelligent person would be bothered by that contradiction.
Because your kids would say, well wait a minute, wait a minute.
When I question your parenting, you say there's all complicated factors and problems and issues and balances and this and that and the other.
But when you told me to be moral when I was a little kid, it was just simple absolute rules with no exceptions and no understanding and no balancing this, that or the other or your childhood or my childhood or
Right?
Morality inflicted is simple, morality defended is suddenly woefully complex, and an intelligent person would be bothered by that contradiction.
I mean, when people have pointed contradictions out in what I'm doing, it bothers me!
It bothers me and I want to correct them!
It really bothers me when there's contradictions and my fundamental gut instinct, which doesn't mean I'm right of course, has always been
It's a lot simpler than you think it is.
I remember when I was sitting down working at UPB, I was like, okay, what if it's so simple that you could teach it to a child?
Because Lord knows we do, and Lord knows I intended to as a parent.
What if, what if it's just so much simpler than we think it is?
Which is, again, what Einstein did with E equals mc squared, what Newton did with the constant of gravity.
What Copernicus and Tycho Brahe did with the sun-scented solar system.
Like, what if it's just simpler?
What if you just move some assumptions, and it's way simpler than you think, and everything clicks into place, and blah-dee-blah-dee-blah, right?
Complication?
Yeah.
I mean, if you're a coder, you're going to end up... I mean, remember Windows NT, way back, like, or Windows 2000, 20 years ago, had like 40 million lines of code.
Okay, well, that's kind of necessary, also because of backwards compatibility, which is a big problem for
The Windows system, you still have to be able to run DOS 1.0.
So, yeah, simple.
You want things to be simple.
So, the clarity and simplicity that great intelligence brings to formally complex questions, or questions that are rendered in a complex manner in order to defend hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy is when you yelled at me to not yell at kids.
Well, it's complicated, I was stressed, there was a difficulty, you weren't listening, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And, you know, the response to that would be, well, Mom, Dad, that's not what you told me when I was a kid.
You didn't say, well, if you're stressed, you can yell, or, well, if the other person isn't listening, you can yell.
You just said, don't yell.
It was a simple, basic fact.
So you said to me, don't yell, while yelling at me continually.
So that's bull, right?
So when you said to me, don't yell, it was a simple rule, an absolute, but when I pointed out the hypocrisy of you yelling at me not to yell, suddenly it's all kinds of complex, and you know, it didn't happen as often as I think, and you had a bad childhood, and you had a job, and it was stressful, and right?
So you have all these excuses.
You didn't give me any of these excuses when I was a kid, right?
So this is just...
Complications in morality are invented in order to defend hypocrisy.
And less intelligent people are unbothered by hypocrisy.
And one of the reasons why you'd be bothered by hypocrisy is...
You can empathize with yourself in the future, which is a rather abstract thing to do and requires, I think, more intelligence.
And, of course, being raised reasonably decently or gaining self-knowledge over the process.
So, there's the free speech question, right?
Why do you not want free speech to be restricted for people you dislike?
Because then people you dislike will get a hold of that weapon and turn it against you.
And, you know, there's principles and then there's also practicality, but people who are less intelligent just aren't bothered by
Those contradictions, right?
Like all the people on the left who were like pro-free speech and anti-war have now become anti-free speech and pro-war and they're not bothered by that contradiction because the goal is the seeking of power and therefore change of tactics is irrelevant if the goal remains the same, which it generally seems to be.
So, at a personal level, if you do better
than your parents.
And I mean, I have direct experience of this, of course, right?
My mother was proud of the company that I co-built, and she was proud of my educational level, and she was proud of what I was doing.
I mean, I remember when I was in, I don't know, grade 8 or grade 9, I was taking an adult computer science course that taught me how to program blocks on a floppy disk and all that.
And she was very proud of that.
She was very happy at that.
She would tell people, oh, he's taking adult computer science courses, he's taking adult or grade 13 writing courses, he's in grade 8.
Actually, she was very, very keen on my intelligence because, I mean, she comes from a family where intelligence was greatly worshipped and she was sort of proud and happy about all of that.
I didn't like it because it felt a little bit like I was a performing monkey, but
Obviously I was a smart performing monkey and I guess I had to take that as a consolation.
So she liked my intelligence when it served her vanity.
But when my intelligence started noting contradictions about her entire life and approach and way of being and blah blah blah blah blah, well suddenly my intelligence is not such a bonus!
Oh no!
He's actually smart and is noticing contradictions and now my intelligence would be a problem.
So she was very happy that I was smart, but then when I would
Point out even as a child her contradictions and I would say well I thought and she would say don't think right so think when it serves my vanity don't think when it harms my vanity that's that's kind of common so you're gonna have that issue if you have I mean I was thinking about this last night just a phrase that had a very large impact on me
When I was on vacation, I went on a two-week vacation on my own to the Dominican Republic, I think it was, and spent the time swimming, playing beach volleyball, snorkeling, and reading philosophy.
Oh, fantastic.
Just fantastic.
What a glorious couple of weeks.
And that's when I was reading a lot of Jung.
It wasn't, I guess, psychology plus philosophy.
I was reading a lot of Jung.
And I came across a sentence that burned itself into my brain, and it was just a casual aside where he said, but of course, most parents are merely ordinary incompetence more than half children themselves.
And that sort of, it's like, shouldn't that be a whole book, not just an aside?
But, you know, I guess he had his cautions, which I didn't, and maybe he was wiser that way, who knows, right?
If you blow past your parents' intelligence or honesty or directness and your intelligence is no longer beneficial to them.
So there's a problem with that.
Your parents don't want you to succeed to the point where
It harms their vanity.
They want you to succeed to the point where it serves their vanity, not harms their vanity.
All right, so that's number one.
Number two, which is the political one, and it's not just your parents, right?
Could be siblings, could be friends, all that kind of stuff.
I happen to have come from a friend group which was divided into fairly significant successes and fairly significant failures.
There wasn't a lot of, like, I don't know many people I grew up with who I was friends with.
I think it's sort of my D&D group.
Most of them
I can't think of a single one who ended up in the middle, right?
There's the people who had significant failures and people who had significant successes, but there wasn't a lot in the middle.
So, the second, of course, is political, which is, what does it mean to be successful throughout most of human history?
Well, remember, in most of human history, there's no free market, there's no private property, there's no objective courts.
We're sort of returning to prehistory in a way.
But, what did it mean to be successful?
Well, to be successful meant to win in a win-lose situation.
See, in the free market, to be successful is to create a win-win situation.
You're successful in a free market because you appeal to your customers better, you provide them better services, or goods, or efficiency, or time savers, or dopamine delivery, happiness, or you do something.
So the people who buy from you in a voluntary situation, that's a win-win situation, and all is good, all is well, all is happy.
In a pre-free market, which again is most of human history, you win at the expense of others.
It's win-lose.
It's win-lose.
Now, of course, in the free market, the only people who lose are your direct competitors, and even they don't lose because they're stimulated to do better by you winning, right?
It's well known that competition brings out the best.
People who run, run faster when they have a fast runner competing with them.
They just do.
Even if you tell them to run as fast as they can solo, they won't run as well as if they're running with someone in some sort of competition.
Just competition brings out the best in you.
Which is why it's always been fairly disappointing to me that it's tough to find someone to debate with who's really good.
So, what does it mean prior to the free market to be successful?
It means that somebody else is losing and the more successful you are, the more you are harming somebody else's interest who probably has quite a bit of power.
Right, so if you grab a bunch of land, really valuable land, you're harming the interests of the people who owned that land, right?
Like if you're able to buy that land, let's say, or you're able to conquer that land.
So success creates enemies.
Now, again, in the free market, success does create some kind of enemy, but mostly among the petty people.
Oh, how dare he get that contract?
My stuff is way much better.
Like a new restaurant opens up that's really good and all the bad restauranteurs get mad at it.
Oh, it's all just marketing.
It's all just hype.
It's like, well, no, maybe try it.
But the smart restauranteurs will recognize that competition and welcome the opportunity to improve their food or their decor or their service or something like that, right?
So yeah, the immature people will get petty and angry, the mature people will generally work to improve and in a sense be thankful for your competition, right?
As Immanuel Kant said about philosophies, the philosophies he disagreed with, it aroused me from my dogmatic slumber.
It aroused me from my dogmatic slumber.
And this was sort of the pursuit of the non-aggression principle to a universal standpoint, that was the same for me.
Now, if you get more of the king's attention, let's say the king really likes you and takes you on as his trusted advisor, well that comes at the expense of other people who were the king's trusted advisors before, and they're going to get mad at you, and they're going to hate you, and all of that, right?
And so they're going to work to plot your downfall, so your success
Creates enemies and because it's not a free market scenario, those enemies will work to take you down.
And of course the same thing does happen at a personal level.
If you do a lot better than the people you grew up with or your family or whatever, they will often get mad at you and trash talk you and try and level up by bringing you down from a reputational standpoint or so.
He's too good for us.
He thinks he's so great.
He thinks he's so hot.
He just got lucky.
I could have done it.
He's so vain, right?
Blah blah blah blah blah.
So, losers imagine that winners took something from them, right?
This is the fundamental definition of somebody who's a loser, is losers imagine that winners took something from them.
Losers imagine that winners took something from them.
It's sort of the relationship between legacy media and alternative media, whatever, right?
The losers imagine that the winners took something from them.
That's foundational to leftism and so on.
If someone has something, he took it from you.
He stole from you and therefore his success makes him bad and because he stole from you, you can steal it back and aggress against him and harm him and attack him and undermine him and so on, right?
So success creates enemies.
Success creates enemies.
Now, moral success in particular, being a better person than your parents, I mean sort of foundationally, fundamentally, particularly in the realm of child abuse, moral
Progress creates enemies long before it creates allies, right?
I mean, if you sort of think about what I'm doing, I have to wait at least a generation for any allies.
I mean, I'm not talking about you guys and all of that's great, but in terms of like substantial social movement allies, I have to wait at least a generation because by putting out peaceful parenting and how to teach ethics without hypocrisy and all of that,
Then there'll be a whole generation of kids who are raised, who will look back and they say, gee, you know, we were raised really well.
What happened?
Oh, this deaf guy, whatever.
And then there'll be some allies, but it's not in the present, right?
As a whole, as a sort of general social thing.
And we can see this playing out, or has played out for the last couple of years, or actually played out immediately over the deplatforming thing.
So, if you have moral improvements,
You know the Prophet is loved everywhere but in his own country.
And by everywhere usually that means the future, right?
Usually that means the future.
So moral improvements will benefit you and your wife and your children, but will create a lot of enemies.
And the other thing too is that with moral improvements, you don't really want to spend time with amoral or immoral people, particularly if you're a father, any more than, you know, the old do-si-do that happens when you want to go over to a big family's house.
You have to ask the kid's sick, right?
Because usually that's one kid who's got something, and it's a real pain in the neck, sometimes literally a sore throat, and I really can't do a week
We're good to go.
I really can't afford to not have a voice for a week or two, and sore throats can get pretty bad with me, so I try to avoid that kind of stuff as a whole.
So, you don't want your kids to be around amoral or immoral people, and so, you know, if you have a family and you're morally improving,
You may not want to spend as much time or any time with, you know, corrupt relatives and so on, which again makes them angry.
They'll trash talk you.
It's, you know, it's a difficult thing to go through.
I understand and I really, really sympathize, but that's sort of a reality.
So, and of course, in the political realm, if you succeed,
Well, you have a lot of problems, right?
You have a lot of problems.
And we've seen this repeatedly over the course of history.
It's kind of playing out in the present in some ways.
So, yeah, so what does success mean?
Success means being targeted, right?
So, success anxiety, you know,
There's a very interesting survival strategy.
You could call it any number of names.
Early mammal, basement dweller, and so on.
Let's just say basement dweller.
So a basement dweller lives small, doesn't raise his head over the parapet, doesn't confront, doesn't draw much attention to himself.
And survives a time of significant change because he's unremarkable.
The T-Rex, in a sense, does not go hunting for the field mouse.
The T-Rex is looking for bigger prey.
So more success makes you bigger prey.
And we have some significant caution regarding success.
Or to put it another way, those who openly embraced success and didn't feel any anxiety about it or any caution about their success,
Often didn't make it, right?
Because they would become too successful and then be cut down by the king or some witch doctor or whoever it was that, who their interests were harming, they would sort of blow back and attack and all this kind of stuff.
So yeah, it is, success is a double-edged sword, right?
And has been throughout almost all of human history.
There was sort of a brief, even think of in a time where there was significantly more free market, right?
Where you sort of look at the 19th century and the people who were very successful,
I think so.
Then what are they called?
They're called robber barons, right?
They're just the age of predation and they were considered to be really bad.
And it didn't matter how much benefit they provided to the consumer.
It didn't matter how much money they gave to charity or how many libraries they found.
It didn't matter, right?
Because what happens is when you harm people's interests and benefit, like you harm
A concentrated number of people and you help a very dispersed number of people.
So if you're really good at, I don't know, importing oil and you can sell it for half the price of your competitors, then there's probably like 50 or 100 people who are really, really angry at you.
Because you're taking away their fortune, the work of decades, their company, their status, their prestige, their sense of self, their sense of competence, like they're just really, really mad at you and there's 50 or 100 of them and they have got a lot of money and resources and political contacts and connections and you're really getting them mad.
Maybe you're benefiting 10 million consumers, but they don't see it directly, and you're not benefiting to the point where they're going to expend a lot of resources defending you, right?
I mean, concentrated costs, dispersed benefits is a great alchemy for creating very motivated enemies and almost no allies, right?
It's just a way of things.
It's sort of like, you know, if someone can
Convince the government to impose a tax that benefits them a million dollars, but it only costs each taxpayer 50 cents, then they have up to a million dollars worth of incentive, and you have 50 cents or less worth of incentive to oppose it.
So it's going to go through.
It's the same thing when you succeed.
You harm concentrated people who are probably going to resent and attack you.
And you benefit very dispersed people who have very little incentive to defend and protect you, right?
So it leaves yourself exposed to the inevitable arrows and hostilities and slanders and attacks and you understand all of this sort of stuff, right?
So it's not just some weird psychological phenomenon like, I just don't want to do well, right?
I mean, of course we want to do well!
We're animals, we're programmed to succeed!
But, evolutionarily speaking, we need the backing of the tribe in order to succeed, and improvements harm existing vanities and resource acquisition and power structures and so on.
And so we are very cautious about success.
Success is a flinch situation, right?
I succeeded, oh no!
Let's be cautious, let's see whether, let's get the lay of the land, has my success created any enemies that I need to get a hold of, right?
Have I created enemies that I need to really keep an eye on?
Will I survive my success?
Success creates enemies, and the enemies are concentrated.
Those you are helping are dispersed, and you're often alone in the battlefield.
So it's not a big psychological problem, really.
I wouldn't put it that way.
Oh man, I'm just not comfortable with success.
I guess I'm insecure.
No, no, no.
Being a basement dweller and not pursuing success
Was really great.
I mean, if there's some revolution coming, the people who fight that revolution usually don't make it or do very well.
And the people who just stay in the basement and don't raise their heads or their voices, they tend to survive and those genes get passed along.
So.
Yeah, don't look in the mirror and see somebody, oh, I'm just scared of success.
I guess I'm concerned, I'm worried, I'm neurotic, I'm insecure.
It's like, eh, I guess you could say maybe, but that's not the first place that I would look.
The first place that I would look, when I have a certain feeling, the first place I look is, okay, what's rational about this feeling?
Don't necessarily say what's irrational.
Who wouldn't want success?
Lots of people wouldn't want success, right?
Lots of people wouldn't want success.
For a lot of people, success has led directly to their demise.
So, I mean, we can think of countless figures throughout human history who were very successful and died for their troubles, right?
Or we're killed for their troubles.
So, don't assume that it's some big psychological issue, but rather look at your feelings as a whole and say, okay, rather than me slandering my feelings and saying, well, that's just insecurity, that's just, I can't handle success, I guess I've got a psychological problem, blahdy blahdy, rather than any of that stuff.
That may be the case, but the first place to start is, okay, what's rational?
about this.
What's rational about this?
You say, okay, so, has success ever bought anyone any problems?
Has success ever engendered any blowback throughout all the course of human history?
You can't just look at the present because we've evolved under the pressures of history and violence, really, right?
So, if you were really, really successful
Well, were you ever harmed for it?
Of course, it's pretty much the norm.
So, of course, success is going to bring caution and anxiety because it's putting yourself in the crosshairs and you need to be alert and you need to be aware, right?
If you get the management position of the Southwest sales team, well, I can guarantee you there were 10 plus other people who are highly ambitious, skilled and possibly malevolent who really, really wanted that job.
And are mad at you for getting it.
And will work to undermine and harm you.
Which is why success comes with anxiety.
It's why success comes with concern, let's say.
Or success comes with vigilance.
It's not good sometimes to succeed.
Not good to succeed.
The blowback can be pretty intense.
So I get where you're coming from.
I understand where you're coming from.
And the life of the basement dweller can sometimes be the most sensible thing
You can do and recognize that it's not irrational to have some success anxiety.
It is, in fact, entirely rational and you wouldn't want to slander your emotions by automatically categorizing them as neurotic or irrational or something like that.
So, just as a general premise, start with, yeah, well, this makes sense.
It makes sense until I can prove that it doesn't.
Emotions make sense until you can prove that they don't.
And that's being self-friendly, and that really is being self-respectful.
So, I hope that helps.
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