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Dec. 5, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
47:55
HOW TO FREE PEOPLE!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain.
Great questions from freedomain.locals.com.
You've got to join the community. It's a really great group of people.
All right. Why does grief feel bad, but also a little good?
Well that is a great question and it made me sad.
Grief feels a little bit good because you have had a relationship or a value that is
worth grieving, that is good enough to grieve.
I mean, honestly, I would give almost anything to have been able to grieve my father's passing.
To be able to grieve his death.
It's the same thing with my mother.
To have people I loved, who had been there for me, who I had shepherded and navigated through the last third of their life, to have had access to some real wisdom, to have had the hand-holding, sailing into darkness experience of helping somebody prepare for and experience death.
To have gained that depth and that connection, to have been reminded of my own mortality on a continual enough basis that it would have enriched my daily life even more.
Daily life is great, but you can always have more enrichment that way.
The real grieving is when you don't have relationships that you're close enough to grieve.
When my wife dies, when I die, There will be grieving beyond words because the joy of the relationship is almost beyond words.
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
And those who get to grieve deep and beautiful and meaningful relationships are among the luckiest.
I mean, that's the deal. Who you love, you will lose.
Who loves you will lose you.
That's the price of being alive, is loss.
And the more you lose, the more you've lived.
So, I think that's why.
Is there anyone that you have not worked with yet that you would like to work with in philosophy?
You know... I'm working my way through the final draft of the Peaceful Parenting book.
It's going to take a while, particularly when we get to the more technical and scientific aspects of the book.
But as I'm working through this book, it is striking me that the arguments are so profound, so obvious, so lived, so experiential, and so simple.
That I'm feeling a kind of dim, inchoate rage towards philosophy and philosophers as a whole.
Why did it take thousands and thousands and thousands of years for a philosopher to turn his attention towards childhood and the morals of childhood and the morals and ethics of parenting?
What the What have these people been doing all these thousands and thousands and thousands of years?
Now, you say, ah, yes, well, Steph, you only wrote this book when you were 57.
Yes, but I've been talking about it from the very beginning of this show.
Oh, well, maybe I'll find out.
So, no, there's nobody I really want to work with in the realm of philosophy.
How to do journaling?
Any tips or structure or just barf out all thoughts down to a paper?
Oof. My friend, my friend, my friend.
Oh my gosh.
I mean, I know I get that it's kind of a joke, but my lord above.
Barf. The essence and depth of your mind, heart and soul.
Barf. You have a distant, overly humorous, clownish and ironic relationship to the depth and power of your mind.
I would caution against that.
You are provoking enemies who will always win.
Do not F with your mind.
Do not F with your unconscious.
It has a million ways to take you down.
It will bleed you dry of inspiration.
It will set itself against you.
It will interfere with your sleep.
It will mess with your health.
It will refuse to give you inspiration in the time of your greatest passion, need, desire or fear.
It is not a pet.
It is not a master.
It is a sensitive, wildly creative, inventive and dangerous companion.
I mean, you've seen me with my unconscious, because I do these things unscripted for the most part, and I rely upon inspiration and connection, as I do in the call-in shows.
So you have now listened, if you've listened to me, For any decent amount of time, a dozen hours plus, you've seen my unconscious in full operation and in full cooperation with my conscious mind, providing me inspiration and guidance and listening and sensitivity and providing me connections.
I did a show a week or two ago where somebody asked a question so difficult I could not answer it.
And that was a live demonstration of, I have to wait for the inspiration for the connection to be made.
And again, you're going to say, hey man, it was only a joke.
Don't do that. The first thing that I would do is say, why on earth would you use the word barf when it comes to your deepest and most powerful, the deepest and most powerful aspects of yourself?
You know, if I made a joke about the love of my life, calling her, I don't know, a witch with a capital B or something like that, and said, hey man, it's just a joke.
It's like, no, there's something more going on there.
It's not a joke that would ever cross my mind.
You know, to learn how to partner with someone else, you first have to learn how to partner
with yourself.
Which means you listen to yourself without being commanded by yourself.
You allow inspiration without the destruction of your ego or your conscious mind that you get a team together.
Everyone gets a seat at the table.
Every part of yourself, every historical part of yourself, every doubt, every debate, every conversation, everyone gets a seat at the table and no one is your enemy.
No one is your master.
No one is your enemy. Internally.
You are goading and provoking.
Like if somebody called you, vomit.
If somebody said that listening to you is like somebody vomiting in my ear, my God, man, how would you feel?
Some woman you've been dating for a while broke up with you and said, well, listening to you is like Somebody vomiting on me.
Oh no, it's just a joke.
That's brutal.
So I would thoroughly caution you against insulting yourself in this kind of way, because the unconscious records all, and the unconscious is Old Testament, both in terms of its power and its capacity for vengeance and destruction.
I'm begging you. Be friendly to yourself.
Have more respect for yourself.
Or you will go through this life like a leaf on the wind, without depth, without power, without connection, without certitude, without authority.
When your conscious and your unconscious are lined up in a team, you're virtually unbeatable.
So, with regards to journaling, be willing to listen to even the most shocking things.
Be willing to entertain even the darkest thoughts.
Only thoughts, never act.
Be willing to explore every wound.
Be willing to dive into pain knowing on the other side is glory.
Be willing to be surprised by everything that is within you.
And don't censor.
If you ask your unconscious with great humility and depth and openness, what is wrong with us?
What is wrong with me? The unconscious has a fractious relationship with the conscious ego, in my view.
And because the conscious ego is in charge, of what happens, but the unconscious is in charge Of what motivates.
The conscious mind is in charge of actions, the unconscious mind is in charge of motivations.
And so for the unconscious to get everything done, anything done, to give you guidance and wisdom, it needs to be listened to.
Which means that the conscious mind has to surrender its power of action to the unconscious.
Again, not letting the unconscious dictate your actions, but Listening with great humility to what the unconscious says.
The unconscious is way, way older than us.
It's way old. It's been around a lot longer than us.
And you should read my book, Against the Gods, and the chapter on the unconscious as God.
It is older and wider and deeper and has access to knowledge that our conscious mind does not.
I mean, think of the operations of your body.
They all run on the unconscious.
Think of walking, think of running.
This all runs on the unconscious after we've learned how to do it.
Think of your nightly dreams, how powerful they are.
This is the unconscious trying to talk to you, trying to give you ancient wisdom, trying to give you wider perspective, trying to peel you off the immediate concerns of the daily to give you power and strength to guide the giant arc of your life.
So, barf. We're really playing with fire, man.
I strongly recommend not doing that.
All right. Steph, our beloved 14-year-old Labrador passed away Friday.
Any philosophy tips as I process this grief?
Well, I'm grateful our buddy boy is no longer sick and suffering.
I'm also feeling intense sadness, emptiness, and wishing we'd had more time with him.
We got him as a puppy, so he was our family member for a very long time.
I miss him so much.
Okay, let me foreshadow this by telling you that this is going to be...
You and I may part ways on this one.
And that's totally fine.
I could be 100% wrong.
It could be some failure on my part.
And I apologize in advance if that's the case.
But I'm going to make a case here that...
The grief that you're processing is not the loss of your dog, but the loss of all the prior relationships that had you invest so much into an animal.
I've had pets. I grew up with pets.
Love dogs. Think they're great.
But it's not a person, and it's not a family member.
It's not your blood.
It's not even your species. It's not a family member.
Why is it that you would bond this much with a dog?
And again, I think dogs are great.
I think pets are great. This has nothing to do with anything like that.
But this level of investment...
See, there's a vulnerability and a danger to over-investment with animals.
What's that old line?
It was Ginny and Garofalo. It's okay to love your animals.
Just don't love your animals.
There's a vulnerability. So, dogs pair bond, and with very few exceptions, they don't turn on you, they don't betray you, they don't undermine you, they don't have mixed motives.
I mean, they're fairly simple creatures.
They bond, and they are, quote, loyal.
But even that word, they bond.
They're biochemically programmed to pair bond with whoever raises them.
It's the old thing where, you know, we had countless ducks in our household, and when they're very little, they follow you around.
And it's, of course, very easy.
Oh, the ducks love me. The ducks care about me.
And it's like, no, they don't.
They're just programmed. They're like NPCs.
They're just robots programmed by their biochemicals.
And dogs... Are pack animals programmed by their biochemicals to follow the commands of the dominant species, which in this case, because the dog is with the wrong group, right?
The dog is bonding to you because of a hack in his biological programming that allows him to bond with non-dogs.
He should have been programmed to bond with dogs because he's programmed to run with the herd, to run with the pack, to reproduce, to guard his puppies, and so on.
And so there's a biological hack that works with dogs throughout their life.
And the reason it works with dogs throughout their life is it's a kind of neoteny.
Neoteny is when you maintain infantile or childlike habits, practices, or demeanors into adulthood.
And so there's a hack with dogs that's partly been bred to allow them to bond with humans over the course of their life at the expense of what they should be doing.
I mean, let's be fair. Let's be fair.
Dogs are not designed by nature to bond with humans.
They're not designed to be pets.
They're designed to guard and protect their fellow dogs and their own puppies.
And when we turn dogs into pets, we are taking them away from what they're designed to do.
Now, again, they've been bred for all of this and, you know, they have a sort of biochemical, quote, affection for people and so on.
But they're not out there raising, like, they're not out there having their own families.
They're bonded to your family.
I'm not, you know, again, they've been bred this way.
I'm not going to get into whether that's cruel or not.
But it is a little bit of an exploitation, right?
I mean, you are taking them away from having their own families and raising their own pups and having their own mates to bonding with you.
And I don't know if you got the dog de-balled or fixed or anything like that.
Maybe yes, maybe no. But if you did, then the dog is a eunuch that stays in a perpetual state of puppiness for the sake of giving you the illusion of affection.
Dogs don't love you.
Dogs can't evaluate you.
If you're nice to dogs, they'll be nice back in general.
If you're nice to people, they can sometimes exploit you.
So people often will run to safety with animals because you are massively reducing the variables of animals, the variables in the relationship.
There's very little complexity.
They're always there for you.
They're always happy to see you because, you know, they're, relative to human beings, of course, ridiculously unintelligent, right?
So they're simpletons as far as that goes.
And of course I know there's lots of people and I can feel this.
It's like, oh no, you don't understand.
There's complexity, there's affection, there's a relationship.
And it's like, well, not compared to human beings.
So one of my concerns is that people take refuge from sorrow in bad relationships by bonding with animals and Because that way they get the illusion of loyalty and love without the virtue that is necessary for those relationships.
You get loyalty and love and affection and consistency from virtuous people.
Dogs are programmed to simulate virtuous human beings, but they're not virtuous human beings.
Dogs have no capacity for good or evil vice or virtue because they don't have the capacity, usually through language, to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
I mean, there's, quote, good and bad dogs, good boy, and that kind of stuff, but...
Working pets, obviously, is fine.
On a farm, you need a sheepdog, you need cats to manage the rodents, and so on.
Working dogs are great, and listen, I understand.
Again, I love dogs.
I think they're wonderful creatures, you know, but this, oh, we don't deserve dogs, or dogs are too good for us, dogs are man's best friend.
It's like... No, no, no, no.
That's not a thing.
I want you to gain your love, trust, and loyalty through virtue.
Now, of course, you're going to say, and it's perfectly fair, and I'm going to completely believe you're going to say, no, no, I do have, you know, didn't you read?
I have a family. I have a great relationship with my wife.
I love my kids. He was part of the family, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm not going to disagree with any of that, but...
The love that you get from your family is considered and chosen based upon your moral virtues, not based upon your proximity and scratching the dog's ear.
And I want you, in my humble opinion, I think you're going to gain more, trying to figure out what...
Usually the pattern goes something like this, that you had distant, emotionally unavailable, or abusive parents...
And therefore, when you bonded with a dog, it was your first experience of loyalty and consistency and affection.
And you ran to it.
And I understand this emotionally.
It can make sense to me. I'm not criticizing anything.
I'm just sort of pointing out what I view as a theoretical cause and effect.
You ran to the dog and bonded with the dog because the dog provided to you something that your parents didn't.
Again, it could be your parents. It could be someone else.
I'll just use the parents for proxy.
But to me, it's like there's painkillers and then there's dealing with the underlying issue.
Dogs can be painkillers for loneliness.
It can be painkillers for the anxiety that arises in human beings as pack animals, as pair-bonding animals.
We have anxiety when we feel isolated.
And so a bond with a dog takes away that agony, that isolation.
But there's always a cost to using proxies, right?
I mean, if you have a...
Some sort of back pain and you just gobble pain pills rather than finding some way to fix the back pain, assuming it's possible.
Some exercise, some stretch or something like that.
Then you gain immediate relief.
But there's a price to be paid.
There's always a price to be paid for proxy solutions to deep issues.
So... Again, I'm absolutely 150% committed to, I could be entirely wrong on this.
But... Animals don't love you.
Animals don't judge you.
Animals... I mean, this is what my daughter is very funny when she talks about owls.
They just sit there judging you.
It's the way they stare without blinking.
And you say, oh yes, but if you're nice to dogs, they're nice back.
Yeah, I get all of that. But they're just programmed that way.
Which is why we have dogs, not panthers as pets or something like that, right?
Because dogs can be trusted in that way.
So... I don't know.
Did you keep the dog from his natural dogness?
I mean, if you have one duck, that duck will bond with you, but you're keeping the duck from the flock and from reproduction.
I won't say it's selfish, but it's a little bit exploitive of the natural Habits and preferences of the dog, which is to be with other dogs, to raise his family and so on.
I think the sadness that you're feeling is because the dog was a kind of proxy cover-up for a dysfunctional human relationship when you were growing up or at some point.
So the dog was something that gave you A sense of connection, loyalty, you know, your parents should be overjoyed every time you come home and if they're not, if they're distracted or depressed or angry or bitter or negative or hostile or something like that, then the dog is happy to see you when you come home and that's a great relief.
Someone's happy to see me when I come home and that's the dog, right?
So I imagine that the grief has something to do with, of course, you know, it's sad when your dog dies, and I'm not trying to take any of that away.
I'm not trying to take away any of the richness of your experience or the depth of your experience or your affection for your dog.
What I am doing is I'm saying that look past the dog as to why the dog was so important to you and deal with that grief.
So, all right. Have you read the book Seven Habits of Highly Effective People?
If so, any thoughts?
I have read it. I don't remember much about it.
All right. Somebody writes, She usually will slap when you carry her, and she wants you to put her down, or when she's upset with her brother because he has something she wants.
So far, I have tried to talk to her, and just let her know, in the most simple words I can use, to not hit, because it causes an owie.
And she usually replies with, no hit baby.
When I'm with her, I will randomly just say, no hit.
Okay, mama, and she will usually reply with no hit baby, but she continues to do it
I'm very patient with her and constantly remind myself She is so little and I plan to continue that
But I would like to know if there's any advice you could give me to help remedy the hitting issue
Or if it's something I just have to let run its course. Ooh No, no, no, no, don't let things run their course
One of the most dangerous things that you can ever say as a parent is oh, it's just a phase
That's abandoning the ship right? That's a but when usually it needs the most expert steering. All right
Yeah Yeah
1.9 month old daughter You
You Bye.
Well, she's angry.
Why is she angry?
It's always what's not said.
The dog didn't bark. Where's her father?
And why does she have a babysitter who watches her two times per week?
Why are you taking a baby less than two months old and giving her to a babysitter?
Where are you going?
Where's her father?
So, she is the only child who is cared for at her babysitter's who watches her two times
per week.
How does a baby who is less than two months old...
No this can't be right!
She can't be speaking.
It must be 1.9 year old.
It can't be months. Sorry, I'm just rebooting here for just a sec.
She doesn't have no-hit baby at 1.9 months.
So what does this mean?
It must be 1.9 years.
Okay, so she's a year and a half.
Then you can have basic sentences.
Okay, sorry. I just was lost in some of the weeds here, but the larger view.
Okay. When you can't, she wants you to put it down, except for the brother because she has something.
Okay. Not to hit because...
Because it causes an owie.
Alright, so first of all, don't insult your daughter's intelligence.
Of course she knows that hitting causes an owie.
You're not telling her she doesn't know.
I mean, if you go to a kid who's five and you try to remind the kid that candy tastes good, you're not telling the kid anything the kid doesn't already know.
So she knows that it causes an owie.
The question is, why does she want to cause an owie at a year and a half of age?
Well, why does she want to hurt?
Because she's hurt. Why is she hurt?
Again, I go back to why is she with a babysitter and where is her father?
Where is the continuity in her experience?
And also, when did she start going to the babysitter?
And what are you doing that's more important than spending time with your baby?
What are you doing that's more important than spending time with your baby?
Now, if you say, well, I'm a single mother and I have to work...
I don't understand that.
I mean, I understand the words, I just don't understand that.
If you have a mother, why doesn't your mother, who raised you and you became a single mother, which means your mother is somewhat involved in your bad choice of mates, your mother can take you in and your mother can take care of you for a year or two or three or four while you pair bond with your baby and you breastfeed and you give skin and skin contact and continuity and eye contact and so on, right? She hits because she's hurt.
Now you just saying, well, I don't want you to hurt and giving her lectures and telling her it causes an owie is managing her behavior rather than looking for root causes.
Why is she angry? Why does she want to hurt other people?
Because she's being hurt herself.
Violence or aggression Is what rushes into, like violence, aggression, manipulation are what rush to fill in the gap without a pair bond.
If there's no pair bond, violence, manipulation, and aggression We'll rush in to fill the absence of the pair bond.
So what's going on with her pair bond?
What happened in the womb?
What happened when she was a newborn?
What happened with breastfeeding?
What happened with you being there or not being there?
Now she's got three primary caregivers.
She's got you. She's got her grandmother.
She's got the babysitter.
Babies don't want that. What do babies want?
They want continuity. They want time with their mother.
And they also want a father around.
Father absence programs the child, and we know this from the R versus K stuff, right?
So father absence programs the child to be aggressive or submissive, right?
Both of which are forms of manipulation, right?
Submission is a way to get what you want by provoking pity.
Aggression is a way to get what you want by provoking fear.
So you're looking at your daughter as, well, she's hitting, and I need to get her to stop hitting.
That's not parenting. That's management.
At least, obviously, you're a parent.
I'm just saying that this is management.
Parenting is when you figure out what the root cause of her aggression is.
Why does she want to hit people? Why is she angry?
You say, well, you know, she's just bad or she's impatient or it's a phase or whatever it is.
It's like, no, no, no, no. She's telling you something really, really important.
That she's angry and she's hurt.
Why is she angry? Why is she hurt?
And this is an emergency, in my view, because her personality is hardening along these lines, along these patterns.
If her personality hardens along these lines and patterns of using aggression and causing pain to communicate something to, quote, get what she wants or whatever, what she wants is for you to solve the problems that are making her angry and hostile and hurt.
But I guarantee you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, I'm not certain about a lot, but I'm certain about this, that if whatever is in her environment is causing her to be hurt and angry, If that continues, this pattern of behavior will harden, it will become fixed, and it will go underground to some degree until puberty, and then it will erupt fully formed and unrecoverable.
And then what'll happen is you'll end up managing this aggression as she gets bigger and stronger, and this manipulation as she starts to discover boys and so on.
And you'll look back and you'll say, whatever you're doing now that is giving her three different caregivers and maybe no father, whatever you're doing now that is around not spending time with her, you will look back and say, well, that wasn't worth it, was it?
Like, whatever, even if you win a million dollars because you didn't spend time with her, You just spend all of that managing the effects of that in the teenage years.
So, again, I don't know, of course, what's going on in your life.
You're welcome to email me, callin at freedomain.com.
We can have a call in if you like. But, yeah, I would view this as a genuine emergency, and just trying to manage her behavior is going to be even more annoying to her, which is why it's not working.
Which is why it's not working.
I mean, I want you to picture this so you understand why this won't change her behavior.
If you're incredibly sad about something, let's say you've got a lover.
You're incredibly sad. It's not to do with your lover, just some real sad thing has happened.
You're incredibly sad and you're crying You know, it's not angry crying.
It's just deep, sorrowful, body-wracking sobs.
And your lover comes in and says, I need you to stop crying.
I need you to stop crying.
Crying is upsetting. Crying makes everyone around you upset.
I need you to stop crying.
Can you stop crying for me?
Can you stop crying?
How are you going to feel? It's the same thing when a kid is angry.
He says, I need you to stop being angry.
I need you to stop hitting. I need you to stop doing that.
It causes owies. Can you stop that for mommy?
Can you stop crying? Can you stop hitting?
It's the same thing. People who tell you to stop doing things that express emotion are saying they don't care about the root cause of your emotion.
What you want is for your lover when you're sad to come in and say, Gosh, what's happening?
What's going on? Tell me. I'm sorry you're upset.
Tell me what's going on.
I want to hear. I want to listen.
And that's if the guy can't change anything.
If your sorrow is to do with your lover, your lover is emotionally distant, your lover is traveling all the time, your lover never seems to want to be home with you, and you're sobbing and you're crying, and your lover says, so what's the matter?
And you say, gosh, I just miss you so much.
I miss you so much. I want to spend more time together.
I just feel alone, and I don't like that you're working this much.
I don't like that you're traveling this much.
I love you so much, and I want to spend more time with you.
Then your lover can do something about it.
But if all he does is say, stop crying, because crying upsets people, it's the same as you stop hitting, because hitting hurts people.
Get to the root cause.
What is your child upset about?
And always assume your child is right.
It doesn't mean obey them in every instance, but just assume your child is right.
Your child has legitimate things that are hurting her.
How much do you trust this babysitter?
I don't know. So, anyway.
Get to root causes.
We're not about managing behavior here.
Alright. What is behind the latest trend in younger women making TikToks and other content that shames their husbands over what they call emotional load and emotional labor?
Seems like a new round of self-victimization by the same feminist psyop.
These women are absolutely miserable.
What's this?
Emotional labor? It is a call out to massive emotional dysfunction to say that you are better because your partner is worse.
That you are higher because your partner is lower.
That you are more functional because your partner is unfunctional.
And, I mean, the guys do the same thing too.
There's comedians talking about the lack of sex that they have in their marriages.
My wife says, no, all these excuses.
I put a dollar in a jar every time to buy her a present and I can go out and buy her a hamburger and stuff like that.
I mean, the idea that You, as a man, would complain about lack of sex in a pair-bonding relationship.
I mean, just be better, be closer, be, you know, I mean, I don't know.
It's just, it's strange to me.
So people who, women, are somewhat prone to this.
And what it is, is a call-out to other dysfunctional people to draw closer and for functional people to stay away.
So, women put down their partners, and it's very common, depressingly common.
Women put down their partners to make sure that their partners never encounter functional people.
Because functional people don't want to hang around people who are complaining about their partners.
Like, we just don't want to have anything to do with that.
It's a complete opposite of our experience.
We have better things to do with our life than listen to pathetic people whine about the choices that they've made and to feel superior by putting down the people they claim to love.
It's such a quicksand of mess-up-it-ness, I can't even tell you there's a bottom to it.
So, what dysfunctional women are continually, and it's true for men too, we're just talking about the female side, I think.
What dysfunctional women are continually terrified of is that their husbands and boyfriends will meet a functional person.
They have this constant anxiety that their husband is going to run into someone who says, is that Your relationship is kind of messed up, man.
This is kind of dysfunctional.
What are you doing? Your wife is, let's just say girlfriend, just lower the stakes a little.
Your girlfriend is publicly talking about how much work you are and how emotionally retarded you are and how difficult it is to be with you.
She's publicly out there in the world saying to everyone what a flaming trash heap you are and how much better she is than you.
That's completely messed up.
What are you doing?
Why would you accept that in a relationship?
That's bizarre.
And it is. So, abusive people, manipulative people, destructive people, they need to create a moat around their victims.
And the way that they create a moat around their victims is drive away the quality people and only let the messed up people into their lives.
I mean, you understand...
And I'm not going to say that the husband here is a pure victim, of course.
He chose the woman, he chose to stay with her.
But let's just say, for the sake of argument, that adult victims of abuse are always about 60 seconds away from salvation.
Could be less. I got out of marrying the wrong woman because of one comment.
A friend of mine's girlfriend said, you think someone about to be married would be happier?
Right? And that, what was that, five seconds?
So I was, and this is why I had little patience for my relationships at the time, is that for years I was five to ten seconds away from salvation.
Like, are you happy? Are you happy with this person?
Is this satisfying to you?
You don't seem happy. You don't seem happy.
I was five to ten seconds away from salvation, surrounded by dozens of people who claimed to care about me.
I was five seconds away, ten seconds away from salvation for years and years and years, and nobody bothered to give me those five seconds or those ten seconds to save me.
And, of course, I was responsible for having those people in my life.
I'm not a pure victim, but it would have been nice.
So you understand Are you happy?
Are you happy with this person?
Do you love, treasure, and respect this person?
Are they noble? Are they virtuous?
Are they good? Are they reliable? Are they loyal?
Are they kind? Are they gentle?
Are they curious? Are they strong?
I mean, you've heard me ask this a million times in call-in shows.
Tell me about your girlfriend's virtues.
Tell me, what do you love about your girlfriend?
What do you love about your wife?
What do you love about your parents?
Of course, parents are unchosen, at least when you're young.
So, the trend is, drive away the functional people so the person you're abusing and exploiting never gets the ten seconds of liberty questions.
I mean, I tell you, you know what society is, to me, a lot of ways.
I have these visions. I have these visions of an endless prison with people locked in.
And there are people walking up and down the hallways, hurrying along.
And there are people writhing, agonized, starving, ribs showing, teeth falling out, hair wild,
eyes staring, trapped in these prison cells.
And there's an old Alibaba story that the way you open the secret doors you say,
open sesame, open sesame, a sign chop, open sesame and it opens.
Or the one from Lord of the Rings, speak, friend, and enter.
And you just have to say the word friend.
In Elvish, I think it is, and it opens, right?
And then there was a Popeye cartoon that I remember from a kid.
They had these really wild 3D Popeye cartoons.
I don't even know how they did it, but like 3D swinging backgrounds and everything.
This is wild stuff. Incredibly detailed.
A real labor of love.
And of course, spinach was considered to be important because there was a typo in the amount of iron it provided.
Therefore, you get Popeye. I'm strung to that finish because I eat my spinach.
And... The hamburger guy.
I will gladly pay you Wednesday for a hamburger today.
Anyway, so Popeye, the sailor with the giant forearms, is in front of a cave with a secret door.
And instead of coming up with the magic spell, Open Sesame...
He says, Open says me!
And just smashes his way through the door.
Open says me! Not open says me.
Open says me! I really like that.
You don't need magic. You just need will and strength to blast through things.
I really liked that as a kid.
So, from comedy to tragedy, back to this prison.
It's an endless prison. There's a hallway.
You've got to go up and down to get places.
Like you go down into the prison, back up.
And there are all these starving, wild-eyed prisoners, desperate to be free.
And all you have to do is pause for a second, look at the lock and say, open says me.
And the lock pops open and the person is free.
There's no reason for people to be in those dungeons.
There's no reason for people to be trapped in those cells.
They can't open them from the inside, but from the outside, you just have to say, open says me.
Lock breaks, person is out, and they have a life.
They can begin to heal. They can get out of the prison.
I was in a prison in this relationship off and on for years.
And look, it wasn't a terrible relationship or anything.
It wasn't horrible or anything like that.
But it wasn't for me. It wasn't right for me.
Or for the woman. And all someone had to do, there were all these people walking up and down.
I'm in this little prison cell.
All people had to do was say, open says me.
Lock makes open and I'm out.
I'm out! I'm bolting! Heading to the sunlight, not looking back.
And that's what I did.
Open, says me.
The unconscious knows if your girlfriend is crazy.
Your unconscious knows that your girlfriend is crazy.
But your unconscious won't give up the relationship unless someone says, your girlfriend is crazy.
Because your unconscious wants to reproduce.
And it needs the relationship to be denormalized.
Otherwise, if everyone in the tribe is crazy, there's no point trying to get away from the crazy girl.
Because all the girls are crazy.
All the boys are crazy. All the women, all the men are crazy.
And so, if nobody says she's crazy, it means there's nobody who's sane.
And the best thing you can do is make but the crazy person and hope that sanity can evolve in the tribe at some point in the future.
It's the best you can do. Or to put it another way, when all that was available was crazy, those who refused to mate with crazy, those genes didn't pass along.
So there's just an external word that is always needed to break free.
Somebody has to walk past your prison, look at you and say, open says me.
And this is my call in shows.
This has been my show, my life for decades and decades and decades.
Just walking past people and saying, open says me.
Open says me. And then you're out.
What you do when you're out is up to you, but you're out if you want it.
At least the door is unlocked.
You can push it and go out.
I hope you will. So the unconscious says, I just need someone to say the magic words.
5 seconds, 10 seconds, maybe 30.
I just need someone to say the magic words.
And we're out. And people spend their whole lives waiting in their prison cells for someone to say, Open says me.
She's crazy. You don't have to do that.
Are you happy? Shouldn't you be happier?
What's wrong with her?
No, that's not right. Denormalize.
Denormalize. It's open, says me.
You don't have to stay here.
This isn't the only place you can breed.
You can get someplace better. Now, the Internet, of course, has given narcissists great capacity to feed their vanity, their egos, the thirst traps, the likes, the clicks, the shares, the you slay queen, beauty, blah, blah, blah.
So cute. Right?
So it's given narcissistic people great feedback.
And people really hate narcissists, which is why they give narcissists all that positive feedback to trap them in their narcissism, weld up the cage from the outside.
But the problem is, of course, with that great positive feedback comes a whole bunch of millions and millions of people who can say, open says me, to the cages where you keep your victims.
They're not underground.
They're not hidden.
Temperance Brennan style.
In a car. Under gravel.
They're not hidden. Anybody can send a message to your boyfriend saying, there's something really not right about her.
This is not good. It's not right.
This is not healthy. And you would be amazed at what that does.
Well, I'm not. And you've listened to this show.
you've heard me do it a million times.
Someone can come along if you're a bad person.
Someone can come along to your victims and spirit them away like that.
So you've got to build these big fiery motes.
You've got to create this whole separate walled-off universe.
I mean, you can see this with the sort of ideological split in social media that the conservatives go this way, the liberals go this way, and never the twain shall meet.
They have to create their own universes where outside information doesn't come in so that the conditioning isn't broken.
So, yeah, that's what they're doing.
All right. I will do the follower of Christ another time, but I think I've done some pretty great stuff today.
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