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Jan. 17, 2024 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:38
NEVER GIVE UP! Locals Questions Answered!
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain, and you can get a great community.
This is where these questions come from, freedomain.locals.com.
So, how do you convince someone a job is not just about the money, even though you understand it's important?
Let's say you're offered a job at a company that pays six figures, but they have, you know, really crazy hiring practices, or if they are unionized, but you don't agree with unions, in spite of all the quote benefits, how do you stand on principle in the face of an increasingly hostile job market?
This is tough, man. This is really, really tough.
And I can't speak to what it's like.
I have seen a lot of prejudice against pro-individualistic, pro-free market, pro-reason, pro-objectivity people in a wide variety of careers.
So it was heavily, heavily left-wing, of course, in the Canadian theatre world.
And that was one of the problems that I had.
They loved me in theater school until they found out about my politics and then they hated me.
And so that was tough.
It was tough in the academic world to be anti-communist, to be pro-free market and so on.
That was very, very hard.
There was a lot of, you know, feel like a salmon going up the Niagara Falls.
So that was very tough. In the business world, I faced significant integrity issues, which is one of the things that helped me to get into the podcasting world.
We're in the world of publishing, getting Gaelic novels and short stories published, even though the novels are very good and very popular with people, and have been, I mean, one of my novels, The God of Atheists, was by a professional reviewer called The Great Canadian Novel, but because they're Pro-individualistic and they're pro-market and pro-self-knowledge and pro-virtue and pro-objectivity that goes against the agenda, right? Nothing in art these days and less and less in business these days is ever...
Like, art should be about going deep into the human condition and unraveling the tangled spaghetti nest of our motivations to get some clear understanding of how to be good, right?
That's not about that, and it hasn't been about that for probably 60 or more years.
It's about advancing the cause, advancing the revolution, and so on, provoking conflict, and so on, and going against people's empirical evidence.
So, I have found the forward momentum of what I wanted to do in life considerably blocked by We say negative forces, certainly forces that we would not be pals, right?
And in the business world, people can go kind of crazy greedy and can lose their souls.
And in the academic world, as the old saying goes, the stakes are so low, therefore the fights are so petty and so vicious.
And control over young minds is the ultimate crack for power addicts.
So there's a lot of that going on in academia.
So there was all of this stuff that I wanted to do that I couldn't...
You know, it's funny because...
When I was, I mean, I think I write great novels, and yet I couldn't get published.
And not only could I not get published, the amount of rage and hostility that I got in response to what I was doing was kind of incomprehensible to me at the time, because I didn't really understand that much about how the world works back in the day.
This is pre-internet, so you couldn't puzzle all the stuff out on your own.
And... I didn't get what the purpose of all of these structures was, which was to advance a collectivist agenda rather than gloriously and happily explore the human condition and so on.
And so, for me, I had to keep shifting gears and I had to keep shifting approaches until I found something that really worked for me and for the world.
Now, I mean, to take a sort of religious analogy, the devils were rejecting me So the angels opened up a path that was the best thing that could have happened.
I know that's kind of an abstract analogy for people who are struggling with this stuff, but I was constantly facing these soft...
Foggy, hostile barriers to basic things that I wanted to do.
And I couldn't argue with the quality of what I was doing.
Like, I mean, I got into theater school, which they take like 1% of applicants.
They loved what I was doing.
They loved, said, you should drop playwriting.
You should just be an actor and all of that.
And, you know, you listen to my audiobooks.
Not too bad at that kind of stuff.
And so... I kept facing these odd oppositions, and I didn't quite understand it, because I thought that there was a publishing world with ideologues in it.
I didn't realize that ideologues basically run the whole thing.
And of course, in Canada, where most of the money in the arts comes from the government, then being pro-individualistic is obviously threatening people's bread and butter and livelihood and vanity and status and all of that.
So I kind of got all this in hindsight.
So what I'm saying is that if you're blocked in what you want to do, And you keep casting about for other things to do.
Now, I get that I have the good fortune to be skilled in a bunch of different areas, so I have options.
And that's not particularly common, but I would certainly suggest learning a multiplicity of skill sets for sure.
So if you can't, or if it's hard on your integrity, and I mean, I was offered, gosh, back in the day, I was offered A crazy amount of money to work just three days a week.
We'll come work three days a week.
A crazy amount of money. And stocks.
Just come work three days a week.
But it wasn't the right thing for my conscience.
So I didn't.
And at the time, these all seemed very hard.
Looking back, you can see, and, you know, I don't want to be the guy who won the lottery who said, oh, you don't need to save money, just play...
So I want to be sort of aware of that, but I will certainly say that in hindsight, for me, being blocked in particular areas was a way of guiding me towards What was the right thing for me in the world?
What was the best thing for me and for the world?
Which was this kind of conversation.
So, the way I sort of think about it is that, you know, there's a mountain, a very jagged mountain, and on the top of the jagged mountain is this snowcap.
And in the spring, you are...
You're ice in the snowcap, and you desperately want to join the beautiful lake down at the bottom, and when you melt, you go crashing down, you bounce here and there, your path is blocked, you sit in a pool for a bit, but all of that Helps you to get the right path down to the lake, to join your destiny, to join what is best for you.
So the important thing is when you reach these kinds of blocks, keep moving.
Keep creating alternatives.
Have friends. You know, make sure you have a network.
This is something I was not particularly great at when I was younger, but yeah, try to have a network so that people are available for opportunities.
If every job offering to you is something that would seriously compromise your integrity, well, first of all, you have to live.
So if you have to join an organization that doesn't align with your values, I certainly did and But that was a time when ideology was not central to the marketplace.
Greed was central to the marketplace.
I think that's always been the case. But ideology was not central to the marketplace.
Now it is. A lot of businesses these days don't exist to serve customers.
They don't exist to serve shareholders.
They don't exist to make money.
They don't exist to produce products.
They exist to transmit ideology.
In other words, they've been hijacked in many ways.
So, if that's not the case, then you need to keep looking, you need to keep moving, you need to...
Perhaps, you know, one of the things that can happen is that...
You can start to think in entrepreneurial terms, right?
So you can start to read books by entrepreneurs.
You can start to read business books.
You can start to try and figure out if there's something that you want to do from an entrepreneurial standpoint.
So for many years, of course, I worked for most of my career.
I worked for other people when I was young.
And then I was chief technical officer.
Then I was director of technology at another company.
Then I was director of marketing and so on.
I felt over time I had to make the kind of compromises that I didn't want to make.
And then what happened was...
I ended up working for you, right?
I mean, working for you, the listeners, and that gives me a kind of integrity that is incredibly precious for me.
So, if you find that bad stuff is coming out of the HR department, then start a company without an HR department, and maybe you can keep it small so you don't ever need one.
That's certainly a possibility, so...
You can look at these barriers in life, and I completely sympathize with this, and again, I don't want to be the guy who lucked out and says, you don't need anything but luck.
But I will say that all of the barriers that came up in my life, which have been, it felt like endless and huge, All of the barriers that came up have gotten me to a better place.
But you just can't stop.
You've got to be like a shark.
You know, just constantly swimming.
We have no bladder. So you have to just keep moving and keep trying.
You can't let anything stop you.
I mean, if you join one of these organizations, you end up self-policing your speech and therefore your thoughts and all of this kind of stuff.
And of course, the purpose of getting you to self-police is so that you're easier to rule externally, right?
If people can get you to self-police, then you can be, quote, policed by others much more easily.
But you just have to keep trying and keep moving and let absolutely nothing stop you.
You have to be like migration.
It takes like three generations for the butterflies to get from North America to Mexico, or you just have to be like the geese flying south for the winter.
No matter what storms, no matter how you get blown off course, you have to get to your destination.
And when you're young, It's an annoying thing to hear from a bald guy.
I totally get that, but I'll say it anyway.
So when you're young, you have...
A vision of your life that accords to what you want.
And yeah, when I was younger, I wanted to be an actor, a playwright, a director.
And I did all of those things. I wrote a play, I produced a play, I directed a play.
And this was something that I enjoyed.
I enjoyed being on stage, I enjoyed acting, I enjoyed performing.
And so I wanted to be...
That. And then there were a bunch of things that I wanted to be that were around my preferences.
To some degree my vanity.
Not that there's something totally wrong with that.
And my ego and my preferences.
And that I completely understand.
I'm not even saying there's anything particularly wrong with it.
But basically I got...
Beaten up by society until I hit the mother load of what it is that I should be doing and how I can best benefit the world.
Of course, when you're young, it's about benefiting yourself.
And particularly if you come like me from a hardscrabble background where nobody thought about what benefited you.
So when you're young, it's about, okay, how can my life benefit just me?
When you get older, I think as you get wiser, again, annoying, I appreciate that, so, you know, forgive me, but I now think in terms of what's best for the world.
How can I use my talents in a way that's best possible?
I view myself as being in possession of a particular skill set that I'm kind of lucky to have.
And because I didn't earn it, there's a certain pay it back to the universe aspect of it.
Or you could say, in other words, the world as a whole collectively sacrificed itself So, you can look at these things and say, my will has been thwarted.
And it has been. I'm sure it has been.
It is in countless ways over the course of your life.
Your will, what you want to do, what you prefer.
And again, it's not a bad thing to want and prefer things.
But if you say, maybe, just maybe, I'm going to dance with the world to move me into an optimum place.
But I just have to keep trying.
I just have to never stop.
I just have to find a way.
I mean, like water. You know the Bruce Lee.
Be like water, my friend. It's a little annoying.
But water will always find a way.
Water gets blocked, it just spreads around.
As you throw a big rock at a pool, the water just spreads around.
You throw a big tree branch, a big tree limb at the top of a small waterfall, the water just finds a way around.
You just have to Take the hardness out of your personality and the hard preferences out of your personality and be in a dance with the world to try and find a way to maximize your virtues and your skills.
You have to be in a dance with the world to try and find a way to maximize your virtue and your skills.
You just can't stop.
The moment you stop is the moment you start to die.
The moment you stop is the moment you lose the treasures of your skills and abilities.
You have to spend this money in order to have it materialize in your heart, and the moment you start hoarding it is the moment it turns to ash and dust and vapor in your hand.
I'm sorry for that poetic analogy, but...
If you don't like this company, apply for another company.
If you don't like any of the companies around, find someone online that you really respect or admire and then try and find a way to get to work for that person.
If you can't find anything like that, try and increase your skills.
You could take a lower-end job and then just work nights and weekends to increase your skills.
You can... You try and start your own entrepreneurial company and then you are largely in charge of the values, at least when it's small, before sort of the regulators come in.
So, that would be my suggestion.
But the absolutely essential thing in life is you just can't stop.
You just, you can't stop.
I mean, There's an old cartoon that I read when I was in my early 20s.
I think it was in Harvard Business Review.
And it was one executive, you know, the lines were all going down at the company.
It was one executive turned to the other and turned to all the other executives around the table and said, Hannibal got elephants over the Alps with that in mind.
Somebody think of something.
And it's like, yes, if you can get elephants over the Alps, what one man can do, another man can do.
People have overcome unbelievable obstacles to be able to achieve things in life.
You just have to try and be one of those people.
The race is to those Who never stop running.
The race is to those.
The victory is to those who just don't stop running.
Those who give up, those who fade out, those who wallow in self-pity.
And again, there's times where that'll happen and I'm not objecting to that.
I know I have. But if you just keep moving, if you just keep running, if you just keep trying to find a way, you will be 99.9% of the people out there because the great seduction is to give up.
Isn't it? Isn't that the great seduction?
Is to give up. And, you know, once the devil can convince you to give up, he doesn't matter.
He doesn't care what you do after that.
So, that would be my suggestion.
Hey, Steph. My first son won the genetic lottery when it comes to looks.
Now, my wife is pregnant with her second son, and it pains me to admit that as a father, this as a father, based on the ultrasounds, it looks like he was not so lucky.
Without going into detail, there is a big chance that he will be bullied slash rejected his entire life because of his looks, and I presume it will also cause a lot of envy with his older brother.
Do you have any advice for me as a father and for my future son to navigate the possible bullying slash rejection and keep his self-esteem up, especially at an early age when I know other kids will be cruel to him?
Why do you know that other kids will be cruel to him?
So I'm going to assume that this is not something like a hair lip or something that can be fixed surgically, right?
Even if he had some crazy outsized nose, you could do things about that, right?
So, of course, I don't know what it is, but let's just say he's just not going to be born handsome.
He's just not going to be good looking over the course of his life.
The emphasis I think that you have put on looks is what's most telling here.
I'll just be perfectly frank with you, obviously, as I always try to be, but there's levels of diplomacy, but I won't attempt to scale them here.
Right? So, you say, he won the genetic lottery when it comes to looks.
He's really, really, really good looking.
All right? So what you're saying is that looks are super important, right?
So what if your second son is not handsome, but he is instead incredibly smart or wise, or he has massive amounts of compassion or strength of character, which may, of course, be related.
So... The fact of the matter is that you yourself as a parent are worshipping at the altar of looks.
And so you say, oh my first son who's so good looking has it so easy and my second son who's not good looking is just going to have it so hard.
Well, You are already judging your second son negatively by something completely outside of his control.
And you say, well no, but that's just the world as a whole.
It's like, no, it's not the world as a whole.
It's not the world as a whole.
I mean, my daughter and her friends don't mock the people who are inadvertently unattractive.
Don't make fun of those people.
I mean, it's not their fault.
It's just how you're born, right?
So, it's your attitude that needs to be challenged here.
It's your attitude that needs to be challenged here.
Now, of course, if your second son is homely, if you put him in a situation where he is bullied and mocked for his lack of attractiveness, then you need to not have him in that situation.
I mean, am I wrong? You need to find some way to have him not be in that situation.
So if you put him in some, I don't know, hell-sent government school and he's mocked for his unattractiveness, then...
You would need to not have him in that situation.
Right? Because he's going to look at you and say, you're responsible for my environment.
All children do. They look at their parents and say, you're responsible for the people around me.
And why would they say that? Because it's true.
You as a parent are completely responsible for the people who are around your children.
So... It's your attitude towards beauty that needs to change.
The idea that physically beautiful people have great lives is satanic propaganda.
The idea that physically beautiful people have great lives is just...
I mean, look at Anna Nicole Smith, for heaven's sakes, right?
She was a beautiful woman, very sexy in her prime, of course, and she had a completely miserable existence.
I mean, some people find Taylor Swift very attractive, and I mean, she's got a great figure, she's tall, she's got, I don't know, a bit of a lemon face, but, you know, very attractive.
Is that a life that a person would want, who wants love?
No. She has ambition, she's been offered the world, and she's taken the world, but I think it's come at the price of love and motherhood, and probably will remain that way.
So the idea that good-looking people just have this great life is one of the greatest lies in the world.
I mean, just go talk to the average beautiful woman and just see how happy she is.
She's often quite neurotic about her looks.
She's often terrified of it fading.
She often has a great deal of difficulty settling down.
It's like saying all, you know, oh gosh, if I just inherited $20 million, you know, like if I had just inherited that as a kid, My life would be perfect.
And I understand that. I do understand all of this.
When I was a teenager, there were a couple of wealthy kids, super wealthy kids.
They got like Corvettes for their 16th birthday and so on and drove around.
And they looked super cool and there was a lot to envy about that, especially for the poor kids and so on.
I get that. The idea that you can be happy with the unearned.
It's really, really, really seductive.
That if you just happen to be born good-looking, that you will be happy.
And, of course, I wrote about this in my novel, The Present, so...
Excuse me, still recovering from the cold.
So I wrote about this in my novel in The Present with the character Arlo, and you should really check that out, that the fragility that underlies beauty, because if your value comes from your looks...
Then you will never feel that you have earned your value.
So what you want to do is remind your good-looking kid that, you know, he happens to be lucky and he happens to have good looks and that there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the source of his value and it's going to fade.
And it's going to fade.
So, and to your, quote, ugly or your not good-looking child, your homely child, I mean, strength of character, strength of virtue.
You know, you'd be really surprised, actually.
There are a lot of women, a lot of girls, who aren't that into looks and do care a lot more about quality of character.
And so, and if you can't find any of them, then just go to church.
So, I hope that makes some kind of sense, but your idea, oh my gosh, my kid's so good looking, that's going to be such a great life, and it's like, you know, that's a fantasy maybe that you have, right?
So, if you yourself are very good looking, and you think that just made your life wonderful, then you are saying that the positive stuff in your life is entirely accidental, you didn't earn any of it, and that's a pretty terrible place to be mentally, so you haven't earned it.
Therefore, you can't take pride in it.
Therefore, you are taking vainglorious pride in the unearned, right?
So, I mean, I happen to have blue eyes.
I was blonde as a young man, good-looking guy.
But I didn't earn any of that.
That just happened to be how I was born.
And then nature humbled me. In a positive way, by taking my hair.
No, everyone's going to end up like your homely son anyway.
Everybody loses their looks.
Everybody ages out. And you're going to have a lot of people, like, for your good-looking kid, you've got to warn him about the looks, right?
For your good-looking kid. You have to remind him that there's going to be people interested in him, there's going to be women interested in him, girls interested in him, just because he's good-looking.
There are going to be guys who want to be his friend just because he's good-looking, and they don't care about him as a person.
They care about his shell, his exterior, and that is something to be careful of, so...
Life ain't peaches and roses for all the good-looking people, and life ain't hell just because you happen to be born homely.
So, you know, the great thing is that if you're born homely and people really like you, they really like you, right?
It's like... If your kids have huge amounts of money that they constantly have to spend, then how many people are going to be around them because they take them to Disney World or how many people are going to be around them because they really like them as people, right?
You won't have that insecurity if you're not as good looking as someone.
Hi, Friedman.
Can severe migraines be caused by an abusive or traumatic childhood?
I have a co-worker who gets debilitating headaches with 10 out of 10 severity, i.e.
crying in agony semi-regularly, yet imaging and MRIs reveal no physical abnormalities.
I haven't been able to delve too much into his childhood, but now his parents divorced and he's a bit unstable overall.
He added these migraines started up again recently after he and his siblings began planning their mother's 60th birthday.
Thought it might be the...
Okay, so let's see here.
I already recommended therapy since I think that's a good idea in general.
For anyone, just curious if you had heard anything about childhood trauma lying dormant for decades only to manifest in this way years or even decades later.
So obviously I'm in no way competent to give any medical advice or feedback.
So I can't talk about migraines in particular.
I can't talk about stress and stress responses.
So, the greatest stress, I think, in life is when you are living a lie and don't even know it, right?
If you're living a lie and don't even know it.
So, let's say something bad, a series of really bad things happened to this guy as a kid, and he's completely covered it up mentally, and he's gone the other direction.
My family is great. My family is wonderful.
Because a lot of bad families, especially if they can keep up appearances, a lot of bad families, of course, will absolutely demand that you appraise them as great and wonderful and virtuous.
And, I mean, if you've dated, I'm sure, if you've dated more than a couple of people, I'm sure that over the course of your life, you've met, say, a woman, if you're a guy, right?
You've met a woman, and she's like, oh, my family's wonderful, and I love my family, and then you meet the family, and you're like, What?
Or you hear more about the family and you're like, really?
You know, I'm so close to my dad, you know, and it's like, well, your dad divorced your mom when you were little, you've not really had much contact with him, and you can't ever criticize him for any of his life choices.
But you're super close, right?
So when people have this sentimentality, which is usually the demand of the The negative parent demands that you praise them and think of them as wonderful.
So if you have this negative experience and you can't ever talk about it, in other words, the price of being in a pretend relationship with a negative parent is that you constantly praise the negative parent and never bring anything up that's bad, then your body is stressed.
Your body is stressed because You keep having to body hug predators.
And if you keep having to body hug predators, you are opening yourself up to virtually endless predation.
And in particular, you're opening up the next generation to virtually endless predation.
So if you are, if the demand of being in a pretend relationship with a parent, if that demand is that you endlessly praise and Be positive and act as if they're the greatest things since sliced bread.
I think your body's pretty stressed because you are putting yourself in a state of constant and escalating danger.
And because criticism is not allowed, negative thoughts, negative approaches, confrontations, none of this is allowed.
And that's because, of course, deep down you know that if you confront the negative parent who's very fragile and hostile, then you're dumped, right?
So you have this great relationship as long as you don't criticize.
And this is true, of course, of a lot of people with friendships and so on, is that everything's fine as long as you don't break up topic X, Y, and Z. And, you know, you can read this all over social media about, oh, my friend of 20 years found out about my politics and dumped me like, you know, 20-day-old bread.
So I think people are pretty stressed as a whole these days because ideology has now infected society to the point where multi-decade friendships and relationships are dumped on ideological disagreements, or and even facts can cause that to happen. Facts that
people don't like or don't want to hear.
So I think if someone's in a relationship where criticism is not allowed and all parents should be open to criticism,
I regularly invite criticism from my daughter.
Is there anything I can do better, or anything that's annoying, or anything that I'm doing that's repetitive, that's getting on your nerves?
You know, because this is the case, you know, with adult relationships.
You know, the jokes I make with my wife are still the jokes I made off and on for years, and she likes them.
But, of course, kids did change, right?
So, kids change and kids grow.
And, I mean, I remember when My daughter was very little.
I used to pretend to call frogs by, here, froggy, froggy, and dad was scary.
I mean, it was funny, right?
And then it really was only a couple months, and then she's like, dad says, that's not funny anymore.
And it's like, oh, great. You know, kids love repetition in comedy.
When they get older, they don't like it as much.
They want new stuff, which is great.
So, you just have to be aware of that.
As your kids are sort of evolving and adapting, they're going to change.
So, you always have to be open to feedback and criticism as a parent.
It's really super important.
So, if you can't criticize your parents, then you're a slave to their vanity.
You're a slave to their ego.
And you're there as a convenience, not as a person.
Anybody who can't criticize, you are exploiting.
You're exploiting. Anybody who can't give you feedback, who can't say, I didn't like that, or that was annoying to me, or whatever, anybody who can't say that is just there for your narcissistic convenience, and you're completely exploiting them.
And so this is why, in order to make sure that you have healthy relationships, you don't just accept criticism, you invite it.
I mean, how do I start off these shows in general, particularly the live streams?
Questions, comments, issues, problems, anything I can do better, anything I can change, anything you disagree with me about, anything I've gotten wrong.
I mean, I don't just accept criticism.
I invite criticism.
I really want to get that kind of feedback because the last thing I want to do is exploit people.
And if I'm not inviting criticism, if I'm not, in a sense, begging for criticism, Then I'm exploiting people.
And so you can ask your friend, it's like, oh, do you have any criticisms of your parents?
Everybody does. Everybody does.
Everybody has criticisms of everybody, and some of them are justified, and some of them are not, but everybody does.
So if they say, no, no, no, they're great, they're perfect, they're there for me 100%, and, you know, it's like, come on.
Come on. Come on.
I mean, if I look at the liberties I had as a kid, and I look at the liberties I have now, we would have criticisms of the elder generation just for allowing the slight decay of our freedoms, even if they were great to us personally.
So there's going to be criticisms of the elder generation.
And if somebody claims to have absolutely none, all they're saying is that the price
of a pretend relationship is endless praise, that my parents want to be vainglorious gods
rather than actual human beings I can criticize.
And that could be the source of some kind of tension.
All right. Thank you everyone so much for listening.
A great pleasure to have these conversations.
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